One way to learn about the Partition is through school history books. Another is to read detailed historical tracts or watch documentaries created by one or another side of this divided land, by scholars whose lengthy footnotes will allow you to discern threads of bias and ideology.
And yet another is from stories told through films and books, or handed down in families who have been touched (or seared) by forced migration and continue to feel the residual memory of violence, heartache and an indescribable sense of loss and longing. My own understanding of the Partition comes from a hodge-podge of all these, and as someone who prefers narrative, I must say that I owe more to Kushwant Singh and Sadat Hasan Manto than to any historian or to the truncated chapters in school textbooks.
For people in the subcontinent, particularly those in the northwest and east, the events of the Partition are more than political history; they are personal, family histories, and so any recounting (or accounting) must attend to the many layers of experience and expedience that make up the record and its remembering. For a nuanced scholarly overview of the many lenses (gender, nationalism, ethics, religion, geopolitics) through which one can look back at this history, I recommend the Mittal Institute’s eight-episode podcast series of 2018: Looking Back, Informing the Future: The 1947 Partition of British India.
‘Greatest controversy’
If you’re interested in history but have little time for the density of deep scholarship, you could try Conflicted: A history podcast, which on July 5 began ‘untangling history’s greatest controversy’ that by the host’s own admission, ‘would hardly rate a paragraph in a typical American textbook’. In the first of several planned episodes Zach Cornwell explores the years leading up to the departure of the British from the subcontinent and the individuals who played key roles. Despite the occasionally flippant tone [“In Lord of the Rings parlance, we have barely left the Shire”] he tells the story in an engaging and nuanced manner that works well as a history lesson for someone new to the subject.
Waiting to be shared
And this is a subject that as yet has so many unknowns, so much buried, and even as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of empire, it’s important to acknowledge the scars that Independence has left. In an insightful conversation on Amit Varma’s The Seen and The Unseen (July 25), feminist writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia excavates the memories that continue to shape families who lived through the events. In an earlier episode of Varma’s podcast (October 18, 2020), historian Anchal Malhotra speaks of the materiality of such memory, something she reprises on Brown History Podcast (March 20, 2022). These stories exist on both sides of the border, with an urgency to be shared. As the would-be Avenger Kamala Khan’s brother notes in the Miss Marvel television series: “Every Pakistani family has a partition story, and none of them are good.”
Tropes in popular culture apart, the more one reads and listens to stories of the Partition, the more one gets the sense that we have barely begun to reckon with this past. As Butalia says: “There is a certain kind of maturity that nations require to deal with traumatic pasts where you have to admit your own culpability... so that we learn from it so that we don’t repeat it.”
Around the podverse
The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.
