Comments on: Particularities of Partition II

By: The Reluctant Feudalist

The Reluctant Feudalist — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 02:12:04 +0000

[...] “Toba Tek Singh” had always been presented to me as ironic, yes, but still an artifact one was meant to read somberly while pondering the tragedy of Partition. It was, in fact, much funnier in Urdu than in English. Translation can make wit ponderous, and though the English translations I had read were good enough, they somehow lost the antic frivolity of the pagalkhana mise-en-scène. In subsequent years after this side-splitting reading, I assigned the story, and a whole collection of Manto stories, to Partition literature classes again and again (an experience I also discuss here and here). [...]

By: Tapsi

Tapsi — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:38:28 +0000

Uh oh, could you just ignore my earlier comment? This is what happens when I read negligently, I skipped part 1 and came directly to 2! I’ll try and be more careful next time.

By: Tapsi

Tapsi — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:24:38 +0000

Partition historiography, as one traces it, has travelled from a discussion of its ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics (Jalal) to oral histories (Butalia) to more of an engagement with the patterns of violence and it becoming more rooted in the context of communalism today, as you point out. I would argue that in an attempt to ‘inform, remember and educate’, individual voices are not lost in history, no, but are perhaps better (more comfortably?) addressed in fiction. The latter might be seen as more of a distancing mechanism that then makes this task easier, keeping in mind the lack of a comprehensive archive for the historian to work with. I realise that this is contrary to what you’re advocating, and a deeper understanding of the experiential mode is certainly desirable (the point you make of Toba Tek Singh is well taken), but I don’t see it as being entirely elided in contemporary histories of the Partition either.

By: Quizman

Quizman — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:37:34 +0000

“The series tried to keep memories and truths about the partition alive”

The series while good overall, was incredibly dubious with regard to its depiction of communists. Since Bhism and Balraj were sympathetic to the party, Bhism presented it in good light.

My favorite film on partition actually has nothing to do with the event, but has everything to do with it. The film ‘Mammo’ was a Shyam Benegal masterpiece. It is the second part of the trilogy which began with Sardari Begum and ended with Zubeida. Khalid Mohd wrote it and it is largely autobiographical. The Gulzar song from Mammo remains a masterpiece.

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:48:48 +0000

Re: sepoy’s comment above: I think at least part of the difficulty (implicit in the title of Zamiondar’s book, and in sepoy’s second paragraph) is that official historiography has conceived of the partition as an event — whereas it was not only an event but a process. In fact the “was” is misleading: it is a process that has been continuing, and thus complicates the task of the historian in the way that writing “histories of the present” always does. Stated differently, partition, forget being safely past, doesn’t even seem past….

By: Aligarian

Aligarian — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:42:52 +0000

Link to TV mini series “Tamas”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5343886488714160113#

By: Aligarian

Aligarian — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:39:54 +0000

Tamas, a novel written by Bhisham Sahni (brother of famous Hindi film hero Balraj Sahni, and a member of Progressive writers Association), is also considered a significant contribution to partition literature. It was later made into a TV miniseries (“Darkness” in English) and became very famous in India in the mid/late 80s for its realistic depiction of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. At one time, it was thought that it should not be broadcast as it may open old wounds and may cause riots. The series tried to keep memories and truths about the partition alive, at a time when many Indians and Pakistanis seemed to be forgetting this historical tragedy, at least in public consciousness. The miniseries became a landmark 297 minute, 35mm film, now shown mostly at Indian Film Festivals. The film is directed by Govind Nihalani with a great cast which included Om Puri, Amrish Puri and Deepa Sahi. This epic looks at Partition from an Indian Punjabi perspective, as the fate of Sikh and Hindu families in West Punjab is emphasized. The first part also underscores the Muslim viewpoint: the provocations they suffered from Sikhs and especially Hindus.

By: gaddeswarup

gaddeswarup — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:25:24 +0000

“But fiction does not fill the gaps in the historical record, good historiography does.”
A layman’s question. Recently I was rereading a story of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee ( who, surprisingly, had strong anti-Islamic views) Mahesh
http://www.boloji.com/stories/106.htm
and wondered whether any sort of historical discussion can convey such things that he does in so few a pages.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:15:58 +0000

Perhaps one way of dealing with the pain and violence of the event would be to take a Paul Cohen approach: separate out the "straight" documentary history from the experiential recreation and the historiographical overlays. (I'm also reminded of Lynn Struve's annotated sourcebook Voices from the Ming-Qing cataclysm, which would be a great model for a collection of sources from this article, and Cook&Cook's exemplary oral history)

By: sepoy

sepoy — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:51:29 +0000

The question of historiography is a vexing one. This much is certain, it has failed to do the job. We still do not know a lot of basic facts on numbers, families, places, incidents etc. And little hope for reconstructing it now.

What is the archive for the historian: There were no trials for perpetrators of violence, the authorities took no statements, and very little data was gathered – either of migrated families or on recompense (land holdings may give some clue). There are no physical remainders left. Even the trains which ran covered in blood across the Punjab border were scrubbed clean. The houses were destroyed. Street names changed. Physical traces obliterated. In fact, the only physical traces left are the people themselves. And they too shucked their old identities for fear of more violence. Hence, while there are newspaper reports (and newsreel footage) and scattered personal memoirs, but very few eye witness accounts, esp. those written or published at the time. So, it is easy to see why historians ceded the space, immediately, to poets and writers and by the time they re-entered the foray, the best one could hope for was Bhatalia style oral-history.

Two recent books attempt to do more. Yasmin Khan’s 2007 book, The great Partition: the making of India and Pakistan, doesn’t leave the colonial archive but does attempt some synthesis. It leads up to 1947 but then skips over to present. Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia much more successfully blends familial memory to official archives, begins in 1947 and continues to the mid-50s. So it is possible, in the fourth generation, start a historiographic project to produce micro-and macro histories of the Partition. Can they deal w/ the pain or even the violence of the event itself? That I am not sure about.

By: Chaplot

Chaplot — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:37:02 +0000

truely lived up the expectations of Part 1… hats off…