Regional perspectives on Indias Partition: Shifting the Vantage Points

Description

This book expands the scope of understanding of the vast, albeit uneven, experience of the 1947 Partition of India by including localities and life stories from and beyond the regions of Punjab and Bengal. Building on existing research on Partition, the chapters present and analyse the consequences of Partition displacement and the resilience of communities in different parts of the nation. Regions discussed include the Chitmahals, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Andaman Islands, and Jammu and Kashmir. The contributors show that the heterogeneity of people’s experiences reside in spaces of the family, home, neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities refugee settlements, letters, memoirs, biographies, films, fiction, oral histories, and testimonies. The book examines the Partition’s complex effects in regions, localities and contexts and its material and psychological ramifications. This book is a unique and comprehensive contribution in enabling a more complex understanding of how Partition played out and continues to do so for groups and generations across India. It will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience, including history, literature, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, modern Asian studies, studies of South Asia, and studies of memory and trauma. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures Acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction 1. Shadowy Pasts of Violence and their Negotiation: Rethinking Partition Violence (1947) 2. Bordering the Nation: Livelihood, Labour and Memory in Bangla Partition Fictions from Assam and Tripura 3. Brick, Verse, Echo: Partition and the Decline of Urdu Poetry in Jeelani Bano’s Aiwan-e-Ghazal (1976) 4. Poisoned Rivers: Partition in Punjabi Literature 5. Screening the Spectre 6. Multan 7. Sites of Memory: Popular Sufi Shrines in Post-Partition Punjab 8. Sindhi Sikhs: Their Histories and Memories 9. Partitioned Subjects: Women in Mainland “Permanent Liability” Camps and Andaman’s Archipelagic Settlements 10. Caught in a Time Warp: The Fate of the West Pakistan Refugees in Jammu and Kashmir 11. Living off the Grid: Surviving the Stateless Era in India–Bangladesh Chhitmahals (Enclaves) 12. Histories, Territories, Partitions, and Memories among the Zo Hnahthlak and the Chakma in the State of Mizoram 13. The Mechanics of Partition 14. Vicissitudes of Listening: Witness as the Archive of Pain Index