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The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into two postcolonial states of India and Pakistan was a cataclysmic event, accompanied by unprecedented genocidal violence and one of the largest displacements of people in the twentieth century. In this remarkable study, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar unsettles received narratives of Partition's violence and displacements and examines the long, contentious, and ambivalent process of drawing political boundaries and making nation-states in the midst of this historic chaos.
The work is based on interviews with North Indian Muslim families divided between the two cities of Delhi and Karachi, extensive archival research in Urdu newspapers, and government records of both India and Pakistan. Zamindar juxtaposes the experiences of ordinary people caught in the chaos and uncertainty of their times against the series of bureaucratic interventions by both the postcolonial states to halt civic violence, manage displacements, administer refugee property, control movement of people, rehabilitate refugees, and define citizenship. She documents in impressive detail the role of bureaucratic techniques of the modern state (from permits and passports to evacuee property) in forging key relationships between nation, territory, citizen, and state and in establishing a nationalized cartography of modern South Asia. In particular Zamindar examines the ‘Muslim question’ at the heart of Partition and the essential ambiguity that lay in where ‘Muslims’ of the region could belong. She draws out the margins and silences in speech and record to reveal the resistance, bewilderment, and marginalization of North Indian Muslims as they came to be pushed out and divided by both the emergent nation-states. It is here that Zamindar asks us to stretch our understanding of ‘Partition violence’ and to place Partition at the heart of twentieth century’s nation-state formation. |
