Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India

by Gyanendra Pandey

• ISBN13: 9780521807593
• ISBN10: 052180759X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of 'event' and 'interpretation', the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted, by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	x
List of abbreviations	xiii
By way of introduction	1	(20)
The three partitions of 1947	21	(24)
Historians' history	45	(22)
The evidence of the historian	67	(25)
Folding the local into the national: Garhmukhteshwar, November 1946	92	(29)
Folding the national into the local: Delhi 1947-1948	121	(31)
Disciplining difference	152	(23)
Constructing community	175	(31)
Select bibliography	206	(6)
Index	212