आदिवासी, ईसाई और बौद्ध विभाजन के शिकार

•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. The ‘partition of India’, which is how the division of the subcontinent in 1947 is universally referred to in Indian historiography, is also (for Pakistanis) the ‘independence of Pakistan’. Within India, the ‘partition’ of the historians, and of the official pronouncements of the nation-state, lives side by side with the ‘partition’/‘uproar’/‘migration’ that survivors of 1947 speak of. What lies behind these alternative names, I suggest, are diverse claims regarding nationalism and the nation-state: the claims of the Indian state against the Pakistani, on the one hand; and, on the other, the claims of the Indian and Pakistani states against non-statist reconstructions of the past, which sometimes deny the claims of nationalism and the nationstate altogether.