Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember [2024 ed.] 9783031433979, 9783031433962

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Postmemory and the Partition of India Learning to Remember Shuchi Kapila

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors

Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK John Sutton Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Shuchi Kapila

Postmemory and the Partition of India Learning to Remember

Shuchi Kapila English Department Grinnell College Grinnell, IA, USA

ISSN 2634-6257     ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic) Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-031-43396-2    ISBN 978-3-031-43397-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43397-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jim Zuckerman / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In memory of my father, Ramesh Chandra Kapila and for my mother, Usha Kapila

“No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere” —Emily Bronte. “No coward soul is mine”

Acknowledgments

The completion of a book is a moment to list the many debts accrued in the writing of it but also an acknowledgment of the fundamentally collaborative nature of life, work, and writing. This project is book-ended with deep personal loss for me and is also in so many ways a reflection on the profound loss felt by millions in partitioned South Asia. I started the project after the passing of my father in 2009, prompted by those untold stories that he had promised that were to give me glimpses of a world I did not know. I was picking up some momentum on the book, in fact discussing its final structure with my husband, Tyler Roberts, on the very day when he died suddenly in June 2021. Family, friends, and colleagues propped me up so that I could take stock of my life and continue working. I thank colleagues in the English Department at Grinnell College for their collegiality and support while I took a sabbatical and then a Fulbright Fellowship in India. First drafts of sections of this book were read with great generosity and engagement by Sue Ireland, Jan Gross, and Elizabeth Prevost. A second group of colleagues held me to weekly writing sessions, read drafts of chapters, and kept me in good cheer. I thank Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Caleb Elfenbein, Karla Erickson, and Deborah Michaels for being my writing partners in the last couple of years. Brigittine French and Maria Tapias offered advice on how to think ‘ethnographically’ and what such research entails. I thank the staff of Burling Library at Grinnell College, the interlibrary loan department, and most recently Sharon Clayton and Kevin Engel, for their efficiency in procuring materials at short notice. Many thanks to Ekta Shaikh for being such an excellent research assistant and for cheering me on toward completion. Students vii

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like her remind me why we chase certain intellectual projects and of the stakes of putting them out in the world. So many people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India shared their time and stories with me. I thank them all for letting me into their homes, the lavish teas and lunches they offered, and the very personal and painful stories they shared. Prof. Vinay Kumar in Chicago shared his stories with an open heart and has kept track of the project through the years. Vineet and Anuradha Nayar were excellent hosts and provided me access to a cluster of storytellers in their home. Close family friends, Mr. H.K.L Jaggi, Dr. Sharda Ranjan, Mrs. Darshan Ranjan, and Mrs. Veena Thapar have passed on in the last few years but their lives and voices are present in the book. Mr. Vijay Thapar provided critical insights into my own family and has always been a concerned and engaged family friend. I also thank the many friends, colleagues, and peers of my own generation who were willing to take the time to reflect on their own partition histories, their family relationships, and their connection to partition narratives at this point of time. Over many years, I have worked with the 1947 Partition Archive led by Guneeta Singh Bhalla. I thank her for her collaboration and Karyn Bellamy-Dagneau for helping me access voices of partition migrants captured by the archive. Thanks to Mallika Ahluwalia and the staff of the Amritsar Partition Museum for sharing photographs I could use. A Fulbright-Nehru fellowship allowed me to be in India in 2022 and 2023, for which I thank the foundation and its Delhi staff, Priyanjana Ghosh and Anupam Anand, for their support. Debts of a more personal kind are many and varied and make life in a small college-town possible. I thank Johanna Meehan and Maura Strassberg for their generous friendship, stimulating conversations, and impromptu dinners accompanied by affection, perspective, staunch support, and great good humor. Caleb and Tina Elfenbein, Tim and Jen Dobe, Phil Jones and Tara Shukla, Jonathan Larson and Deborah Michaels, Dan Reynolds and Garrett Roche, and Alan and Jill Schrift warmly welcomed me into their homes with wonderful meals and sustaining conversation. Susan Ferguson has always provided me a listening ear and warm friendship in all my time at Grinnell. Thanks are due to Erin Bustin, Xavi Escandell, Brigittine French, Mark Laver, Tony and Jacqui Perman, Maria Tapias, and Angela Voos for their friendship. Meena Khandelwal and Wendy Singer, capable multi-taskers, warm hosts, and intellectual mavericks, have been generous comrades and interlocutors for decades who read

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drafts of chapters and gave extensive comments. Great conversations about our books and wonderful meals with Rashmi Varma were one of the highlights of my time in London. Thanks also to Clelia Clini for her friendship and solidarity in researching the partition. In India, Meenakshi Malhotra and Kiran Keswani have been dear friends with whom I have been able to spend happy time re-discovering our connection. Many thanks to Krishna Menon for her friendship and support and for being my Fulbright host. I thank friends from my student years, Rita Chakravorty, Anu Vijh, and the (S)Quad of Anna Neill, Talia Schaffer, and Pam Thurschwell for sustaining me through some difficult times. How does one begin to thank the family that nurtures, supports, and sustains you over and over again? Jane and Amy Roberts offered love and encouragement through many stages of the writing of this book. My brother Ashutosh’s impatient questions about how long the book would take and his belief that I would finish it kept me working on it. My daughter, Shivani, has brought me so much joy with her questions, curiosities, and excitement about this book that “Mom might finish one day.” Thinking about how partition memory connects me to her generation led to many of the analyses in this project. The stories, memories, and insights of my mother, Usha Kapila, inform this work throughout and her love and support kept me functioning through a traumatic time in my life. This book is a small tribute to her strength and resilience and that of her parents who made a difficult and life-changing cross-border migration seventy-six years ago.

Contents

1 “Learning to Remember: The Indian Partition of 1947”  1 2 Partition Postmemory: “Someone Should Know” 27 3 Hospitality and Loss: “Talking About My Heart” 49 4 Nostalgia: Re-witnessing ‘Home’ 77 5 Collecting Memory: The 1947 Berkeley Partition Archive 97 6 Preserving Memory? The Partition Museum in Amritsar117 7 Conclusion:  Retelling South Asian Stories, Magar Pyaar Se (with Love)139 Index147

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CHAPTER 1

“Learning to Remember: The Indian Partition of 1947”

A classic dinner table joke in my family of four would begin with my mother describing the size of maltas (a kind of orange) that grew in her family orchard in Gujranwala where she lived with her parents, a brother, and sister, in a large sprawling house with many rooms, supported by a staff of cook and gardener. The maltas were huge, juicy, plentiful, and the like had never been seen since nor will be again. My brother and I would laugh because we were convinced that our mother was exaggerating, and the family joke, encouraged by our usually circumspect father, was to make gestures with our hands that suggested that the oranges were really huge, bigger than grapefruits, and then collapse into helpless laughter. My mother’s expression would reveal her disdain for our humor and she would continue reminiscing about a beautiful house near a canal, where she rode her tricycle, and where her family were blissfully happy. Not once in those thoughtless childhood years did it occur to us that there was pain under her nostalgia. We just liked to hear her tell her story and assumed that it was a parental habit to think of the past as golden. Our father was gently teasing her storytelling style rather than mocking the substance of what she said, but we could not tell the difference. He had suffered violence during the partition but I did not discover that until after he passed away in 2009. Once, when he got a cut on his hand and I rushed to put a band-aid on the injury, he said ironically, “Indians don’t hurt.” How

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43397-9_1

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could I have known that under his self-deprecation was the encrustation of decades of pain from witnessing the awful violence of partition and its impact on his family so that small injuries were to be laughed at? Or that laughter, celebration, and joy were forever intertwined with knowledge of the horrors that humans could inflict on each other? As the daughter of a partition migrant, born in independent India, I am a third-generation inheritor of partition history and a researcher interested in probing the practices of partition memory today. This places me among those who are between fifty and sixty-five years old today, who were too young to experience partition but nevertheless grew up in its constant shadow.1 This ‘hinge generation’2 is increasingly drawn to analyze partition memory in their own lives and its significance for the future. Such postmemory is described by Marianne as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 1996, 659). It is the largeness of these stories that dominate our psyches even as we often know very little about them, a kind of haunting that is often not understood. Like many in this generation, I, too, was protected from all knowledge of the event by the silence of those who had experienced it3 and feel a compulsion and an ethical imperative to understand the legacy of the partition on my own terms.4 The flood of writing on the partition that has emerged since the fiftieth anniversary of independence in India and Pakistan includes scholarly histories, oral histories, feminist studies, and literary and cultural studies of the partition, which have poured out in a steady stream in the decades after 1997. Priya Kumar’s Limiting Secularism, one of the most significant studies of the ethics of remembering, presents a compelling summary of this terrain of ‘return’ to the partition. She argues that it is not merely that the first generation of partition migrants is now dying out leading to an understandable anxiety about capturing their voices but also in Dominick La Capra’s terms the fact that partition is the “founding trauma” of the subcontinent to which we must return in constant acts of “avowal” (Kumar 2008, 87). My book then is one such act of return and avowal in exploring again from a postmemorial position the travels and travails of partition memory. The enormity of the partition—a million dead, migration of between twelve and fourteen million across the borders of Punjab and Bengal, 75,000 women of different religious groups abducted by Hindu, Sikh,

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and Muslim mobs—gave it the quality of unspeakability that was so much a feature of other well-known and well-documented twentieth-century historical traumas.5 Critical as the Indian partition of 1947 has been to the history of the subcontinent, South Asians are still undecided about whether it is necessary to remember it today, seventy-six years after the event. Mention the word ‘partition’ and you get a range of strong responses: that so much has been written about it already; that we should move beyond it; that it’s an old story that has nothing to do with present generations; that so much still needs to be said, written, and disseminated; or that unlike other twentieth-century historical traumas, we have not memorialized partition adequately. As recently as August 14, 2021, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement that this day would be remembered every year as ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’ was met with a flurry of opinion pieces by scholars, civil society leaders, partition migrants, and politicians. For a start, the choice of August 14 prompted commentators to say “it was not lost on anyone that the new anniversary also happens to be the day when Pakistan celebrates its independence”6 and that “some of us believe that behind the announcement of the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day are the politics of the ruling establishment.”7 The title of another piece proclaimed that “the horrors of Partition are not for remembrance, but for learning lessons.”8 A fourth opinion piece concluded that Partition Horrors Remembrance Day “is a terribly divisive idea that mocks the pain, suffering, tears and tribulations of all those people who suffered that carnage.”9 Given that Partition was a territorial, social, and political division of peoples who had lived together for the previous centuries, that there were many who resisted the idea of this division but equally that it was a moment for Muslim self-determination in the formation of Pakistan, and that there was a feeling among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that the departing colonial powers had betrayed them, remembering partition can never be a linear and decisive act. It is inevitably marked by the recognition of multiple narratives jostling for attention with all communities involved as perpetrators and victims. The Indian nationalist myth that the Indian Congress party wanted a united India whereas Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, wanted to divide India and secure Pakistan for Muslims has been interrogated most famously by Ayesha Jalal who argues that Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan as a ploy to get representation for Muslims in independent India’s legislative and political

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structures, never expecting division to actually come about.10 Venkat Dhulipala argues, on the other hand, that “far from being a vague idea that accidentally became a nation-state, Pakistan was popularly imagined in U.P. as a sovereign Islamic State, a New Medina, as it was called by some of its proponents” (Dhulipala 2015, 4). The role of the Indian National Congress in stalling negotiations with the Muslim League has also come under new scrutiny in these revisionist accounts, but in the end, it is clear that partition was a solution desired by none of the political actors and the political deadlock proved catastrophic for ordinary people in the Indian subcontinent. For postmemory to have any cultural or critical value, we have to ask what it can do, what is it good for, and why we should be interested in it. To that end, I foreground the perspective of postmemorial generations in this study of the modes of dissemination, narration, and public expression of partition memory. If my mother’s memories of partition became a part of my consciousness through that ineffable term ‘affect,’ a manner of facing the world, a set of fears about our safety, a hope for a trauma-free future, and my father’s experience of partition was never articulated, I nevertheless wonder if these were passed down to me and whether I, in turn, will pass them down to my daughter. How much of my parents’ relationship was structured by a deep and intimate understanding of partition trauma? How much of their subterranean anxieties about their children were shaped by the experience of partition? Heeding Marianne Hirsch’s description of postmemory mediated “not by recall but imaginative investment, projection, and creation,” I ask how we can explore its potential for progressive futures (Hirsch 2012, 5). Family history, such as mine, though repeated many times and extensively written about is both representative and singular, each experience one more testimony to what millions experienced. In emphasizing a humanistic approach to partition memory, I explore it not as aggregation of historical or social fact but for the relationship it sets up among postmemorial generations and between them and first-generation migrants and the importance of each act of articulation. This book is thus a study of the culture of partition memory that is being built by postmemorial generations through public institutions, research, oral history, and family stories. For these generations, studying partition is an experience in learning to remember from new socio-political locations not just in South Asia but also in its diaspora in Europe and the United States, and other parts of the world.

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Ambivalence about remembering and the silence of survivors such as we see in South Asia has been a part of other contexts of traumatic history as well.11 Even survivors of the Holocaust had to wait for a few decades before their experiences could be articulated and sometimes even longer before they could be shared with non-survivors. In her autobiography, After Such Knowledge, Eva Hoffman remembers that when her family migrated to Canada from Poland, they could not talk about their experiences with Canadians, some of whom questioned the severity of atrocities that constituted the Holocaust: “Not that I myself knew at that stage what I might have wanted to convey to my new friends on this forbidding subject … Nor did I wish to inflict burdensome instruction on others” (Hoffman 2004, 92). After a while, it became easier to keep that knowledge concealed or within the family. In a similar way, if not completely silenced, partition stories were sometimes shared within extended families or between friends who had experienced it but rarely within immediate families. Added to this is the fact that for the first generation of migrants, the formation of national identity meant accepting the national narrative of independence, which did not give any space to the tragedy of partition. The absence of collective mourning has meant that for many decades there was no agreed-upon value assigned to the act of remembering the partition. In the newly built cities, buildings, museums, and memorials in independent India, there were almost none explicitly dedicated to the partition. There were thus no gathering spaces for those traumatized by the removal, violence, and loss associated with the event. The lack of official and public memorials also means that there has been no collective acknowledgment of the tragedy. Most importantly, for decades after 1947, systematic education about the partition through school and college curricula, museums, archives, or memorials was unavailable for postmemorial generations. This has meant a lack of clarity and conviction about the goals of partition remembrance. In other historical contexts such as the Holocaust, scholars have argued for the need for witnessing another’s pain, the importance of telling one’s story, and the importance of archiving historical memory, but these are not as universally acknowledged in the case of the Indian partition as for other state-led atrocities. The clear-cut moral injunctions to witness and never forget the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust emerged from processes that involved public testimonials during legal trials, the televising of such trials, and the deep impression it left on public memory.12 Similar legal processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the Rwandan Genocide Commission in their pursuit of

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justice for victims of apartheid and genocide, respectively, brought to light the atrocities committed under state regimes in both countries. No similar public process impressed itself upon public memory in India nor led to the evolution of an idea of witnessing. The participation of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities in large-scale violence against each other made questions of legal justice difficult to pursue; nevertheless, it left a large population on both sides of the border with tremendous losses and unhealed scars from the traumatic experience of sectarian violence. It may even be the case that in the decades following 1947, silence about the partition had a constructive role in inaugurating a post-­independence society in India, which did not look like, for instance, post-­war Bosnia, where the alienation between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs created a deadlocked society. The ability to forget and move on created the conditions for establishing a functional civil society in India. In her Making Peace with Partition, Radha Kumar recounts a telling episode from the years right after partition in which a Hindu writer who adopted a Muslim name, Fikr Tausvi, visited the new India-Pakistan border soon after partition. On his second visit across the border to see friends in Lahore from the Indian side, he notes a three mile-long line of people who had blurred the border between the two countries and were laughing, talking, and sharing food. They did not seem to remember that only a few months ago they had carried their homes on their heads or that they had fled in terror of losing their lives. A free exchange of people went on across the border and Muslims and Sikhs sat next to each other and sold the religious texts of different communities, not necessarily their own. Such a continuing exchange between people and the persistent sense of kinship became harder once passports were instituted as a requirement to cross the border in 1965. Kumar rightly points out that in the case of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, the three countries implicated in the partition, they “have not challenged each other’s right to exist after the event” (Kumar 2005, 35). And, unlike other partitions, the Indian partition “did not create divided cities” (Kumar 2005, 37), making it possible for both countries to imagine, in principle, a multi-ethnic and a multi-religious society.13 This is, of course, a claim that is impossible to support in the current socio-political climate under the BJP government where minorities have been violently targeted in many cities in India. Some scholars have taken the idea of forgetting further to conclude that remembering the partition is dangerous. In a conversation in 1997 entitled “remembering partition” political scientist Javeed Alam and historian Suresh Sharma argue that the survival and continuing co-existence

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of India’s many religious communities is dependent on forgetting. At a collective level, if “Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs have to live together in peace and harmony and amity, it is important they leave behind these events as something most traumatic, something tragic but something most unfortunate which ought not to have happened.” But he adds further that it is important “they also think that we were all equally responsible” (Alam and Sharma 1998, 101). Alam believes that a new generation has emerged for whom partition is a distinct historical event, a faint memory relegated to a bitter and divisive past, which is where it belongs. In his view, such a forgetting is crucial to our politics, to the everydayness of life, and to future peaceful social interaction between communities. Different historical contexts are absolutely critical to our understanding of specific traumas but there are also similarities created by the sudden onslaught of suffering inflicted on innocent people, which raise similar questions: should you re-visit that pain? Does it have a therapeutic effect? Is it important to record and hand down that experience? Is it not an ethical imperative to collectively mourn the horror of that time, acknowledge and memorialize, and understand its bitter legacies for our present? Edward J Mallot asks the important question “should we remember?” and lays out the different reasons why remembering partition is particularly fraught with problems, arguing in the process that partition presents an example of “why Eurocentric notions about memory and memory practices may not apply to South Asian contexts” (Mallot 2012, 14). He points out the difference between Holocaust remembrance and the partition, the latter being an intercommunity conflict with widespread mutual culpability and violence and not a pogrom organized by a fascist state. The absence of a clear narrative of state-led atrocity makes the value of partition memory particularly vexed and contentious. But does that mean it should not be tackled and instead left to fester and emerge at critical moments? In a report on a conference held in October 2002 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Yale Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Testimonies, Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark note that though the conference was focused on the Holocaust, it was not exclusively about that genocide but also considered the contribution of testimony to genocide studies more broadly.14 They conclude that “the problem of how to deal with this postmemory (to use Marianne Hirsch’s term), this shadow of a past not one’s own, demonstrates that even when the histories themselves are quite different from each other, problems of memory cut across the range of historical experiences” (Rothberg and Stark 2003, 91). It is precisely this

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commonality of the dilemmas that confront the generation of postmemory that makes comparison with other contexts enriching but also complex.15 In so many ways, thinking about the partition is happening in a global frame with memory seen as an important attribute of modern human culture and life. Holocaust memorialization has had an outsized influence on memory institutions in many parts of the world including in India.16 Forgetting and moving on in a violently volatile society simmering with communal tension leaves out crucial questions of justice, repression and recall, and the fact that without confronting, processing, and taking stock of such events, a steady desensitization to them happens again and again. Discussions about responsibility threaten to reopen old animosities, rupture carefully built compacts, and recall unprocessed suffering. But even if, unlike in other contexts, justice cannot be the goal of partition remembrance, collective memorialization of loss is a process that would have aided a collective ownership of responsibility. These processes did not happen in South Asia. As I write this, tensions between the majority Hindu population and minorities in neighborhoods even around the national capital of New Delhi have led to violence and rioting.17 Tensions with Pakistan are at an all-time high and Kashmir has remained under occupation by the Indian army. Many of these sensitive political issues go back to the division of India in 1947 and definitions of belonging in India are being continuously contested with deadly consequences for minorities. What partition presents is the possibility of thinking through a conflict that is past history but one that we have some distance from, that can bring together personal and political perspectives and grapple with the consequences of loss that threatens to repeat itself again and again in modern South Asia. Communal tensions in independent India, whether they took the form of anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Bombay conflagration of 1992, or the Gujarat riots of 2002, have been viewed through the lens of similar riots leading to and during the partition.18 As India’s national capital New Delhi continues to grow, for large numbers of people who live in neighborhoods constructed to house partition refugees, present events that threaten their homes are a reminder of the trauma of homelessness following the partition and their migration to India.19 And while the Indian partition eventually created a successful middle-class in North India, it also created large groups of ‘stateless’ people, migrants, and refugees in border areas in North and East India. The after-effects of partition echo through South Asia even today making it ‘the long partition’ in

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Vazira Yacoobali Zamindar’s words, because the after-effects of nation formation created divisions not just of territory but within families and lives forever after.20 Forgetting the partition has taken many forms, from suppression of traumatic histories to a desperate desire to move on. Silences around this profoundly formative experience have meant that intergenerational relationships are marked by distance and bewilderment even when they are very close. Urvashi Butalia’s famous story about her uncle Rana Mama records her shock at her discovery as a mature adult that she had an uncle on the other side of the India-Pakistan border.21 A kind of ‘sanctioned ignorance’ prevails in many families as partition is considered to belong to another time and place. In her research on a middle-class population of Hindu Punjabis in Delhi, Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj discovered this distance between generations: Each of these three generations has a different understanding of partition for two reasons: they grew up in different periods and their family narratives are disjointed. The memories are not straight forward remembrances, but are interspersed with forgetting: individuals do not want to remember, families do not want to recall bad times, people attempt to avoid the stigma of being a refugee and the nation state wants to focus on the newly established independent nation. (Raj 2000, 36)

The disjointed nature of family narratives is a critical insight on which I build in this book as I explore what is of most concern to partition migrants and how they articulate the uses of this memory for the future. For such memory in the time after forgetting, which includes fragments of memory that remain and knowledge of places we have never visited that were communicated in stories, though not always directly, Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2013) coins the term ‘post-amnesias,’ which captures both the forgetting of partition memory but also the will to remembering and recovering it in postmemorial generations. The focus of my inquiry will be on how we might intentionally remember the partition in intergenerational communities in order to generate new South Asian solidarities and on a critical examination of memory practices that we are in the process of building. Acts of forgetting are not always conscious or driven by the goal of suppressing information; sometimes the conditions for recounting and revisiting traumatic memories do not arise. Even though I knew that my mother had experienced the partition when

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she was six years old, I did not know that on her family’s arrival in Jullunder on the Indian side of the border, she had heard the family gardener narrate to her father that their home had been torched, the precious glass decorations smashed, the Persian rugs reduced to cinders. It was only when I questioned her closely “Were you told this later or did you hear it then, as a six year old” that she confirmed that she had heard it being narrated by the gardener who wept bitterly as he told the story of how his life had been spared by the mob that invaded the house. “You know, all the decorations in our house were in Muslim style,” she added, as she recalled for the very first time the tubes of colored glass strung together by a thread that created a curtain between rooms and that tinkled as people left the room or entered it. That memory of the smashing of her home lay as a fragment in my mother’s memory till I quizzed her about it and it led to a conversation about her life-long fear about the precarity of life and the sudden end of things as a distinct possibility at any given time. This was a narrative with cause and effect that she articulated for the very first time in that space where I was both a daughter and a researcher. It is thus the generations of postmemory that have tasked themselves with questioning, probing, eliciting, as both an exercise in sympathetic listening and one that brings the analytic questions and tools that we have brought to literature, film, and expressive culture to a study of these migrant narratives. As a literary scholar, my interest in narrative frames my method of approaching partition memory. The word ‘narrative’ is often used to suggest simply a story, which is important mainly for the ‘factual’ information it gives us about an event. But narrative is also about the emplotment and arrangement of a story, the affective and emotional registers in which it is presented, and a consciousness of the audience to which it is being presented. Making an important distinction between traumatic memory and narrative memory, Mike Bal et al. argue that traumatic memory is a non-­ memory that is solitary and inflexible and hence has no social component while “ordinary narrative memory fundamentally serves a social function: it comes about in a cultural context whose frame evokes and enables the memory (Bal et al. 1999, x).” Explaining further its connection to a social and to the present, they write “It is a context in which, precisely, the past makes sense in the present, to others who can understand it, sympathize with it, or respond with astonishment, surprise, even horror: narrative memory offers some form of feedback that ratifies the memory” (Bal et al. 1999, x). Partition memory here is narrative memory—the rhythms of everyday life, description of homes, schools, markets, family life, and, most

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importantly, an accounting of a purposeful life by survivors. The eruption of violence into this life is, of course, an inevitable part of it, but is not the sole teleological goal of the interview. Bal et al. make clear “cultural recall is not merely something of which you happen to be the bearer but something that you actually perform, even if, in many instances, such acts are not consciously and willfully contrived.”22 Further, they  point out that “narrative memories, even of unimportant events, differ from routine or habitual memories in that they are affectively colored, surrounded by an emotional aura that, precisely, makes them memorable” (Bal et al., viii). I pay careful attention to the many expressions of ‘this emotional aura’ as constitutive of the form and content of what is expressed in oral narratives, conversations, and public institutions. An attention to narrative is not new in studies of partition literature and film in which partition themes have  appeared for decades through displacement and indirection. Bhaskar Sarkar and Kumkum Sangari have both argued that narratives in Indian cinema of the late 1940s and 1950s engage with partition memory even when they do not overtly seem to be doing so and that partition had a strong presence in contemporary popular imagination. Sarkar makes the case that “Indian cinema of the first two decades after 1947 abounds in narratives in which Partition appears in displaced, allegorical forms, intimating a kind of melancholic obsession” (Sarkar 2009, 30). Sangari discusses popular Hindi cinema of the late 1940s and 1950s as everywhere permeated by ‘viraha’ or the longing caused by separation; whether it is lovers, or children, or friends, the idea of separation and longing shapes storylines, songs, lyrics, and the entire structure of cinematic production in those decades. For her, this is the popular culture that formed the partition generation and their children.23 Literature and film has been described as “an archive of memory in the public sphere—a public, collective, non-statist memory” (Daiya 2008, 39) even as the partition continues to be “a spectral presence that continues to inform and haunt both Hindu-Muslim relations in India and contemporary international relations in the subcontinent” (Kumar 2008, 85). Literary narratives have also enabled scholars to discuss the ethical imperatives of partition memory, for instance, the salutary processes of witnessing the pain of partition. Tarun Saint, in his extensive analysis of partition literature in English and regional Indian languages, considers literary writing as a place where sustained reflection on the partition has happened: “Imaginative writing … does engage with precisely pain and suffering at the individual as well as collective level … but does so in a different register,

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often through a reordering of temporality” (Saint 2010, 216). For him, literature offers a testimonial space that registers the violence of partition and stands as witness to the partition, an idea that has often been used to describe literature of the partition published in the 1950s and later.24 These were the decades before the proliferation of testimonies and oral histories in the 1980s and later, which fully embraced the idea of a ‘witness’ to suffering endured by another.25 Literary texts, museums, archives, and oral history projects are all involved in the business of witnessing the partition, generating narratives, and preserving and disseminating its memory. Partition stories, images, and behaviors are especially important as the repository of lost histories, relationships, neighborhoods, and loves because the sudden, unexpected nature of the movement of people and the dislocation from homes has also meant that partition survivors did not have many material possessions to hand down as these were all lost in the sudden conflagration and the violent movement of populations. People expected to be back in their homes, not permanently removed from them and the unexpected need to travel meant they could not carry many belongings with them. Material traces of partition, though available, are not found in plenty—photographs, albums, heirlooms, jewelry—these are the last things to carry in the event of unexpected removal from home.26 Most partition stories are about leaving with one set of clothes and whatever else you could grab in your haste. Memory, thus, attaches more to narratives of prepartition life and post-partition survival than to objects. Literary narratives have also offered scholars the opportunity to think through the ethics of co-existence, which is the focus of Priya Kumar’s study, Limiting Secularism (2008), in which she considers how literary texts imagine possibilities and histories of productive relationships that seemed to have been irrevocably lost with partition. Another significant area of research opened up by the first generation of oral histories about which I will have more to say later revealed that women’s lives were deeply impacted by the rape and violence visited upon them during partition and the silencing of their narratives as a patriarchal state was inaugurated. Jill Didur (2006) reads the silences and ambiguities of women’s stories as an important counter-narrative that unsettles partition, revealing, for instance, how the agency of abducted women was completely elided even in the recovery operations to establish a benevolent paternalist state.27 Given that there is a necessary relationship between the public and private realms of memory, it is unsurprising that some of the same themes can be found in testimonials and oral histories as well. This is the case

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made by Anindya Raychaudhuri who writes about the “complex dialectical relationship between the public representation and private memories about partition—how people’s memories are influenced by public discourse and how the creative and critical practice of academics, artists, and activists is influenced by their own direct and inherited memories” (Raychaudhuri 2019, 5). His attempt to think through partition as “a productive event” is very much in line with my effort to highlight the different generational voices of my interviewees (Raychaudhuri 2019, 13). However, though Raychaudhuri begins his book with a statement about his own inheritance of partition memory, we do not see it reflected in the nature and texture of each encounter. His argument establishes a continuity between all these genres as disruptive in similar ways of the national narrative in post-partition South Asia. Although my book also considers private family memory and public institutions like the 1947 Partition Archive and the Amritsar Partition museum, both these public institutions are so new that we will need to wait longer to think about their impact on private memory.28 Like literature and cinema, oral histories have also expressed themes of loss, violence, home, childhood, and trauma that appear repeatedly in stories of partition migrants. Yet, despite scholars’ clear understanding of the particularity of each oral history encounter, most studies distill them for themes and documentary evidence rather than as specific performances based on the subject position of interviewer and interviewee, time, space, social and regional position. In contrast to this, my interviews are constituted by a more expansive understanding of the filial and affiliative in each encounter as it rearticulates the nature of family, belonging, and community and while partition literature and film have colored narratives and tropes which shape how people remember or narrate, my focus is on the interaction between the subject position of interviewer and interviewed. I explore the particularity of Punjabis in thinking about affect, sensibility, and their linguistic inflections in the stories they narrate. Anjali Gera Roy’s significant work on partition testimonies works toward an amplification of the historical record, which by filling in “the personal, sensory, affective memories of both documented and undocumented historical events” (Gera Roy 2019, 24). She sees her work, then, as a corrective and supplement to historical accounts of the partition. In the 160 testimonies gathered by her and her research assistants in many cities of North and East India, she unearths the ‘intangible violence’ of partition. However, this strategy of collecting stories relies on quantification of information and is

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a search for a fuller historical record whereas I engage with the form of oral history itself and its mutations and protean articulations in intergenerational contexts. Other significant insights offered by Gera Roy’s Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India (2019) foreground the continuing the trauma of partition that leads to a ‘stutter’ in narrators rather than a clearly connected story, a concept similar to my idea of open and jagged partition narratives. In my own understanding of partition, loss and sorrow are intertwined with opportunity and celebration, making it a very mixed narrative that also yields a particular stance toward life and the world. Instead of a search for historical truth, the critical goal of this book can be articulated in Deepti Misri’s understanding of the importance of testimonies and oral histories: “From memorial recollections, historians and literary critics alike must (and indeed can only) seek not a chronicle of events and experiences at a given moment in history but a tracing of the discursive logic ruling those happenings and the manner of their comprehension in multiple public and private discursive sites” (Misri 2014, 63). Building on many of these important studies, but also narrowing in on a less discussed aspect of oral histories of partition, Learning to Remember considers the significance of each act of intentional articulation for the speaker and the audience as an exploration of partition memory by postmemorial generations. For first generation of migrants such articulations become a gesture of hospitality toward those whom they include in their audience and a confirmation of affiliative relationships. For their children and grandchildren or those in that position, it is both an opportunity to witness but also to interrogate those narratives from the perspective of the present. This process makes apparent sorrow, loss, joy, guilt, anguish, complicity, regret, and resilience all mixed together in a sensibility that Punjabis associate with themselves, one that was formed and tempered through the experience of partition. Research itself is a process not just of investigation as though a particular history or story is to be extracted and examined but rather a process of building and co-creating that community. The goal of this study then is to meet partition migrants and their children where they are now, at the present moment, which is the period from 2011–2022 when I collected oral histories (including 2015–2022, the years when the 1947 Partition Archive has been building its repository), to the present post-pandemic moment of completing this book.

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In considering the ethics of studying partition at this moment, I take seriously Marianne Hirsch’s claim about the affiliative communities that memory work can create. Intergenerational connection is a more complicated relay through society in the way best explained by Hirsch as a process that makes imaginative leaps of understanding across the gap of time, experience, and context. Hirsch writes of the importance of telling untold stories, and of understanding the pain of another generation so as to create filliative sympathies that are larger than those created by the familial. This is an important distinction given the importance placed on family stories in partition research. Such work, especially feminist work, opens a space “for the consideration of affect, embodiment, privacy, and intimacy as concerns of history,” and it shifts our attention “to the minute events of daily life” (Hirsch 2012, 16), and, importantly, it can feel “personal” and “urgent” though not necessarily “autobiographical” and “familial” (Hirsch 2012, 15). Though the ‘familial’ is an important access point to partition memory, it is not the story of a single family; the autobiographical is, similarly, representative of the relationship of an entire generation to partition memory. In an earlier article, Hirsch suggests that opening yourself to the pain of others produces “distancing awareness” that “though it could have been me, it was decidedly not me” (Hirsch 2014, 339). She describes this “as a form of solidarity that is suspicious of empathy, shuttling instead between proximity and distance, affiliation and disaffiliation, complicity and accountability” (Hirsch 2014, 339). This kind of engagement with the partition would proceed with an awareness of the pitfalls of nostalgic thinking and uncritical solidarities; it would be turned toward the future in order to ask what use we can make of past experiences and how we retrieve lives of dignity and projects for peace. It would also ask what kinds of relationships are built by understanding the pain of others. Might this be an important educative, ethical, historically rich, and bracing experience for the generation of postmemory rather than a disabling one? What sorts of damage does amnesia do to the affective structures of society? We can learn an entire generation that formed us only through their “stories, images, and behaviors” (Hirsch 2014, 339). Arguing for the importance of memory as a building block of culture in a post-Holocaust society, the philosopher Avishai Margalit offers some ideas that help us consider why partition memory might have social significance. Making a distinction between thick human relations (parent, friend, lover, fellow-countryman) and thin ones (those that rely on some

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aspect of being human [such as being sick]), Margalit argues that “thick relations are anchored in a shared past or moored in shared memory” (Margalit 2002, 7). He describes memory as “the cement that holds thick relations together, and communities of memory are the obvious habitat for thick relations and thus for ethics” (8). His concept of human community is larger than those we have face-to-face relationships because we “lead collective existences based on symbols that encapsulate shared memories” and that “collective existences are webs of relations based on bonds in which shared memories play a crucial role” (Margalit 2002, 95). Community is created through the practice of memory, Margalit writes because “the social unit for my discussion of collective memory and our obligation to have shared memory is not necessarily the nation, the ethnic group, or, for that matter, the tribe, but instead it is the community of memory—whatever it happens to be,” which in its best version is “the relation between a community of memory and a nation is such that a proper community of memory may help shape a nation, rather than the nation shaping the community of memory” (Margalit 2002, 101). It is my working hypothesis that ‘thick relations’ that are based on intergenerational sharing of memories of the past were brutally interrupted in the traumatic aftermath of partition. Without the ethical drive to share histories as built into the idea of Jewish identity, no systematic transmission of memory took place in the South Asian context. My book demonstrates that research can be a process of sharing memories and witnessing the lives of others, a process that can build transnational and intercommunity solidarities. A second aspect of oral histories that is parallel to other contexts of trauma and survival is the opportunity that my interviews gave partition migrants to make a memory narrative of their own lives. These vary, of course, with class, nationalist ideology, investment in nostalgia, or the idea of family. Studying these ‘life stories’ coming out of the experience of the partition as a genre in itself, I discover narratives that are jagged, open, fragmented, infused with loss at the same time that they can also be about success and the re-formation of a family. Even though there are continuities and similarities between these testimonies and literature and film, there are also differences in that partition migrants express the struggle to remember, the unfinished nature of memory, the significance it accords each life, the dynamic nature of the narration, the invitation to the audience or a rejection of it, the particular admixture of grief and celebration, loss and opportunity, the glaring failures of the nation-state that each of these stories represent.

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I have chosen to collect interviews myself in order to reflect on the methods of oral history and ethnography and what they yield for a study of the Indian partition at the same time that the limits of these methods also become evident. Even in my discussion of interviews collected in the 1947 Partition Archive, I consider each interview as an ‘event’ to be studied for the methods used and the stories elicited by researchers. Between 2011 and 2022, I interviewed twenty-one second-generation partition migrants and seventeen third-generation migrants (all names changed for these two groups), and have studied thirty-nine interviews in the Berkeley Partition Archive, following the archive’s direction in naming and citing them. I am especially attentive to the position of the postmemorial researcher and the voices and curiosities of this generation as they encounter partition memory today. My primary goal is to study the method as much as the content of memory practices, a literary scholar’s interest in genre brought to a study of forms of partition memorialization. Regional considerations are, of course, paramount in what was a territorial division of South Asia with different linguistic groups in the mix. I am mindful of the excessive attention already given to the partition in Punjab and the skewed universalisms produced from this research when the case of the Bengal partition was different in duration and kind. Much more attention also needs to be paid to Northeast India, the Northwest Frontier province, and Sindh as places with their own memory cultures. But the goal of my study is not to generate a universal theory of the partition or to apply my findings to other regions of India. It is precisely to situate my own journey as a second- generation Punjabi woman armed with the linguistic skills I have to catch people as they remember, look back, refuse, parry, acknowledge, or reject the memory of the partition. This does not mean that the experiences detailed here cannot apply elsewhere—more that my study is focused on describing northwestern localities and the kinds of solidarity and kinship they enabled.29 This book takes multiple approaches to partition memory by studying testimonies and family stories, the Berkeley Partition Archive, and the new partition museum in Amritsar as ‘memory practices’ that perform partition memory for an audience newly sensitized by a global comparative lens to the importance of memory to culture. Each of these ‘practices’ of memorializing generate their own narrative about the partition, their own map of its significance and consequences. My goal is to engage with them in a dynamic way studying their protocols, their methods, their goals, and their understanding of the value of memory.

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Some of the questions I explore in this study are: what is the role of memory in a culture where the wound of partition permeates life, but is rarely acknowledged? Second, how is partition memory handed down to second and third generations of migrants? What forms does this memory take and how aware are families of this transmission of memory? By studying memory work, we can slowly replace an attachment to ‘authentic’ memories and instead do the collective work of understanding how we remember. In doing so, we may also get a much more complicated picture of belonging, grief, loss, and memory that does not allow an easy alignment with national identity, a recognition that can be the fertile ground of new South Asian sympathies and solidarities.

Structure of the Book The book is divided into two parts and considers multiple practices of partition memorialization. Each of these practices of ethnography, oral history, museum, and archive building comes with its own inheritance in the field of memory studies. These practices are being transformed by generations of postmemory, who have brought comparative memory cultures into the discussion as they bring partition into focus for themselves. As a scholar of literary studies, I am interested in genre and form and consider each of the practices—of ethnography, oral history, museum, and archive building—for the specific insights that they give us into partition memories and also their specific limitations. Ethnographic research, for instance, enables the building of relationships with partition survivors that elicit a narrative about their experience that can be shared and witnessed but that also limits and forecloses an overarching perspective on numbers, locations, multiple sites of partition violence. Similarly oral history is richer when it enters the form of a dialogue, but often it is focused on accumulating a certain number of stories that by themselves are each a fragment of the event. An engagement with each of these modes of creating and conserving partition memory has much to teach us about how we are learning to remember the partition. In the first part of the book, I explore what ethnography and oral history can accomplish for our understanding of partition, and how we might understand ‘nostalgia’ in this context. I ask how memory narratives are inflected by my position as a postmemorial daughter and researcher, sometimes in conversation with my peers, at others with the elderly witnesses of a historical trauma. The second part of the book studies the building and

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evolution of two public institutions of partition memory: the Amritsar Partition Museum inaugurated in 2017 and the 1947 Partition Archive housed in Berkeley and founded in 2011. Both these institutions are the first of their kind and are led by women whose families experienced the partition. I examine the goals and methods of the museum, its exhibits, the contexts and histories it invokes, and the experience of visiting the space. Chapter 2 focuses on the generations of postmemory, those who did not experience partition and were not eyewitnesses but inheritors of partition memory. I explore how memory has been transmitted to this generation, whether or not they wish to have a relationship with the partition, and how it has inflected their sense of themselves as second-generation South Asians. A sense of being unmoored from a place or a location haunts second-generation Punjabis as much as their parents, but there is a clearer commitment to speaking out and sharing the experience than among those who were first-generation witnesses. An intergenerational narration of the partition informs Chap. 3, which is based on my own interviews conducted between 2011 and 2017 with partition migrants, largely middle-class Punjabis, settled in Delhi and other parts of North India. Their personal stories complicate the idea of subjects formed by a linear national history. Feelings of love for a home, friendships, places, and experience spill across national boundaries, across religious identities, across regional affiliations, generations, languages, customs—it is a reaching back and forward, wide in scope and hence finds connections with ideas about gender, belonging, and cultural identity. At the same time, layers of trauma are concealed and banished to the back of their lives, psyches, and minds. I consider why the sharing of this memory with a younger postmemorial interviewer like me is important for producing certain kinds of narrative. Chapter 4 expands on the idea of nostalgia as the most recognizable structuring trope of partition memory—visits to former homes on the other side of the border become an occasion to celebrate a better time of intercommunal harmony and peace. Media outlets seize on these moments to celebrate the affection between the people of Pakistan and India. What might be the uses of such compulsively performed nostalgia for a progressive transnational political project? Chapter 5 is a study of the Berkeley 1947 Partition Archive, which was established by a young South Asian physicist, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, who realized on a visit to Hiroshima that there was no comparable memorial to the Indian partition and that its memory was slowly disappearing with the

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passing on of first-generation witnesses. This chapter is based on my study of thirty-nine audio-visual recordings and explores themes of kinship, hospitality, and friendship in a multi-religious, multi-ethnic society that was pre-partition India. It also focuses on the mechanics of such memory projects, their achievements, and challenges in accumulating this archive. I study not only the content of the collected interviews but also the work of the founder of the archive, the interns, and archivists and analyze the archive’s protocols in collecting interviews in order to assess its achievement in creating a repository of these partition testimonies. While thinking about the ways in which the Berkeley repository could be useful for my study, I searched for a group of subjects that would be inaccessible to me without travel and extensive local resources, and, with the help of the archivist, found a cluster of women migrants in rural Pakistan on which I focus a section of this chapter. In Chap. 6, I discuss the new Amritsar Partition Museum focusing on what it achieves through its curating of partition memorabilia and historical information for the everyday visitor and what the shortcomings of a ‘nationalist’ approach to partition memory might be. After decades of debate about the advisability of having an official museum on the partition, an Advisory Board of scholars, art historians, and civil society leaders led by writer and journalist Kishwar Desai conceptualized a public museum to the 1947 partition of India in Amritsar, which was inaugurated on August 17, 2017, to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence from British colonial rule. Given the astonishing absence of any museum or memorial to the partition, this was a pioneering move, which, however, needs to continue to evolve to serve the needs of many different partition constituencies. I present a case for curating a museum with a feminist lens given that gendered violence was the essential character of the event. In conclusion, partition memory reveals contradictions of national and regional belonging which are a salutary lesson for hinge generations that a simple adoption of polarized identities should never be possible in the subcontinent. The creative and intentional goal of learning from the partition shapes and inflects memory projects in the current landscape and can be harnessed for a progressive politics in South Asia. Most importantly, we injure ourselves and others if we do not remember that our South Asian identities are at every moment complexly layered by language, region, and co-implicated forms of belonging.

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Notes 1. See Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory (2012) where she defines postmemory as the “relationship that the ‘generations after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before— to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (5). 2. In After Such Knowledge (2004), Eva Hoffman writes, “The second generation after every calamity is the hinge generation in which the meanings of awful events can remain arrested and fixed at the point of trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the world, and new understanding” (xv). 3. Urvashi Butalia’s account of visiting her Uncle Ranamama in Pakistan is one of the most evocative of how silences around even the closest family left on the other side of the border persisted for decades after partition. See The Other Side of Silence (2000), 23–50. 4. Ananya Jahanara Kabir makes this point in her Partition’s Post-Amnesias (2013) suggesting in her title itself the forgetting that has marked the aftermath of this event. 5. These figures are cited by Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence (2000), 35. 6. Shyam Saran, “The horrors of Partition must be remembered—but for the right reasons,” Opinion, Indian Express, Aug 19, 2021. 7. Harsh Mander, “Remember the Horrors of Partition, but also draw lessons from them,” Opinion, Indian Express, Aug 22, 2021. 8. Shah Alam Khan, “Partition horrors are not for remembrance, but for learning lessons,” Opinion, Indian Express, Aug 31, 2021. 9. Manish Tiwari, “Partition was not just ‘batwara’ or division, it was ‘ujara’ or devastation,” Opinion, Indian Express, Sept 2, 2021. 10. This is the argument of her The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (1985). For the clearest discussion of the traditional and revisionist perspectives on the high politics of India’s partition, see Asim Roy, “The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective,” 1990. 11. Acknowledging the after-effects of partition has also been difficult because there has been resistance to the psychological vocabulary associated with trauma and genocides in other parts of the world. In his Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia (2012), Edward J Mallot considers arguments against a strictly psychoanalytic approach to partition trauma in the Indian context advanced by Ashis Nandy (“does not resonate with a theory of life for a majority of Indians”) and Christiane

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Hartnack (2012) who argues that a culture with different philosophical and scientific traditions, religious beliefs and myths would not receive psychoanalysis easily. It is certainly the case that there are practices and traditions of healing drawn from the socio-cultural matrix of South Asian life that have expressed, absorbed, or echoed the partition, but it is not clear to me that an absolute argument can be made against the value of psychoanalysis in the Indian context. On the contrary, a recent study by practicing psychiatrists Alok Sarin, Sarah Ghani, and Sanjeev Jain found that when faced with vignettes of suffering partition survivors, most mental health professionals concluded that they had psychological problems and required professional help. For this study, Sarin, Ghani, and Jani created fifteen vignettes of firstperson accounts of people who had experienced political violence. These included people in India and Pakistan and Indian and Pakistani migrants in the US who had left after the partition and survivors of Hutu-Tutsi riots in Rwanda. Of the 450 mental health professionals contacted with a questionnaire, only 13 responded and of those who responded almost all felt that the people in the vignettes were suffering from psychological problems and that they required professional help. See, Sarin, Ghani, and Jain, 253 (2015). 12. Carolyn Dean argues that the work of David Rousset and others show that “Bearing witness was a dialogue between witnesses and spectators meant to forge and secure collective human bonds against the camp systems everywhere, a celebration of humanity that demanded politics even as it transcended them” (Dean 2019, 82). 13. Clearly the situation in contemporary India after the rise of the BJP and particularly from 2020 to the present is far from one of intercommunity harmony. Muslims and other minorities have been targeted for violence in many cities. The recent hijab ban at a school in Karnataka has only highlighted the persecution of Muslims in India. 14. Michael Rothberg and Jared Stark published this report entitled “After the Witness” in History and Memory, 15.1 (Spring/Summer 2003), 85–96. 15. See the excellent points made by Jie-Hyum Lim (2022) in his “Postcolonial Reflections on the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crimes, and Colonialism.” Lim points out that the marking together of Hiroshima and Auschwitz memories in a kind of cosmopolitan global frame led to a forgetting of Japan’s history as an imperial power and its oppression of its minorities, 30–31. 16. In her “Ghosts of Future Nations, or The Uses of the Holocaust Museum Paradigm in India (2015),” Kavita Singh discusses how Yad Vashem influenced the setting up of the Khalsa Heritage Complex dedicated to Sikh history in Anandpur Sahib in the Indian Punjab and the Tibet Museum in Dharamshala, India.

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17. See, for instance, this news report in The Indian Express, Aug 7, 2023, Sukhbir Swach, “Nuh violence leaves Haryana reeling but farmers stand guard, stop it from spreading,” https://indianexpress.com/article/ political-­pulse/nuh-­violence-­leaves-­haryana-­r eeling-­but-­farmers-­stand-­ guard-­stop-­it-­from-­spreading-­8879581/ 18. Kavita Daiya (2008) writes about how “partition continues to haunt contemporary life in India.” She includes the killing of Sikhs after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, the vandalization of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and the violence against Muslims in 2002 as a reminder of this fact. See Violent Belongings, 2. Priya Kumar (2008), in her study of partition literature and film, “points out that partition is a spectral presence that continues to inform and haunt both Hindu-Muslim relations in India and contemporary international relations in the subcontinent” (85). See her Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film. 19. When a government-led plan to demolish a housing colony was floated in 2002, it reminded those living in it of being rendered homeless overnight in the aftermath of the partition. See Ravinder Kaur (2007), Since 1947. 20. In her The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (2007), Yacoobali Zamindar studies the allocation of evacuee property left behind by migrants fleeing partition violence in South Asia and the construction of ‘legitimate’ citizens through this process. 21. See the section “Blood” in The Other Side of Silence (2000), 23–51. 22. See introduction to Acts of Return: Cultural Recall in the Present (1999), vii. 23. See Kumkum Sangari (2011), “Viraha: A trajectory in the Nehruvian era.” 24. Tarun Saint (2010) eloquently makes this point in his Witnessing the Partition, an analysis of writing from the subcontinent in the decades following partition. 25. As we know now, even in the case of the Holocaust in which ‘witnessing’ by the rest of the world became central, it was not until the 1970s that this concept emerged. Annette Wieviorka describes this process in her discussion of ‘testimony,’ a truth-telling narrative in front of witnesses: “Personal, individual memories, confined within closed, family-like groups, had been generated from the moment the events took place” but “were not part of the cultural mainstream and had little political meaning” (Wieviorka 2006, 55). According to her, it wasn’t until the Eichmann trial made witnessing and memory both a legal and a political event that testimony became important. Witnessing the partition does not have similar legal ramifications, but the cultural and social modalities of witnessing for later generations has more recently become the focus of attention. 26. See Anchal Malhotra’s recent Remnants of Separation (2017), which is a study of the material culture that traveled with partition migrants. 27. See Jill Didur (2006), Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, 11.

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28. See the recently published studies of the archive and the museum by Ted Svensson and Pippa Virdee. See Ted Svensson (2021), “Curating the partition: Dissonant heritage and Indian nation building” and Pippa Virdee (2022), “Histories and memories in the digital age of partition studies.” I discuss their critiques at length in Chaps. 5 and 6. 29. A just-published scholarly study of North Indian partition migrants makes the same point that a shared sense of loss builds a sense of kinship through ethnographic work. See Pranav Kohli (2023), Memories in the Service of the Hindu Nation, 60.

Works Cited Alam, Javeed and Sharma, Suresh. 1998. “Remembering Partition.” Seminar 461: 98–103. Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe, and Spitzer Leo. 1999. Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present. Hanover, N.H: The University Press of New England. Butalia, Urvashi. 2000. Blood. In The other side of silence: Voices from the partition of India, 22–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Daiya, Kavita. 2008. Violent belonging: Partition, gender, and national culture in postcolonial India. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dean, Carolyn J. 2019. The moral witness: Trials and testimony after genocide. Cornell University Press. Dhulipala, Venkat. 2015. Creating a new Medina: State power, Islam, and the quest for Pakistan in late colonial North India. Daryaganj, Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Didur, Jill. 2006. Unsettling partition: Literature, gender, memory. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Hartnack, Christiane. 2012. Roots and routes: The partition of British India in Indian social memories. Journal of Historical Sociology 2 (25): 244–260. Hirsch, Marianne. 1996. Past lives: Postmemories in exile. Poetics Today 17 (4 (2023/04)): 659–686. ———. 2012. The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2014. Presidential Address 2014, “Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times.” PMLA, 129.3: 330–348. Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After such knowledge: Memory, history and the legacy of the holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group. Jalal, Ayesha. 1985. The sole spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim league, and the demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kabir, Ananya. 2013. Partition’s post-amnesias: 1947, 1971 and modern South Asia. Women Unlimited.

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Kaur, Ravinder. 2007. Since 1947: Partition narratives among Punjabi migrants of Delhi. New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press. Khan, Shah Alam. 2021. Partition horrors are not for remembrance, but for learning lessons. Indian Express, August 31. Kohli, Pranav. 2023. Memories in the Service of the Hindu Nation: The afterlife of the partition of India. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press. Kumar, Priya. 2008. Limiting secularism: The ethics of coexistence in Indian literature and film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kumar, Radha. 2005. Making Peace with Partition. Penguin. Lim, Jie-Hyum. 2022. Postcolonial reflections on the mnemonic confluence of the holocaust, Stalinist crimes, and colonialism. In Global easts: Remembering, imagining, mobilizing, 1st ed., 92–126. New York: Columbia University Press. Malhotra, Anchal. 2017. Remnants of a separation: A history of the partition through material memory. Noida, U.P: HarperCollins Publishers India. Mallot, J.  Edward. 2012. Memory, nationalism, and narrative in contemporary South Asia. Springer. Mander, Harsh. 2021. Remember the horrors of partition, but also draw lessons from them. Indian Express, August 22. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The ethics of memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Misri, Deepti. 2014. The violence of memory: Women’s re-narrations of the Partition. In Beyond partition: Gender, violence and representation in postcolonial India, 33–50. University of Illinois Press. Netizens call 90-year-old woman visiting ancestral home in Pakistan an ‘indo-pak dream come true’. 2022. Dawn. Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi. 2000. Ignorance, forgetting, and family nostalgia: Partition, the nation-state, and refugees in Delhi. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 44 (2): 30–55. Raychaudhuri, Anindya. 2019. Narrating south Asian partition: Oral history, literature, cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Rothberg, Michael, and Jared Stark. 2003. After the witness: A report from the twentieth-anniversary conference of the fortunoff video archive for holocaust testimonies at Yale. History and Memory 15 (1): 85–96. Roy, Asim. 1990. The high politics of India’s partition: The revisionist perspective. Modern Asian Studies 24 (2): 385–408. Roy, Anjali Gera. 2019. Memories and post-memories of the partition of India. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Saint, Tarun K. 2010. Witnessing partition: Memory, history, fiction. New Delhi; London: Routledge. Sangari, Kumkum. 2011. Viraha: A trajectory in the Nehruvian era. In Poetics and politics of Sufism and bhakti in South Asia: Love, loss, and liberation, ed. Kavita Panjabi, 256–287. Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

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Saran, Shyam. 2021. The horrors of partition must be remembered—But for the right reasons. Indian Express, August 19. Sarin, Alok, Sarah Ghani, and Sanjeev Jain. 2015. Bad times and sad moods. In Partition: The long shadow, 270. India: Penguin Group. Sarkar, Bhaskar. 2009. Mourning the nation: Indian cinema in the wake of partition. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Singh, Kavita. 2015. Ghosts of future nations, or the uses of the holocaust museum paradigm in India. In The international handbooks of museum studies: Museum transformations, ed. Annie E. Coombes and B. Phillips Ruth, 1st ed., 30–60. John Wiley & Sons. Svensson, Ted. 2021. Curating the partition: Dissonant heritage and Indian nation building. International Journal of Heritage Studies 2 (27). https:// doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1781679. Tiwari, Manish. 2021. Partition was not just ‘batwara’ ozr division, it was ‘ujara’ or devastation. Indian Express, September 2. Virdee, Pippa. 2022. Histories and memories in the digital age of partition studies. The Oral History Review 49 (2). https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798. 2022.2097877. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of Witness. New York: Cornell Univ. Press. Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. 2007. The long partition and the making of modern south Asia. Cultures of history. Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Partition Postmemory: “Someone Should Know”

“Someone should know, something should go on,” said my friend Nitin, when I asked him why partition should be remembered. However, he has not discussed his own partition heritage with his children, and even though they know it in fragments, he does not believe they have any interest in learning more. His own relationship to partition history did not really begin until the late age of forty-two, when he learned from his uncle for the very first time about the traumatic flight of his father’s family from Pakistan to India and their narrow escape as partition violence was spreading in North India. Nitin’s feeling about his children’s distance from partition memory is, ironically, what most partition migrants feel about his and my generation—that we know very little about the partition, that our parents’ lives were too busy to allow them time and space to share their memories with us, and that these memories were too painful and difficult a topic of discussion. Our parents, whom I call second-generation migrants, were themselves children when they experienced the partition in 1947 and now express a kind of protective pity for us, bechare bacche (poor kids) who had neither experienced the peace and prosperity before partition nor had any knowledge about the agony of territorial division. All we have seen up close is the post-partition struggle of our parents to re-­ establish homes, livelihoods, and a place in the world.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43397-9_2

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The ‘ignorance’ of third-generation migrants, not unusual in cases of traumatic history, was very much the case for the post-partition generation born in the decades after independence. In her pioneering research on partition migrants in Delhi and the United Kingdom, Dhoolekha Sirhadi Raj argues that the “ignorance of partition is actively produced in subsequent generations [of Delhi’s refugee families] through the ideological work of the refugee generation that experienced displacement in the first place” (Raj 2000, 31). She studies “what is not remembered in one generation and therefore not known in the next,” a phenomenon that she sees as deeply intertwined with “a changing sense of nationhood” (Raj 2000, 31).1 Making the important point that memory is a social process that creates a sense of group identity that happens in the everyday of family life, she contrasts—as do I—the pervasive quality of Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust with the complete absence of a similar emphasis in Punjabi Hindu families. She also links this ‘forgetting’ of the partition to their investment in the making of modern India and the rise of the Hindu right. Raj in her ethnographic interviews with middle- and upper-­ class Punjabis in Delhi traces three different themes that come up: “the emphasis on success, the temporary nature of the event and the shared Punjabi culture” (Raj 2000, 61). She notes three phenomena in the first generation of partition refugees: they construct an almost mythic idea of wealth; they thought their displacement would be temporary; and they feel greatly the loss of their former lives and homes. Her research was conducted at the charged moment of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, while mine was conducted at the moment of the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its eventual success in the national elections leading up to the present moment. I agree with Raj that postmemorial partition generations did not experience the complexity of Punjabi identity, but I do not agree that they view pre-partition camaraderie as merely ‘nostalgia and much more’ (Raj 2000, 41). I hope that my oral histories below will show a will to memory that is emerging in that generation. Given these zones of silence around the partition experience, the generations of postmemory have often learned about partition indirectly, accidentally, and in fragments. Scholars of partition have so far been primarily focused on capturing the experience of first-generation migrants both because those were, understandably, the first access into that experience and from a sense of urgency that the older generations were passing on.

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I explore instead the different attitudes to and opinions about partition memory in the postmemorial generations and argue that these generations are now taking the initiative to grapple with it and create enduring and educational institutions of memory through transnational efforts. Many of us, the ‘hinge generation,’ experience the growing majoritarian nationalisms of the subcontinent with dread and look back to traffic between communities that we hear about from our parents for lessons in co-existence and mutually enriching exchanges. The foundational influence of Nehruvian secularism for this ‘hinge generation’ born in the 1950s and 1960s in newly independent India, a secularism that created a commitment to diverse and progressive civic and public cultures, also shapes our investment in the lessons of partition. The generation of partition postmemory has pushed itself out of a kind of fog of ignorance and bewilderment to a desire to re-think and re-­envision partition memory. This state of being is perfectly articulated by Eva Hoffman in After Such Knowledge when she writes, “The second generation after every calamity is the hinge generation in which the meanings of awful events can remain arrested and fixed at the point of trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the world, and new understanding” (Hoffman 2004, xv). For the partition, this would be the third generation, which is presented with a choice, to actively relearn and rearrange partition memory for what it can offer future generations. As many of my interviews below show, arriving at such a conviction has been a slow process often culminating in an understanding of partition’s long reach only in adulthood or middle age. And yet as Hoffman makes clear, instead of such conviction, this generation may be battling the ghosts of their parents without a clear sense of what they have inherited: And yet, at the same time, this is exactly the crux of the second generation’s difficulty: that it has inherited not experience, but shadows. … And sometimes, it needs to be said, wrestling with shadows can be more frightening, or more confusing, than struggling with solid realities. Like Hamlet’s father, the ghosts demand devotion, sacrifice, justice, truth, vengeance. (Hoffman 2004, 66)

Instead of becoming a vengeful ghost that demands revenge, how might partition memory inaugurate an era of mutual understanding and alternative ideas of nationhood? This is the question that drives my conversations with the postmemorial generation.

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In this chapter, I discuss the ‘coming-into-memory’ of the third generation who express a growing conviction that partition memory should be discussed, disseminated, and analyzed, thus marking a new stage in partition memorialization. This third generation’s exploration of memory now has the potential to forge bonds with earlier generations of migrants as they take the initiative to listen, witness, and learn through their experience, even though the ‘surprise’ discovery of their parents’ partition story late in life shows that there is no ritualized or predictable mode of communication of this memory. Interviewees in this generation, who have led transnational and cosmopolitan lives outside India, have turned to this memory both in a search of their roots and histories but also because they have become aware of other cultures of memory associated with many historical traumas of the twentieth century. To these interviewees, I began with questions about the presence of partition in their lives and whether they had a desire to connect with that memory or any interest in their parents’ pre-partition lives, which was a large part of their parents’ childhood and adolescence. My first interviews were with children of family friends but soon included others introduced to me through my acquaintances and friends.

Belated Knowledge I have known Nitin2 since we were children as our parents have been friends for decades, both sets having experienced the partition first-hand and three of the four bringing a West Punjabi sensibility to the friendship, conversations, narrations. Nitin is the middle of three brothers, studied engineering, and now lives with his family in Singapore. He agreed to a virtual meeting with me after at least a couple of decades of our being out of touch. Given that he is only a year older than me, the meeting became an opportunity for us to reflect on the legacies of partition for our generation, born in the 1960s, children of independent India, to whom partition filtered through in stories, jokes, references to earlier times, to regions we have never seen, and experiences that we will never have. This is not a conversation that could have happened when we were children or even young adults—so much of what parents represent is taken for granted and partition remained in the hazy background of our lives. In 2005, when he was forty-two years old, Nitin’s Uncle narrated it to him on one of his visits back to India from the United States. In his interview with me, Nitin started with “I would like to narrate that incident”

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because it was clearly important and moving for him as an insight into his father’s experience. He felt that given how painful and dangerous the passage from West Punjab to safety in the East was, it is only to be expected that Nitin’s father would not have wanted to talk about it to his children The exodus of Hindus from Nitin’s grandfather’s village, Pindi Gheb in District Attock, had begun after partition was announced in June 1947. Usually, professional groups would travel together, for instance, traders had decided to leave together in a group. His grandfather, a teacher in the local school, had learnt that all the Hindu teachers were leaving the village in the next couple of days. But he missed the trucks carrying passengers across the border because there were too many elderly women traveling with his family and they could not all be accommodated. A couple of days later, his grandfather got the news that the entire truck load of those teachers and their families had been butchered on their way to India. In this atmosphere of terror, the family got on to the next available truck and began the journey across the border. At one point, they had to stop because they saw black smoke rising in the distance, thought that it indicated that a truck had been burnt on that route and that there might be trouble ahead. Hearing the sounds of a group of people advancing, Nitin’s grandfather asked for the truck to be stopped so that he could get off and talk to them. All the people in the approaching mob had masks or a cloth on their faces so that they could not be identified. This was a very dangerous moment as so many such confrontations had ended with the massacre of fleeing migrants, but before any conversation could happen, one of the people in the group saluted Nitin’s grandfather and addressing him as ‘masterji’ or ‘teacher’ told him that he was free to go and would not be attacked. Fortuitously, this man had been a student of his grandfather and so allowed safe passage to all those in the truck with him. Even though the trauma of their narrow escape was never narrated to Nitin until a decade and a half ago, there were other signs of it. Nitin remembers that for as long as she lived, his grandmother refused to have anything to do with Muslims and would say “I will never drink water from the hand of a Muslim.” When I asked Nitin how he understood this behavior of his grandmother, he said that that generation had seen so much killing by Muslims that “a general repulsion had gathered.” I wanted to press Nitin some more on the question of his grandmother and asked if a general suspicion of Muslims had not been part of the mindset of a Hindu at that time? To my surprise, he disagreed and said that his grandfather had students who were Muslim and who spared his life. When his

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father went back to Pakistan to visit his home in 2006, most of the classmates he reconnected with were Muslim. Describing an instance of a kind of syncretic culture that prevailed in their home, he said that whenever they started something auspicious or something as simple as cutting a watermelon, they would say Bismillah. So, in his mind, not only was there was no general suspicion of Muslims in the family, but he said his parents “have taken us to Muslim holy shrines like Karbala, to Sufi saints and mosques in many places … so Muslims have never been considered enemies or pariahs in our family.” When they arrived in India, the family were allotted an ‘evacuee property,’ which refers to homes left by fleeing Muslims that were taken over by the government of India and were given to Hindu refugees who arrived in Delhi and parts of North India from Western Punjab. Nitin’s grandparents fed themselves by selling off the Qurans they found in the house that was allotted to them. Since Nitin’s grandfather had been a schoolteacher in Pakistan, he did not earn a lot and had no savings to bring with him. Nitin points out that this financial insecurity probably added to the trauma of post-partition life and made it hard for his parents and grandparents to talk about it at length. An awareness of the financial consequences of partition marked Nitin’s life until well into adulthood. Yet no one in his extended family ever spoke of their lives in pre-partition Pakistan, only rarely mentioning the fact that his father’s family had carried nothing with them except the clothes on their back, quite literally, as his father and two brothers wore fifteen shirts each so that some of their clothes would make it across. He contrasts his own experience with his wife Neeta’s whose affluent family had a much easier passage across the border. However, he confirmed that even Neeta’s parents never spoke to her about their partition experience. Even though they arrived in India well before the violence had started in West Punjab and so were able to escape to safety early, they lost property, money, and valuable possessions and were witness to the devastation it wrought on the lives of so many. Like many other first-­ generation migrants, they did not feel able to share their experience with their daughter. In other words, a painful story that formed an important part of their parents’ experience was not shared with the children and hence not emotionally processed together. Given the belated and accidental nature of the discovery of partition trauma and without a clear ethical imperative to memorialize it, what makes third-generation partition migrants want to remember their parents’ and grandparents’ partition experience? Why not leave partition

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experiences as painful, inconvenient truths better left in the deepest recesses of memory? Nitin speculates that perhaps he is influenced by the TV show Roots3 to think about his grandparents and their history. While his reference to Roots might have been half-joking, it also expressed an emerging interest in the culture of memory that is a characteristic of a mobile middle-class population worldwide. It is ironic that Roots is not about this middle-class culture of memory but about keeping alive memory in a context of traumatic removal from a homeland during the period of slavery in the Americas. He agreed that his desire for handing down the past might have something to do with the fact that he has lived outside India for many years to the point that when in Singapore he found a Malaysian acquaintance with the same family name as his, he asked him if he knew of any connections with a Punjabi family. He found out that the person’s grandfather had migrated from North India to Malaysia, but he did not have any connections in India nor any curiosity about them. Nitin commented that for this Malaysian, the link to an Indian homeland had been broken over sixty years or more whereas the geographical proximity of India to Pakistan has kept that link alive. While Nitin did not want to visit Pakistan to see his grandparents’ home because he did not expect that anything had remained of their life there, he said that when his father went back, he enjoyed his visit very much and praised the friendship and hospitality of Pakistanis toward Indian migrants and went so far as to say that that kind of affection had been expressed to him only by Pakistanis and other non-Indians. So even though his own closest friendships have been with Pakistanis, the paranoia of states has stood in the way so that when his brother applied to visit Pakistan in 1991, his visa was rejected. His own desire to connect with friends across the border were met with a stern reprimand from the Indian state. Three officers from the Indian intelligence service arrived at his office in Delhi to ask him how he, an Indian Hindu, could want to make friends with a Pakistani Muslim? This experience made Nitin determined to explore such friendships from a ‘third place’ outside India. He has shared with his college-going children what he learned from his own uncle in 2005, but given that these young diasporic professionals have lost any connection to India, he is not sure if these stories are meaningful to them in any significant way. The ‘hinge generation’ feels some kinship with Punjabis across the border as there is still the sense of a familiar sensibility that comes from the social and linguistic context of West Punjab that is almost totally lost in the next generation.

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The indirect transmission of partition memory has meant that it was only when children of partition migrants became adults that they were able to process the significance of their parents’ and grandparents’ experience. Many a story of partition memory begins with conversations that grandmothers had with their grandchildren. Amal spoke of her maternal grandmother’s love of storytelling so that as young children she, her siblings, and cousins heard many tales about their lives in pre-partition India.4 On sunny winter days, when the family was together, they would ask their grandmother to talk about the splendor of their home left behind in Pakistan or the fact that they were the first family to own a car. Amal remembers that her grandmother had five stories that she would narrate and that each time the children in the extended family would enjoy listening to these repeated stories on a holiday visit when they all sat together and talked. For those who left a prosperous life back in Pakistan, these stories were a nostalgic evocation of that time but also an effort to communicate to children a different sense of their family heritage than suggested by the often sad and subdued grandparents they knew in post-partition India. Amal remembered conversations about partition that were, on the one hand, overheard exchanges between adults not addressed to children and, on the other, the absorbing storytelling of her maternal grandmother addressed to children. When her father got together with his siblings, they spoke about their former homes in Pakistan, but those stories did not register as deeply as her grandmother’s stories. In that sense, much of what was transmitted to the third generation was fragmentary, not a joint processing of memory as much as an accidental discovery of information about other worlds, lives, and experiences that had formed their parents, but from which they were kept separate. Amal expressed a desire to return to Pakistan to visit her maternal grandparents’ home in Dera Gazi Khan in Multan because of her grandmother’s stories: “She left us with such vivid images that anything to do with their lives there, I remember.” Memory for her is personal and familial so that when she and her husband made a plan to visit Pakistan, her parents were eager to join them. Deteriorating conditions between India and Pakistan meant that the visit never happened, but Amal was left with an unrealized desire to see those places. In candid comments about the after-effects of her parents’ experience of partition, she mentioned the fear of Muslims that her father had inculcated in her that she struggles against all the time especially in diaspora when her young daughter, for instance, befriends a Muslim girl at her school and the legacies of partition seem to

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live on in the hesitation that she feels or that her parents communicate to her in their granddaughter pursuing an innocent friendship. At the same time that Amal is acutely aware of this legacy of the partition, my questions revealed that none of her grandparents (or the three that she knew) nor her mother ever expressed animosity toward Muslims. To correct the balance of memory, it is critical that generations of postmemory examine, interrogate, and understand the after-effects of partition memory in their own lives. A similar accidental discovery of his family’s partition story in mid-life and in diaspora marked Ajay’s experience as well.5 He is married to one of my friends from college with whom I had lost touch with for many years, but we have picked up our friendship in the last two decades and this interview came about as a result of conversations with her about her husband Ajay’s partition heritage. Ajay was born in 1961, and as his father worked for a British multinational, he traveled all over India with his family, and was educated in the towns of Calcutta, Kanpur, and Ajmer. He studied at a leading Institute of Technology for his undergraduate engineering degree and has been living in Canada with his family for the last few decades. For Ajay, conversations about partition came up only around 2009 when he met a distant cousin at a wedding and they both realized they belonged to the same extended family that had migrated from Multan in 1947. On another occasion a cousin visited Lahore with his father and sent him some pictures of that visit, which led to a conversation about partition between Ajay and his parents. Ajay does not remember many conversations with his mother or father on the subject of partition in childhood or adolescence. Both his parents fled West Punjab in 1947 but his mother’s experience was particularly traumatic as she lost her father in the violence. Her mother, Ajay’s maternal grandmother, sometimes spoke of her life before partition, but Ajay only gathered the bare bones of the story of the hardship she endured when she was left with three children and no source of livelihood after the death of her husband. Those who had owned land and means in West Punjab migrated to India into a much better situation than those who did not. Even as Ajay’s grandmother suffered the agony of uncertainty, she was allocated a two-story house in the now prime location of Babar Road in New Delhi, another part of the same house rented by none other than I.K Gujral, who later became Prime Minister of India, evidence that it was a neighborhood settled by elite professionals from West Punjab even if they were now penniless refugees.

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Even though the large trauma of the loss of an entire life and the seeming impossibility of survival was somehow overcome by Ajay’s grandmother, I did not hear about the day-to-day routine of those days or details of the means of livelihood for someone in her situation. Ajay’s mother remained resolutely silent about that painful time, and even though Ajay remembers fondly the time that he spent with his grandmother before she died in the early 1990s, he does not know those details either. In his interview with me in 2016, Ajay says, “We never really sat and chatted about it too much but as people started reconnecting with their past and their roots and her family started traveling back to Pakistan to see their ancestral properties and homes and then I reconnected with her cousin here, is when she opened up about it.” Ajay’s mother slowly started to open up about her partition experience in the decade prior to 2016 and she passed away in 2020, but even in the warmth, intimacy, and affection of a loving family life, there was no opportunity for a sharing of this trauma across generations: Everybody knew what happened, but nobody really wanted to go there. And I suspect that my grandmother also sort of locked it out of her mind. At some point, she dealt with her grief, she dealt with the past. She had gone through a really difficult time making sure that kids were ok, that they were growing up, in school, and everything. I am sure money was a problem and then I think she just wanted to move on with her life. She was by herself, she never remarried.

I pointed out to Ajay that when he was living in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), a cosmopolitan city in South India, he probably met many Punjabis there and wondered if partition as a topic of conversation had ever come up for them. He reports that everyone knew about it but no one ever talked about it. Partition has been more the subject of conversation since he has moved to Canada and his children have been curious about ‘where they come from.’ Ajay told his children to look up Multan as their parents’ families came from that area of Pakistan. He has had a family conversation with his wife and children about going to visit Pakistan with their parents. He pointed out that he would need his parents to show him around because he would not know where to go (both his parents have passed on in the last few years). He remembers his paternal grandfather as too forbidding a figure for him to ask questions of but he did ask his father to describe his life in pre-partition India. To my question about

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his sense of his Punjabi identity, Ajay hesitated as this is a difficult question for cosmopolitan, itinerant Punjabis who have lived in many parts of the country and abroad. He said that none of the historical context of being Punjabi was handed down to him, and when he went to college and after, he lived away from North India, which further dissolved his sense of being Punjabi. But the desire to capture some sense of that identity, especially as related to his parents’ lives, is very strong: I think we came when we came to Canada is when … by then I was starting to think about the history of what we had. I was also starting to think about the fact that my parents are now starting to age. You start hearing about other people losing their parents. I did at one time—I was actually going to take a recorder, just the way you had, this big VCR, video camera, with these tapes that we had bought on some trip and … I have to take this and I need to sit with my parents and actually record, ask them questions, just the way we are doing now. And I don’t know if I actually maybe I got that done, maybe I have a couple of tapes that I did.

Ajay’s long-standing project to find and record ‘memory’ echoes the wishes of many third-generation Punjabis who are now attached to the idea of ‘memory’ as central to the formation of their identity and see it as disappearing in this generation. They have also become unofficial investigators of this memory as questions of generational continuity have appeared in diaspora. Regret about the silences around partition experience was also expressed by Vineet—whose story I focus on in my next chapter—when he said that his parents did not talk to him about their pre-partition history because most of the conversations were about the routines of life, especially completing schoolwork on time. He remarked that he had asked his father many times to write down his experiences, but for personal reasons, his father was reluctant to re-visit or write about his experiences, although his mother wrote down some of her recollections for him. He expressed anxiety that as he gets older and forgets things, this history will also disappear. His life in the United States and the professional opportunities to travel have given him a strong sense that people all over the world want to know about their roots and where they belong. “Europeans settled in America would like to find out, to go to Europe to find out where their parents belong. Maybe Australians would like to do that, maybe South Africans would also like to do that. … If I had to trace where I belong, I can’t even

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go to Pakistan, ok. And if I become a little vociferous about my emotions about Pakistan, it may not be liked.” The paranoia of nation states that came into being after the partition stands in the way of exploring kinship that is transnational, making it easy for most people to simply avoid the legacies of partition.

Should We Remember? A strong investment in partition memory and a conviction that it should be taught, spoken aloud, and shared can be found in South Asians in diaspora who have had the experience of leaving homelands and recreating new homes as was clear in my interview with Ahmad,6 a professor of South Asian history in Qatar, who was introduced to me via email by a colleague and with whom I spoke via Skype. Ahmad remembers that his grandmothers on both sides were the bearers of the stories of partition. On the question of handing down stories to his son, he said that though he does talk to his son about these things, he has a lasting regret that his mother has passed away and so his son would not hear about partition directly from her. For him it is not about politics or history so much as about family. Ahmad’s mother read him Saadat Hasan Manto’s partition sketches when he was ten years old. This struck me as precocious given the maturity of some of Manto’s themes, and the fact that he is relentless in his exposure of the cruelty of partition violence and his critique of religious identities as they were expressed at this time. Ahmad’s son was ten years old in 2017 when we had this conversation and he said he was reading Manto’s stories to his son as well so that this literature could become part of his son’s understanding of ‘where he came from.’ Ahmad agreed with me when I said that the first migration of Ahmad’s family in 1947 seems to have made them permanent migrants, people who needed to keep moving to find their place in the world. His mother and father were five and ten years old, respectively, when they left with their parents in 1947 traveling from Delhi and Bombay to Karachi in Pakistan, part of the mass departure of Muslims from what was to become Hindu-­ majority India. He speaks of his parents’ belief in Pakistan not necessarily from a perspective of orthodox Islam but Muslim cultural solidarity and their subsequent disillusionment with Pakistani nationalism in the 1970s with the rise to power of Z.A Bhutto, who, though a popular, non-­military leader, was also focused only on his own interests. The business community was hit by the fact that he nationalized many businesses, which then

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led affluent migrants like Ahmad’s family to emigrate to the United Kingdom for better prospects when Ahmad was only seven years old. I asked him about his childhood in ‘multicultural’ United Kingdom and whether his parents kept in touch with either their pre-partition home of Gujarat, India, or their later connection to Pakistan, and he said Karachi and Pakistan featured very heavily as cornerstones of his family’s identity. In London, Ahmad studied at a ‘multiethnic’ London ‘comprehensive’ school though the rest of his schooling was in two preparatory schools in which he was one of two non-white students. While he felt a certain pressure to assimilate into English society, his parents ensured that he remained proud of his heritage as a South Asian and Pakistani. At fifteen, his family moved back to Pakistan and then shortly thereafter to Dubai because Pakistani society and politics did not seem welcoming. Over the next few years, the family returned to Pakistan and left again so that Ahmad encountered Pakistan at many different points in his life. I share with Ahmad that first and second-generation migrants did not say a lot about partition to their children and ask if there is any reason to share partition stories, to which he replied that he truly believes that “it is a mistake that South Asians have made unlike the Jewish community with the Holocaust not to drive home the lessons that we can learn from partition on every level—the emotional, the historical, the psychological, etc. on every level.” He was happy to hear about the inauguration of the partition museum in Amritsar because in his opinion “there should be museums, archives for testimonies, there should be central points for younger generations to be able to have access in one way or another to every different facet of the event that we can possibly archive in one way or the other. Because it is ultimately one of the most defining moments in the history of South Asia—its modern history. It’s not one of those things that because of sharam (shame) or this or that or other we should be brushing under the rug. Or saying ‘kya phayada hai abhi’ (what’s the use now?) There is definite reason for us to do the study you are doing, talk about things with our children, because whether we care to admit it or not, the event has defined us.” In a comment that was both moving and telling, he compared forgetting partition memory to trying to forget your mother after she has passed away because you don’t want to confront that sad fact. It might be the easy thing to do, but not necessarily the right thing to do. He said that what is important about partition and what he teaches his Indian and Pakistani students are not just the statistics of the event but also its human and affective dimension. If it were not for the stories that

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he has heard from his mother, partition would be as distant an event as the Holocaust is to South Asians: “I would draw parallels with the Holocaust in the sense that many of the kids I teach—I will impress this on my son when he is old enough—partition is often spoken about simply as madness or momentary lapse of reason, people drive by lunacy.” Ahmad countered this by saying that it was no sudden madness as “a number of parties came together to systematically kill.” This argument has been made by scholars of partition who have discussed the violence as an intrinsic part of the articulation of new national identities and the othering of those who had to that point been living in close proximity.7 Ahmad’s narrative affirmed for me that his family’s peripatetic life gave him a transnational perspective on the significance of memory without which, he believes, South Asians are living in denial. This ethical commitment to remembering partition was not evident in my discussion with Jeevan,8 which provided an interesting contrast to a culture of memory marked by nostalgia that we take for granted. I met Jeevan through my mother who had occasionally asked him for help with some neighborhood matters, requests to which he was responsive because his family, like my mother’s, had also migrated to India from the Pakistani town of Gujranwala. Jeevan works as a guard in the neighborhood and so occupies a different class position than others that I interviewed. It was also the only interview that was conducted in my mother’s living room. Given my social position, it would be impossible and inappropriate for me to ask to go to his house even though I considered doing that. During our interview, he got repeated phone calls from people in our neighborhood asking for urgent help. Most of these calls sought his assistance in using his strong-arm tactics to move vegetable and fruit cart-sellers seen to be disruptive or in the way from a neighborhood that was built as a residential zone where commercial activity is prohibited. Jeevan was quite open about the informal economy in which he participates, which involved a passing of bribes from the fruit and vegetable sellers to him and policemen in the vicinity so that the police and guards would not harass them as they plied their trade. Since he was losing this source of income while he spoke to me, I thought it appropriate to compensate him for his time, even though it made me feel uncomfortable and complicit in this economy. Jeevan learnt about the partition from conversations in the extended family when his grandparents and great-grandparents would sit together and talk. His family were goldsmiths by profession and also had farmland in undivided Punjab. Jeevan reports the disbelief with which the news of

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partition was received by his family, which was not prepared with money or resources. He said there were two options: to stay and convert to Islam or to flee. When the violence started, most of his family fled just in the clothes they were wearing. But his great-grandfather’s brother became a ‘Mohammadan.’ He said he had not been in touch with him but knew that he had stayed on as a Muslim. As Urvashi Butalia (2000) has so vividly narrated, she discovered as a mature adult that she had an uncle in Pakistan who had stayed there and converted to Islam. This narrative of ‘conversion’ and continued residence by Hindus in Pakistan cuts across class. Jeevan said that there were fifty or sixty people left in a group crossing farms on the way. In his narration, you get a sense of the precariousness of the families that were fleeing on foot. The ‘gadar’ would happen on the way when young women and money would be seized from the fleeing population. This was not the smoother transition to India by air or even via train. In a statement that evoked the horror of the choices people had to make at that moment of violence, Jeevan said that if someone had an elderly mother who could neither flee nor could be left behind, it was an unsupportable dilemma what to do so “many people threw their parents into the well on the way.” He went on to say that only his grandmother’s uncle brought his mother who was disabled across the border by taking turns with his brothers to carry her on their shoulders. When Jeevan brought up the issue of the vulnerability of young women to mobs of the opposing side and the fact that their own family members killed them, he also made it clear that such horrific stories were derived from the conversations of his extended family and could have been made up of eyewitness accounts and hearsay. However, when he said for the second time that some people had no choice but to “push their parents into a well,” I asked him if this was something he had heard his own family speak about as their experience or a more general fact he had heard as a story about partition migrants. His answer was revealing as it gives us a glimpse into the complicated psychic burdens carried by those who have been close to partition migrants. Using both a kind of indirection and a sense of collective, he said when his family left it was impossible to keep track of other members of the extended family, so “it’s not only my own chacha-tayas (uncles) who might have done it—everyone who left, with their own hands pushed their elderly parents into a well … if we leave them we will be tortured by the thought of what they would have to endure.” I could not tell whether his own uncles might have done this if faced with this choice or had actually made this choice. Such moments in partition narratives have to be left

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open as it seems impossible to extricate a ‘fact’ when the emotive investment in the story is so deep it threatens to fuse fact and story. If socially more privileged second-generation interviewees had a nostalgic and emotional attachment to the idea of a homeland, and even an ethical belief in the importance of memory, Jeevan’s narration confirmed Partition as a wound that had not healed. He moved between using the collective pronoun ‘we’ and ‘they’ when describing the events of Partition even though he was born in 1979. “When we came from there—we had nothing—we spent time in the camp in Jammu.” This conveyed to me his deep identification and empathy with the situation of his family after partition. The family—‘they’ now—earned their livelihood by physical labor. They were given a 500 square yard plot of land and a truck full of bricks with which they started their life. As Jeevan says, others did not get even this much, so they were invited to join his family in the communal manner in which many families lived together right after partition. He remembers with visible emotion that his paternal grandfather could only afford to mix salt with flour and cook it on wood and that for a long time he did not eat a vegetable. He bought a pump and made a little money by inflating cycle tires, the only sign of a slight upward economic move that it turned into a shop that was owned by Jeevan’s uncles and his cousins. His largest sense of deprivation came from the fact that neither he nor anyone in his family had received any education or a secure government job. He said he was the most highly educated in his family and he had only studied till tenth grade. As Yasmin Khan points out, those who were well-off before partition were favored in rehabilitation schemes while for many others, there was to be no narrative of middle-class success even a couple of generations after the Partition.9 In a poignant comment, Jeevan pointed out that people still call him a refugee and ask—as Punjabis often are—where are you really from, in other words, where is your village or home town in Pakistan? In the neighborhood where he works, he has struck up a friendship with others who left Gujranwala and have settled there. Despite the huge differences in class that make a real relationship impossible in that stratified society, there is a kind of concern that Partition migrants express for each other, an assumption of understanding that is based on this shared past. He does not like being called a refugee—for him it is not a matter of pride or nostalgia, but a reminder that independent India has not yet provided him the opportunities that others have benefited from. He says “It hurts to be called refugee. We came from our own country to our own country.

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Refugee is someone who seeks asylum from another country.” Jeevan’s main concern was not nostalgia, memory, or the value of remembering partition but that his daughter be educated and independent so that she would not be at the mercy of a future spouse. The situation was, however, very different when despite her trenchant critique of the nation state, a Sikh woman who I befriended on a visit to a gurudwara in Des Moines, Iowa, insisted that I write down her story and teach about partition to counter the indifference of people of her children’s generation. When I decided to find partition migrants or their descendants at the Des Moines gurudwara, I had some qualms about going to the service solely for the purpose of finding subjects for my study. It seemed disrespectful, but as I was thinking this through, I also realized that I was eager to attend a gurudwara service, something I had not done in my twenty-six years in the United States. At the end of the service, I waited outside till a group of women came out, introduced myself, and asked if anyone came from a family of partition migrants and would be willing to speak to me. Instinctively, I did not accost men in the gurudwara even though I had made contact with someone who was a gurudwara administrator who had agreed to speak to me. When I requested the women to speak to me, I did not experience the enthusiastic desire to speak that I had become accustomed to within my circle of family friends and their friends. Instead, I found hesitation and suspicion, not an unfriendly response so much as a guarded one that reminded me that I was no longer among a population that formed the core of India’s nationalist project—upper-class Hindus in North India. After several awkward pauses, a woman named Balwinder10 came forward and said that it was good to try to help someone if you could and so she would speak to me. I thought at the time that the fact that we were standing outside a gurudwara prompted her to make the generous offer to me. However, she wanted reassurance that I was Indian and not Pakistani when I made initial contact because she did not want any trouble and wanted to be free to express her views—I guessed that these views would be about Muslims. A few months passed after this conversation before I was able to call Balwinder back to set up a time for an interview. Interestingly, she wanted to wait and call me back to fix a time though she again expressed her willingness to talk. When we finally spoke about meeting, she was candid with me and said that she had wanted to talk this over with her adult children before committing herself. Implicit in this conversation was her recognition that any discussion of the partition would be political in nature,

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uncomfortable, and possibly upsetting. After discussing an appropriate place to meet, perhaps the public library, perhaps her home, we finally decided to meet at her house. By this time, she had spoken to her adult children and been reassured that sharing memories that were very politically loaded would not present any danger in the United States. I had also assured her that I would use her interview only with her permission and have changed all names so as to protect the identity of my interviewees just as a matter of principle. During the  interview, Balwinder explained her reasons for inviting me to her home: The reason that I told you to come over—because I am burning somewhere, I want to tell you the story because I feel relief. If someone hurt your parents, are you happy? If someone hurt your grandparents, are you happy? No. It’s painful, I am telling you it’s painful. I have a strong hurt, I have to tell you. You have opportunity, you have authority, you can write in the book. One day when the kids go through hard time, they will pick up the book, then they have insight. Our parents, great-grandparents went through this. It’s knowledge.

Everything that Balwinder narrated was from hearsay within the family; in this respect, she was working within the realm of what I have called postmemory. However, given her strong emotional bonds with her family, she felt very connected to the grief of her grandmother and mother who had fled the violence in Pakistan to arrive in safety to India. The core of traumatic memory was around gendered violence against women happening elsewhere. Much of what Balwinder narrated to me had been told to her by her grandmother. She repeated the stories she had heard of beautiful Sikh girls being abducted by Muslim men who then branded them and kept them in shame for the rest of their lives. She said “what was religion at that time? In that time of blindness, there was no religion.” Her family had fled with just the clothes on their backs and a cloth sack of uncooked rice. Balwinder’s mother was about fifteen years old at the time of partition and her family included two sisters and two brothers. On the way to India, one of her mother’s sisters, who was only about six years old, fell sick and died. The family threw the clothes they were wearing on her body and burnt it right there in a hurried cremation. She remembers that her grandmother cried often when she thought of this daughter and so did her mother when she remembered her young sister. Balwinder was emotional

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as she narrated this and said it was a source of continuing pain to think of this tragedy. Another traumatic aspect of this memory was the fact that she had heard from her grandmother that the family survived on just a handful of uncooked rice as they had to travel on foot and could not carry any food with them. This memory moved her to tears and she paused in her narration as she thought of the plight of her fleeing family. Balwinder’s grandfather had earned his livelihood by doing physical labor (majdoori) in pre-partition Punjab, but unusually for her time, her grandmother was an educated woman who was a teacher near Sialkot near Lahore at the time of partition. After the family came to India, the grandfather became a guard at the railway station, and after he had a heart attack, one of his sons worked and supported the family. I had been surprised to learn that Balwinder’s grandmother was a teacher in a school given that very few women received an education in pre-partition India. She said that her mother had been taught by British teachers and became a teacher when she came to India and explained, “In Pakistan, the ladies did not have the privilege of education in those days. Only Indians Hindus sent their daughters to schools. From the beginning they [the Muslims as I clarified] were told they couldn’t go to school.” She added that in Pakistan women were expected to keep quiet and be “baby machines” though she also attributed these ideas mainly to Muslims. On the other hand, not only did her grandmother become a teacher, she also educated all her daughters, some of whom became teachers. Balwinder herself is more educated than her husband as she has a BA from Punjabi University in Patiala. The privilege of education for women in independent India was read by her as a ‘Hindu’ privilege and the prejudice that she has inherited but which has its roots in the Arya Samaj movement’s push to establish schools for girls in the late nineteenth century both as a part of social reform and to keep pace with steady westernization in the north.11 My conversation with Balwinder on the subject of partition abruptly but perhaps not unexpectedly turned to the subject of 1984 when she said “we are survivors of 1984 also.” I gently probed that history and was presented with a past as painful as the experience of partition had been for her grandparents. It made me wonder to what extent her own more vivid memories of the violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in Punjab of the 1980s, which made innocent Sikhs targets of the Indian army, were the filter through which she was narrating her grandparents’ memories of the partition. She went back to 1984 when she lived with her parents, three sisters, and one

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brother in the town of Patiala in Punjab. One day, on hearing the sound of machine guns being fired, Balwinder’s father gave all his daughters kirpans so that they could defend themselves, but he also told them that if the army raided their home, he would kill them all because the Indian army was known to use rape as a weapon of terror against suspected separatists. This part of the narration was difficult for Balwinder and was hard for me to hear. Not only was it a deeply traumatic memory for her, but it reprised moments from similar stories that we know from partition.12 When I asked Balwinder if she had talked to her children about the partition, she responded in the affirmative but then went on to say: The problem is my kids were born and raised here. They’ve never seen war—they think it’s like the books, a story, they don’t know the reality. They say religious wars—they don’t believe in all this. I’ve told them, they listen, but they aren’t afraid, they have friends who are Muslim. They say it’s over—It’s not over for us because we are scared.

Balwinder’s words show that the fear and trauma generated by the partition are far from over for her even if they have not touched her children. Both the experience of her parents and grandparents and the trauma of brutal political violence against a minority Sikh community in 1984 have scarred her. Even though her own parents have tried to communicate their stories to her children, they do not want to listen and do not seem to care about the historical trauma of partition. The trauma of being a targeted Sikh minority in India has made Balwinder fearful of expressing her political views and she has cautioned her children about expressing their views too freely, but her children reassure her that she has nothing to be afraid of and, in fact, encouraged her to speak to me. The generations of postmemory have found their way to an understanding that partition should be intentionally remembered, analyzed, and imparted to younger generations, that the lessons of history are important to learn while India and Pakistan, in particular, continue to perpetuate a volatile political culture. It is precisely this generation that has begun to take stock of partition memory and have taken the lead in pursuing research projects on the partition, building public institutions, and learning about the partition on their own terms. Yet for many, partition is a continuing wound because they have not been able to access the fruits of nationalism and independence and do not want to be called ‘refugees’ in a country that they think of as their own.

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Notes 1. The title of Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s book, Partition’s Post-Amnesias (2013), also signals the forgetting that marked partition. 2. Interview with Nitin via zoom, Aug 29, 2016. 3. The reference here is to the mini-series Roots that aired in 1977 and was based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The novel is the story of a family from the moment of enslavement to the period after the Civil War and it focuses on keeping alive the memory of Kunta Kinte, a west African man who was sold into slavery in the eighteenth century. 4. Interview with Amal via zoom, Sept 29, 2016. 5. Interview with Ajay via zoom, Jan 8, 2017. 6. Interview with Ahmad via zoom, April 27, 2017. 7. See especially, the introductory chapter of Gyanendra Pandey’s Remembering Partition (2001) in which he argues that “Nationalism and nationalist historiography … have made an all too facile separation between ‘Partition’ and ‘violence.’ This is one that survivors seldom make: for in their view, Partition was violence, a cataclysm, a world (or worlds) torn apart” (6–7). 8. Interview with Jeevan, Aug 10, 2016, Gurgaon, India. 9. Yasmin Khan (2007) The Great Partition, 172–173. Khan discusses the Frontier and Punjab Riot Sufferer Committee, which requested advantageous housing for those considered of good character, clear evidence of class conscious concepts of who was deserving of government assistance. 10. Interview with Balwinder (name changed), Jan 24, 2017, Des Moines, Iowa, USA. 11. See Karuna Chanana, “Partition and Family Strategies: Gender-­Education Linkages among Punjabi Women in Delhi.” Chanana’s analysis complicates the motivations for providing women with education and she concludes that women’s education reinforced existing social and cultural hierarchies rather than promoting ideas of autonomy and freedom for women. See also, Madhu Kishwar, “Arya Samaj and women’s education: Kanya Mahavidyalaya, Jalandhar,” Economic and Political Weekly, Apr 26, 1986, 21.17: WS9–WS13+WS15–WS24. 12. Urvashi Butalia (2000) has chronicled stories of Sikhs killing women in their extended families with swords and kirpans to protect them against rape and abduction at the hands of Muslim mobs, 139–194.

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Works Cited Interviews Interview with Ahmad via zoom, April 27, 2017. Interview with Ajay via zoom, January 8, 2017. Interview with Amal via zoom, September 29, 2016. Interview with Balwinder, January 24, 2017. Des Moines, Iowa. Interview with Jeevan, August 10, 2016. Gurgaon. Interview with Nitin via zoom, August 29, 2016.

Secondary Sources Butalia, Urvashi. (1998; rpt 2000). The other side of silence: Voices from the partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chanana, Karuna. 1993. Partition and family strategies: Gender-education linkages among Punjabi women in Delhi. Economic and Political Weekly 28 (17): WS25–WS34. Chomsky, Marvin J., John Erman, David Greene, and Gilbert Moses. 1977. Roots. Ed. David L. Wolper. Vol. TelevisionABC. Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After such knowledge: Memory, history and the legacy of the holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group. Khan, Yasmin. 2007. The great partition: The making of India and Pakistan. New Haven, CT: Yale University. Kishwar, Madhu. 1986. Arya Samaj and women’s education: Kanya Mahavidyalaya, Jalandhar. Economic and Political Weekly 21 (17): WS9–WS13+WS15–WS24. Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi. 2000. Ignorance, forgetting, and family nostalgia: Partition, the nation state, and refugees in Delhi. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 44 (2): 30–55.

CHAPTER 3

Hospitality and Loss: “Talking About My Heart”

I began this research into partition memory feeling equal parts of curiosity, fear, and uncertainty about my methods and goals. In 2011, when I began interviewing partition migrants, many scholarly and community projects had been unearthing memories of this population for over two decades. Yet, among partition migrants, a deep ambivalence remains even today about the value of memory.1 It is the peculiar experience of Punjabi Hindu migrants from West Punjab to have changed overnight from a well-­ settled minority in pre-partition Punjab to becoming part of a Hindu majority in an independent India. Such overtaking of the regional by the national was not a simple process and left layers of ambivalence and struggle in this population, which this chapter explores.2 Needing reassurance about the value of my research project, I asked Jagat Uncle, a close friend of my parents and also a partition migrant, if he thought there was any point in talking to people like him about their experiences of the partition.3 He responded, “This is like asking a sick person if you should ask after him.” I was startled by what the analogy revealed about both his relation to partition memory and my own: it was a communal, social obligation to ask after the health of those who are sick to find out how they are doing. That he thought of the partition experience as a sickness also struck me strongly, especially as the stories Punjabi migrants tell have almost all focused on their success, hardihood, and their overcoming of the devastation of partition to raise successful families. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43397-9_3

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The communal obligation to ask after a sick person that Jagat Uncle brought up connects generations of partition migrants in ways that are rarely articulated by them. This has led to a kind of apathy about their partition experience in this population. Often families have not spoken to their own children about what exactly happened to them during the partition and right after. Often my interviewees were surprised that I was interested in an event that happened more than six decades ago in which time life had moved on. What, then, did I hope to get from these interviews? An inquiry central to this chapter is how the narration of uprooting and re-invention caused by the partition can be used to form affiliative communities in ways described by Marianne Hirsch in The Generation of Postmemory: “it is this presence of embodied and affective experience in the process of transmission that is best described by the notion of memory as opposed to history” (Hirsch 2012, 33). I argue that this process can build more intentional communities of citizens, who would understand the tragedy of sectarian hatred and move forward with a better understanding of shared pasts. I think of this process of research with survivors as relational, as sensitive to context and audience and the location of subjects involved, the sharing of such as “common culture, a source of kinship” (Erikson 1995, 190). Though oral history projects have collected thousands of partition testimonies, the goal of such projects is still not clear. Instead of looking for ‘truth’ as in a historical study, this chapter explores how storytelling is an act of education for the listener/witness. It seeks to understand how partition migrants coped with their traumatic past, what they think of contemporary India, and how they define their identities as Punjabis with this vast inheritance of loss. Such listening and sharing builds intergenerational bonds, but it is a process that has to be renewed in each successive generation. Even if children and grandchildren of partition survivors have an awareness of the experience of their parents, a vast silence surrounds this experience, which has built a distance between generations.4 As partition migrants pass on, and opportunities to speak to first-generation migrants decrease every year, my interviews became special opportunities to seek this knowledge and forge these bonds. The research process I describe in this chapter, an admixture of the personal and the intellectual, was prompted by my curiosity about the after-effects of the partition on people of my generation. As the daughter of Punjabis from East and West Punjab (now in Pakistan), I had only heard family stories of the partition in fragments and they did not seem to

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have much to do with my life in independent India. But living and working in the United States has given me a diasporic vantage point from which I have developed an interest in thinking about memory, history, and the legacies of rupture caused by partition that are all deeply connected to generational dynamics and political and gender identity. Like many other partition scholars, I, too, have inherited a past that has not been fully defined or processed. I have  channeled the autobiographical curiosity about partition memory that guides this inquiry into a method of research. Unlike oral history projects that focus on ‘collecting’ a numerically significant number of stories, I consider each interview an event in which the subject position of the researcher co-creates memory in conversation with partition migrants. That process is thus guided by a mixed methodology that borrows the terminology of oral history and ethnography and the analytic concepts of narrative theory. The loss of my father in 2009 was a devastating blow that impressed on me the loss of an entire world of experience, sensibility, and historical and social understanding that he embodied. It was also a loss of those promised conversations about his life that I knew nothing about and from which I had been protected. Searching for some sense of these, I began interviewing his friends, who, not by accident, were almost all partition migrants. In several trips to India beginning in the winter of 2011 and over the following six years, I conducted twenty-one interviews with first-­ generation partition migrants, during which I invited them to speak about their experience of the partition and their lives before and after the event. Most of these families were located in Delhi, but I also interviewed subjects from other cities, including Ambala and Nahan. The interviews were meant to be unstructured conversations, though I had a list of questions that I posed about the subjects’ pre-partition memories, post-partition lives, families, views on religion in India, the political situation in Kashmir, and their identities as Indians, Punjabis, and citizens. My interviews, which were almost always conducted in homes and with more than one family member present, make the family a focus of the transmission of memory. I provided each participant with an opportunity to become a kind of memoirist, reliving 1947 as an experienced event or as remembered through the stories of their parents or other family members, touching on the high and low points of their lives, and contrasting the moment of loss and trauma with the success and happiness of their lives in modern India. Anna Bernard identifies these life stories as ‘bildungsroman’ while other genres of partition writing she mentions are the romance and the fragment, each

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enabling a different kind of plotting of the event.5 While the idea of the bildungsroman as a structure on which to hang the partition story works well as it is a recall of childhood in pre-partition India followed by adulthood in independent India, the rupture of partition stays as a kind of chasm and is often accepted in a matter-of-fact way. The narration of lives before and after the event proceeds with the unspoken fact of the partition in the mix. If the bildungsroman usually concludes with absorption into a community, the partition bildungsroman was more fractured and irregular, framed as a story of deep loss rather than of upward mobility and resolution. With this generation of migrants who were between seventy-five and eighty-five years old, my position as a daughter was both enabling and limiting. This point is well illustrated by the anthropologist Lila Abu-­ Lughod in her research on the Bedouins. She was presented to the Bedouin chief by her father as a daughter of Arabs and lived with the family of a Bedouin chief while she pursued her research on women’s stories among the Bedouin. Abu-Lughod notes that “both factors, that I was a woman and that I was of Arab descent, had consequences for the kind of research I could do and the types of relationships I could establish in the field.” “Furthermore,” she writes, “these two aspects of identity combined to place me in the position of what I would call dutiful daughter” (AbuLughod 1988, 140–141). My research with these two friends, and with first-­ generation Punjabi Hindu migrants generally, created a similar dynamic in which I was welcomed as a daughter and trusted and invited into the conversation. However, my position as researcher and the intentional nature of the ‘interview’ placed the necessary distance between the interviewees and me; each of the interviewees noted my professional identity as a professor and researcher and that it gave me certain abilities to write their accounts. Both because of ease of access for me and because I was interested in probing how people came to terms with the losses associated with partition, almost all my interviews were with middle-class professional Hindus and Sikhs. However, we can speculate from this fact that those who both suffered immensely and did not have the means for recovery from economic deprivation continue to feel the after-effects of partition trauma even today. By inviting them to talk about their families, I was providing my interviewees with a narrative arc that was familiar, especially in Punjabi communities: the story of survival through struggle. However, instead of a repetition of well-worn stories, my hope was that this would be an opportunity to question, to connect, to understand the consequences of the partition in their lives.

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Everyday Punjabiyat: The Bitter Intertwining of Celebration and Loss This chapter is an exploration of two themes that continue to characterize and shape Punjabi communities. The first is a profound sense of loss that was caused by the partition in the form of uprooting from homes and societies, loss of property and livelihood, the death of family members in the journey across borders, and the witnessing of brutal violence and its aftermath. As psychologists have noted, “few people who had to endure partition have actually verbalized their feelings” (Sarin and Jain 2015, 3). Further, while the aftermath of the Holocaust has received considerable attention from psychiatrists, the Indian partition has not appeared in psychiatric literature, nor did India have the resources to devote to build an understanding of the psychological wounding of an entire population. We can argue that a sense of loss is absorbed into the rituals and practices of everyday life6 or addressed through the resources of a particular society such as in religious communities. However, there is enough evidence to show that the lack of a way or space to process this sense of loss has perpetuated the trauma of the partition in the lives of first-generation migrants and, indeed, even second and third generations. The second theme that this chapter explores is the idea of ‘Punjabiyat,’ a cultural quality of being Punjabi that can be captured for a progressive politics in India today. This idea of Punjabiyat encompasses Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim cultures; is built around Punjabi, a language spoken by all three groups; and, in India, relates to a regional imaginary, the larger part of which remained in Pakistan as only Eastern Punjab remained in India. Scholarly research on Punjabiyat has yielded studies of regional Punjabi solidarity in the joint management of religious shrines by Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim religious leaders and  the shared knowledge and appreciation of quisse or Persio-­ Arabic epic stories that have passed into Punjabi vernacular.7 For Punjabi migrants this sense of loss has permeated and reshaped Punjabiyat after partition. A reshaped idea of this regional identity might be described as a joy in life laced with loss and bereavement that is the subterranean social glue that binds partition migrants together. In her Where are you From?: middle-class migrants in the modern world (2003), Dhoolekha Sirhadi Raj researches Punjabis in the United Kingdom, who always wanted to know ‘where she was from,’ which leads her to conclude for many Hindu Punjabis, there is a sense that real belonging is to a homeland that was either in pre-partition or present-day Punjab.

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Sirhadi Raj argues that “Partition is manifest as a memory of loss (of property, of homeland, of family, of friends, and of identity), which has become a means of collective identification: everyone suffered a loss. Most interesting is the manner in which this collective memory is then rearticulated and understood by the British-born generation as a lack of homeland and a former status of glory” (Raj 2003, 74). Questions about belonging also present the opportunity to talk about a shared Punjabi culture and connections to particular cities from undivided Punjab. The context of loss, remembered or inherited, creates a particular affective structure for Punjabis who are conscious of having either witnessed or escaped the worst of partition violence. Partition migrants have the kind of mutual empathy and friendship that comes from a recognition of having experienced and survived much. It is in the context of this knowledge that the famed Punjabi emphasis on good food, hospitality, and even a kind of ironic humor that revels in endurance and resilience. Many of these ideas have seeped into a certain idiom, lifestyle, and everyday habits of speech. My interviews confirmed that a shared culture of poetry, narrative, language, practices such as visiting shrines, and ideas of hospitality were vividly remembered by partition migrants.8 Such memories of co-existence, social exchange, and an understanding of the cost of communal conflict can become a powerful critique of majoritarian Hindu politics. However, it is also true that a majoritarian Hindu politics has emerged from the original rupture of the subcontinent and is increasingly expressed as hostility to Muslims that dates back to the partition. For the generation of postmemory, articulations of Punjabiyat are educative given that it is an idea no longer connected to region or language. In both India and Pakistan, Hindustani was jettisoned in favor of ‘official’ languages of Hindi and Urdu, respectively. Through the experiences of partition migrants, I hoped to understand the political and social legacies of this migration, the unspoken assumptions that shaped our childhood and adolescence, a kind of debris of attitudes, memories, histories, never explained or acknowledged. Even as I prepared myself for difficult revelations, I discovered that the partition interview also became a social event, a rite of inclusion, a gesture of hospitality, and an acknowledgment of kinship. Each of my interviewees extended their hospitality to me in the form of an offer of lunch, tea, snacks so that it seemed not just a work meeting but also an occasion for

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sociability.9 In that respect I was an insider, expected to know that it would be rude to refuse this hospitality, an attempt to create distance that would go against the spirit of the interview and the connection that I was seeking to establish. In the case of at least two clusters of interviews, I was treated to lavish lunches that seemed occasions for festive family gatherings, the interviews an opportunity for good food and conversation. In this respect, it felt very different from a context in which survivors of trauma were to be interviewed. Hospitality was an essential component of the performance of Punjabi identity, and a gesture of inclusion that signaled that I was being accepted into the fold as intimate stories of family life were to be shared with me. In that sense, it was not my objectivity that was valuable here, but my commitment to these as yet unheard stories. In establishing a relationship with my interviewees through our conversations, I was also working through a kind of ‘post-memory’ for myself. Instead of the ‘frozen slides’ of memory that Veena Das identifies as the hallmark of partition memories (Das 2007, 11), these interviews were an intentional recounting in which my subjects faced both their past and their evasions of it. They thus opened up a space for active remembering, for creating stories and narratives that contained loss, but also memories of human connection, courage, and love.

Fathers They Lost In this section, I recount the loss of fathers during partition migration, who were often the sole breadwinners of the family. How was that experience absorbed into family life, and if not, what consequences has it had for these interviewees? My very first interviews in January 2011 happened thanks to the generosity of Jagat Uncle who introduced me to partition migrants in his neighborhood. He had been a friend of my family for over six decades. His parents and grandparents had fled partition violence in Attock in present-day Pakistan to arrive safely in India in 1947 where he met my father in their first year of high school. The two became fast friends as they processed partition at fourteen years of age; other friendships made at this same moment also endured through my father’s lifetime. Jagat Uncle had led a successful life, having completed his professional education in one of India’s leading engineering colleges, after which he served in one of India’s premier national civil services. At the time of the interview, he was living a comfortable life with his wife in a neighborhood of

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retirees from the same service. They had educated their children very well after overcoming the kind of economic hardship that starting over after partition brought to so many migrants. Jagat Uncle introduced me to his friends, Sharan Aunty and Kapoor Uncle, who had agreed to be interviewed by me. When I met them, their willingness, even eagerness, to talk to me despite the potentially painful subject indicated that this was a relational context in which they felt comfortable telling their stories: I was a daughter of a family friend, also of Punjabi background, and a researcher with a serious interest in their stories. As Jagat Uncle, Sharan Aunty, and Kapoor Uncle sat down for a conversation about their partition experience,10 the atmosphere was that of a social event, of conversations eagerly invited, on the one hand, and approached with great interest and trepidation, on the other. Sharan Aunty’s husband and the other two present had all worked together in the same national civil service and then chosen to retire in the same neighborhood, which is made up entirely of former officers of this service. Tea and snacks were offered and accepted by everyone in the room. They were all survivors of partition, clearly joined together in a camaraderie that was conscious of their West Punjabi lineage despite the six decades they had spent as residents of Delhi. At one point, Sharan Aunty said, “they all belong to the same society,” suggesting a kinship based on their lives in pre-partition West Punjab. The new element in this gathering was the person who had requested this meeting, that is, me, the researcher/interviewer who was admitted into this circle as the daughter of a family friend. I include in this first section only the narrative of Sharan Aunty from these conversations. A particular feature of the camaraderie generated by the event of the interview was the fact that Jagat Uncle, who had only intended to take me to Kapoor Uncle’s house and then return to his own, chose to stay on and participate in the conversation. This happened in other instances too when family members other than the one being interviewed would join in and often discover parts of a history that had not been formally imparted to them. Sharan Aunty began her story by recounting her childhood in the Rawalpindi district of Pakistan. She expressed the rhythms of a privileged childhood in memories of family holidays in hill town retreats, and the comfort, safety, and seclusion for women. As she reminisced about the pleasures of being privately tutored as was customary at that time for middle- and upper-class Indians, she mentioned the ‘masters’ or teachers who came to her house to teach her to play the instruments dilruba and the

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sitar. At this Jagat Uncle and Kapoor Uncle asked in a teasing voice if she remembered anything and would be willing to play for them. Everyone laughed as Sharan Aunty smilingly refused. It was a moment that underscored the fact that as much as I was anxious and excited to hear their stories, the group was also enjoying the narration, the surprise discoveries about each other’s past, and the opportunity to recount them to each other and to me. Jagat Uncle chimed in often to explain the geography of pre-partition Punjab, the layout of the different towns that Sharan Aunty mentioned. Other markers of Sharan Aunty’s upper-class status were evident in her memories of ‘tailors and shoemakers’ who came home to custom-­make clothing and shoes for the family and, especially, sandals for her mother. For this reason, the women never left home to go out into public places, not even to shop. But if I expected this to be a story of domestic confinement, Sharan Aunty again surprised me by saying that she completed her pre-medical degree and had joined medical college when she had to leave because of lack of funds to complete her education. In this story, ‘wealth’ and ‘class’ were expressed in a gendered way of being in the world, in the security of women, their being ensconced in domestic spaces, in references to consumption, to the arts, to opportunities for education. As the reference to tailors and shoemakers shows, social being is articulated in an entire structure of relationships across classes. Even though the tenor of the interview seemed light-hearted, as though sharing life stories was an enjoyable activity, very soon the sense of loss overtook Sharan Aunty’s narration. She summed this up by saying “we used to be high-ups, but after partition my father arrived in India with nothing in his hands. It was tragic.” The recognition that in the post-­ partition world many came to acquire wealth and upper-middle-class status through opportunities in business and trade while others lost that status overnight is cast as a philosophical reflection on the vagaries of fortune and time. In her narrative, Sharan Aunty was referring as much to the loss of that social-cultural space, of language, of gesture, of connection across religious and ethnic identities as to the massive loss of property suffered by her family. This loss was not just physical and material but also felt as deep injury or grief to a close or immediate family member. Sharan Aunty’s father never recovered from his displacement from a life of affluence and prosperity once he came to Delhi. She described his resourcefulness in getting a job as a building inspector with which income he took care of his children. But it always seemed to her that her father kept waiting to ‘go back’ to Pakistan and bided his time in India while the children

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grew into adulthood and his youngest daughter got married. By this point, the conversation had the tone of friends sharing information about their pasts and remembering places they had known as children. Sharan Aunty had just become comfortable in telling us about her family when her next revelation stunned everyone in that living room. Even her friends who had known her for decades did not know what she chose to reveal to me: a few years after partition, Sharan Aunty’s father left home and never came back. A shock went through the room as everyone turned to her with a barrage of questions followed by silence as it brought tears to her eyes. Despite advertisements in the newspaper and announcements on the radio, Sharan Aunty’s father was never found. Her reading of his disappearance was that once her younger sister was married, her father felt free of his responsibilities. His grief at the loss of his home, business, and property couldn’t be repressed any more, leading him to wander away from the world. Despite the shared loss of home that surely constituted every single person in that gathering and the assumption of shared histories, no one in the room was prepared for this revelation. As she spoke about this, Sharan Aunty became tearful and paused. “You’ve brought back memories of my childhood,” she said to me. She added that till the day her mother died, if she heard footsteps at the door or the doorbell ring, she would ask if her husband had returned. Her sharing of this fact came as a shock to her audience and was a reminder not only of the innumerable lives lost or destroyed by the partition but also that such critical aspects of the lives of these migrants are not even mentioned to close friends who meet regularly and spend social time together. This was evidence to me that life-changing traumatic events had simply been repressed with no cultural or institutional space available for processing them. Trauma hidden at the heart of successful Punjabi family life became evident once again when I went to interview Mr. and Mrs. Chaman.11 They are the in-laws of one of my friends from my college years in New Delhi. At the time of the interview in August 2016, they were leading a comfortable retired life in a multistory apartment complex in a posh satellite city of New Delhi. When I arrived at their home to interview them, I discovered that Mrs. Chaman was not there. This surprised me as their son had written to me to say that his parents would be ready to speak to me at their home. Mr. Chaman and I launched into a long conversation about his life in pre-partition Multan and his memories of his family home and his parents. At some point in the course of the interview, he shared with

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me that his wife had chosen to be absent for the interview because the subject of partition is still too painful for her. They had extended to me the courtesy of inviting me to meet with them but had not shared over the phone or through their son that Mrs. Chaman did not want to have this conversation. Toward the end of my interview with Mr. Chaman, his wife returned to their apartment. After introductions were made, she was immediately solicitous about whether I had been offered tea and snacks. I was reluctant to continue discussing the partition in her presence because I had been warned by Mr. Chaman that this was a painful topic for her. To my surprise, Mrs. Chaman sat down and relaxed into the conversation. I turned off the tape recorder out of respect for her. I learnt that her entire family had survived partition violence and made it safely across the border into India. However, her father went back to collect his belongings from their house in Lahore and was murdered in cold blood. She described the incredible hardship of the years immediately after partition when her mother had to take care of three children without any means of livelihood. It was clear that this was a grief that she still found hard to talk about and one that she had not completely mourned. Later, in my interview with her son, this sense was confirmed when he said that this part of his mother’s past was still very painful for her and that she never spoke about it when they were growing up. He spoke with his maternal grandmother about some aspects of their former life and with his father about life in pre-­ partition India, but always realized that it was not a topic on which he could question his mother. Even though Mrs. Chaman’s mother was left without any means of earning a livelihood, class privilege and a certain social capital traveled even in these times. They first lived in a refugee camp in Red Fort, but then her uncle helped the family to get a small apartment in a house in central Delhi. The other apartment in that house was occupied by a refugee family of which two brothers became prominent citizens in modern India: one became Prime Minister and the other an internationally celebrated artist. Those who came from landowning families were eventually able to get a small portion of the value of their lost property as compensation from the government. However, it still was not clear to me how Mrs. Chaman’s mother clothed, fed, and took care of three children in that situation. All Mrs. Chaman could remember was that well-placed friends would help her mother and visit occasionally. However, within the space of the family, no collective mourning had taken place for the large tragedy under the shadow of which they had lived. The trauma has continued into

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the present and has remained buried in her heart. She was also very ambivalent on the question of returning to Pakistan to see her family home. Even though her brother had visited it, she and Mr. Chaman expressed their fear of traveling to a place that seemed unsafe and dangerous. She was still considering my question about whether she would like to go back and said that her home couldn’t possibly look the way it had when they left when Mr. Chaman intervened with a categorical statement that he would certainly like to go back and has spoken about it with his son. I was struck by the fact that these questions about returning to Pakistan had not been considered and were being discussed as though for the first time. Feelings related to their pre-partition lives and the years immediately after had not been the subject of conversation between the couple. Their somewhat differing perspectives on the question of return were also being articulated as though for the first time. However, narrating her painful story to me was not an alienating experience for Mrs. Chaman. I came to this conclusion because at the end of my interview, as I took my leave, she walked me downstairs from their apartment, invited me back, and said I should have a meal with them. We talked about my friendship with her daughter-in-law since my college days and there was clearly a greater welcome in her voice that had replaced the anxiety with which we started. My third instance of the buried and unarticulated trauma of partition is from my interview with Mr. Arora. Our conversation began with his interest in Gandhian philosophy and his understanding of Indian history. Mr. Arora is retired from a premier Indian civil service and lives with his wife in a newer neighborhood in South Delhi. His home showed the marks of a scholarly life with books and papers everywhere. Also, unusual for an Indian household, a large room in his house was set aside for his study. Both Mr. Arora and his wife have dedicated themselves to different forms of public service even during their retired life. While he continues to write and publish, she runs a free homeopathic clinic at the local temple every Sunday. Early in our conversation, Mr. Arora expressed the view that much had happened in South Asian history including critical moments such as the formation of Bangladesh so that the 1947 partition had receded from view. Many layers of experience now intervened between 1947 and the moment in July 2012 when I was interviewing him. So, it was not clear to him why partition was of interest to me or what new information that he could give me would add to my understanding of the event. He assumed that I was interested in his interpretation of partition from his Gandhian

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lens, which privileged anticolonial non-violent struggle, Indian nationalism, and harmony among different religious and social groups in India. It took some discussion about my goals for my research to lead him to a narration of his personal experience of the partition and what it had meant for his family. I appreciated his graciousness in allowing me to move the topic of conversation to a more personal one but did not begin the interview until he had signaled a clear willingness to speak about it. Mr. Arora described in painful detail the story of his family’s crossing over into India from Pakistan. His father, five siblings, and mother who was in an advanced state of pregnancy crossed over from Sialkot to Jammu. But their travails weren’t over yet as they did not have any relatives in Jammu. There was no mode of transport and they had to cross the flooded Ravi river to reach Pathankot. Finally, a small bus was found that was already crowded with passengers and their luggage. This statement reminded me of some of the most recognizable images of partition: buses and trains overloaded with people trying to escape violence. Mr. Arora and his father were barely inside the bus, in fact, hanging half out of it. As a piece of luggage was precariously perched, his father leaned over to replace it and was hit on his head by an overhanging tree branch. He was rushed to the hospital in Pathankot but could not be saved and died in that hospital. Having lost the main earning member of the family, everyone in his family was shocked and left with very little sense of direction. Mr. Arora and his siblings were sent to different parts of India to live with extended family who could support them at that time. Even though I had braced myself for some painful revelations in the course of my interviews, Mr. Arora’s account of the hardships that his family faced were a painful reminder of the suffering that ordinary people were subjected to even after they safely crossed the border to find safety in India. After the shocking and sudden death of his father, Mr. Arora, as the oldest sibling, felt the responsibility of earning a livelihood. In those months right after partition, his family suffered further losses: of the three youngest brothers, one died immediately on crossing over into India having faced starvation and stomach disorders on their way to Ferozepur. When they moved to Baroda to live with other relatives, another young brother died from fever and typhoid. The infant brother who had been born immediately after partition died by the time the family went to Lucknow. Mr. Arora’s mother was beside herself with grief. Yet, once the family moved again to Ferozepur, she rallied and started teaching refugee women

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knitting and stitching for which she received a small salary of Rs 70 per month (less than $1) from the government. With these meager earnings, a family of three children and the mother survived until Mr. Arora completed his matriculation and his degree in engineering and was able to get a good job in a central civil service. He was then able to take care of his mother and others in his family. The tone in which Mr. Arora narrated his story was matter of fact rather than emotional. I was visibly moved, shocked at the suffering the family had experienced, not because I had not heard these stories of partition but because they are completely invisible, deeply buried in productive and successful lives. It is trauma that has been absorbed into the business of living and moving on. All three of these stories highlight the place that fathers held in these families and the loss that echoed through the decades after partition. The vulnerability of fathers who took risks to provide for their children— returning to hostile territory, hanging out of a bus, or simply disappearing from society after his responsibility was discharged—is evident in these narratives. In two of the three cases, the widowed mothers rallied to provide for their children, who did find middle-class stability in their lives. I wondered how the grandchildren who never saw or knew their grandfather felt about the partition, Indian history of that period, the forces that shaped their lives, and the lives of their parents in the shadow of enormous loss. Even more, not only had there been no memorialization of this loss, but in fact it had been shrouded in silence for decades. In all of these interviews, narrating the trauma of the loss of a parent felt like a mode of connection between the interviewee and me, an unearthing of a painful, bald fact with which my subjects had lived for a long time. They were faced with an unexpected moment of revelation, which was moving for them and for me. For me, the sharing of these stories meant being a witness to self-assertion, survival, and ultimately success but also the costs of these in each family, and the major losses along the way that shadowed ‘freedom’ and success in the new nation.

Losing the Plot If the endurance of loss is etched on the Punjabi psyche in so many ways, there were other aspects of their experience that has made them citizen subjects in particular ways. I explore, in particular, the thoughts and views of Punjabi Hindus about the partition and what it has meant for them in the long perspective since independence. Many of my interviewees

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considered Partition to be a tragedy that should not have happened. The shock of separation from West Punjab and the mystery of how and why people were forced to migrate are still unhealed wounds for people who were taken by surprise by the political decisions made on their behalf. However, the consolidation of nationalist feeling in Pakistan and India meant that eventually many of them accepted that nation was the reward for the suffering that they endured. However, despite this acceptance of nationalism as an important goal for both India and Pakistan, silence about the partition created an incoherence at the heart of Punjabi Hindu desires about citizenship and belonging. This is also a place of hope; the multiple layers of political commitment, historical understanding, and layered identities that these interviews elicited created an affective and affiliative map beyond the national. Terminology of ‘story’ and ‘discourse,’ taken from Russian formalism, helps understand what I have called ‘incoherence’ through an understanding of the concepts of story and discourse, the fabula and sjuzhet. The story material or fabula is arranged into a narrative that is inflected by the political discourse of the moment (sjuzhet).12 In looking for principles of organization and coherence in partition, this tension between story and discourse helps to diagnose essential contradictions and hence the unresolved nature of the partition and its consequences for contemporary India. The same story could contain vignettes of Hindu-Sikh-Muslim harmony and scenes of betrayal by other communities. A story that began with examples of love between Hindus and Muslims would end with blame for the Muslims as unreliable citizens of India (as most of my interviewees were Hindus or Sikhs). This produced an antagonistic and complicated relationship between fabula and sjuzhet. Discourse (sjuzhet) was informed by the political transformations happening in Indian politics at this time. At the time of these interviews, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was gaining strength, which led to its victory in the national elections of 2014. This right-leaning political party with a strong Hindu majoritarian ideology was led by Narendra Modi who became Prime Minister following this election. In the years following the victory of the BJP, there was a marked increase in the persecution of minority groups in India and an increased hostility toward those who did not fit a majoritarian idea of Hindu India.13 In narratives from this time, it was almost as if Muslim betrayal struggled with stories of intercommunity love in a kind of conflict between fabula and sjuzhet. Other narratives showed a clear-eyed critique of Hindu majoritarian politics from the vantage of having experienced a different kind of co-existence between

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communities that respected a diversity of social and religious practices. Did political discourse shape the stories that survivors shared or did the stories shape the discourse? While this is always a productive tension in any narrative,14 the partition experience has unglued one from the other leaving a confusion of understanding, story, memory, and discourse as I show below. In framing my inquiry in this way, I stay committed to searching for and finding glimpses of a larger cosmopolitan world view and life experience that would not simply ‘other’ those who were brutally evacuated from nation states in the formation of postcolonial South Asia; rather, a recognition of entanglements and complicities remains regardless of the seeping of contemporary political discourse or the anger of past wrongs.15 These interviews brought up questions that are as much about method as content in the study of partition: did partition reinforce the worst stereotypes of otherness in the process of forming national communities based on majoritarian religious affiliations and would going back to that moment help us retrieve other parts of our combined inheritance? Will future generations shake off the legacies of this trauma and choose different forms of belonging? Does visiting the past help or is it only future solidarities that we can hope for? Gyan Pandey’s study of partition survivors questions the idea of a community as fixed and sees it instead as “malleable, fuzzy, contextual.”16 I try to capture these transformations in ideas of community in the course of these conversations. Intercommunity friendships, social exchanges, and ability to live together characterize pre-partition memory for most middle-class Punjabi partition migrants. Mr. Arora, for instance, was very committed to the idea that in his family, partition did not produce any anger toward Muslims, that the violence did not result in hatred toward other communities: “I have never heard anyone, my mother, my brother or my sister, or our other relatives ever saying one word against Muslims.” He was categorically against the idea that later communal riots in India were a ‘reaction’ to the partition. He argued that Punjabis and Bengalis were not inclined to ‘communal’ feeling and that other parts of India such as Maharashtra and Gujarat where riots did happen had not suffered through the partition. He thus believes that the suffering caused by the partition had given people an insight into the suffering of all communities. He also believes that partition violence was caused more by the abdication of responsibility by the British, the total absence of governance at that time, and the communalization of the police force. In strong contrast to this, Mr. Chopra,

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though he narrated a story that he had heard of how his brother’s life was saved by a ‘Pathan’ who fearlessly faced a mob of Muslims wanting to kill the brother, also expressed an enduring suspicion of Muslims and Islam that dates back to the partition.17 In later conversations too, this suspicion of Muslims as the ‘other’ of Indian social and political life has come up. It is a feature of his thinking that even his adult daughter has noted as a continuing presence that filters into her life. She is afraid of acknowledging to her father that her young children’s closest friends at school are Muslim fearing that it will prompt him to caution her about against such closeness with ‘others.’ Despite having had evidence of the goodness of people across religious lines, then, the trauma of partition manifests itself in Mr. Chopra’s life as a continuing dread of Muslims and Islamic culture. Taking exactly the opposite view, Dr. Puri maintained that though political changes in the subcontinent had been happening “for ten thousand years,” especially in northwest India, in cities like Peshawar and Kabul, Hindus and Muslims had been living together and do so even under Taliban rule.18 Yet, in those times  there were no reports of mass slaughter or massive transfer of populations of the kind that happened during the partition. He was insistent that “British role in these atrocities should be recorded somewhere” or it will be remembered as an instance of Indian brutality. Identities were much more locally defined, so that people would say they would not marry their daughter to someone from the Doab region of Punjab or they would introduce themselves as belonging to a particular mohalla (neighborhood). He characterized the nature of pre-partition society as ‘tolerant’ toward people with different practices of living and believing. I was intrigued that he rejected the idea of ‘composite’ culture and pointed instead to the entrenched system of caste that ruled Indian society. He highlighted the openness of a market and commercial system where people were rewarded for their work and could trade with each other. “You worship your Gods and we worship ours. I don’t know if this was a composite culture, but it was a successful one. And, in the market, your will be judged by your performance. However, in matters social, you were governed by caste rules.” Dr. Puri also believes that in Punjab (and his vision of Punjab included Haryana and Himachal Pradesh) a mild form of Islam led by Sufism dominated because of its openness to all. He cited the example of a shrine at Ambala airport of a Sufi saint that people believed protected them from Pakistani forces during the wars with India. This sort of ‘mild Sufism’ became Islam but was followed by many who did not consider themselves Muslim.

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Dr. Puri’s conviction that co-existence between different communities was a fact of pre-partition life also led him to underline British responsibility for the partition. In his view, “the civil servant, army, traders, and Anglo-Indians of pure British descent whose families had for several generations worked in India did not want India to become independent.” He identified in them a vindictive desire to show Clement Atlee, the British Prime Minister, that they knew India better than the British administrators in London and that Indians would be “at each other’s throats” the day the British left. In order to prove this, they steadily communalized the country. He presented a detailed vision of the upper echelons of white British administrators in India, who, in their conversations in clubs and other gathering places, were identified with particular Indian religious groups and labeled ‘Hindu,’ ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Sikh’: “New DC Sahib (Deputy Commissioner) has come to Rawalpindi. He is a Sikh and goes to the gurudwara.” He even went so far as to say that “toadies” of the British specialized in creating riots, would do things like killing a cow in front of a temple or destroy a Quran with impunity and get “a pat on the back from the English DC.” Dr. Puri said that most Punjabis from West Punjab would share this opinion. He narrated a story told to him by a Sikh man only the year before our interview. He was a policeman who lived in Vacho Wali in Lahore and was ordered to accompany the Deputy Inspector General of Police to the Shah Alami area in Lahore, which famously caught fire during partition riots, burning a large part of this bustling commercial center of Lahore. When they arrived there, the British police officer watched the market burn, did a Bhangra (dance) on the road, and said in pure Punjabi “bhenchodo lo azadi” (sisterfuckers, take your freedom). He concluded bitterly that the British were very happy to play different groups against each other: “We the fools and our bigger fools could not see through this.” The disjuncture between fabula and sjuzhet that I use to highlight two opposing forces in the narratives of Punjabi Hindus was especially evident in Mr. Sarin’s account.19 I was introduced to him through friends of my family and met him in the lobby of the hotel that he owns in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi. He looked every inch the well-heeled businessman that he is. The story that Mr. Sarin chose to tell me expressed not his views that Muslims were communal and of the polarization between Hindus and Muslims after the partition but, in fact, the opposite: the friendships that exist across national borders. As a member of the Rotary Club, Mr. Sarin visited Pakistan a number of times. He is very proud of his friendship with an advocate of the Lahore High Court whom he met through the Rotary

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Club. Every year, the first phone call he gets on New Year’s Day is from his friend in Lahore. They visit each other’s home and the cultural differences between Hindus and Muslims are the subject of friendly teasing rather than insurmountable obstacles to a friendship. Mr. Sarin was quite honest about the fact that he and his wife are committed vegetarians and find the predominance of meat in the food offered in his Pakistani friend’s home a problem. Similarly, his friend and his wife are disinterested in the meatless menus at Mr. Sarin’s home when they visit them in Gurgaon. So, Mr. Sarin takes them out to restaurants that can cater to their tastes. They are also quite honest about acknowledging this to each other because when his friend’s wife invites them to visit, Mr. Sarin’s wife says, “I am going to die of starvation; I won’t find anything other than meat there!” But the friendly visits have continued on these terms attesting to an affection that does not seem greatly affected by these cultural differences, and both enjoy cultural similarities like the fact that both speak a similar kind of Punjabi. This tale of affection belies what Mr. Sarin began his narration with: betrayal by the Muslims in demanding Pakistan. Not only does he have this long-lasting friendship with a Pakistani friend renewed annually, but the supposed differences between the communities become meaningless when it comes to life-long friendships. The plot of his story moved away from the matrix of Hindu political ideas about hostility between the communities since the partition. Despite his close friendship with a Pakistani family, Mr. Sarin insisted that the Muslim League was responsible for the partition. Until 1945, there was ‘harmony’ between Hindus and Muslims, he says, but when the League won the state assembly elections, tensions arose between Hindus and Muslims. Mr. Sarin was eleven years old in 1947 and narrates in detail his memories of his ‘refugee status’ right after partition and the hardships that he and his family were subjected to. After they arrived in Delhi as refugees, he was eager to earn some money, looked around for work, and started selling newspapers on the sidewalk. He and other boys from similarly afflicted refugee families would tell a tea stall owner whom they called ‘chacha’ (uncle) that they had no money, so he would buy them a bundle of newspapers to sell and in this way became their financier. After the Kashmir conflict started in October 1947, army jawans were  moving across the country, and by offering to carry their luggage, he earned a few annas. Given his current prosperity, it was difficult to visualize the desperate poverty that Mr. Sarin must have suffered immediately after partition. This was not a group of people who brought with them land or the

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trappings of wealth and certainly had a steep climb back into the middle class. The political beliefs of this group of Punjabis were consistently supportive of the Congress and nationalism, but against Nehru and Gandhi. Mr. Sarin also blamed them for the partition and thought that Sardar Patel would have made a better Prime Minister. He reported that as a child when he used to sell small pocket pictures of famous and admired Indian leaders, the most popular was Subhas Chandra Bose, with images of Sardar Patel a close second. Mr. Sarin reported that until 1943, even though his parents took him out of a Muslim school and admitted him to a Hindu school, marking the beginning of a kind of communal consciousness, relations between the two communities were not acrimonious. By about 1946, he remembers tension in the schools, and his older brother reported similar Hindu-­ Muslim tension at his college. Still Mr. Sarin insists that until 1945, there were “brotherly” relations between the communities and only 10–15% of people would have participated in a communal discourse. Yet, he does express the belief that the demand for Pakistan led to the division of the country and that “communal” feeling was stronger in the Muslims whereas the Hindu community was “peace-loving.” The source of the tension with the Muslim community is identified as cow slaughter. The other Hindu fear he expressed was about the abduction of Hindu women who were “sold to Muslims.” Yet even as he presents this ‘Hindu’ point of view, Mr. Sarin remembers the massacre of populations, the aftermath of which he saw, in Amritsar, for instance, as impacting Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs equally. Mr. Sarin’s comments suggest that for a majority of people, not cognizant of elite politics, the reality on the ground remained one of ‘communal harmony’ until 1945. Later, though, Mr. Sarin noted the rising militancy of the ‘shakhas’ of the RSS and the influence of “Guru Gowalkar” in injecting a sense of militancy among Hindu youth. He agreed that a large section of the Hindu middle-class male population participated in RSS shakhas around the time of partition. An even starker incoherence between expressed beliefs and plots of his life story appears in the narrative of Mr. Dutt.20 The connection with Mr. Dutt was made for me by Jeevan, a guard in his neighborhood who is also from Gujranwala, where Mr. Dutt lived with his family in pre-partition India. It was remarkable that these identities from a former life continue to bond people—my mother, who is also from Gujranwala and lives in the same neighborhood, has a friendly acquaintance with Jeevan, which is why

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he agreed to introduce me to Mr. Dutt. Over tea and snacks in his palatial home Mr. Dutt began his narration, even before I had had a chance to ask him a question, with the categorical statement that in pre-partition India, there was no difference between Hindus and Muslims and that during holidays he went to his Muslim friend’s home and participated in the festivities, which included eating food at his house. It is telling that in contemporary India, and especially under the BJP government, any discussion about partition inevitably gets connected to the defining marks of Hindu and Muslim identity, namely, the consumption of food. Whenever there were ‘functions’ (events) in the homes of Muslim neighbors, Hindus would participate. Since eating habits were and still are one of the main markers of religious practices, he said that Hindus were not offered any beef at such events but were invited to partake of dishes like biryani made with vegetables. He said he would never have imagined that there would be a partition and considers it till today a “burning subject.” We return to this thread later in the interview. Mr. Dutt’s partition narrative incorporated many of the incidents that are familiar to us from similar migrant stories: sudden flight, the narrow escape, separation, the later reunion of families, and safe arrival in India. He said that his family left everything behind including food that had been cooked for consumption that day. His mother left her gold buried in their house, a common method of keeping valuables safe in those days. His father, a Railway Engineer, put his wife, two sons, and a daughter into a train bound for India. Inside the train was a passenger who was the principal of the local school who had rented a place to stay from Mr. Dutt’s family. A group of his students entered the train and told him that he should not go by that train because they had heard that it was going to be “cut,” that is, passengers would be ambushed and massacred en route. When Mr. Dutt’s mother heard this, she and her children got off the train and sat on the platform. Fortunately, Mr. Dutt’s father spotted them there and, on learning what had happened, arranged for the family to get on another train. They had another narrow escape when their train stopped at the border because their driver did not want to cross over to the Indian side; however, disaster was averted when Major Dutt’s father was able to arrange for the train to arrive safely on the Indian side. By this point in our conversation, Mr. Dutt has said repeatedly about Hindus and Muslims in pre-partition India, “We were all together,” so I offered the provocation, “Now all this stuff about cow protection is in the news?”

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Mr. Dutt: “I am vegetarian, I hate killing somebody. We are inhuman if you think that—killing is inhuman—even a dog. I say if a dog comes that if there is some roti, give him some. He must have come here with some expectation. I am very religious in that way, I am very god-fearing.” When you say it’s inhuman, killing the cow is inhuman? Mr. Dutt: Anything, anything, even a goat. I am not in favor of it. When I was 10–12 yrs old, my parents used to serve, at that time, I never knew about it. Subsequently, after the partition, I realized, I realized. But at the same time, if Muslims do eat beef, you shouldn’t kill them, is that what you are saying? (I was referring here to recent news in the Indian press about the murder of Muslim men on suspicion of procuring or selling beef, which Hindus consider a prohibition). Very true but you see how we can say they have rights. You see they are one man marrying four women.

I point to this shift in his narration as indicative of the almost incoherent tension between the fable of good relationships between Hindus and Muslims destroyed by the incomprehensible violence of partition to a rationalization of Hindu majority hostility toward Muslims and a complete elision of the process through which he has arrived from being comfortable with a variety of living and eating practices arising from co-existence to a judgment about the ethics of meat-eating. The exchange at this point was tragic and comic by turns: while I tried to get him to agree to the enormity of the violence against Muslims, he seemed to want to return to the question of violence against animals. This is where discourse trumps fable and the attempts to suture the different parts of the story together so transparently fail. A disjuncture between events and sympathies meant that Mrs. Mehra’s conclusions about her partition experience surprised me.21 I met her at her son’s home in a wealthy neighborhood in West Delhi together with other members of her family and some friends who all had partition stories to tell. In her memory of that time, she remembers segregated neighborhoods of Muslims and Hindus in Jullunder. The uncertainty about the exact lines of division meant that people lived in fear in case their city was allocated to the opposite side; in this case, if Jullunder went to Pakistan, Hindus would suddenly feel insecure in their homes. She was told by her father that “if we had to run, we should not waste time putting on slippers but just run.” Her family kept all their gold in a bag should they have to leave suddenly and take it with them. The first instance of ‘atrocities’ that Mrs. Mehra remembered  were of Sikhs against Muslims. In Jullunder,

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citing accounts that she had probably heard, she said that Sikhs “took their [Muslim] beautiful girls” and marched them naked. The taal where wood was sold was set on fire by Sikhs and Muslims were burnt alive in that fire. She said that rumors fueled violence on both sides as Muslims on one side and Sikhs and Hindus on the other wanted to retaliate against acts of violence committed against their communities. She remembered an instance that still brought tears to her eyes. As a young girl of about eleven, she was in her room as violence spread all around her home. On a day with heavy rainfall, she saw from her bedroom window a young boy running away who took shelter under a tree. A few Sikh men caught up with him and asked him “what he was” (which community did he belong to). “Fool that he was, he said Muslim, and they killed him on the spot with their swords.” In another impassioned statement, she said, “[S]o why do they fight on the border? They don’t have any quarrel about land or anything else. Why? Every day they kill, one side or the other, sometimes they kill in a village. Why? Same passions. Same feeling. As soon as the topic of division came, hearts also became divided. Hatred entered the hear. That hatred caused the violence. The reason is the word division, that we are separate, we are not one.” Even though Mrs. Mehra began her story by saying that because her family lived in Jullunder in East Punjab they were spared the worst of the violence, traumatic memories are very much part of her inheritance as became clear when she described the journey of her extended family to India. Her grandmother, maternal uncle, maternal aunt, and their families were all in Pakistan at the time of partition. Her aunt, two sons, and three daughters set out for India on a train while her husband, a station master, stayed back. The train was ambushed by a Muslim mob on the way. While the sons were killed, and two daughters dragged away, the third threw the bag of family gold she was carrying into the melee and ran into the neighboring fields while the attention of the attackers was on the gold. She was later rescued from the train station by someone who recognized her as the daughter of the station master. Mrs. Mehra said, “To this day we have no idea what happened to my aunt or her other two daughters.” I was by now getting an image of someone deeply traumatized by her family narratives of partition but instead of expressing anger and antagonism toward Muslims as one might expect at the end of such a story, she said in the same breath that everyone had suffered and all communities were involved in the violence of partition. She could say honestly that we (Hindus) did not treat Muslims as equals in peaceful times, so how was it

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likely that we would do so “in a time of war”? But in the very next sentence she admitted that she would accept her sons marrying women from any caste, but not if they brought home a “Mohammadan.” She was critical of the government of Narendra Modi and yet she segued almost seamlessly to expressing a hostility to Muslims in what are now stereotypical terms: “What will they give other than bitterness to Muslims? India’s Muslim is so backward. They have no education, no job prospects. There are also the faithful who have given their lives in the army … now even the President of India is a Muslim … but they produce many children. Population of Hindus will decrease, Muslims will increase. You see when elections happen, we will have Muslim leaders. Slowly, we are heading towards a Muslim country.” Embedded firmly in this narrative is the strong sense that Muslims are the underclass in India and Hindus are the elite and that is how it should stay. But there was also another comment that she repeated that struck me—she said that the bitterness had settled into our hearts and even when we claim friendship with Muslims, it isn’t from the heart: “I am not rigid, but I am talking about my heart.” Her wavering between the fact that “Muslims are very good, very honest,” that her father and her family have had friendships with Muslims, and that she finds it hard to trust them revealed the complicated, intertwined feelings, equal parts bitterness and class anxiety that are the legacy of partition. I concluded that we have not grappled with what kind of society we wanted to build in India and what a multi-religious India would look like for Hindus, Muslims, and other groups. What do our hearts say? Are we hiding secret hates and fears but also love and longing? Partition narratives present the possibility of expanding our sense of an alternative idea of Hindu identity that had been created in another time and history and that did not simply merge into a monolithic majoritarian identity in post-­ partition India. But these cannot be allowed full play until even the generation of postmemory grapples with the legacies of partition both the bitter and the sweet in the stories that our parents and grandparents remember.

Notes 1. In Borders and Boundaries (1998), Menon and Bhasin note that during their research, questions were posed to them by women they were interviewing: “What is the use of asking all this now? It’s too late—you can’t change anything” (15). Pippa Virdee notes another source of ambivalence among her women interviewees who did not think they had anything wor-

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thy of note to say and deferred to their male relatives. In another example of this ambivalence, Sarhadi Raj reports that at first, partition migrants would only talk about the ‘official facts’ of partition so that ‘very little information was forthcoming.’ She continues, “one elderly man got angry at me for asking about it—he raised his voice and charged: ‘Why do you want to talk about partition, everyone knows what happened. What happened? The British came, we had to leave, we are here. There is no use talking about the past, it’s done’” (2000, 42). This same man later spoke to her and told her about his pre-partition life and the difficulties he had to face. See Dhoolekha Sarhadi Raj (2000), “Ignorance, Forgetting, and Family Nostalgia: Partition, the Nation State, and Refugees in Delhi.” Social Analysis 44.2: 30–55. 2. See Neeti Nair’s excellent study of the negotiations of political identity among Punjabi Hindus from the early twentieth century to the partition in her Changing Homelands (2011). 3. In keeping with a middle-class Indian tradition, I addressed him—and in fact all my parents’ friends and anybody in their age group—as ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty.’ 4. On this point, Dhoolekha Sarhadi Raj (2000) calls the lack of knowledge of partition a kind of willed ‘ignorance’ perpetuated by parents among second-­generation Punjabi Hindus. 5. See Anna Bernard (2010), “Forms of Memory: Partition as a Literary Paradigm,” 10. 6. Veena Das (2007) makes this point in her Life and Words when she writes, “The feeling that everyday life as a site of the ordinary buried in itself the violence that provided a certain force within which relationships moved was to become strengthened in my mind as I came to know these families,” 11. 7. See especially Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, Practice Eds. Farina Mir and Anshu Malhotra (2012). The editors of this collection take up Punjabiyat as a particular feature of Punjabi identity and the shared literature and attitudes that constitute an idea of being Punjabi have been explored through multiple lenses in this collection Two essays are noteworthy for this argument: Anna Bigelow’s work on shared shrines and Farina Mir’s on quise as an Arabic-Persian and Punjabi literary genre shared across different religious groups. 8. See Qi Wang, Song Qingfang, and Jessie B.  K. Koh (2017), “Culture, memory, and narrative self-making,” which argues that “autobiographical memory is an open system that emerges, develops, and transforms under the multitude of influences of culture,” 200. In a related point, Ruth Kevers, Peter Rober, Ilse Derluyn, and Lucia De Haene (2016) point to research that shows that memories of suffering and trauma “tend to be interdependent with the memories of others and thus indivisible from their social context,” 626.

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9. See a similar comment about the atmosphere of interviews in Raychaudhuri (2019), 13, who describes it as like an “adda,” the practice of getting together with friends and having informal conversations. 10. Interview with Mr. Kapoor and Mrs. Sharan, New Delhi, India, Aug 5, 2010. I refer to many of my interviewees by this formal address because it would be disrespectful to address them by their first name in Indian culture. When the relationship has felt warmer, almost familial, I’ve used ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunty’ in referring to my interviewees as that is how I would address them in their presence as is customary in middle-class Indian culture. 11. Interview with Mr. Chaman, Aug 9, 2016, New Delhi, India. 12. There is a great deal of commentary and about these two components of narrative that have remarked on the productive tension between the concept of story and discourse. For a definition of fabula/sjuzhet, see Petre Petrov (2011), “Fabula/Sjuzhet” in The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. See also, Kent Puckett (2016), “Introduction: Story/ Discourse,” in Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction. 13. See Christophe Jaffrelot (2021), “Targeting Minorities” in Modi’s India: Hindu India and the rise of ethnic democracy. 14. For an excellent discussion of this tension that is never really resolved, see Jonathan Culler (1980), “Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American Discussions,” 27–37. 15. I differ in my account of this generation from Pranav Kohli (2023), who has just published Memories in the Service of the Hindu Nation just as I am sending off my manuscript. His account of the perceived victimhood of upper-caste Hindus that has become inextricably connected to rampant Islamophobia is persuasive in the India of 2023, but, I continue to hope, not the entire story. 16. See Gyanendra Pandey’s conclusion in Remembering Partition (2001), 204. 17. Interview with Mr. Chopra, Aug 18, 2016, in New Delhi, India. 18. Interview with Dr. Puri, June 15, 2014, Ambala, India. 19. Interview with Mr. Sarin, June 19, 2014, in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. 20. Interview with Major Dutt, July 30, 2016, in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. 21. Interview with Mrs. Mehra, July 6, 2015, New Delhi, India.

Works Cited Interviews Interview with Dr. Puri, June 15, 2014. Ambala. Interview with Mr. Dutt, July 30, 2016. In Gurgaon, Haryana.

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Interview with Mr. and Mrs. Chaman, August 9, 2016. New Delhi. Interview with Mr. Chopra, August 18, 2016. In New Delhi. Interview with Mr. Kapoor and Mrs. Sharan, New Delhi, India. August 5, 2010. Interview with Mr. Sarin, June 19, 2014. In Gurgaon, Haryana. Interview with Mrs. Mehra, July 6, 2015. New Delhi.

Secondary Sources Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1988. Fieldwork of a dutiful daughter. Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society: 139–61. Bernard, Anna. 2010. Forms of memory: Partition as a literary paradigm. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Trauma and Memory 30: 9–33. Culler, Jonathan. 1980. Fabula and Sjuzhet in the analysis of narrative: Some American discussions. Poetics Today: 27–37. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Erikson, Kai. 1995. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 183–199. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2021. Targeting Minorities. In Modi’s India: Hindu India and the rise of ethnic democracy. Trans. Cynthia Schoch, 188–210. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Kevers, Ruth, Peter Rober, Ilse Derluyn, and Lucia De Haene. 2016. Remembering collective violence: Broadening the notion of traumatic memory in post-­conflict rehabilitation. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40: 620–640. Kohli, Pranav. 2023. Memories in the Service of the Hindu Nation: The afterlife of the partition of India. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Malhotra, Anshu, and Farina Mir. 2012. Punjab reconsidered: History, culture, and practice. Oxford University Press. Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. 1998. Borders and boundaries: Women in the Indian partition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Nair, Neeti. 2011. Changing homelands: Hindu politics and the partition of India. Harvard University Press. Petrov, Petre. 2011. Fabula/Sjuzhet. In Literary Theory from 1900 to 1966, ed. Gregory Castle, The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell. Puckett, Kent. 2016. Introduction: Story/discourse. In Narrative theory: A critical introduction. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

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Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi. 2000. Ignorance, forgetting, and family nostalgia: Partition, the nation state, and refugees in Delhi. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 44 (2): 30–55. ———. 2003. Where are you from?: Middle-class migrants in the modern world. Berkeley: University of California Press. Raychaudhuri, Anindya. 2019. Narrating south Asian partition: Oral history, literature, cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Virdee, Pippa. 2013. Remembering partition: women oral histories and the partition of 1947. Oral History, 41 (2): 49–62. Wang, Qi, Qingfang Song, B.K.  Koh, and Jessie. 2017. Culture, memory, and narrative self-making. Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice 37 (2): 199–223.

CHAPTER 4

Nostalgia: Re-witnessing ‘Home’

In 1984, when my mother was forty-four years old, she went to Gujranwala, Pakistan, in search of the home that her family had abandoned as they fled across the border into newly formed India in the wake of the partition. She had been six years old, immersed in a secure childhood in a rambling house with her parents and two siblings, a gardener, and a cook, when the imminent violence of partition, led my grandfather, warned by his employees that it was time for them to leave, to gather his family and board a train headed for Jullunder on the other side of what would become the India-­ Pakistan border. On her return visit to Pakistan, thirty-seven years later, my mother came to a house that she thought might have belonged to her family. Although an elderly man who came out of the house informed her it was not the house she remembered, he kindly offered to help her find the house she said was looking for, which she recalled was near a river, across from a railway line, and had the best malta (kind of orange) orchard in the region. As this man got into my parents’ car and introductions were made, he realized that he had worked with my paternal grandfather in undivided India making them both members of a small world of educated middle-­ class Punjabis who had been employed in state administration. When they arrived at another house, my mother was reassured by the remains of an orchard that it was indeed her childhood home. As she approached the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43397-9_4

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house, she saw the name of her great, great-grandfather inscribed at the top, ‘Kothi Pandit Ram Bhaj,’ announcing that it was a home that had been built in memory of a Hindu ancestor. When she knocked on the door, the woman who opened the door was clad in salwar kameez, a chador around her, and she found standing before her a woman in a sari, with a bindi on her forehead, who was clearly feeling eager, troubled, and excited. Just as the local man who had accompanied my parents began to tell the woman who lived in the house that “this lady is looking for her home,” she backed into the room and called to her son, who was home from college and asleep in his room, “Son, wake up, wake up, the owners of the house have returned.” The Pakistani woman’s immediate recognition of a familiar story of the rediscovery of a lost home reveals a deep understanding of similar histories of loss and suffering shared by partition migrants on both sides of the border. Returning to the door, the woman graciously invited my mother to enter the house. There the two women sat on the couch in the living room and without any preamble poured out their life stories to each other, crying as they spoke, pausing from time to time to hug each other. My father chose to leave the house and take a walk. As the women cried, smiled, and talked, my mother recalled riding on a tricycle through a beautiful orchard of maltas by a river held at bay by sandbanks constructed by her engineer father. The other woman shared her own childhood memories of an orchard of the best ‘juice’ mangoes in the country, left behind in what was now India. To their surprise, my mother recalled taking a trip to the same mango orchard with my father and grandparents a few decades after the woman’s family had left and agreed that they were the best juice mangoes she had ever eaten. The reference to these fruit mark a particular relationship to land, food, and sensibility. Malta oranges, as the name suggests, came to northwest India from the Mediterranean, possibly via the Portuguese and mark a delicacy that became rarer in independent India. The same variety of blood red oranges also traveled to Tunisia underlining Northwest India’s connection to trade and travel from Europe. In my mother’s narration, the reference to maltas often accompanied descriptions of other food that growing up in independent India I had come to think of as ‘exotic,’ like guchchi mushrooms, or manakka raisins, or chilgozas (a kind of pine nut). These indicated both prosperity and abundance and a connection to Persian and Afghani culinary traditions, less familiar in the Gangetic Plains near which the capital city of Delhi is situated.1

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As the visit to her pre-partition home progressed, my mother asked the current owner of the houses if she could look around, and she was invited to do so. She paused on the landing, experiencing a mixture of emotions as she saw an electric outlet into which, more than forty years ago, she had asked her sister to put her fingers and turned the switch on just to see what would happen, prompting a thorough beating by her mother. Going up the stairs to the roof, she found the specially crafted tiles put there by her father in broken heaps and picked one up, wrapped it lovingly in her handkerchief, and came downstairs. As she passed the kitchen, she recognized a large stain on the floor where her family used to pound almonds to make almond oil at home, a sign of Punjabi prosperity in a bustling household that was now irrevocably lost. On her return to our home in India, my mother shared this story of a recaptured past and warm welcome with me, and though the story moved and awed me, I quickly returned to my own life and concerns as a college student. Nonetheless, something about the incident stayed with me, a half-startled recognition of lives and experiences of a scale far beyond mine, of geographies, homes, cultural practices completely different from those of my own life in cosmopolitan cities in independent India. As children, my brother and I had treated my mother’s stories of pre-partition life as made up of equal parts of exaggeration and fact and paid little if any attention to the underlying layer of pain and loss that partition represented. This response was due at least in part to my mother being happy to re-live the abundance and prosperity of her childhood but saying almost nothing about her family’s desperate departure from Gujranwala to India or the time the family spent in a refugee camp in Jullunder. She preferred to remember instead that because her brother had been Aide-de-Camp to Lord Mountbatten, they were given special housing in the Presidential Estate in New Delhi. Still her decision to make this journey to Gujranwala made it clear that she had retained a curiosity about and a sentimental investment in her childhood home and her visit there made the loss of her home during partition that much more concrete for her. Although her discovery of connections with people she had met there as the privileged spouse of a government officer and her ability to speak Urdu seemed to have been a source of delight for her, unlike those who seek continuing cross-border relationships, she seemed content to have visited her former home just that once and has never mentioned a desire to return. Nor did this deep love and attachment to the places she visited and the people she met in Pakistan appear to significantly change the political hostility toward

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the state of Pakistan that she had learned as an Indian citizen. This recognition has led me to analyze the value of our regular performance of hospitality, love, and cultural traditions across the northwest Indo-­Pakistan border. My mother’s story is just one of many such reunions with long lost friends, rediscoveries of remembered homes, tearful welcomes of visitors from across the border, and sentimental avowals of intercommunity affection in villages and neighborhoods that have become widely recognizable scenes in many areas of post-partition South Asia. As recently as July 20, 2022, for instance, national dailies in India and Pakistan and international outlets like the BBC reported the visit of Reena Verma, a ninety-year-old woman from India to her former home in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, a narrative that reprises many of the common tropes regarding such reunions— particularly the description of the emotional reception and warm welcome given to the elderly woman as “an Indo-Pak dream come true,”2 a celebration of cross-border affection even in the face of political hostilities. Although Verma had initially been denied a visa by Pakistan, a media report about activists from a Facebook group called India-Pakistan Heritage Club who had begun a search for her home had caught the attention of a Pakistani minister, who instructed the Pakistan High Commission to grant her a visa, and a video of her subsequent visit was widely posted on news outlets. Varma had found her old house “still very much the same—the tiles, the roofs and the fireplace—and that it reminded her of the beautiful life she once had here and the loved ones that she had lost,” concluding like most of these media stories that “many in India and Pakistan believe that her charming story has given hope to the region where the politics of hate and the othering of communities have dominated the narrative for so long.”3 Such feelings of nostalgia and belonging have also been encouraged by the two states of India and Pakistan such as through the introduction in 1976 of the Samjhauta (agreement) Express, a state-sponsored attempt to promote goodwill among citizens of the two nations by providing train service that would allow Indians and Pakistanis to travel between Amritsar, India, and Lahore, Pakistan. Although the service was suspended when a bomb attack on the train in 2007 killed sixty-six people and again in August 2019  in the face of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, for more than four decades the train has supported a continuing cultural traffic between families, friends, pilgrimages, and tourist sites, and taking people to visit places they had loved, meet people they

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remembered, and experience a welcome on the other side. More than a million passengers are reported to have used this rail link over the years demonstrating that decades after partition, people’s longing to see the homes they had left behind remained strong.4 In a more recent expression of goodwill, the Pakistan government opened the Kartarpur corridor, a four-and-a-half-mile route intended to allow Sikhs from India to visit, visa-free, places of historical and religious significance to them such as Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of the first Sikh guru, Guru Nanak Dev.5 At the time of this book’s writing, India and Pakistan are celebrating seventy-five years of independence from colonial rule leading numerous writers, journalists, and civil society organizations around the globe to commemorate partition. Newspapers in the two countries and beyond are full of stories of the reuniting of siblings and families who had been separated first by the violence of partition and then the drawing of paranoid boundaries between two nation states. In addition to state efforts such as those mentioned above, these reunions and nostalgic visits across the border have been enabled and mediated by internet and media technologies. As The New York Times reported in August 2022, interviews with partition survivors posted by Nasir Dhillon on a YouTube channel called ‘Punjabi Lehar’ had led to about hundred people finding each other across the border.6 According to Anam Zakaria (qtd. in Masood and Ives 2022), who has researched Partition oral histories in Pakistan, many partition migrants express a dying wish to reunite with the people they left behind, and Dhillon, who is thirty-eight years old, argues that many who were children at the time of partition and are innocent of any blame in relation to the partition should be allowed to visit their lost friends and home. Another such technology-mediated effort, Project Dastaan, a virtual reality project started by Sparsh Ahuja when he was a student in the United Kingdom, provides partition migrants with videos of the places of their birth as they exist now. After interviewing elderly migrants who want to see their old homes but are no longer able to travel, Sparsh and his colleagues visit the places described to them by partition migrants, bring back current videos of their cities and homes for them to view, and film elderly migrants experiencing their former homes through these videos.7 So familiar and legible have these scenes of cross-border nostalgic reunions become that Coca-Cola decided to capitalize on this with its ‘Small World machines’ placed in malls in Lahore, Pakistan, and New Delhi, India. These machines created a glass wall where citizens of India and Pakistan could put their hands on a screen creating the illusion that

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they were touching and thereby creating a trans-border community that would, for a few moments, overcome the political hostility that has marked relations between the two states. In another example of the use of post-­ partition nostalgia, an advertisement for a cell phone began with a sentimental series of frames in which two elderly men from India and Pakistan meet after decades when their grandchildren connect them to each other via their cell phones and some GPS sleuthing. That such familiar scenes of post-partition reunion can now be mined by corporate houses to sell soft drinks and phones has led to dismay about the cynical uses of nostalgia.8 Contrary to these critiques of a nostalgia we have taken for granted, this chapter will argue that not only have we paid very little attention to the kind of nostalgia partition reunions evoke but also that the word ‘nostalgia’ does not capture all the emotional and political dimensions of a return to a place of forced traumatic removal, leaving us with the kind of set pieces mentioned above. Recent efforts to complicate nostalgia have offered us, for instance, Svetlana Boym’s useful term “reflective nostalgia,” which she distinguishes from “restorative nostalgia.” The latter is laden with the heritage-building aspirations of nation states while the latter looks at nostalgia from a distance, creating room for irony and reflection. Dennis Walder sees nostalgia as a way of becoming more aware of history9 and as connected to “the ethics of remembering, and/or forgetting.”10 In establishing a relationship to the past nostalgia inevitably raises the questions that are the focus of this book: what kinds of memory should we save and to what end? In another recent critical intervention, instead of trying to “rescue nostalgia for a progressive politics,” Alastair Bonnett presents it as a “disruptive and unsettling force” that enables us to question standard political labels such as ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary,’ which is exactly the kind of complication that partition narratives bring up (Bonnett, 1). In Punjab (and Bengal, for instance), the maps of affiliations with region, language, religion, social observances, laws of hospitality, and food cultures are infinitely more complicated than post-partition sectarian and national divisions would have us believe. It is both revealing and educative to hear and analyze narratives about the relationships that migrants have to partition memory and they are at their most articulate in these narratives of return to former homes. Although nostalgia might be described as an almost universal condition of modernity and inescapable component of identity in our times, in many cases it is also laden with middle- and upper-class and ‘heritage’ associations that are politically retrogressive. The desire to revisit former homes

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across the India-Pakistan border has been largely a preoccupation among members of the middle and upper classes who had homes and property to return to. For many other partition survivors, the uprooting of partition was but one more chapter in a life of continuing dispossession, void of such attachments to homes and property. The oral histories of many migrant women who traveled with their extended families from India to rural Pakistan collected by the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley, California, reveal that they did not feel they had anything to return to or any material possessions such as a house that they longed to see. However, even they expressed a general sense that in their pre-partition world, life had been so much better in terms of the food they ate, the air they breathed, and a generalized remembered sense of wellness.11 It might be more productive, then, to think about the particular combination of grief and happiness, joy and bitterness, and hope and despair, that is the legacy of partition witnessing and the kinds of sensibilities these experiences have created. The longing for former homes and lives that partition migrants express, which I am calling ‘nostalgia’ here for want of another word, is as much a love for home as for sensibilities constructed in western Punjab. In an article on Najm Hosain Syed, a poet who was one of the leaders of the advocacy movement for Punjabi in Pakistan, Anne Murphy argues that Syed recuperates “folk or subaltern cultural formations in South Asia” that cut across religious differences (Murphy 2022, 505). This folk is not just in the past, a romanticizing of a pre-partition identity, but also presents a critique of the national. Such a folk, regional consciousness has been articulated in the Punjabi consciousness of qisse or stories of love and longing derived from Persian origins and widely shared by Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities.12 It can also be seen in the reverence for pirs or spiritual leaders whose religious affiliations are less important than the regional cultural and spiritual status they enjoy as Anne Murphy (2015) explains in her study of Guga Pir in northwest India and areas close to the border in Pakistan.13 To these well-researched ideas of Punjabiyat, I add intercommunity enactments of hospitality that are a cultural practice that is carried forward into the present time, a performance of kinship that transcended religious difference in the past and does so again in the present. To be able to sit together and share a meal with the recognition that caste prohibitions and other prejudices prevented this from happening in the past goes a long way toward owning friendship and connection. To share the edgy humor verging on black humor that Punjabis display in the midst of loss,

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sorrow, and trauma is also a significant part of the performance of Punjabi identity. Dennis Walder reminds us that nostalgia is “a longing for an experience—subjective in the first place, and yet, far from limited to the individual. It is possible to speak of a group or even a whole society as nostalgic” (Walder 2010, 4). If the return to find homes is not simply about homes but also a longing for those social relations, those gestures and idioms that constituted a community, then producing an affect that counters the hardening of sectarian identities could be our most important resource. This affective terrain expressed in the experiences narrated by partition migrants, especially on return journeys to find a lost home to which an attachment persists even decades after they were left behind is different from other similar instances of territorial partition in which those searching for lost homes have faced hostility rather than friendship and welcome. For instance, Jewish people returning to Poland to reclaim property and homes are not welcomed but looked upon with suspicion.14 Marianne Hirsch argues that in fiction about the Holocaust and Nakba, a feeling of dread pervades the anticipated discovery of a lost home. In these cases, re-traumatization seems to happen when those expelled from homes return to find images of lost children or children themselves, and the trope becomes a resonant symbol of haunting loss that is handed down to the second generation (Hirsch 2012, 204–206). An incident from the life of Mr. Sarin, who appears in my previous chapter, goes a long way to explaining why it is friendship rather than fear that is the dominant emotion in rediscoveries of lost homes in the context of the Indian partition. Mr. Sarin is a hotelier in Gurgaon and a member of the Rotary Club, which has facilitated several visits to Pakistan for him. He describes his visit to his pre-partition home on one of these visits, including the hospitality of friends across the border, one of whom gave him a protected vehicle that he could use to go to his hometown in Jhang. His visit was quite the community spectacle it often is in accounts of rediscovery of lost homes. When he found his family home, he was told that the owner of the house was not at home, and so the women in the household refused to let him enter the house. A large crowd gathered there in support of Mr. Sarin and tried to reason with the women that all he wanted was a glimpse of his former home. On his visit, Mr. Sarin had also discovered that the present owner of the house was planning to sell the property. The story has an even more intriguing conclusion in that when the owner of the house returned, he wrote to Mr. Sarin and expressed his regret that

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he was not able to see his former house. Mr. Sarin wrote to ask, “Mir Sahib, why are your selling the house?” To this the owner responded, “Why don’t you buy the house and come back?” This is, of course, a form of witty and friendly sparring, but it performs the subcontinental intimacy of a pre-partition era and the multiple regional connections that people hold on to in the two independent states. Such good humor is both an index of cultural literacy and the security that each person in this exchange has of the impossibility of anything changing. As an Indian national, Sarin is not likely to purchase a home on the other side of the border. With such clear lines of demarcation of what is possible, humor and repartee enact a friendship that came to a crisis at the time of partition when so many people on both sides of the border fled for their lives, facing hostility in their neighborhoods, villages, and cities. At the end of this narration, Sarin concludes “it was not the Muslims who were bad, it was the politicians who were bad,” a sentiment he expresses despite his political affiliation with a Hindu majority state such as India. The homes that partition migrants return to are historical records of their lives and subsequent displacement. They are also repositories of memories of social lives, relationships, and connections to particular geographies. However, it is important to note that most migrants who went back to see their homes in the last four decades were children or at best adolescents when the forced removal of partition took place. Inevitably, then, their memories are mixed with those of their parents and grandparents, and it is most often in these cases that people are moved to return to former homes. What do these former homes represent to those who have sought them out in the decades after partition?15 In her study of partition oral histories, Devika Chawla emphasizes home as a place of being “rooted, aligned, nurtured” in an environment of community and belonging (Qtd. In Chawla, 60). It is the locus of identity especially for women whose work was centered in the home and it becomes “idealized, even sacralized” expressing “the desire for things to stay as they are, and to consider them right and just” in the words of Richard Daniels (qtd in Chawla 2014, 61) making these homes a conservative idealization of the past. In her own research, while recording the story of an elderly woman, Labbi Devi, Chawla comes to see that women telling a story of home in pre-partition India often uphold reverence for the patriarch of the family even though it was quite clear that it was Labbi Devi who was central to the effort of rehabilitating her family after partition. Such narratives of return that are about the goodness, social values, and benevolence of a patriarch, keep “the

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hierarchical power lines intact” (Chawla 2014, 11). However, given these social hierarchies, we are often surprised by pragmatic and forward-­looking women who are the mainstays of their families. My grandmother who was in most ways a traditional homemaker wanted to access the benefits of the forced migration to India by seizing the opportunity to educate her three children in good schools in Delhi and insisted that my grandfather build a house in a neighborhood where this would be possible. In other words, though nostalgia often implies a backward glance at conservative values of an earlier period, there are many internal contradictions that come up even in the articulation of these values that give us a more complicated picture of the homes, societies, and cultures inhabited by migrants. In the discussion that follow, I offer two contrasting examples of the nostalgia that often marks Punjabi investment in pre-partition homes, the first interviewee, Anil, who has never been to Pakistan and the second, Vineet, who was only two years old at the time of partition and offered the most extensive and in-depth accounting of his experience. The ground for such interviews was prepared in both these cases by the subjects asking me more than once whether I had a Punjabi background as what they wanted to share was seen to be an affective universe that is a Punjabi inheritance. When I asked Anil the whether my being Punjabi would make any difference to our conversation, his response that what he was going to share would be better understood by someone who was a Punjabi struck me as surprising given our actual life histories. Anil has lived all over the world as a consequence of his work for the merchant navy and traveled widely in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world, but has not actually spent any time in Punjab, while even though I had lived in cosmopolitan Chandigarh as a child—a city that has been the shared capital of the states of Haryana and Punjab—I received all my college and university education in the capital city of New Delhi, and at the time of the interview had lived in the United States for twenty-five years. So neither of us was really a Punjabi by location nor had a daily immersion in Punjabi culture in our personal or professional lives. Yet his answer seemed to reflect my experience that those who chose to share their stories with me were hoping for a particular openness to and an understanding of the sentiment of loss on the part of their interviewer. Vineet expressed a similar concern about my receptivity to his story when he called me a week before our appointed time for his interview to introduce himself and ask if I spoke Punjabi and whether I was familiar with Punjabi culture generally. However, as I pointed out to him later during the interview, Vineet has

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lived in the United States for the last five decades, so he cannot point to significant time spent in Punjab. Yet he feels emotionally connected to Punjab and his family stories from his pre-partition years. Those who wish to share their stories are looking for a particular openness to and understanding of the sentiment of loss in their audience. Many who were born just before partition or in independent India long to find and corroborate what they have heard of affectionate and close neighborly relationships, kinship, and community from their parents and grandparents. Often this sense of connection to a place and culture is imaginative, even mythical; sometimes it exists despite the trauma of departure felt by the fleeing parents and grandparents. Given that for those born after 1947, an idea of Punjabi heritage is almost entirely constructed through stories, it is remarkable that the desire for such heritage is so strong. For Anil, the return to a pre-partition home exists only in his imagination. He was born in independent India and has never visited the other side of the border but has an enduring fascination with what was left behind manifested most clearly for him in his concern about the gradual forgetting of the languages of Western Punjab. Anil is the cousin of a close friend of mine from my undergraduate years in a Delhi College and he and his wife Sunita were introduced to me via email by this friend. He has spent most of his life in the merchant navy and has now retired to a posh South Delhi neighborhood to which I was invited in August 2016. As is customary in Punjabi households, I was offered high tea with snacks, and only after we had cups of tea in our hands and familiar jokes had been cracked about family and extended family life, did we start a conversation about his relationship to his parents’ partition heritage. Anil remembers vividly the post-partition years when his family had settled in the Anand Parbat area of Delhi, a neighborhood where many other partition migrants had also built their homes. His grandparents spoke Multani, the distinctive language of Multan, a region, a district, and also a city of the same name in Western Punjab. Anil is so fond of the sound of the language that he spends a fair bit of his time trying to find soundbites of spoken Multani online and in television programs. He had just been listening to the news of the horrific honor killing of Qandeel Baloch by her brother and remarked that he was quite taken with an interview with Qandeel’s father because he spoke in Multani. Unusually for such cases of honor killing, the father was appalled by what his son had done and wanted the law to take its course against him.16 We did not, however, talk about the details of this case, a conversation that might have focused on the deadly patriarchal

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culture in the region that drove Qandeel’s brother to murder her. I wished that we could have pushed the conversation in the direction of discussing patriarchy and honor killings as also part of Multani and Punjabi culture, but it did not happen. For me this was evidence of a certain idealized evocation of the past that prevents us from grappling with the legacies of deep misogyny in that culture. It also became clear that Anil’s fascination with Multani language and Pakistani culture in general was not shared by his family. His wife, who was present for most of our conversation, said that he spent too much time thinking about the past and not enough about the present and future! She, however, does not have a family background associated with the partition, making it harder for her to appreciate the almost melancholic investment that children can have in the lost worlds of their parents. Connected to Anil’s knowledge of his parents’ history is a sense of belonging to a place or a language group. He expressed regret that Punjabi Hindus have let go of the language Punjabi and speak Hindi instead. For him, the Multani of his grandparents was a critical factor in connecting him to Pakistan. He commented that while the Bengalis and the Tamils would speak their own language, he did not feel that his speaking in Hindi connected him to any particular cultural group. It was this sense of rootlessness that keeps Anil searching for his parents’ pre-partition history. It is a significant fact that his speaking in Hindi did not seem to constitute a community, partly because Hindi is the language of so many groups in North-Central India and partly because in Delhi it denotes a cosmopolitan urban life with no connection to a historical linguistic group. For Anil, the memory of an earlier home is a reminder of community, the outward expression of which was a common language, which is no longer available to him. Urban Punjabis often express this feeling of rootlessness and an absence of community based on regional or linguistic heritage especially given the emphasis on Hindi as a national language in independent India that led many in North India to abandon regional languages in favor of Hindi. The most extended and eloquent evocation of a continuing relationship with a pre-partition home came from Vineet whom I met in Chicago. I made contact with him through family friends; both men who made this connection for me have passed on in the last two years, underlining the fragility of these links between generations. I met Vineet and his wife Surinder in September 2016 in their beautiful apartment, overlooking the lake in Chicago, the home a clear sign of his successful career in medical

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education. He expressed having a fascination with his birthplace Okara, Pakistan, a town approximately eighty-one miles southwest of Lahore, even though he had been only two years old at the time of partition. Vineet began researching Okara in the summer of 2006 when he was invited to go to Lahore for a talk in November of that year by a Chicago-­ based Pakistani association of doctors in his field. His story of this return trip to his early home is a remarkable story of friendships arising out of notions of belonging that have very little connection to Vineet’s life since leaving Pakistan and demonstrates a sense of loss that continues to be part of many people’s regional Punjabi identity. In fact, when I pressed Vineet as to whether he thought it was odd to be so attached to a place that for most of his happy, productive life in Delhi, North India, and the US was at best only an idea, he attempted to explain the possible reasons for this strong sense of connection: Vineet: No no no no. I actually feel I belong there. That’s what drove me to … drove me to go back. Why don’t you tell me about that? Vineet: I’ll tell you in a minute. I think you have to understand … what I want you to appreciate is how powerful my sense of connection to it is. But what gave you that connection given that you were so young …? Vineet: I don’t know, I don’t know. I think maybe the influence of my grandfather. Yeah. And that influence … so is it a connection to a place? Vineet: It is a connection to a place. You see he never felt that he belonged here. He always felt that he belonged there. And the other thing that I should say to you is this—we were born in a Punjabi household, we speak Punjabi even now, Ok? And I think there is also a … you know the term Panjabiyat? There is also a sense of feeling that I am a Punjabi. And I like Punjabi, I like Punjab. But most of the Punjab is not here—it’s in Pakistan. Look at the line two-thirds there, one-third here.

During his narration, Vineet recalled with visible emotion his online search to find Okara on the map and the chance friendship he had struck up with a young college student, Shahid,17 who had written online about his love for Okara and provided his contact information. Vineet, pointing out that nationalist xenophobia had meant purging of all references to Indian history from Pakistani school text books, found it surprising that a young person who had grown up in Pakistan would respond in such a welcoming and affectionate way to someone like him, who had grown up

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on the other side of the border. It became clear to me that Vineet viewed his trip to Lahore and from there to Okara, where he met Shahid in person, as the culmination of our interview and had structured our conversation to build up to it so as to explain its affective weight for him. As Vineet told his story, he had made his acceptance of an invitation from a Pakistani colleague to speak at a conference in Lahore contingent on the colleague’s promising to also take him to visit his childhood house in Okara. When Vineet eventually made the trip and went in search of his grandfather’s house, where he was born and where his grandfather had practiced medicine, he met not only Shahid but also Shahid’s extended family and was invited to stay with them, an invitation he had to decline because of his travel schedule. In a classic yet moving performance of Punjabi identity, despite the obvious differences in class position, Shahid’s family had extended themselves to prepare a feast—‘meat pulao’ among other things. There was very little furniture in the house, but they had spread a dari (woven rug) on the floor in anticipation of guests and acknowledged that they wanted to welcome Vineet to Okara even though they were poor people who could not do as much khidmat as they would like. Khidmat has, of course, the connotations both of hospitality to a guest and the idea of service. Even in the midst of reliving a traumatic past, hospitality, establishing Punjabi kinship, and an exchange of goodwill over a shared meal are inevitably part of the experience. Vineet’s tale of his search for his grandfather’s house follows a set-piece narrative that closely mirrored my own mother’s account of a search through childhood memories of signs of an earlier place. He remembered a little red door cut out from a larger entry gate into the house and was certain he would be able to recognize his grandfather’s house from that door. This gate occupied a space between the real and the dream world in Vineet’s narration—after all, he was only two when his family left Pakistan. The door represented the only certitude that such a place existed and that he would eventually find it: It was a large wooden door, one of those old style doors which are fairly high and a smaller door which you opened to go inside. … So I knew that— there is a small door in the middle, made of wood, of this shape. That’s all I remember. (Interview with Vineet)

After a few false leads, Vineet finally found his grandfather’s house and the warmth and hospitality with which he was greeted by many members

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of the family that now lived in his ancestral home had moved him to tears. He was touched by the fact that his grandfather’s clinic was being used by the doctor who now lived there as a clinic and nursing home. The house had been preserved in almost the same shape as before with only minor additions that were required to maintain it. As Vineet marveled at the building while walking around it, the current owners of the house went inside and brought out a beautiful marble plaque engraved with Vineet’s grandfather’s name. It proclaimed “Dr Uttam Chand Ahuja, 1926” in English and Urdu, the Roman letters followed by the Nastaliq script indicating that it had belonged to a flourishing doctor’s house and medical practice from the pre-partition years. The current owners of the house explained that they had been forced to remove the plaque when they did some repair and maintenance work to the house but they had stored it instead of throwing it away. Storing a plaque from 1947 for a family that had left six decades earlier suggests an expectation of reuniting with those who had left, or at least a respect for the shared history that had made them both possessors of this home. At this point in his recounting, Vineet went into another room and brought out the heavy plaque, which he had carried back with him to his home in the United States. I was, of course, riveted by his account, but even more so by this affective connection to a place and identity that I had personally never experienced. As in most of the ‘return visits’ discussed in this chapter, the people I interviewed performed and demonstrated a continuity of connection between families and people through a language of hospitality and familial relationships. In Vineet’s case, the oldest member of the family who now lives in his grandfather’s former house borrowed Vineet’s phone to call his aunt (Vineet’s mother’s sister), referred to her as ‘sister,’ and asked when she planned to visit the home in Pakistan, insisting that she should still consider the house her home and that they would welcome her if she came. Vineet described his visit as a scene of excited commotion as he was offered chai and samosas and family and friends of his hosts arrived to greet him, telling one another that “Uttam Chand’s grandson has returned.” Further evidence of the closeness between the two families came to light when Vineet learned from members of this Pakistani family how his grandfather had provided financial security for his daughter who had been widowed at a very young age by building two houses for her, one for her to live in and another for her to rent out for income, thus confirming for Vineet that his grandfather had indeed been as excellent a provider and head of the family as he had imagined him to be. Vineet

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learned that before leaving for India, his grandfather gave his house on rent to the family that lived there now, fully expecting to return to Okara once the violence of partition was over. This belief follows a pattern that has been noted in partition narratives—the certainty that things would blow over and life would return to normal. Vineet’s story echoes many of the narratives shared by my informants, which often included reminiscences about paternal figures who represented service, commitment, decency, and family values and become symbolic of an earlier time that is idealized by their descendants. So thorough is the commitment of partition migrants like Vineet to an idealized view of a certain location, culture, and family history that I did not hear from either Vineet or his wife any hint of suspicion about Shahid’s motivations in seeking their friendship. They believed that the mutually recognized kinship created by their connection to the town of Okara was sufficient reason for this outpouring of affection. Not quite in the same place as they, and in the position of researcher listening from a distance, I had some skepticism about these feelings, which were strengthened when Vineet revealed that later in their friendship, Shahid’s family turned to Vineet for monetary and other kinds of support. For Vineet, Shahid’s later requests for help underlined and nested within the main story of bonding between people from different generations who both loved Okara. Not only did Vineet expedite the medical diagnosis that Shahid’s sister needed, he also sent money to his family when they were in financial need. For me, on the other hand, Shahid’s seeking of financial help was a different and parallel motivation for striking up a friendship with a successful doctor like Vineet, well-settled in the United States, with their shared love of Okara the means by which this friendship was developed. The ‘middle path’ I am trying to chart here is between a cynical rejection of nostalgia as a motivator and a total embrace of nostalgia as the only motive in this complex performance of kinship and friendship. The arrangement of Vineet’s storyline kept the narrative arc moving toward a greater and greater emotional climax that culminated in the meeting first with Shahid and then the family that now lives in his grandfather’s house. This became clear to me when his wife Surinder intervened with some of the details of the story and Vineet stopped her with “that comes later.” I wondered whether a prior commitment to the idea of friendship shaped and drove Vineet’s narrative or whether his visit confirmed and perhaps created the ‘happy reunion’ of partition returnees. Like any narrative, both those elements probably played a role, the

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expectation of friendship and the performance of it on the other side of the border. The first was further confirmed when Surinder voiced her opinions about the division caused by partition, which, according to her, was a division of hearts among people who were and are essentially the same in their customs, cuisine, and language. Such a division was evident to her in Hindu ideas of purity and contamination that ‘othered’ Muslims even before partition, for instance, in the common practice of keeping separate dishes for Muslim guests. Vineet disagreed with her and thought that such customs would have been an accepted part of Hindu practice at that time. The divergence in their opinions expressed to me their different Sikh and Hindu backgrounds given that Sikh doctrine is against such discriminatory practices against other castes or religions whereas Hindus have still continued such practices. Surinder said more than once that partition “should never have happened,” revealing to me how often partition migrants think of it as a wound that has not healed. This yearning for an undivided Punjab and an abiding love of Punjabi language, sensibility, and custom decisively framed the narrative that Vineet shared with me. In all of this, there was, of course, no discussion of the political process by which Muslims had come to want a country of their own, a process that had been set in motion earlier in the twentieth century.  As  Venkat Dhulipala has argued, among different political and civil society groups and in the media an idea of a powerful Islamic power was being forged in the decades prior to partition so that it was hardly a thoughtless mistake or intransigence that led to partition.18 Nor was there acknowledgment of the failure of political negotiations among Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims at the moment of independence from colonial rule. It may be the deepest irony of partition that the finality of division and separation is what allows for an expression of love and friendship precisely because claims to homes and land can no longer be contested. What remains are expressions of hospitality and kinship that appear, for a short period, to overcome religious and political differences. In conclusion, I return to a question has shaped my investigation of the nostalgia of partition returns: how can we read such cross-border desires as a frame for futures of solidarity? I’ve argued in this chapter that the longing for a time prior to partition is an inheritance of many Punjabis even after they have spent decades in post-partition India. I explore their longing for the sound of languages such as Punjabi or Multani as signaling kinship and community that their parents had experienced more than they had but a love of which is nonetheless handed down to them. In

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expressing cross-border longing of this kind, ordinary citizens of both India and Pakistan not only disrupt majoritarian Hindu and Muslim identities but also articulate to each other joy, grief, pleasure, hospitality, kinship, and community despite the political hostility generated by both nation states. During cross-border reunions, a performance of connection with each other is a choice, a willed experience on the part of the visitor and the host, the mirroring of grief and loss among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs lends a depth of sympathy rarely enabled by the contemporary politics of India and Pakistan. The broad publicity given to these experiences demonstrate for younger generations other ways of interacting with each other than through the paranoid lens of the nation states and keeps alive a common humanity in South Asia not merely through assertion but through a common language, customary practices, memories, and attachment to place.

Notes 1. See https://citrusvariety.ucr.edu/crc4085. Accessed on Jan 19, 2023. A blogpost on the UC Riverside College of Agricultural and Horticulture website cites sources for the possible origins of the Malta in Northwest Punjab. 2. See Shumaila Jaffery,  “Reena Varma: Teary-eyed Indian welcomed in Pakistan after 75 years”,  BBC news, July 22, 2022.  https://www.bbc. com/news/world-­asia-­india-­62250407 Accessed Aug 12, 2022. 3. See above Jaffrey, BBC news. 4. See Kavita Daiya (2008), Violent Belongings, 3 5. See Navid Siddiqui, “This is the beginning: PM inaugurates Kartarpur corridor on historic day,” The Dawn, Nov 9, 2019. https://www.dawn.com/ news/1515830. 6. Salman Masood and Mike Ives, Survivors of Partition Seek Closure Through an Unlikely Source: YouTube. New York Times, Aug 13, 2022. Accessed on Aug 15, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/world/asia/ nasir-­dhillon-­india-­partition-­youtube.html. 7. See Project Dastaan at https://projectdastaan.org/about/. It describes itself as “a peace building initiative which examines the human impact of global migration through the lens of the largest forced migration in recorded history, the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.” 8. See Rahul Gairola’s study of the these two commercials in his “Migrations in Absentia: Multinational Digital Advertising and Manipulation of Partition Trauma (2016),” where he argues that “Here, transnational capitalism’s marketing campaign is a familiar wolf in sheep’s clothing: recogni-

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tion of the Indian/Pakistani ‘other’ can be transcended by mimesis of the Occident/Global North, and more specifically in the context of twentyfirst-century happiness, with engagement in the profitable technocultures of the West” (63). 9. See Dennis Walder (2010), 9. 10. Walder (2010), 12. 11. See my discussion of these oral histories now available in the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley, California. 12. See Farina Mir (2006), “Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives: Rethinking cultural and religious syncretism” in Punjab Reconsidered. 13. See Anne Murphy (2015), “The uses of the ‘folk’: cultural historical practice and the modernity of the Guga tradition” in South Asian History and Culture, 6.4: 441–461. 14. See the report in The Guardian, Harriet Sherwood,  “Anger as Poland plans law that will stop Jews reclaiming wartime homes,” Aug 1, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/01/anger-­as-­poland-­ plans-­law-­that-­will-­stop-­jews-­reclaiming-­wartime-­homes. 15. Homes were also central to the continuing process of nation making and partitioning, a point made by Vazira Zamindar (2007) in her study of evacuee property on both sides of the border. Allocation of houses to migrants articulated notions of citizenship and belonging at the same time that the dispossession of millions from their homes made them refugees on the other side of the border. See her The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. 16. See Jon Boone, “‘She feared no one’: the life and death of Qandeel Baloch.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/22/qandeel-­ baloch-­feared-­no-­one-­life-­and-­death. 17. Name changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals in this story. 18. See Introduction to Venkat Dhulipala’s Creating a new Medina: state power, Islam, and the quest for Pakistan in late colonial North India (2015).

Works Cited Interviews Interview with Anil. August 1, 2016. New Delhi. Interview with Balwinder. January 24, 2017. Des Moines, Iowa. Interview with Mr. Sarin. June 19, 2014. in Gurgaon, Haryana. Interview with Vineet. September 10, 2016. Chicago.

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Secondary Sources Ahuja, Sparsh, Sam Dalrymple, and Sadie Gardezi. Project dastaan. https://projectdastaan.org/about/. Bonnett, Alastair. 2015. The geography of nostalgia: Global and local perspectives on modernity and loss. Milton: Routledge. Boone, Jon. 2017. ‘She feared no one’: the life and death of Qandeel Baloch. The Guardian. September 22. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ sep/22/qandeel-­baloch-­feared-­no-­one-­life-­and-­death. Chawla, Devika. 2014. Home, uprooted: Oral histories of India’s partition. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Daiya, Kavita. 2008. Violent belonging: Partition, gender, and national culture in postcolonial India. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Dhulipala, Venkat. 2015. Creating a new Medina: State power, Islam, and the quest for Pakistan in late colonial North India. Daryaganj, Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Gairola, Rahul. 2016. Migrations in absentia: Multinational digital advertising and manipulation of partition trauma. In Revisiting India’s partition: New essays on memory, culture, and politics, ed. Amritjit Singh et al., 53–70. Lexington Books. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. Objects of return. In The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the holocaust., 203–225. Columbia University Press. Jaffery, Shumaila. 2022. Reena Varma: Teary-eyed Indian welcomed in Pakistan after 75 years. BBC, July 22. Masood, Salman, and Mike Ives. 2022. “Survivors of partition seek closure through an unlikely source: YouTube”. New York Times, August 12. Mir, Farina. 2006. Genre and devotion in Punjabi popular narratives: Rethinking cultural and religious syncretism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (3): 727–758. Murphy, Anne. 2015. The uses of the ‘folk’: Cultural-historical practice and the modernity of the Guga tradition. South Asian History and Culture 6 (4): 441–461. ———. 2022. Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Husain Syed. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57 (3): 501–519. Sherwood, Harriet. 2021. Anger as Poland plans law that will stop Jews reclaiming wartime homes. The Guardian, August 1. Siddiqui, Navid. 2009. This is the beginning: PM inaugurates Kartarpur corridor on historic day. The Dawn, November 9, 2019. Walder, Dennis. 2010. Postcolonial nostalgia: Writing, representation, and memory. Taylor and Francis. Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. 2007. The long partition and the making of modern South Asia. Cultures of history: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Collecting Memory: The 1947 Berkeley Partition Archive

The idea of an archive has a long history as a bureaucratic and administrative tool for colonial governments. Colonial archives attempted “the ordering of the world and its knowledges into a unified field  (Richards 1993, 11).”1 In the late twentieth century, national archives have become repositories of histories of anticolonial struggles and records of postcolonial administrations. Archives allow not simply a retrieval of history but also enable a claim about the past that is based on a shared cultural understanding.2 However, the most progressive uses of archives have been as records of the injustices committed by fascist and authoritarian regimes and as records of the violence against innocent people in different historical contexts. In the case of the Holocaust in Europe, apartheid in South Africa, the 1992 War in Bosnia, and genocide in Rwanda, eyewitness accounts and testimonies were involved in questions of justice and bringing to light the brutality of the Nazi state, governments, coteries, ethnic groups, and white colonial rulers. Archives and repositories of these accounts are available as important tools of research for later generations. Researchers can read accounts of the powerful against the grain to highlight voices that are in minority or voices opposed to the powerful. Given that the lapse of time and the absence of records makes justice an impossible goal for the partition, what is the value of oral history archives emerging from this specific South Asian context? In order to answer this question,

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I explore the goals and objectives of the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley, California, documenting the work of their staff and the protocols that drive their oral history collection. This archive is a repository of voices that would otherwise be lost to time and history, voices of everyday people who experienced the partition, crowd-sourced witness accounts that are available to researchers. With my focus on narrative, I am less concerned with the ‘authenticity’ of these voices as with the play of story and memory in the aftermath of a historical trauma that is intimately connected to postcolonial nationalism in South Asia. The 1947 Partition Archive enabled me to access stories of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim survivors of partition, but in my most recent work with the collection in 2021, I worked with the primary archivist, Karyn Bellamy-­ Dagneau, to identify records of rural women in Pakistan, using this group to represent for me people I would find the hardest to access by myself. Travel to Pakistan is not without its problems at a time of heightened hostilities with India and to arrange for conversations with women in rural areas would be even more challenging. The archive’s recorded audio-­ visual interviews placed me as a critical observer of the encounter between the interviewer, usually an anthropologist or other educated person who had been trained as a citizen historian and elderly women who are first-­ generation witnesses to the partition. The raw, unedited quality of the interviews meant that often the setting up, background noise, process of getting ready for the interview, and the comings and goings of family members were all activities that were included in the recording, giving me the best vantage point to study the encounter and some of its unscripted qualities as well. Oral history collections, a strong and pervasive focus of partition memory projects since the 1980s, inaugurated a new era in partition research and moved the focus from political histories to the experience of partition migrants who left their homes and lives in a hurry to cross the border into India or Pakistan from August to December of 1947. The 1947 Partition Archive is one of the most prominent and successful of these ventures. Founded by Guneeta Singh Bhalla when she was a postdoctoral student at UC Berkeley, the archive is engaged in a race against time to record the testimonies of those who experienced partition either as young children or as teenagers, which is an aging population between eighty and ninety years of age at this time. The setting up of the archive in Berkeley has much to do with the longing for genealogy, history, and stories that shape

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subjectivity in the multicultural social space of contemporary United States, and the coming to consciousness of the generation of postmemory. The passionate commitment of postmemorial generations to saving and archiving the disappearing memory of a major historical event is instantiated in Bhalla’s work as the director of the archive. A second-generation Punjabi-American who has received much public praise for her work in creating and administering this archive. Bhalla visited Hiroshima in 2008 and saw there the memorial to the Second World War. She was struck by the fact that there was no comparable memorial to the Indian partition even though a million people lost their lives in that tragic transition from colonial rule to independence. She was moved and inspired to give up her career as a physicist and devote herself to creating and managing an archive of partition stories. She first spoke with family members, then contacted survivors through the gurudwara in Fremont, California, and armed with her own camcorder and a camera borrowed from the South Asian Studies Center at UC Berkeley, began recording interviews. In April 2011, she registered The 1947 Partition Archive as a non-profit and found office space through the UC Berkeley Skydeck Accelerator Program.3 Bhalla’s account expresses the postmemorial shock of the discovery of the scale of a trauma that also affected her own family members but had no presence in public memory. As she describes it, there was a “fire within” her to get as many voices of partition migrants recorded as she could and the feeling that “no one was going to stop her” from pursuing this project.4 Recent studies of The 1947 Partition Archive have criticized its protocols of detached observation and neutral collection of oral histories, pointing out that these directives to interviewers miss the interactive quality of rich oral histories.5 It is a fallacy that oral histories allow us to access unmediated authentic experience, they argue, and that they can in any way help us establish a new sense of collectivity. However, I begin with the assumption that ‘authenticity’ need not be the point of oral histories, which are much more about the process of accessing voices not heard before, and the dignity and self-articulation that oral histories enable in interview subjects. When massed together in a collection, oral histories can provide an important range of source material even with all its pitfalls. Second, if we think of the archive as simply a repository, it is left to researchers and scholars to bring out the diversity of themes that partition migrants talk about that might lead us to a creative reclamation of partition memory. It is the goal of this chapter to explore this process, an instance of which I present in my study of the memories of rural women migrants in Pakistan,

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a collection of oral histories I could only have accessed through a repository such as the 1947 Partition Archive. The ‘raw’ quality of the interviews in the archive, which, I hope, will remain in that form, encase within the space of the interview the awkward exchanges, difficulties, and challenges of conducting such interviews with elderly migrants whose memories have acquired a certain fuzziness in some cases and a sharpness in others. More than what it does for filling out the historical record, the interviews reveal the human ability to cope with unthinkable loss, to embrace or reject nationalist ideologies that led to the horrors of the partition, and to recreate families and cluster together again in communities. A ‘critical juxtaposition’6 of partition with other historical traumas such as the Holocaust can yield important insights. Geoffrey Hartman, in his discussion of Holocaust testimony, writes that “insofar as the testimony interview remains genuinely open and encourages the possibility of dialogue, whether with others or oneself,” it has the potential to be healing (Hartman 2006, 251). “There is a performative as well as an informative dimension to each testimony … each testimony places us in the presence of an individual, communicates something of the original impact of what was experienced, retrieves in the spontaneous flow of the interview forgotten episodes, and is generally unafraid of the emotional aura” (Hartman 2006, 254). Partition testimonies are opportunities for owning the tragedy of partition with dignity, each story a record of human assertion and survival. Such testimonies when spoken to a younger generation of researchers or witnesses are also an opportunity for transgenerational understanding, for an empathic connection with survivors. Finally, partition testimonies are a record of the experiences of entire social and regional communities that help us understand the many local dimensions of the event, in cities, trains, homes, and on the road, filling out an abstract sense of the tragedy with the particularity of experience. A significant contribution of oral history archives is that they enable research and interpretation of muted and marginalized voices or less known stories. Ultimately, such research contributes to the building of public memory; it has the potential to create intentional and inclusive communities of memory through a continuous engagement with and interpretation of the archive. In this endeavor, the work of archivists and archive administrators becomes critical. Instead of a technology of control, taxonomy, and administration of others as has historically been the case with national and colonial archives, such archives can aim for openness of access, participation of community members, and a transnational

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inclusiveness. The 1947 Partition Archive is meeting this promise by including stories from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Because citizen historians from all over the world can interview partition survivors in their regions, many cities, language groups, and areas are represented. Its location in the United States also allows for a transnational gathering of testimonies, making it an excellent resource for future research. For younger generations of partition postmemory, the archive provides opportunities to engage with history through the voices of migrants. When I visited the archive in summer 2015, I found that many young South Asians and South Asian Americans were involved in its running and administration. They provided technical skills and the labor of listing, classifying, and depositing tapes in the library. Many of the recorded interviews include information about the interviewers that shed light on how it transformed them. They were motivated to work there in order to practice their language skills and to understand their subcontinental heritage. Shreya Dhingra, a student of business administration and Political Economics at UC Berkeley, wrote that she had heard small stories from her grandma but is now interested in the bigger picture of the partition: “After attending UC Berkeley, I have come to question my South Asian identity more and I want to understand where I come from, what the culture is, and what differences there are between Pakistanis and Indians— why we have so many political problems facing us.”7 Gurwinder Kaur, a third-year student at UC Berkeley at the time of her interview with Harmeet Singh Bains, wrote: “Growing up, I certainly had wished that I had a greater influence of the Punjabi culture and a closer bond with my relatives, especially my grandparents. So when I conduct interviews of those that lived through the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, I feel as if I am talking to my own. … I am attracted to this project because I want to learn more about my roots and want to preserve the history for the upcoming generation (especially of the Punjabi diaspora) so that they are better informed about their identity.”8 The act of searching for family stories becomes deeply personal as familial relationships are displaced on to the interviewees and enable an  understanding of partition through the stories of migrants. The desire to systematize the collection of stories is evident in the Berkeley archive in that citizen volunteers undergo training and are given a set of questions around which they build the conversation with survivors. These questions are compiled in consultation with historians in the

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area and pertain to families, schooling, holidays, relations between communities, and memories of departure from homes. The ‘raw’ nature of these oral history recordings means that the uncertainties and awkward moments involved in an encounter between different generations and the varying assumptions and understanding of history are very much part of the recordings. Researching the video recordings of these interviews felt like an ethnographic exercise in that I was observing the narrative construction of a testimony sometimes smoothly mapped on to middle-class understandings of self, history, and identity, at other times, jagged with the resistance the interviewers faced from those who had not had the time, opportunity, or vocabulary to think of their partition experience as a narrative about memory. Like my partition interviews, these interviews were also conducted in living rooms or outdoors with the sounds of animals, dogs, cattle, and traffic interspersed with the conversation. In this first stage of research, I set out to select interviews randomly and once I had listened to and transcribed thirty interviews, I worked on the themes and ideas that came through. In the second phase of research in 2021, however, the archive had expanded and was now able to give me digital access to recorded stories. It gave me access to the voices of partition survivors that I could not get to myself, across the border in Pakistan, in rural towns, and especially to the voices of elderly women who might not have wanted to talk to a stranger. In finding these voices, the assistance of archivists who have painstakingly gathered and organized close to 10,000 oral histories becomes critical. In this respect, like any other collection, the archive will have important questions to answer about how to classify this information and in what forms to make it available. I did not want transcripts, even had those been available, but wanted to be able to access the raw recording and make my own transcripts. This was the closest that one could get to becoming an observer of the exchange between interviewer and interviewee. The truly transnational nature of the archive makes it possible to find voices of Pakistani Punjab, given that both the pandemic and the hostilities between India and Pakistan have impeded travel. The work of local citizen historians has also meant that a researcher like me can access interviews conducted in rural areas and with underprivileged groups who may not have kept abreast of burgeoning cultures of memory emerging from heritage and academic institutions. The current mapping of the archive also means that researchers can now look for interviewees from specific cities and those that followed particular migration routes.

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The multilingual nature of the encounter meant that interviewers had to invent a set of questions that most closely approximated their sense of the values, measures, and substance of the lives of partition migrants in the moment before partition. Wealth and status, for instance, was measured in terms of number of cattle owned, the size of the house in which they lived, number of rooms, whether or not the construction was ‘pukka,’ and whether the house had its own well. This did, of course, lead to the awkwardness of question about ‘cattle’ being posed to the urban dwellers of Lahore or Gujranwala! Memories about school and friends that are the basis of a structure of remembrance in the construction of a middle-class life were received with either puzzlement, amusement, or enthusiasm depending on the rural or urban, lower- or middle-class backgrounds of the interviewees. This disjuncture between the memory scape that interviewers approached survivors with and their own sense of what has been memorable or important in life shows us that the idea of ‘memory’ as an important component of identity as in the Jewish context does not exist in South Asia. Interviewees expressed surprise that partition narratives were still of interest, for instance, and even more that details of their lives such as if they had nicknames, whether they remember their schools, or the structure of their pre-partition homes were important to reconstructing the moment before the division. Some nodal points that emerge are certain dates on which massacres happened, for instance, outside Gujranwala, or in Agra. In this inductive method, the map of memory that begins to emerge has most clearly a nostalgic or commonsensical description of a rural or pre-industrial urban life, close communities of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs clustered by religious groups, but also living in close proximity to each other, and narratives of peaceful co-existence based on a recognition of difference between different cultural practices. Linguistically, if the word ‘partition’ denotes a geographical division, which has accrued to it much emotional resonance, the Punjabi word ‘ujada’ or the Hindi word ‘batwara’ has a much more traumatic ring to it. The word ‘ujada’ better captures the idea of uprooting and destruction, and it is clear that in the vernacular Punjabi, it is never thought of as simply the political division of land, but the shocking, astonishing loss of home, society, relationships, identity, being stripped to the status of ‘refugee.’ Another term used by an interviewee “vand da syapa,” literally the lamentation of division, has much more the sense of mourning for a death. Interviewee responses to whether or not Partition should have happened

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varied from espousing nationalist sentiments about the necessity of forming Pakistan to regret that Partition had to happen to a feeling that living together brings ‘barkat’ (abundance, plenty, blessedness) whereas separation is painful. Most significantly, a close analysis of these narratives reveals fascinating life worlds that are barely understood by contemporary educated researchers. Customary practices, relationships between kin, village life, and movement of people are all approached with curiosity by the interviewers but responses require decoding in a group setting where other people explain, translate, or amplify statements by the interviewees. Even more importantly, if one expects the educated researcher/interviewer to have all the power in this exchange, the elderly men and women here express impatience with the interviewers, mock and chide them, make it clear that some questions are being repeated and some answers are obvious. Often, the interviewers are as bewildered as those interviewed, which also makes for unexpected moments of comedy. As Fakhra Hassan, a scholar and one of the interviewers, acknowledges to her interviewee, “I am also illiterate!” The interviews reveal rural North India in turmoil immediately after partition and capture very well the unexpected nature of a tragedy visited on ordinary people, some of whom are entirely unaware of the politics of territorial division. An especially affecting part of the interviews are the narration of extreme deprivation as large populations moved across the border without access to food, water, shelter, or safety. And here the interviewers’ questions about modes of transport, sources of food, and avenues of government or military assistance are very helpful in understanding the experience of forced migration. The most useful insights about oral history are provided by two Italian oral historians, Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, who have both made significant contributions to working-class history in Italy. As in the case of the subjects interviewed below, Passerini also found that “very little information was volunteered about dates, places of birth, schooling, and sometimes important aspects of private life, like marriage or children, were passed over in silence” (Passerini 2011, 8). It was her persistence that brought forth this information for the record. There are similar gaps in the information provided by women from rural Pakistan in the interviews that I will study here and a similar persistence yields information about location, marriage, number of children, and name of parents and spouse. The search for factual and grounding information is in tension, however, with the goal of “letting [memory] organize the story according to the

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subject’s order of priorities” (Passerini 2011, 8). A central tension in oral history research is lucidly articulated by Passerini when she points out that while personal histories are a search for the “exceptional—the things that make one individual different from another,” a questionnaire “implicitly suggests that it is uniformity that counts.” The invitation to subjects “to present themselves as unique and irreplaceable through an autobiographical account, … induces them to reveal their cultural values, and hence, paradoxically, throws light on stereotypes and shared ideas” (Passerini 2011, 8). Making a similar point about the genre of oral history, Alessandro Portellin writes that “its role is precisely to connect life to times, uniqueness to representativeness, as well as orality to writing” (Portelli 1997, 6). The movement from the hope for extraordinary (expressed in questions about whether the family was famous or the village well-known for something) to the everyday is found repeatedly in the interviews below. And they establish some patterns of rural poverty, lack of resources, the suffering caused by the sudden removal of partition, and the struggle to settle life on the other side of the border. The practice of oral history involves a shift from a question-answer session to a “thick dialogue” in Portelli’s words. This is an ongoing practice perfected as one becomes more comfortable initiating such a dialogue. This is determined by how much space the interviewers allow for answers and their follow-up comments and questions that would lead the speakers on to reveal more.9 In their interviews with elderly women especially, interviewers have to persist and take many tacks to formulate a precise idea of the location of their village, their age, the route on which they moved across the border, the number of days they stayed in a camp, the amount of land they got as compensation, and the amount they lost. Often interviewers are doing their very best to establish these points and also follow through on comments that elderly interviewees make about a traumatic episode in their lives. For instance, when Hasan reveals to Mohammad Sarfaraz that her sister was abducted, he has to stall for a moment while he considers how he can move forward after that revelation and settles for another question about the exact timing of the attack on her village and people, seeking the concreteness of facts and numbers when the overwhelming emotion in the interviewee becomes unsupportable.10 Though my investigation of the entire archive was by no means exhaustive, I transcribed and studied thirty-nine interviews with people from Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities. I have chosen to write about women in rural areas who suffered the consequences of post-partition

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displacement. My rationale for this is that for a researcher like me, with no access to women in rural areas, especially in Pakistan, the archive is most useful in helping me find those voices. In this way too, the archive serves an excellent purpose because as Portelli points out, “[O]ral history is more intrinsically itself when it listens to speakers who are not already recognized protagonists in the public sphere” (Portelli 1997, 6). In 2021, during the pandemic that made travel impossible, I turned to the archive again to find voices that I would not be able to access at this moment but that would have presented considerable challenges even if I had been able to travel and talk to people face-to-face. I searched for voices of women migrants in rural areas and with the help of the archivist, Karyn Bellamy-Dagneau, I was able to study nine of these voices, eight women and one possibly transgender person. I looked at what such interviews might tell us both about the partition but also about the memory scapes that we build through oral history and the process of collection. The quality of the recordings in Pakistan were rich in potential, but often difficult to access because of sound quality. In both India and Pakistan, ambient sound had a lot to do with the social status of interviewees. Rural backgrounds produced more sound, while middle-class homes provided greater opportunities for settled conversation, which was also, however, interrupted by sounds of traffic and construction. All of this brought to the fore the layers of time, silence, space, and life that make it near impossible to approach partition memory in the subcontinent. All the women interviewed were surrounded by family members who would join in the conversation to clarify a point. Sometimes language and vocabulary were a barrier if the interviewer’s primary language was Urdu, even though there is some level of facility in the proximate languages of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi on both sides of the Punjab border. Loud, ambient sounds of birds, children at play, traffic, whirring fans all formed part of the interview, often interrupting or distracting both interviewer and interviewed. On the one hand, the conversation was staged as people looked on and added information, but, on the other, signs of life outside the space of the interview continued unabated. I have chosen to explore in depth here only one interview that is set in rural India while all the other eight are from rural Pakistan. As the archive has acquired density by the sheer number of interviews now, the mediation and assistance of archivists becomes essential in finding and sorting through audio-visual interviews. The chief archivist, Karyn Bellamy-Dagneau, whom I interviewed in July 2021, is a historian by

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training with a background in Viking and medieval Norse studies, so that working on histories that are difficult to access from the present fascinates her. She expressed her interest in how partition oral histories reveal in fragments the details of and texture of material life in colonial South Asia. She is now involved in organizing the interviews under many topics and keywords and said that the archive’s ability to organize and cluster interviews into ‘geographical pockets’11 can now give us an understanding of the lives of people in particular regions and the dilemmas they faced during partition. The archive is also looking at global standards for preserving oral history, software that is being fitted to the needs of the archive, and evolving search protocols that would be unique to South Asian material. The summaries of interviews once submitted by the interviewer are copyedited and added to the disc or digital version of the interview. It is only from this summary that a keyword can be generated. However, the interview itself is rich in all kinds of possibilities not suggested by a single topic. In a vision worthy of a historian, Karyn imagined a future two hundred years from now when this repository would provide rich source material for a disappearing era. In that she compared this work to that of medieval monks who also kept records, wrote books, and preserved knowledge for future generations. For Pat Pandolfi, who has worked at the archive as a copyeditor for the last few years, there is an injustice in letting certain histories die. She discusses with me the desire to forget what happened “in the South” of the United States and feels that history needs to be told as fully as possible. She brings this same conviction to the partition and says that we need to know and understand the experiences of people who suffered through the partition. In her extensive and in-depth conversation with me, Amy Michelle Genova, who has a doctorate in history and works as an archivist, shared her conviction that archive would be a rich resource for every evolving new questions about the experience of partition given that the pandemic had led her and others in her team to think about the spread of disease in the refugee camps and the aftereffects of malnutrition. She also expressed the same idea with which I approached the collected interviews, that each audio-visual recording shows the viewer-listener how the speakers are responding to each other and the challenges of a particular conversation. The researchers can thus approach interviews through multiple modes of mediation and make their own judgments about key themes, attitudes, and the very nature of the exchange.12

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There is an assumption that the experience of these migrants can be understood in the space of the interview; however, so much about their lives, gender position, customary practices, and social location is opaque to both the interviewer and the researcher playing those interviews. What is fascinating about these interviews is the jagged putting together of memory by parts of a rural impoverished population that do not have memory narratives as comparison or a will-to-family lineage or a middle-­ class desire to own institutions of memory in the modern world. In her interview with Rafiqan, it is clear that the interviewer Fakhra Hassan is trying to find a vocabulary in which a narrative of a life can be rendered and made visible. Hence her interest in objects (“What kinds of utensils did you use in your house? What kinds of clothes did you wear? What kinds of food was served at your wedding?”), relationships (she asks about parents and siblings), and practical details of the journey to Pakistan (how did you travel? Where did you live?). Instead of the acts of translation that both the interviewer and the audience/researcher hope for, this exchange articulates the distance between the lives and experiences of those who lived through the partition and those talking to them today. However, a fragmentary glimpse of the lives of women in rural Punjab comes hazily into view as the conversation proceeds. Rafiqan expressed the same impatience with interviewers that I have seen in other rural migrants.13 When asked who named her, she answers reasonably, “[M]y parents, the name you have must have been given by your parents, right?” She doesn’t know in which district or county her village in India fell but she mentions ‘karedha’ as her village, to which the interviewer asks if the sound is like karela, the bitter gourd eaten widely in the subcontinent. Rafiqan corrects and chides her saying “you can’t pronounce it, it’s karedha!” On further questioning, she remembers that her village was in Ambala district. When the interviewer asks “what was famous about karedha?,” as an invitation to Rafiqan to make it stand out, Rafiqan responds with “My father didn’t have any land; he worked on land,” a poignant reminder of her concerns about living without wealth. To a question about whether after crossing the border Rafiqan realized that she was in Pakistan, she shoots back that she was not a child, she was sayani or a grown up with understanding, and had already had her muklawa (ritual of bringing back a young bride to her parents’ house). The interviewer hears this term as baklava, the sweet, and asks if it is the same as ruksati or the formal departure of the bride and groom from the marriage venue as

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a married couple. It is in fact not quite but others in the room simply correct the pronunciation of the word. Among the first questions asked of eighty-year old Vidyawanti, who comes from a family of kumhars from Sialkot and lived in a mixed mohalla of Hindus, Muslims, and Jats, is whether there is anything famous about her ancestors.14 This is a question very much directed at those who seek family trees, greatness of lineage, and usually belong to the middle or upper classes. Vidyawanti responds by saying she does not have famous ancestors and “only big people are famous that way.” When asked what her house was like says that it was ‘kuccha’ or made of mud like everyone else’s house. When the interviewer quizzes her, she retorts that everyone had mud homes unless you were really very rich and could afford homes constructed of bricks and mortar. Vidyawanti’s impatience with the interviewer’s questions is revealed in the acerbic responses she makes to her questions, responses that mean to normalize her life rather than make of it a curiosity. I wondered also whether the fact that she was speaking to a much younger woman made her impatient with her questions. When asked what she played as a kid, she responds “like kids play” before elaborating that they played with a ball or with theekar (shards of pottery). To a question about schooling, she responds that only Muslims sent their children to school, not the Hindus, thus underlining the importance of class to our general understanding of the spread of education across gender in Hindu families. She emphasizes that she is illiterate by saying she cannot count and so does not remember how many days it took to get from Pakistan to India. Even though she does not have a great attachment to a memory narrative, she remembers with some emotion and gratitude that her family was saved by the moral stand taken by the Muslim lambardar of their village. When his own son threatened to kill all the Hindus, among whom were several elderly women, he stepped in and said that the kumhars work and eat and don’t bother anyone, so why kill them? Once the son and son-in-law of the lambardar said that they would not let the kumhars stay, her family knew they would have to leave the area, so they traveled with the entire biradiri and were evacuated to Batala in India. The real disjuncture between the goals of the interviewer and the apprehension of the interviewee become apparent when questions about nostalgic return to a pre-partition home come up. Vidyawanti says she has never gone back to Pakistan because there is no family left there so there is no one to go back to. When asked if she would want to go back, she says that when she closes her eyes, she can see images of being detained at the

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border, of being unable to leave. For her the other side of the border is marked by an image of terror and entrapment rather than memories of a good life. The limits of oral history are revealed when Vidyawanti wants to leave some things unsaid for reasons that are not clear to the listener or the interviewer. A question about her marriage prompts an unexpected response in that she refuses to answer, wants the interviewer to switch off the recorder, and says that if she were to say anything people would think the kumhaars are crazy to do this to their daughters. She is clearly uncomfortable and awkward about her personal life because she says aloud “should I tell her? Should I” when asked what she does for a living. This leaves the listener and the interviewer mystified, speculating about these unspeakable facts of her life or what seems unspeakable to her. The violence of partition as witnessed by ordinary people has stayed with them, a traumatic memory that is often not shared even with close family. This makes the interview in which such trauma is revealed a fraught exchange for which neither party can fully prepare. Some of the trauma is born not necessarily from personal injury but the fear and terror produced by news and stories of violence against others. On being asked if her family left of their own accord or because they were forced out, Rukeya15 narrates an episode in which her extended family of uncles, aunts, and their children had taken shelter in a school while “Sikhs with long swords were killing people outside. They would hit the sword on the head and cut it in half. So much blood. So many people killed.” Yet, none of her family was attacked and they were rescued by the army. She also shares that “[the Sikhs] also abducted young girls. They had to be hidden.” But this is also not her personal experience or of anyone in her family; rather these familiar reports of the abduction of women are repeated by Rukeya as part of the trauma that her family lived through. Recalling a more personal trauma, in her interview, Jannat first says that her mother died in partition riots but later clarifies that she was abducted and never heard of again. The terror she experienced as a woman is present in Hasan’s narrative when at the very beginning, she breaks down at the memory of the abduction of her sister, Hajraan, who was ‘recovered’ by the army after three to four months.16 Ignoring the interviewer’s question about the time of day when the attack happened, she says, “in those days, the boys would round up all the girls in one place … their plan was to pour kerosene oil through the roof and burn the place down with the women in it so they would not fall into the hands of the Sikhs.” It was the principal in their village, she says, that young women would not be abducted. The words ‘koi shai na si’

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(there was no refuge) echo through her narration. Eventually, her sister comes to Pakistan with the army, marries, and has children, who have been looked after by Hasan after her sister’s death. But the sense of betrayal, terror, and deprivation is still very strong. Jannat herself was unable to migrate to Pakistan until two years later, and as the interviewer questions her some more, she reveals that both she and her sister were abducted and recovered by the police and later arrived in Pakistan after staying in migrant camps. The men of the family were on the lookout for news of the sisters and traveled to bring them to the extended family. Both these interviews paint a vivid picture of the terrible times that women, in particular, lived through and the struggle to reconstitute families. While many seized upon narratives of nationalism and martyrdom, many remained skeptical of what territorial division had done for them. As Jannat says about Pakistan: “It’s good that it was formed but it would have been good if it hadn’t been formed.” The vivid quality of traumatic memory is buried in fragmentary details about the rest of life, which the interviewer painstakingly elicits from Fatima.17 At one point Fatima goes straight to the fact of ‘hamla hua’ (attack) on her village. But the interviewer, Muhammad Hanif, wants to follow a chronological and biographical narrative more in keeping with the instructions by the archive to collect all the facts and details of a person’s life. Fatima wants to tell stories; occasionally Hanif will pick up where she has led but more often than not he wants to come back to his list of questions as the framework of the interview. When Hanif questions her about the attack on the village, she says that while Muslim weavers had slingshots (gulel), the Hindus had ‘barchas’ and so killed half the village. The other half escaped somehow. Fatima says they lay flat on the ground or hid from the attacking Hindus. At this point, she holds her ears with her hands and breaks down. The memory is clearly traumatic and still painful and this is obviously the core of the story: the attack and the escape. All the other questions, though clearly meant to create context and elicit social information, ultimately lead up to this. Fatima cries when she remembers that she traveled alone, without a sister or brother or any other family member. At the same time, when she does tell stories of people and her encounters with the police and bureaucracy, Hanif doesn’t follow it up or repeat it for easy understanding for the viewer. He goes back to an earlier thread of the narrative, which leads me to question whether a chronological narration of a traumatic event is helpful—does it assist articulation

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or the giving of form to a painful memory? In the recording, it feels more like it distracts from the stories and threads she wants to bring up. Fatima’s family fled separately and individually from Bunoor to Chamkoi and then arrived in Lahore, where after seven days, all members of the family were united in a camp set up for refugees. Hanif questions again whether everyone made it to Lahore safely or whether they were killed in the attack and Fatima affirms that her family members arrived safely and died only many years later in Pakistan. Hanif again asks “brothers, sisters, mother, and father all arrived safely?” And Fatima says—now contradicting herself—that her father did not make it because he was shot at Chamkoi. Poignantly, she says that as he lay dying in Lahore, her father asked them not to cry as these were ‘shahidi rutbe’ (or the color of martyrdom). For many migrating Muslims, the displacement to a new place also carried the promise of a new nation in the formation of Pakistan. The father interprets his death as an offering to the new nation and forbids mourning his death. I struggled to imagine what it must have been like to lose a parent in a new country, having lost home and everything familiar and with no time to mourn. Fatima says, “How could we cry? We each were trying to survive. You are educated—you understand? Apni apni pai hui si (we were each concerned about ourselves).” Hanif asks where Fatima’s father was buried and on learning that it was in Lahore, he turns again to material details, asking where they found a shroud and Fatima says, “what shroud? He was buried in the clothes he was wearing.” When Hanif expresses surprise, she says that many people who had been shot and died were buried in their clothes. (Lots of loud background noise of construction work going on can be heard as is so often the case in South Asia.) Hanif starts again and asks, “so he was buried right there,” and Fatima adds “but the janaza was read. If anyone died, everyone got together to read the janaza.; if people got to know that someone was dead, people came to read the janaza,” underlining both the absolute devastation of the loss of a parent and yet the presence of a familiar community that helped to perform the basic rituals of death. Nationalist feeling was strongly expressed by Ghafooran who said she was glad about the formation of Pakistan but had not heard the name of Qaid-e-Azam (Muhammad Ali Jinnah) until she came to Pakistan and joined school there (she would have been about seven years old in 1947). She identified non-Muslims as kafirs and said the mistake in the formation of Pakistan was that it did not get “those five districts” (presumably a reference to the border areas of, among others, Gurdaspur, Ferozepur, and Amritsar)

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which went to India and that the separation of Bangladesh was also a mistake. Although her parents-in-law were very attached to their home in India and would not have left except for the violence that forced them out, she expresses satisfaction that “we left the kafirs and got independence.” Interviews in this archive also helped me explore whether nostalgia about pre-partition life was expressed by people with fewer resources and without the appurtenances of middle-class life. Responding to a question that was meant to be about amenities available in pre-partition India such as hospitals, Rafiqan responds, “Mhare Mulk mein koi bimariyan nahin thi; hamare mulk mein mauj bahut thi, bahut sahultan thi, ‘blood blood Kadin suniyan si’?” (There were no illnesses in my country/region; there was lots of joy, lots of amenities, who had ever heard of “blood blood” ailments (hypertension)? She continues that fever was the only complaint and the remedy was to have the person drink some sweet lassi and lie down. When prompted by the interviewer, Rukeya confirms that “the water [in pre-partition India] was very good and that they never saw disease or illness.” Memories of a kind of plenty are expressed in her description of brass utensils in which food was cooked and served. Rafiqan points out that after the migration, only clay pots were available for cooking. As with the case with many partition migrants, their villages are remembered as harmonious while even neighboring areas were full of violent, hateful rioters. She remembers the lambardar (landowner and revenue officer) of their village as “a very good person” who was kind to animals and made sure that no massacre happened in their village. “Our village was very good. No place like it. There were massacres close to our village but none in our village.” But when asked if she would like to go back to see her village, she shoots back, “What for? I don’t have anybody left. Whose village will I go to?” A nostalgic recall of pre-partition life is not available in every case, however, as some migrants do not express an attachment to their earlier lives. When Jannat was asked whether she would like to return to Hindustan, she responds, “Why would I return? I’ve never gone back. If you are going to spend money, might as well go to Medina.”18 She expands on this theme further by asking what there is to see in a village? At the same time, she acknowledges that many people have gone back to see their villages and some have even married their children across the border. A similar indifference toward partition memory was expressed by Ghafooran who was not sure that the partition and ensuing suffering is worth

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remembering. She did not remember any friends and said, “there was neither enmity nor great friendship with the Sikhs.”19 This cluster of interviews from the archives that I accessed gave me a broader sampling of partition migrants than allowed by my own particular location in the United States and north India. It provided me a glimpse into dearly held ideas of nationalism among ordinary people who believed in the founding myth of Pakistan and India. It confirmed that so many migrants have held on to the trauma of deep loss, memories of violence, and devastation with not even the compensation of having this sorrow witnessed or spoken aloud. The success of oral histories is not just in information collected in the positivist sense but also in confronting fragments and failures of language, the paucity of concepts, and the gulfs that exist between then and now. The devastating glimpse of suffering and continuing hardship for South Asians should be a learning experience for everyone interested in and invested in peaceful futures in the region.

Notes 1. See Thomas Richards (1993), The Imperial Archive, 11. Richard argues that the idea of positive and comprehensive knowledge structured the imperial archive. 2. Joan M Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002) cite Halbwach while making this argument, 3. 3. See Anjali Enjeti, “One woman’s quest to record the history of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-­ america/one-­woman-­s-­quest-­record-­history-­1947-­partition-­india-­n560506. 4. Interview with Guneeta Singh Bhalla, July 16, 2021. 5. Ted Svensson (2021), “Curating the Partition: dissonant heritage and Indian nation building”. See also, Pippa Virdee (2022), “Histories and Memories in the Digital Age of Partition Studies”. 6. Jie-Yun Lim’s term in his “Postcolonial Reflections on the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crimes, and Colonialism (2022),” which expresses an intellectual connection or resonance between two disparate historical events that do not have to be causally connected. 7. See Shreya Dhingra, 343, Disk 4 in the 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley CA. 8. See Harmeet Singh Bains 369 Disk 4, The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley CA. 9. See Alessandro Portelli (1997), The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, 9–12. 10. Mohammad Sarfaraz’s interview with Hasan referenced below.

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11. My interview with Karyn Bellamy-Dagneau on July 14, 2021, in Berkeley, CA. 12. My interview with Amy Michelle Genova, July 15, 2021. 13. Rafiqan Bibi interviewed by Fakhra Hassan, May 5, 2018, in Baddoki Gosaian, Punjab, Pakistan, The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. 14. Vidyawanti, Interviewed by Ranjanpreet Nagra on Jan 2, 2012, Prem Nagar, Qadian, Distt Gurdaspur, India, The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. 15. Rukeya Bibi interviewed by Usama Usman, July 19, 2018. Village Baler, Punjab, Pakistan, The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. 16. Hassan Bibi 7371. 5-5-2019. Interviewed by Mohammad Sarfaraz on May 5, 2019, in Chak 304 GB, Punjab, Pakistan, The 1947 Partition Archive. 17. Fatima Bibi, interviewed by Muhammad Hanif on November 29, 2015, The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. 18. Jannat Bibi. Interviewed by Taha Shaheen, Aug 12, 2016. 19. Ghafooran Bibi, interviewed by Taha Shaheen on October 3, 2016, in Christian, Punjab, Pakistan, The 1947 Partition Archive. 20. All translations from Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu are mine.

Works Cited Interviews20 Fatima. Interviewed by Muhammad Hanif. November 29, 2015. Interview #1986. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk. Ghafooran. Interviewed by Taha Shaheen. October 3, 2016. Interview #2531. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk. Harmeet Singh Bains Notes to 369, Disk 4, The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley CA. Hassan. Interviewed by Mohammad Sarfaraz. May 5, 2019. Interview #7371. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk. Jannat Bibi. Interviewed by Taha Shaheen. August 12, 2016. Interview #3147. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk. Rafiqan. Interviewed by Fakhra Hassan. May 5, 2018. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk. Rukeya. Interviewed by Usama Usman. July 19, 2018. Interview #6514. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk. Shreya Dhingra, Notes to 343, Disk 4 in the 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley CA. Vidyawanti. Interviewed by Ranjanpreet Nagra. January 2, 2012. Interview #230. The 1947 Partition Archive, Berkeley, CA. Digital Hard Disk.

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Secondary Sources Enjeti, Anjali. 2016. One woman’s quest to record the history of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. NBC. Hartman, Geoffrey. 2006. The humanities of testimony. Poetics Today 27 (2): 249–260. Lim, Jie-Hyum. 2022. Postcolonial reflections on the mnemonic confluence of the holocaust, Stalinist crimes, and colonialism. In Global easts: Remembering, imagining, mobilizing, 1st ed., 92–126. New York: Columbia University Press. Passerini, Luisa. 2011. A passion for memory. History Workshop 72 (Autumn): 241–250. Portelli, Alessandro. 1997. The battle of Valle Giulia: Oral history and the art of dialogue. University of Wisconsin Press. Richards, Thomas. 1993. The imperial archive: Knowledge and fantasy of empire. New York: Verso. Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. 2002. Archives, records, power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science 2: 1–19. Svensson, Ted. 2021. Curating the partition: Dissonant heritage and Indian nation building. International Journal of Heritage Studies 2 (27). https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13527258.2020.1781679. Virdee, Pippa. (2022) Histories and memories in the digital age of partition studies. The Oral History Review 49 (2). https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798. 2022.2097877.

CHAPTER 6

Preserving Memory? The Partition Museum in Amritsar

The late twentieth century was a time of reckoning with the traumas, genocides, and difficult histories that the world had lived through with the two world wars as the two points of particular intensity but by no means the only ones. Memorializing these events in the space of a museum is especially challenging when it is clear that the world is still grappling with the consequences and aftereffects of these events. The global spread of a memory culture represented in museums and their own personal history as postmemorial generations of the Indian partition inspired a group of civil society leaders to set up the first partition museum in Amritsar, India, in the state of Punjab in 2017. However, the process of creating a partition museum in India has not been without controversy. Scholars have been at pains to point out that memory in this context did not necessarily have a positive consequence, that the partition was unlike the Holocaust or apartheid as the issue was not state repression but rather an outburst of hatred between communities that had built up in the years leading up to 1947. In 2013, debating the wisdom of creating a partition museum, the historian Ramachandra Guha argued that “the well-meaning individuals who proposed a partition museum saw it as a vehicle of reconciliation. In truth, such a project is far more likely to create new fissures, open up new wounds. The narratives carried by these communities are so intensely felt, so parochial that it is impossible ever to reconcile them within the space of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43397-9_6

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a single building or exhibit.”1 As one of my interviewees put it, “Make a museum of love, but don’t bring back the hate of that time.”2 Invoking partition memory is thus never marked as a social justice project in which the barbarism of a regime or a group of people is revealed and remembered; instead, the involvement of many different communities in the violence meant there was no clear division between perpetrator and victim. A museum or a memorial is a complicated project in this context of painful memory colored with ambivalence. In critically examining the partition museum, I argue that amplifying and focusing the narratives in the museum exhibits, in one case through a sharper feminist lens can make room for a truly engaging and educational museum of memory for future generations. In other difficult historical contexts, for instance, in Rwanda, museums to memory have confronted the brutal ethnic violence of the war of 1994, which was an outcome of historic tensions from the time of colonial rule into postcolonial Rwanda. Roughly a fourth of the population of Rwanda still suffers from the trauma of that year, but a process of confronting that war and teaching new generations about it has been adopted by civil society and government actors. A British anti-genocide organization, at the behest of the Rwandan government, helped create the Rwanda memorial museum. Identifying the category of ‘memorial museum,’ Amy Sodaro points out, “more than a museum or a memorial, memorial museums work both to commemorate and educate, as well as document and preserve the past, collect survivor testimony and details about victims, influence national and international policy to prevent genocide and human rights abuses, and, ultimately, foster democratic culture” (Sodaro 2011, 72). Sodaro explains the difference between the ‘raw’ evidence of brutal massacre put on display in one of the museums in Rwanda and the more educational mission of the Kigali Center, which uses the ‘difficult knowledge’ to educate. Educating about partition, though, has not been a priority in South Asia. As the early oral histories of Urvashi Butalia revealed, the silences around partition had persisted well into the 1980s in a manner that we know from other contexts, such as the Holocaust. The partition museum in Amritsar was formally inaugurated in October 2017 but was fully opened to the public on the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence in August 2017. It is being run by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, a body chaired by journalist and writer Kishwar Desai and has on its Advisory Board, among other civil society leaders, the artist Anjali Ela Menon and designer Ritu Kumar. Desai describes the

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setting up of this museum as a dream she has had for twenty years in which she felt that documenting partition “also required a physical space so that future generations would understand what happened at the time of Independence and Partition when people were forced to leave their homes overnight—in the largest forced migration in history.”3 The museum is located in a central city square, surrounded by other memorials such as the prominent Jallianwala Bagh memorial, which commemorates the massacre of a peaceful gathering of people gathered in a public park on April 13, 1919, to celebrate the festival of Baisakhi. General Reginald Dyer, commanding the British Indian Army in that part of Punjab, convinced that an insurrection was imminent, fired into the crowd of innocent men, women, and children and killed 379 people and wounded over 1200. This brutal massacre led to anger all over India and confirmed for many the cruelty of empire. The memorial, complete with bullet holes in the walls, is visited every year by thousands of tourists and commemorates those innocents declared martyrs in the struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Close by is also the holiest place of worship for Sikhs, Harmandir Sahib or the Golden Temple Gurudwara, to which also thousands of pilgrims throng everyday. The gurudwara houses a memorial to those who died in 1984 in ‘Operation Bluestar,’ a counter-terrorism attack organized by the ruling Congress party led by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Following her assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, members of the Congress party led violent mobs that murdered Sikhs in Delhi and many parts of North India. The gurudwara memorial remembers Sikhs killed in these attacks as ‘martyrs’ thus creating a Sikh identity that is very much at odds with the nation state. The entire area around the town square for a radius of about two miles is thus a memorial region that reminds visitors as much of anticolonial violence as the violence of a postcolonial state against its own minorities. In the midst of these memorials, stands the grand Town Hall, a colonial building made of pink stone, a part of which has been renovated to house a museum to the partition of 1947. The grandeur of the building invokes the glory of colonial era architecture, from the pillared corridor to the stone patio. As you enter the building, the first thing that strikes you is the red tile floor with flowers of yellow and blue scattered all over it. As I entered, the first aural experience I  had was of the Hindi song “Mera Rang de Basanti Chola” playing on the sound system (the from the 1965 Hindi film Shaheed on the life of Bhagat Singh), a reminder of the strong nationalist fervor with which the story of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and

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Courtesy: Partition museum, Town Hall, Amritsar

Rajguru as martyrs in the struggle against colonialism is often recounted. It prepares the visitor for the strongly nationalist perspective expressed in the first half of the museum ­exhibition. In thinking critically about this as the backdrop and lead-up to the museum exhibition, my question for us is: is the anticolonial, nationalist perspective presented here the best approach to thinking about the partition? A comparative approach to partitions in other parts of the world could position them as the modus operandi of departing colonial powers who gave little thought to logistics or consequences of territorial partition. But by focusing solely on the role of the colonial government, other difficult questions about culpability, responsibility, and collective acknowledgment of violence across communities are sidestepped. A museum such as this could be an opportunity to broaden the conversation to voices, opinions, and perspectives from many different regional locations from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Northwest Frontier Province, and Northeast India. A beginning has been made in this direction with the inclusion of a special section on Sindhi survivors of the partition. On my two visits in 2017 and 2018, the rules of the museum laid the groundwork of reverence as the manner of engagement with the exhibits.

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No laptop computers were allowed in and photography was strictly forbidden. Museum guards stationed in different rooms watched me suspiciously as I sat and looked at the exhibits and took notes in a paper notebook. I realized that I was acting contrary to expectations of museum visitors in sitting before the exhibits for that long and taking notes. It was expected that after making your way in silence through the different rooms in the exhibition, you would enter the ‘tree of life’ room to register your visit and then leave the building. While concern about protecting the intellectual property vested in the exhibits and protecting art work from the deterioration involved in being subjected to photography is understandable, the museum is also a place open to the public, a place for education and encounter so that hedging the experience in with the paraphernalia of security is jarring for what the experience can be. The arrangement of the exhibits is chronological with the first few rooms covering the years 1900–1929. They describe major events such as the passing of the Rowlatt Act, the Divide and Rule Policy of the British, the “economic loot of India’s resources by the British,” and include images of Bhagat Singh and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. An interesting image on the wall shows an artistic rendering of Batukeshwar Dutt opening his chest to show images of Rajguru, Bhagat Singh, and Sukhdev. This underlines the strongly nationalist bent of this history and provides the larger context of Indian independence which culminated in both independence and partition. This argument/orientation continues into the next couple of rooms right up to 1945 and is entitled ‘The Rise.’ The exhibition has found place for most of the main actors of the independence movement, the Second World War, the Cabinet Mission Plan, and Master Tara Singh and his leadership of the Sikhs. The displays make good use of newspaper clippings, for instance, one from the Pakistani newspaper The Dawn, which reminds us that the Akalis, representing Sikhs, resisted the formation of a Muslim League Ministry in Punjab after the provincial elections of 1946. The next set of images that move from rooms into hallways discuss the ‘prelude to partition.’ Most of the images are of Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech is played on the speaker in this room. The next room moves closer to the questions around the territorial division of India, a vexed issue that never achieved satisfactory resolution. Notable figures whose biographies are on the walls here include Indian leaders who were members of the Radcliffe Commission such as Mehr Chand Mahajan and Master Tara Singh. One panel mentions the Bengal partition and the referendum in Sylhet that led to its inclusion in Pakistan, one of the few

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references to Bengal in the museum. W. H. Auden’s 1966 poem ‘Partition’ graces one corner of this room. In this section of the museum, ‘Jo Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal’ and ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ can be heard on the public address system, once again underlining the nationalist perspective of the exhibition. Among the artifacts displayed in the museum is a letter between two people, a Muslim and a Hindu, who corresponded about their friendship and the border crossing that each had undertaken, which took them in opposite directions to Pakistan and India. The letter expresses the hope that these upheavals are temporary, and once normal life is resumed, they could go back to their friendship. Throughout the museum, a number of screens on the walls play testimonial accounts of the partition. From the age of the speakers, one can make out that these are first-generation survivors who are recalling details of their homes, neighborhoods, and friendships in pre-partition India. The idea that partition was an unplanned act, made in haste, leading to massive loss of lives and homes and that pre-partition life is recalled with affection and love is the driving narrative of the museum. The themes of the second part of the exhibit are the events of the partition and its consequences. Entering a large hall, you are greeted by the sound of a persistent train whistle and an entire wall covered with an enlarged black and white moving image of a train carrying thousands of passengers inside and on its roof—very much reminiscent of Margaret Bourke-White’s black and white pictures of the partition. As we know, the train was a powerful image of the partition as thousands of people fleeing violence on both sides of the border traveled by train. Some of the violence also involved trains as has been represented powerfully in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956). Near the train, the museum curators have chosen to keep two suitcases that were brought to India by partition survivors and have been donated to the museum. The third object in this series is a sewing machine under which a plaque acknowledges the name of the donor. The other installation in this room is a crumbling brick structure that looks like the remains of a house with some cooking vessels lying abandoned on the floor. It is a reminder of the haste with which people fled for their lives and the unplanned nature of this territorial partition. This is the second such structure, the other being a wall made of similar rudimentary bricks and cement through which has fallen a giant saw that is suspended from the ceiling. The idea of division—of homes, territory, neighborhoods, and people is clearly symbolized in both installations. A large tree of memory is the final object in the museum. It is a metal structure that covers the entire center of the room with paper leaves hanging from it. Visitors are invited to write a

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memory on a piece of paper and hang it on the tree. From the many leaves hanging on the tree, it is clear that the museum has had many visitors who have felt a family connection to partition. In order to suggest both the challenges of exhibits about the partition and productive directions in which museum pedagogy can move, I want to turn now to one exhibit in particular, which memorializes a horrific episode in Thoa Khalsa in Rawalpindi in which on March 12–13, 1947, surrounded by a Muslim mob, about ninety Sikh women threw themselves into a well and drowned.4 It is one of those traumatic moments of the partition that have echoed in film and narrative representations of the event, which serves as a reminder that in episodes of sectarian violence in the subcontinent— and other instances of war—women are often the worst sufferers.5 The installation that recalls this incident is placed in the center of a big room, thus given prominence among the exhibits in the partition museum. It is a dramatic display of a brick well of the kind that would have been found all over Punjab in 1947 that served sometimes as the main source of water for villages. A folded shawl with the signature phulkari embroidery of Punjab was draped on one of the walls of the well. This is the kind of shawl that women would embroider in many colors, usually on a cinnamon brown background, the more elaborate versions given to daughters as part of their dowries. On my second visit to the museum in July 2018, the phulkari shawl was no longer draped across the well. Banners above the well record the numbers of women abducted, later recovered, and those lost to the public record altogether and to their families on both sides of the border. My discussion about this memorial to the women of Thoa Khalsa will suggest ways in which it can serve a memorial purpose to women in the Indian partition more broadly as well as provide opportunities for an engaged discussion about difficult pasts and their legacies in the present. I want to suggest further that an alternative and more powerful framing of partition exhibits would begin with the suffering and victimization of women as opening out into questions of violence, community, honor, pre-existing patriarchy, and misogyny, and then its consequences for the sectarianism and territorial division that followed. In an article on the evolving role of museums today, Saloni Mathur (2020) discusses the “churning of the museological status quo” in which every aspect of the museum from its funding sources to the complicated histories depicted in them are being debated.6 Instead of reverence and high art, museums can be places that encourage debate and an acknowledgment of multiple axes along which material culture, historical

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narratives, and representation can be understood. Identifying the category of ‘memorial museum,’ Amy Sodaro points out, “more than a museum or a memorial, memorial museums work both to commemorate and educate, as well as document and preserve the past, collect survivor testimony and details about victims, influence national and international policy to prevent genocide and human rights abuses, and, ultimately, foster democratic culture” (Sodaro 2011, 72).7 Similarly, Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton (2011) articulate the new goals and aspirations of contemporary memory projects in their introduction to the pioneering volume Curating Difficult Knowledge. They address the efficacy and objectives of memory projects arguing that neither knowledge of our past nor confronting it need to be the only modes of tackling memory: “Memory-workers have begun to explore other modes, including attempts to kindle social aspirations like empathy, identification, cross-cultural dialogue, to recognize multiple perspectives, or to catalyze action” (Lehrer and Milton 2011, 1).

Courtesy: Partition museum, Town Hall, Amritsar

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Lehrer and Milton recognize the dual imperative in ‘difficult contexts’ to reveal the tensions and scars caused by history while at the same time channeling it in productive directions. They argue that “there is a need for curatorial work that can both reveal and contain such tensions, highlighting the ways that aggrieved parties live in ‘contentious coexistence’ in the aftermath of violence, while also creating spaces for more robust ‘dissensual community’ to emerge” (Lehrer and Milton 2011, 7). This is an extraordinarily difficult task in the India of today in which the government built on majoritarian Hindu interests has been aggressively shaping interpretations of history, rebuilding monuments to rid them of their Muslim pasts, and censoring artistic production that is critical of Hindu cultures. It would be a challenge, then, to open up discussions of partition with the goal of teaching a vexed and violent history without prejudice. This would assume a certain degree of autonomy from bureaucratic and statist patronage and space to nurture dialogue and understanding. Such dialogue would become one of the highest achievements of a museum like this one and partition an excellent learning opportunity. From narrations of the Thoa Khalsa episode, we learn that Sikh women saved themselves from approaching mobs of Muslim men by jumping into the well. Sikh families had  collected in a gurudwara for protection, but when it became clear that they would be at the mercy of the mob, Sikh men killed women in their families to save them from rape and abduction. Among the first published account of this tragedy were interviews conducted by Butalia (1998), Menon and Bhasin (1998) for their oral histories of the partition. Mangal Singh, a partition migrant from Thoa Khalsa, admits to Butalia that seventeen women in his extended family were killed but cannot quite bring himself to say the word ‘killed,’ preferring instead the word ‘martyred.’ He insists that the real fear was of being ‘dishonoured’ and that the women presented themselves to be martyred.8 In another horrifying example, Bir Bahadur Singh recounts to Butalia how in the haveli of Sardar Gulab Singh, twenty-five young Sikh women were killed. One particularly wrenching moment that he recalls is how his sister Mann Kaur ‘moved her plait aside’ and his father ‘removed her dupatta,’ and swung the kirpan to decapitate her (Butalia 2000, 163). Equally horrifying is the story told by his mother, Basant Kaur, who jumped into the well but survived:

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Then Mata Lajwanti, she had a well near her house, in a sort of garden. Then all of us jumped into that, some hundred … eighty-four … girls and boys. All of us. Even boys, not only children, but grown-up boys. I also went in, I took my two children, and then we jumped in—I had some jewellery on. Me, things in my ears, on my wrists, and I had fourteen rupees on me. I took my two children, and then we jumped in, but … it’s like when you put rotis into a tandoor, and it if is too full, the ones near the top, they don’t cook, they have to be taken out. So the well filled up, and we could not drown … the children survived. (Butalia 2000, 158)

This, then, is the context in which Thoa Khalsa is remembered. As Butalia finds out, silence surrounded this grim episode for decades until some of the people involved agreed to speak to her. In her study of women and violence, Deepti Misri makes the important point that  feminists have insisted that the “suicide” of large numbers of women for the sake of honor be reframed and named as “violence”—that too, violence perpetrated within families and communities rather than simply being brought upon them by hostile enemies (Misri 2014, 56). In thinking about this exhibit, I found most helpful the ideas of indexicality in the case of memorials at trauma sites presented by Patrizia Violi (2012).9 The Amritsar museum is not at the site of the trauma being memorialized. Nevertheless, Violi’s concept of ‘the scales of indexicality’ is helpful in that it asks how much of the traumatic event is being recalled through material objects and to what end. As she argues, there are different levels of representation of a trauma that are made visible by the nature of the exhibit and the extent of its verisimilitude, and its production of particular meanings has aesthetic and ethical dimensions. As she compares the Toul Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile, and the Ustica Memorial Museum in Bologna, Italy, she points out the very different experiences produced for visitors at these three memorial sites. The first has retained and preserved the horrific remains of the executions of citizens carried out by Pol Pot in the form of bones. The second has transformed the place of torture of political prisoners into a garden of Peace thus veiling some of the horror of the site. The third is housed in a new, modern museum and uses the debris of the plane—the Itavia DC-9 aircraft that was to fly from Bologna to Palermo in Italy but disappeared mid-flight and crashed into the Mediterranean—as an installation to memorialize the crash in which

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77 passengers lost their lives. The experience of visitors to each of these sites is very different: if in Toul Sleng, visitors are invited to see the human cost of the Pol Pot regime, which justified its ouster, in the Ustica Memorial museum, visitors experience an artistic installation that invites reflection on different aspects of the disaster and the workings of memory. The well memorial in the Amritsar museum is the closest to the third museum that Violi describes above. The well is not the original well in this case but is an approximation of a well displaced to another site where it memorializes and reminds us of the tragic loss of life in Rawalpindi. As Violi points out, a memorial museum can, at one end of the scale, “conserve almost obsessively all possible elements of the original place, through a literal and realistic representation of the past, without any distancing from it” (Violi 2012, 40). But at the other end of the scale, “there are sites that downplay the rhetoric of original authenticity, operating more through abstraction and allusion rather than through direct exposure of past remains, seeking to transpose memories into a different interpretative framework” (Violi 2012, 40). The well aims at abstraction—there is a phulkari shawl draped across it to remind us that this was a tragedy particular to women in that area in response to a particularly gendered form of violence. It thus memorializes the tragic loss of life, but it also presents an opportunity to open up an exploration of arguably one of the most painful aspects of the partition, namely, its cost to women. Unlike the Villa Grimaldi discussed by Violi, it would ideally seek not to downplay or whitewash this history but educate visitors in a way that is revelatory and ultimately lends itself to a progressive understanding of gender in South Asia today. What might be the affective terrain on which an exhibit to this complex history of a tragic episode of partition can be built? In an essay on the ‘emotional museum,’ Alex Drago notes that given that museums have long prized “reason, intellect, and objectivity,” the idea of provoking emotional engagement produces discomfort, but he writes that “museums can offer much more to their audiences than the traditional passive learning experience described above” (Drago 2014, 20). The point of moving through an exhibit should be “changed perception or behavior for the learner” (Drago 2014, 20). More critical viewing experiences would lead to a progressive politics for younger visitors of all genders given that at the heart of this tragic event lies the violence visited upon the bodies of women from all communities. This is no easy task as Candice Boyd and Rachel

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Hughes make clear in their discussion of the many ways that emotion works in an exhibit. They argue (in the words of Bondi, Davidson, and Smith) that emotions should be viewed as “relational flows, fluxes or currents, in-between people and places rather than ‘things’ or ‘objects’ to be studied and measured” (qtd in Boyd and Hughes 2020, 12). The well is thus an object through which the museum seeks to generate an emotional response to this episode of partition history. To be more effective as an exhibit, the well installation needs to be placed in a larger perspective that emphasizes that similar mass suicides also happened in other places on both sides of the border and were part of the larger landscape of violence against women during and before the partition. So perhaps photographs, more factual and descriptive information about location, demographics, and timelines would be helpful tools to understand the historical moment of this Rawalpindi tragedy. For a large number of visitors to the museum, the partition is not comparable to any part of their experience. Some may have heard stories from family members but would not have experienced anything like it. It is important to present viewers with a larger context, to gesture to other instances of this horror as much among Muslim women as Hindu and Sikh women so that sectarian and nationalist thinking can be interrupted. Younger visitors may know nothing at all about this episode about the partition, but they may be familiar with other global instances of violence against women in the context of civil war. A comparative perspective on violence against women, for instance, in Darfur, Sudan, the Congo, and Colombia perpetrated by paramilitary groups, or even earlier during the Second World War, would underline the global challenges of gendered violence as a continuing issue today. Memory is, inevitably, political and projects like partition memorialization are charged in the current political climate in South Asia where suspicion and violence are being directed against Muslim and other minorities. The well installation then is not merely a space of representation but also a pedagogic opportunity that can teach us about the horrors of the past and how not to repeat them. A strong critique of the patriarchal values of honor that prompted women to kill themselves, and the continuing horror of women’s bodies being violently appropriated during war or sectarian violence are ideas that should be built into the presentation of the well installation. Brandon Hamber, in a discussion of the term ‘Never Again,’ points out that the term does not enjoin us simply to remember the past in certain ways but also to engage with the politics of the present. Such

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engagement should not “create an idealized and imagined concept of the future that is devoid of context and political reality,” but should be realistic (Hamber 2012, 273). This is an especially important goal in representing the partition, so that we neither immerse ourselves completely in the nostalgia of the past nor drown in the terror of its violence as in the Thoa Khalsa episode but instead emerge with understanding and a renewed commitment to progressive gender politics in the subcontinent. Framing the installation through the scholarly interrogation of concepts of honor and martyrdom that have emerged in these oral histories is a necessary pedagogic move here. Urvashi Butalia points out the clear hierarchy of those women who died and those who were saved: “those who got away, are in some ways seen as being inferior to those who ‘offered’ themselves up to death to save their religion” (Butalia 2000, 158). This is what Bir Bahadur Singh explicitly tells her, that when the Muslims saw Sikh women killing themselves by drowning in the well, it stopped them in their tracks. Butalia concludes from this “that the implication all along is that the power of such a supreme sacrifice worked to frighten away the aggressor” (Butalia 2000, 159). She also comments on the fact that though Bir Bahadur Singh also mentions that a woman named Basant Kaur jumped into the well but survived, he does not identify her as his mother, “much easier, then, to speak of his sister [Mann Kaur] who died an ‘honourable’ death, than the mother who survived” (Butalia 2000, 161). Menon and Bhasin question whether such a death, prompted by fear and an ingrained sense of shame and honor, can be called voluntary and write that this is an instance when “to acquiesce is not to consent, and to submit is not necessarily to agree” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 46). We cannot assume that the women died voluntarily or that thinking of them as a glorious sacrifice is the best way to present this episode. In fact, Menon and Bhasin make the important point that there was a consensus in the way that families, societies, the state, and even social workers assumed that women needed to be restored to their families without consulting their wishes, and that women’s bodies were seen to belong to one or the other nation or religion, often ignoring the complexities of the situations in which they found themselves. Such a consensus about the meanings of identity and honor for women created a continuum between government and civil society organizations. The struggle for a more progressive understanding of women’s situation in South Asian societies, freed from the burdens of ‘shame’ and ‘honour,’ is ongoing.

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Masculine violence both within the family and at the level of community and state is represented in a recent much-discussed movie that reprises the Thoa Khalsa episode and could be an important accompaniment to the multi-modal experience of the room with the well installations. Sabiha Sumar’s Silent Waters (Khamosh Pani) dramatizes the story of Veero, a young Sikh woman, who refuses to jump into a well at the urging of her father as a Muslim mob approaches during partition riots in West Punjab. She is surrounded by the mob and we are left to imagine the worst, but we see her next as Ayesha, the wife of a Muslim man, who lives peacefully with her son in a small village in Pakistan. Sepia-colored images keep flashing into her memory, fragments of those traumatic episodes during the partition that she has buried as she lives out her new identity. However, a growing Islamization of the country under Zia-ul-Haque leads her son to join fundamentalists concerned about a pure and militant Muslim identity. At the same time, a visit by a group from India brings Ayesha’s brother, Jaswant, to her village in search of her. He tells her that their father is dying and would like to see her once, but Ayesha refuses to go to India or acknowledge the father who would rather she had died an honorable death than fall into the hands of Muslims. Once Ayesha’s son discovers her identity, he turns against her, leaving Ayesha to return to the well and throw herself in. This cycle of patriarchal and community violence driven by notions of pure belonging that constituted the two nation states of India and Pakistan repeat themselves leading to the great tragedy of Ayesha ending her life. The film is thus a profound and gut-wrenching critique of women’s bodies dispossessed of home, belonging, and life as they are sacrificed repeatedly to the interests of states and communities. A representation of this film in the same room as the well would lend a critical feminist perspective on Thoa Khalsa and give any audience a more contemporary angle on this historical tragedy. As much as installations and photographs create an exhibit, the soundscape of the room is equally important and calls for discussion. I return once again to Patrizia Violi’s useful essay on memorial museums, in which she describes the “poly-sensorial” experience of visiting the Utica museum where sounds that approximate ocean waves are combined with pulsating lights where pieces of the aircraft are laid out together. In this respect, she points out, it is not a reassembled plane, but an installation that produces a ‘reality effect’ for the spectator (Violi 2012, 64–65). The well, however, is not producing a reality effect, acting much more as a symbol inviting the visitor who stands before it to imagine the horror of the event being

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memorialized. The ‘poly-sensorial’ experience here is provided by the banners above the well announcing in cold numbers how many Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women were abducted during the partition and from the voices speaking on monitors on the walls surrounding the exhibit. In the first iteration of the exhibit, the well was surrounded by images and video clips of, and informational plaques about, women who had been involved in a recovery  initiative related to women abducted during the partition. When I visited the museum again in July 2018, the installation with the well had been moved to a larger room, but this time, the oral histories being played on screens around the room were all male voices, men who had held important positions in the army or others who were sharing their accounts of the partition as part of the museum’s oral history project. It was disorienting to be surrounded by these male voices, with just the well as a reminder of the awful tragedy of Thoa Khalsa and others like it. A welcome addition, however, was the audio recording of Punjabi writer and poet Amrita Pritam reading from her lament about the destruction of Waris Shah’s Punjab where the Chenab overflowed with blood, reminding us that women also wrote in moving ways about the partition. As the earlier video emphasizing a woman social worker had suggested, women were also leaders of relief efforts at this time. Mridula Sarabhai was in overall charge of the ‘Recovery and Rehabilitation of women’ operation on the Indian side, but social workers like Rameshwari Nehru, Sushila Nayyar, Premvati Thapar, Bhag Mehta, Kamlaben Patel, Damyanti Sahghal, Anis Kidwai, and others were also involved in this process. We know from histories and accounts of these women that teams of social workers and police personnel responded to information about abducted women and brought them back to their families. Butalia’s extended interview with Damyanti Sahgal is exemplary for the many themes of women, work, solitude, loss of family, recovery, and rehabilitation that emerge from it.10 Snippets from that interview and Butalia’s reflections on Sahgal’s life as well as conversations with Kamlaben Patel would amplify the active presence of women in this history.11 Similarly, Anis Kidwai’s astonishing life, which was also involved with the state-mandated attempt to recover abducted women, is now available in an English translation as In the Shadow of Freedom and could be cited to fill out our understanding of this episode of partition history. Much has been written about the messiness of the relief and rehabilitation operation in which abducted women were brought back to the appropriate state, the paternalism of the state that would recover and protect

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women, and the expression of conservative and misogynist values such as family honor that did not allow these women to be seamlessly accepted back into their natal families. But there is very little on how participating in this operation transformed the life of social workers, on what it led them to conclude about society, state, citizenship, family in that traumatic moment of history, which was also the transition from a colonial to postcolonial state. A fuller account of the period, including the work of these women and their participation in a major government operation, would provide insights into the fraught legacy of this tragedy and would provide a counterpoint in which women were actors and doers while at the same time keeping before us the paternalism that often prompted this project. Such an approach to this section of the museum would be in keeping with the goal of present-day museums to educate but also prompt discussion and questions for present and future generations. A sewing machine dating to pre-partition times among the objects displayed in another part of the museum is another reminder that having lost male family members in partition violence, many women suddenly became breadwinners of their families and earned a meager income by sewing. It would make sense then to bring that exhibit to the same room as the well and add oral testimonies of women who entered the labor force, took care of their families, and showed extraordinary resilience and courage. The Facebook page of the museum already has this description of this exhibit: After the Partition of 1947, a large number of women were provided with sewing machines as a means of rehabilitation. Post-Independence, women in rural India were encouraged to use sewing machines for sewing and embroidery. In 1936, Bishandas Basil created the first Indian prototype of the sewing machine based on the Pfaff machine, which he named ‘Usha’ after his daughter. The Partition Museum’s collection houses an ‘Usha’ sewing machine, which is currently on display in the Migration Gallery. This sewing machine was brought across from Bahawalpur (now in Pakistan) during the Partition. It had been generously donated by Vishesh Kumar Bhatia.12

Such exhibits that provide evidence of survival and agency would serve as a counterpoint to the deadly episode of Thoa Khalsa that is the central installation in that room. The goal of such an expansion of our horizon would be for spectators to come away with a more complex understanding of partition violence and to see women as actors with agency in the public and private spheres in the decades following the partition. Testimonies

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that would enable this are now available in the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley and they have the advantage of covering Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. A fuller, multi-modal exhibit, having already announced in Amrita Pritam’s voice the topic of “a million daughters crying out to you,” cannot but lead us to her other great literary work on the partition, also recently turned into a film. The protagonist of Pritam’s novel, Pinjar (1950), is a Sikh woman, Pooro, abducted during the partition riots by a Muslim man to whom she is now married. Described as “the very fragment that finds its narrative,” Pritam’s novel represents the life of Pooro at the intersection of multiple violent patriarchies, partition being only the latest episode (Subramanian 2013, 2). In another representation of the violence against women not just by men of a hostile community but their own families, Pooro’s father rejects her when she returns home after her abduction by the Muslim Rashid, itself an act of vengeance for an earlier dishonor committed by Pooro’s family against Rashid’s. The narrative does not, however, end with this rejection. Pooro returns to live with Rashid as his wife, has a son with him, and becomes an ally and advocate of women in a similar situation to hers. When presented with the opportunity to go back to India to her natal family as part of the state-led ‘recovery and rehabilitation’ program, she refuses. Well-known short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto (“Khol Do” [Open it] (1997b) and “Thanda Gosht” [Colder than Ice] (1997a), for instance) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel What the Body Remembers (1999) have also represented the brutality visited upon women’s bodies during the partition. Selections from their writing would provide critical  amplification of this larger theme. Another way to broaden our perspective would be to bring in the research done by scholars on this incident and include excerpts from oral testimonies. The diversity and variety of women’s stories during the partition also needs to be represented here. As a pioneering study by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998) puts it, women brought “the normative to crisis” in the following ways: [M]ass widowhood on an unprecedented scale, compelled the state to step in as rehabilitator and, in the process, made for a temporary suspension of the traditional inauspiciousness and taboos surrounding widows. At the same time as it released a very large number of women into the workforce, it also put the welfarist assumptions of the state to test. … The extent and nature of the violence that women were subjected to when communities

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conflagrated, highlights not only their particular vulnerability at such times, but an overarching patriarchal consensus that emerges on how to dispose of the troublesome question of women’s sexuality. (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 20)

Questions about violence against women are important not just for the study of the partition but also for the present. Installations like the well are bound to trigger reflection on the status of women today and the continuing inequality of their relationship to the state, law, and society. Presenting the complexity of this picture seems an important goal for an exhibit like this one, which presents an opportunity to open debates about the place of family, honor, gender, and nationalism in our evolving society. In cities like Delhi and Kolkata the  Amritsar Partition museum has organized temporary and pop-up exhibitions; a new partition museum has opened in the Dara Shikoh Library in Delhi. The museum has also organized public events with writers, artists, and poets that have expressed not just the long shadow of partition but also the creative forms in which the continuing trauma has been expressed. All these efforts point to the museum’s role as an educational institution that is seriously engaging with the history of the partition, creating new opportunities for public audiences to engage with this defining moment of South Asian history, and showing aspects that have not received attention, for instance, in a new focus on Sind as mentioned in this communication from March 8, 2023: While the Partition Museum, Amritsar, has dedicated a section to Sindhis, at the Partition Museum (shortly to be opened in Delhi) we will have an entire gallery devoted to Sindh. Curated by Aruna Madnani, the Sindh Gallery traces the history and loss of the province of Sindh. Customs and conventions, trials and tribulations are highlighted. Like the other communities who underwent terrible suffering and loss in 1947, the Sindhis were also enormously resilient. We pay homage to them in this special gallery.13

While it is enormously important to keep bringing to light different aspects of partition history and also to acknowledge and pay homage to them, it is equally important to build new modes of affective engagement with this history, a forward-looking process that builds possibilities of political transformation in the future. This work will have to push against the polarized rhetoric and learnt habits of mutual suspicion and hatred that have marked South Asia. My goal in this essay has been to suggest a strong

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alternative, feminist lens through which the museum can be presented. This is not a prescription for what the current partition museum can do; rather it is a thought experiment on how to make a difficult, entangled history that has had long-reaching political and social consequences yield lessons for us today and offer reparative experiences that show possibilities for the future. Transforming what museums do from providing passive consumption to more engaged learning that leads to “changed perception or behavior for the learner” is now a major preoccupation of curators, scholars, and staff.14 The mission of the National Museums Liverpool (NML), for instance, includes the educational purpose of museums, their belief in social justice, and also the goal of promoting good and active citizenship.15 Bernadette Lynch’s discussion of an exhibit on Somalia at the Manchester museum that worked with Somali refugee women arrives at the conclusion that giving up absolute authority over a narrative and enabling a participatory interrogation of exhibits is both democratic and intellectually productive. Writing about these women who entered the exhibit with no prior knowledge of how museums work, Lynch reports: [T]hey had disrupted precedent—picked up the exalted objects, passed them round, discussed and debated them and then turned to us, the museum staff, often to challenge us. They took particular pride in angrily correcting the museum’s knowledge and interpretation of ‘Somali’ collections, which they frequently (correctly) identified as Ethiopian. By ignoring museum norms and prohibitions, these women demonstrated to the very nervous museum staff members the use-value of heritage, and the complexity of the relationship between museums, objects and people. (Lynch 2014, 89)

That this model of engagement with an exhibit seems such an improbability in South Asia where the reverence of audiences and the authority of curators and museum staff are ubiquitous is an index of how urgently a new model of engagement is needed for institutions of public memory. A practice of museology without fear that can reach beyond national boundaries and invite people in to confront the messiness of the partition, our collective culpability, and our connected histories, can open up new creative spaces for postmemorial generations.

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Notes 1. Ramachandra Guha, “Memorializing Partition” The Telegraph (Calcutta, India), Aug 10, 2013. 2. Interview with Mrs. Mehra (name changed), July 6, 2015, New Delhi, India. 3. See, Lady Kishwar Desai, “The Partition Museum is our tribute to the resilience and courage those who migrated.” LSE Blog, Dec 19, 2017. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2017/12/19/this-­is-­the-­worlds-­first-­ and-­o nly-­p artition-­m useum-­a nd-­o ur-­t ribute-­t o-­t he-­r esilience-­a nd-­ courage-­those-­who-­migrated-­lady-­kishwar-­desai/ 4. Butalia, 156. The author points out that according to newspaper accounts, sporadic attacks continued till March 15. 5. Sabiha Samar’s 2003 film Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters represents the story of Ayesha, a Sikh woman, who marries and lives with her Muslim abductor instead of drowning herself in a well as instructed by her family. 6. Mathur, “Museums and Decolonial Activism.”  7. See Amy Sodaro (2011), “Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center” in Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E Milton Ed. Curating Difficult Knowledge London: Palgrave Macmillan. 8. See Urvashi Butalia (2000), The Other Side of Silence, 154–155. 9. See Patrizia Violi, “Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Toul Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum.” 10. For an extended discussion of this, see Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998), Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, pp. 65–129. 11. See, Kamlaben Patel (2011), Mool Soton Ukhdelan trans. Into English by Uma Randeria as Torn from the Roots: A Partition Memoir, Women Unlimited: 2006 and Anis Kidwai, Azadi ki Chaon Main trans into English by Ayesha Kidwai as In Freedom’s Shade, Penguin India. 12. See https://www.facebook.com/PartitionMuseum/posts/sewing-­machines-­ were-­i ntroduced-­i n-­i ndia-­i n-­t he-­e arly-­1 900s-­a nd-­t riumphed-­o ver-­o / 985529964955310/ 13. Email communication from the Partition museum in its newsletter to subscribed readers, March 8, 2023. 14. See Alex Drago (2014), “Introduction to ‘The Emotional Museum’” in Challenging History in the Museum. 15. Quoted in David Fleming (2014), “The Emotional Museum: The Case of the National Museums Liverpool.” (Reference as indicated in the Works Cited).

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Works Cited Baldwin, Shauna Singh. 1999. What the Body Remembers. Print. Boyd, Candice P., and Rachel Hughes. 2020. Exhibiting with emotion. In Emotion and the contemporary museum, 11–21. London and Singapore: Palgrave Pivot Singapore. Print. Butalia, Urvashi. 2000. The other side of silence: Voices from the partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Print. Drago, Alex. 2014. The emotion museum. In Challenging history in the museum. Burlington VT: Ashgate. Print. Fleming, David. 2014. “The Emotional Museum: The Case of the National Museums Liverpool.” Challenging History in the Museum, 23–32. Burlington, VT: Ashgate: Print. Guha, Ramachandra. 2013. Memorializing Partition. In The Telegraph (Calcutta, India), sec. Opinion, August 10. Print. Hamber, Brandon. 2012. Conflict museums, nostalgia, and dreaming of never again. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18 (3): 268–281. Print. Khamosh Pani. 2003. Dir. Sumar, Sabiha. Prod. Peter Hermann. Perf. Anonymous Film. Shringar Films. Kidwai, Anis. 2011. In Freedom’s shade. London: Penguin. Print. Lehrer, Erica, and Cynthia Milton. 2011. Introduction. In Curating difficult knowledge. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Print. Lynch, Bernadette. 2014. “Challenging Ourselves: Uncomfortable Histories and Current Museum Practices.” Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives, 87–100, ed. Kidd, Jenny, Cairns, Sam, Drago, Alex and Stern, Miranda. Surrey, England: Ashgate. Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1997a. Cold meat. In Mottled Dawn. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Print. ———. 1997b. Khol do. In Mottled dawn. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Print. Mathur, Saloni. 2020. Museums and decolonial activism. Web. https://uchri.org/ foundry/museums-­decolonial-­activism/. Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. 1998. Borders and boundaries: Women in the Indian partition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Print. Misri, Deepti. 2014. “The violence of memory: Women’s re-narrations of the Partition.” Beyond partition: Gender, violence and representation in postcolonial India, 33–50. University of Illinois Press. Patel, Kamlaben. 2006. Torn from the roots: A partition memoir. Women Unlimited. Print.

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Sodaro, Amy. 2011. Politics of the past: Remembering the Rwandan genocide at the Kigali memorial Center. In Curating difficult knowledge: Violent pasts in public places, ed. Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Print. Subramanian, Sreerekha. 2013. The cracking of India in amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Mohandas Menishrai’s Aaj bazaar band Hai. In Women writing violence: The novel and radical feminist imaginaries, 153–186. SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd. Print. Violi, Patrizia. 2012. Trauma site museums and politics of memory: Tuol Sleng, villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica museum. Theory, Culture, and Society 29 (1): 36–75. Print.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Retelling South Asian Stories, Magar Pyaar Se (with Love)

This book has been a personal and intellectual journey into the affective and psychic remains of the Indian partition in the lives of first-generation migrants, their children, and grandchildren. My goal was to bring a humanist’s interest in trauma and narrative to honor those stories that had not yet been told but also to explore the telling of stories as a mode of building community and a mode of teaching and learning about the partition. Such an interest does not focus on an aggregate social reality but on honoring each articulation of experience for what it tells us about the individual through a tumultuous moment of history. In that sense, the idea that the North Indian partition has been worked on by many scholars is not particularly meaningful as there remain so many who have never told their stories intentionally to another interested listener. These stories are ‘testimonials’ in that they bear witness to a specific period but not in the context of a legal process—the justice in question is testifying to the suffering of ordinary people, unspeakable suffering that every human should have an opportunity to articulate and, in many cases, the recovery from such an experience and the re-assertion of life, whether in the forming of families, homes, professions, or a sense of self. Stories of partition’s traumatic history can be surprisingly consoling narratives—not because they point out the evil and the good in stark opposition in the way that political discourse has come to represent but

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rather because real stories are riven with contradictions, regret, guilt, even the joy of opportunities made available by migration, edgy humor, hospitality, and intergeneration connection. For me, as the generation of postmemory, always feeling the lurking presence of the partition, confronting was both an education and an act of mourning for my father who passed away in 2009 with many stories that he promised to tell but for which we never found time. It was with regret, sorrow, and curiosity that I turned to research on the partition, which became an unresolved question for me. Partition migrants consider their experience of the partition as constituting a kind of culture, one that is permeated by memories of another place and time, but also by the humor, irony, hospitality, and connection that formed the sensibility of masses of ‘displaced persons.’ As one of my interviewees made clear, partition migrants still want to be asked if they are doing well, if they are content with their lives, and how they feel about it and even if we hear often enough that partition is such an old story, that it has been talked about often, that much has been said about it. Research then is an encounter with a few such voices so that partition research is not ‘done’ and over with just because a slew of partition studies have been emerging steadily especially since the fiftieth anniversary of independence from British rule in 1997. The potential for affective bonds across borders was demonstrated to me in the small midwestern town where I live and teach in February 2023, when the Hindi movie Pathaan starring the ever-popular Shahrukh Khan was released in India and screened in the United States at the same time. The film had caused a media firestorm with the picturization of a song on Indian actress Deepika Padukone that was deemed ‘obscene’ by viewers and the Censor Board of India. The wrangling over the song held up release of the film, which could not happen until the song was edited. Of course, as these things go, it only made the film more intriguing and popular, and by the time it opened in India and abroad, it had become one of the biggest revenue earners of all time.1 The film brought joy even as it divided audiences across the subcontinent and its diaspora. Not the least of the joy was on account of the success it brought to Shahrukh Khan, an Indian Muslim actor, married to a Hindu woman, whose liberal leanings have made him an object of suspicion for the BJP and whose son, Aryan, was arrested on drug-related charges that were never substantiated. While some commentators thought that the film simply glorified the Indian government while Pakistani generals and other deranged terrorists are portrayed as harming India because of its claim to Kashmir,2 others read in it

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a transregional love that delighted everybody. To critique simply the battle over Kashmir is to miss the other aspects of the film such as that Khan’s parentage is obscure, that he is adopted into a village in Afghanistan where he goes to celebrate Eid every year, that his love interest is a Pakistani agent allegorically named Rubai for a form of Sufi poetry, that border-­ crossing allegiances and loves exist despite the nation and against its machinations.3 Finally, the film gestures to the fact that the only hope for South Asians is to recuperate from our individual histories the many different affiliations we have to region, language, literature, song, poetry, stories, landscapes that would continually muddy the divisions that seem to shape our identities today. It is in seeing these affiliations not as diachronic or sequential but simultaneous (Muslim, Indian, Afghani, patriotic, critical) that we can invent new identities in South Asia. My own attempt to watch Pathaan placed under erasure national identities in favor of the pleasure of the film event. Word spread among a small group of South Asian students at the small college where I teach that I was going to drive with a South Asian faculty colleague to a neighboring town to see this film and a couple of my students requested me to take them along. The composition of this pair of friends—one a Pakistani Muslim, the other a Hindu Indian, both Punjabis—gave them great pleasure because they understood their diasporic friendship as an instantiation of precisely the kinds of alliances that the film portrays. Added to this was the fact that four South Asian women of different ages were united in their admiration of and support for Shahrukh Khan in a kind of subcontinental alliance! In the vexed political landscape of South Asia both aesthetics and affect have immense power and cannot be separated from politics. This book has been an attempt to understand an affective universe and to call for reconfiguring it so that the landscape of ‘othering’ shifts until it is unrecognizable. As I conclude work on this book, the 1947 Partition Archive has completed its collection of ten thousand stories and is launching a book on the project in different parts of the world. The governing council of the Amritsar partition museum is about to complete its work on a new partition museum exhibit at the Dara Shikoh Library in Delhi. The generation of postmemory is determined to create institutions that will commemorate the partition. These institutions will have an important part in creating memory for the future, for many generations for whom partition is a historical fact buried in decades-old history with which they have no affective connection. Kavita Daiya’s Graphic Migrations (2021) has just been

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published and uses the term ‘Restorying,’ which she borrows from Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side That Side to describe the processes by which we need to re-tell partition stories for ourselves. It has become clear to me through the process of research for this book that South Asia exists in a kind of traumatic paralysis that originated with the division of territory and continued through the life of independent nations in the postcolonial period. And while we have thought through at length the displaced presence of partition in literature and film, we are still working on intentional modes of memory in South Asia that would acknowledge, accept, co-implicate before moving on to enduring friendship with our neighbors. At best, most of these modes of remembering have been couched in nostalgia about the delights of pre-partition life and at worst they are a traumatic recall of violence and suffering. Quite understandably, the focus of partition memory projects has been on the content of memory as embodied and carried by the first generation of migrants or on the representation of this memory in literature and film. Scholarship on the partition has not, however, studied at length what partition memory does for the generation of postmemory or how it might have a productive presence in our lives. An example of the challenges presented in creating transformative memorials is presented by Churnjeet Mann in her analysis of Sirhind in Punjab, a city marked by the early eighteenth-century martyrdom of the sons of Guru Gobind Singh, the last leader of the Sikhs. The young sons of the Guru were buried alive in a brick wall on the orders of the Wazir Khan, the Mughal governor of Sirhind. A historic Mughal garden called Bagh-i-Hafiz Rakhna during the emperor Akbar’s reign was expanded by later Mughal emperors and finally renamed Aam Khas Bagh or Everyman’s garden by the rulers of the state of Patiala.4 Using the idea of a palimpsest to understand the layers of history found in Sirhind and borrowing Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s idea of connecting pre-modern South Asian pasts to present-­day locations in South Asia so as to escape the polarization found in nationalist narratives, Mann and a group of students from a local university set out to imagine exhibits and events that would honor the Mughal past of Sirhind, now in ruins, and particularly neglected after the departure of Muslims following the partition, and to think about Sikh history that is not driven by a sense of revenge against Muslims for the murder of the sons of Guru Gobind Singh. Students who did not have a personal connection to these histories participated in three different projects: one group created a film without an authorial narrative that spliced together

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the Mughal monuments of Sirhind with present-day sites of worship like the Rauza Sharif Mosque and the Fatehgarh Sahib Gurudwara. Images of water, which is very important to the city and is used for ablutions before worship by Muslim and Sikh communities, appear often in the film as a kind of unifying theme. The second set of students interviewed residents of Sirhind with a view to highlighting their views of the partition but found only one resident who could speak on the partition. Mann notes that “The interviewee who had experienced Partition deviated from the group’s expectations by identifying strongly as a Sikh while acknowledging the spiritual importance of a dilapidated Mughal-era mausoleum lying next to her farm” (Mann 2018, 269–270). The third set of students organized and exhibition in Aam Khas Bhag that was curated to highlight Sirhind’s different pasts through signage, descriptive panels, and interviews. At the end of this project of trying to memorialize the different kinds of heritage aspects of Sirhind, which was deeply impacted by the transfer of Muslim populations to Pakistan in the aftermath of the partition, Mann concludes that though their project was a great success, local communities need to be involved in such projects, and in order to keep such memory active and to sustain such efforts, state funding and permission is critical. The absence of a population that could give meaning to the mosque has meant that such monuments suffer from extreme neglect. Finally, without a process of information and education, residents of Sirhind are not likely to move beyond inherited narratives of intercommunity hostility. As the student interviewers discovered, “In the marketplace, badla (revenge) and the sahibzadas (or sons of the tenth Guru Gobind Singh) were a recurring topic, with consistent physical redirection to Fatehgarh Sahib [the center of Sikh worship and identity] as the site for authoritative information” (Mann 2018, 269). The exploration of a progressive heritage installation in a town that had both a history of pre-modern conflict and trauma and had also faced the aftermath of the 1947 partition of Punjab underlines the importance of continuing education about the partition. More than simply an academic exercise, what Mann’s project here underlines for us is the same lesson that ethnographic and experiential research into the partition always reveals— that as vehemently as narratives of division and difference are restated, equally unfailingly, narratives of connection and intimacy reveal themselves between. Interests, factions, and identities that nationalist formations have created and fostered are by no means purged of transnational forms of belongings that appear as memory or recall or are embedded in

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the narratives themselves. In the Sirhind project, young students who had no memory of the partition set out to recapture the town for their own curiosities and interests. An absence of this process can break the pedagogic, memorial, affective, and historical chain of transmission as represented vividly in a minor plot line of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games that has stayed with me. In this novel, the young Sharmeen, a Muslim Pakistani-­ American woman living a comfortable life in her family home in Maryland, is unable to follow the mumbled prayers and dying words of a woman she knows as her Muslim grandmother, and though intensely curious about these unfamiliar words that sound like a Sikh prayer, “Nanak Dukhiya Sab Sansaar” and her confusing reference to “Mataji,” decides not to follow through on her curiosity as she is not sure whom to ask. The reader meanwhile has gathered that the dying grandmother is Navneet behenji, the older sister of Sartaj Singh’s mother, abducted by a Muslim tempo-driver during partition riots and lost to her natal family for the rest of her life. A few days later when Sharmeen is told that her grandmother has died, she has the bitter realization that she would never know all there was to know about her: “it seemed like a whole world had blinked out on that Tuesday afternoon in the American spring, a whole universe extinguished just like that, so easily. And Sharmeen had no chance to get it back” (Sacred Games 2006, 935). The point of this story isn’t just this obvious one of the forgetting of history in this third generation, but the willful obliteration of it in Sharmeen’s father, the army general Shahid Khan, who knows, but will not speak a word out of hatred for Indians. As the generation of postmemory, he refuses to process or communicate his parents’ history to his own daughter and would rather let it die. The fear that hits Sharmeen is the after effect of his decision, a fear that is intensified in the generation of postmemory. What have we missed? What don’t we know? Should we, like Sharmeen, turn over and dream of our favorite film stars and forget about those histories lost in those mumbled words before life is snuffed out? Or do we have a responsibility to remember and hand down even traumatic histories? Teaching and learning can happen in many different ways, through archives and museums, educational institutions and their curricula, but also through informal social networks in which intergenerational storytelling is accompanied by critical questioning and re-framing of memory. My search for partition stories was an intergenerational learning experience to

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which I brought both empathy and critical skills that would examine, question, and be moved by such stories. To make such processes meaningful, younger generations need to be educated through a radical pedagogy that combines the study of partition in school and college curricula with continual engagement with embodied memory and a vigilance toward the culture of memory that is being built in South Asia. Public institutions of memory such as museums have a special responsibility to invite multiple publics into the museum to participate, question, recount, and be questioned in turn in a truly participatory and democratic practice such as has been modeled in other contexts of vexed and difficult histories. I hope this book points to such possible pathways of ongoing work and shows that each iteration of partition memory can carry with it a critical process of teaching and learning about this formative moment of South Asian history.

Notes 1. See The Economic Times, Feb 23, 2023, “Pathaan creates history, Shah Rukh Khan’s movie becomes second-highest-grossing Indian film at IMAX.” https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-­u pdates/pathaan-­ creates-­history-­shah-­r ukh-­khans-­movie-­becomes-­second-­highest-­grossing-­ indian-­film-­at-­imax/articleshow/97952893.cms?from=mdr. Also, Swati Sharma, “Breaking down Pathaan, the most popular movie in the world,” Vox, Feb 10, 2023, https://www.vox.com/culture/23592808/pathaan­shah-­rukh-­khan-­bollywood. 2. See Fatima Bhutto, “Bollywood is obsessed with Pakistan. We’d be flattered if it weren’t so nasty” in The Guardian, Feb 3, 2023. She writes: “To set up an event such as the degradation of Kashmir as a fun plot point—those who are against the revocation of article 370 are homicidal maniacs and those who defend it, such as Khan, are valiant government agents with pectoral muscles—is beyond tragic. The political project of Modi’s quasi-fascist BJP cannot be set to fun music and helicopter stunts, try as Bollywood might.” 3. Madhavi Menon makes this point very well in her “How ‘Pathaan’ gives secular credentials of Bollywood a new boost of life,” The Hindu, Feb 14, 2023. 4. For a complete narrative of this experiment in re-thinking the ‘heritage’ of Sirhind, see Churnjeet Mann (2018), “In Ruins: Cultural Amnesia at the Aam Khas Bagh.”

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Works Cited Bhutto, Fatima. 2023. Bollywood is obsessed with Pakistan. We’d be flattered if it weren’t so nasty. The Guardian, February 3. Chandra, Vikram. 2006. Sacred games. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Mann, Churnjeet. 2018. In ruins: Cultural amnesia at the Aam Khas Bagh. In Partition and the practice of memory, ed. Churnjeet Mahn and Anne Murphy, 255–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­64516-­2_12. Menon, Madhavi. 2023. How ‘Pathaan’ gives secular credentials of Bollywood a new boost of life. The Hindu, February 14. Swati Sharma, Swati. 2023. Breaking down Pathaan, the most popular movie in the world. Vox, February 10.

Index1

A Abduction, 47n12, 68, 110, 125, 133 Alam, Javeed, 6, 7 Archive, 11, 18, 20, 39, 97–102, 105–107, 111, 113 B Bal, Mieke, 10, 11, 121 Bhasin, Kamla, 72n1, 125, 129, 133, 134 Bildungsroman, 51, 52 Bosnia, 6, 97 Boym, Svetlana, 82 Butalia, Urvashi, 9, 21n3, 41, 47n12, 118, 125, 126, 129, 131, 136n4 C Chawla, Devika, 85, 86

D Daiya, Kavita, 11, 23n18, 141 Das, Veena, 55, 73n6 Dhulipala, Venkat, 4, 93, 95n18 Diaspora, 4, 34, 35, 37, 38, 101, 140 Didur, Jill, 12 E Ethnographic, 18, 24n29, 28, 102, 143 Evacuee, 23n20, 32, 95n15 F Fabula, 63, 66, 74n12, 74n14 G Gairola, Rahul, 94n8

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

H Hirsch, Marianne, 2, 4, 7, 15, 50, 84 Holocaust, 5, 7, 8, 22n15, 23n25, 28, 39, 40, 53, 84, 97, 100, 114n6, 117, 118 Hospitality, 14, 20, 33, 49–72, 80, 82–84, 90, 91, 93, 94, 140 I Index, 85, 135 Indexicality, 126 Installation, 122, 123, 126–132, 134, 143 J Jalal, Ayesha, 3 Jallianwala Bagh memorial, 119 K Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, 9, 21n4, 142 Kohli, Pranav, 74n15 Kumar, Priya, 2, 12, 23n18 Kumar, Radha, 6 L Lehrer, Erika, 124, 125 M Mann, Churnjeet, 142, 143 Margalit, Avishai, 15, 16 Memory, 2, 4–20, 21n1, 22n15, 23n25, 27–30, 33–35, 37–40, 42–46, 49–51, 54–58, 64, 67, 70, 71, 78, 82, 85, 88, 90, 94, 97–114, 117–135, 140–145 Memory studies, 18

Menon, Ritu, 72n1, 125, 129, 133, 134 Mir, Farina, 73n7 Misri, Deepti, 14, 126 Multani, 87, 88, 93 N Narrative, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9–14, 16–19, 23n25, 40–42, 51, 52, 54–57, 62–64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74n12, 80, 82, 85, 90, 92, 93, 98, 102–104, 108–111, 117, 118, 122–124, 133, 135, 139, 142–144 The 1947 Partition Archive, 13, 14, 17, 19, 83, 95n11, 98–101, 133, 141 Nostalgia, 1, 16, 18, 19, 28, 40, 42, 43, 77–94, 113, 129, 142 O Oral history, 2, 4, 12–14, 16–18, 28, 50, 51, 81, 83, 85, 97–100, 102, 104–107, 110, 114, 118, 125, 129, 131 P Partition, 1–20, 27–46, 49–72, 73n1, 73n2, 73n4, 77–79, 81–89, 92, 93, 94n7, 97–114, 117–123, 125, 127–135, 136n13, 139–145 The Partition Museum, 17, 39, 117–135, 141 Pathaan, 140, 141 Postmemory, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 15, 18, 19, 21n1, 27–46, 54, 72, 99, 101, 140–142, 144 Project Dastaan, 81

 INDEX 

Punjabi, 13, 14, 19, 28, 30, 33, 36, 37, 42, 49–56, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 73n7, 77, 79, 83, 84, 86–90, 93, 101, 103, 106, 131, 141 Punjabiyat, 53–55, 73n7, 83 R Raj, Dhoolekha Sarhadi, 9, 28, 53, 54, 73n1, 73n4 Raychaudhuri, Anindya, 13 Refugee, 8, 9, 28, 32, 35, 42, 43, 46, 59, 61, 67, 79, 95n15, 103, 107, 112, 135 Rehabilitation, 42, 131, 132 Roy, Anjali Gera, 13, 14 Rwandan Genocide Commission, 5 S Saadat Hasan Manto, 38, 133 Sacred Games, 144

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Samjhauta Express, 80 Sangari, Kumkum, 11 Sarkar, Bhaskar, 11 Sharma, Suresh, 6, 7 Silent Waters, 130, 136n5 Sjuzhet, 63, 66, 74n12 Sodaro, Amy, 118, 124 South Africa, 5, 97 T Thoa Khalsa, 123, 125, 126, 129–132 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 5 V Violi, Patrizia, 126, 130 Y Yale Fortunoff Archive, 7