Revisiting India's Partition - by Amritjit Singh & Nalini Iyer & Rahul K Gairola (Paperback)

About the Book

This collection explores the continuing cultural, political, and social impact of the Partition on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and in the South Asian diaspora. It focuses on neglected areas in the existing scholarship on the subjects-themes as well as regions within South Asi...

Book Synopsis

Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics brings together scholars from across the globe to provide diverse perspectives on the continuing impact of the 1947 division of India on the eve of independence from the British Empire. The Partition caused a million deaths and displaced well over 10 million people. The trauma of brutal violence and displacement still haunts the survivors as well as their children and grandchildren. Nearly 70 years after this cataclysmic event, Revisiting India's Partition explores the impact of the "Long Partition," a concept developed by Vazira Zamindar to underscore the ongoing effects of the 1947 Partition upon all South Asian nations. In our collection, we extend and expand Zamindar's notion of the Long Partition to examine the cultural, political, economic, and psychological impact the Partition continues to have on communities throughout the South Asian diaspora.

The nineteen interdisciplinary essays in this book provide a multi-vocal, multi-focal, transnational commentary on the Partition in relation to motifs, communities, and regions in South Asia that have received scant attention in previous scholarship. In their individual essays, contributors offer new engagements on South Asia in relation to several topics, including decolonization and post-colony, economic development and nation-building, cross-border skirmishes and terrorism, and nationalism. This book is dedicated to covering areas beyond Punjab and Bengal and includes analyses of how Sindh and Kashmir, Hyderabad, and more broadly South India, the Northeast, and Burma call for special attention in coming to terms with memory, culture and politics surrounding the Partition.

Review Quotes

"Adding to the richness of this trove is Revisiting India's Partition, a newly released essay collection containing 19 pieces.... These accomplished essays, despite their academic leanings, can benefit serious readers in furthering their knowledge of the subcontinent or be used as reference material." --International Examiner

"The comprehensive introductory essay by the editors and the nineteen essays by scholars of literature, sociology, law, and peace and conflict studies underscore the far-reaching implications of Partition and 'the legacy of decolonization in South Asia.' Singh, Iyer, and Gairola write a concise but provocative overview of the event itself and the ensuing seven decades. . . .Revisiting India's Partition offers an important intervention against forgetting or revising history; and is this, the volume stands as a memorial of India's Partition and its seven decades of aftershocks on the subcontinent and beyond." --South Asian Review

"Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture and Politics, edited by Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola, is a timely reminder of the 1947 Partition of India, filling several lacunae and expanding the growing field of Partition Studies. This magisterial volume is comprehensive in its spatial, temporal, and theoretical coverage of the multiple meanings and dimensions of Partition.... The book also breaks new ground through its engagement with the many Partitions prior to and after 1947.... The volume offers original insights into the effects of the Long Partition, including new essays on both canonical and more contemporary writers who have grappled with Partition.... All the essays are extraordinary in some way: in their engagement with uncharted dimensions of canonical fiction, their bringing to light of new writers who were not directly involved with documenting the Partition trauma, or in their movement into new territories such as graphic narratives." --Journal of Sikh & Punjab Studies

"[A] fine addition to the corpus of Partition scholarship. . . . [T]he book significantly expands our understanding. . . .The collection also ventures in some new directions, and in so doing proves itself a welcome portent of the scholarship likely to emerge as scholarly attention mutates and new nuances are introduced. . . . [W]hat Revisiting India's Partition manages to do certainly merits serious attention from readers." --The Hindu

"The many essays collected in this volume demonstrate the expanding scope of scholarly inquiry into the afterlives of the Partition of British India. They range across new territories and texts, explore less-known archives, and argue for the generative importance of the nation-making and nation-breaking events of 1947. Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of Partition studies." --Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania

"Building on earlier works by Mushiral Hasan, Vazira Zamindar, Urvashi Butalia, Alok Bhalla, and others, this provocative collection of nineteen interdisciplinary essays uses the hermeneutic lens of the Long Partition to demonstrate the 'messy identities' in today's descendants of the various 'looking-glass borders' attendant upon 1947. Drawing on trauma studies and oral narratives--and alert to the ongoing ramifications far beyond the Punjab and Bengal--this welcome consideration of collective memories and new art forms gives voice to women, ethno-religious minorities, and other marginalized populations. The book should prove to be a significant addition to South Asian studies." --John C. Hawley, Santa Clara University

"In this highly commendable volume, the editors have collected critically alert and morally engaged essays about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and its long term political and social consequences. The contributors make sophisticated and judicious use of different critical theories to offer intelligent readings of several Partition novels and films. The book is especially welcome for its well researched historical accounts of regions like Sindh, Kashmir and the Northeast that were also scarred by violent events but have received little scholarly attention." --Alok Bhalla, author of Stories About the Partition of India (4 volumes) and Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home.

[A] fine addition to the corpus of Partition scholarship. . . . [T]he book significantly expands our understanding. . . .The collection also ventures in some new directions, and in so doing proves itself a welcome portent of the scholarship likely to emerge as scholarly attention mutates and new nuances are introduced. . . . [W]hat Revisiting India's Partition manages to do certainly merits serious attention from readers.

Adding to the richness of this trove is Revisiting India's Partition, a newly released essay collection containing 19 pieces.... These accomplished essays, despite their academic leanings, can benefit serious readers in furthering their knowledge of the subcontinent or be used as reference material.

Building on earlier works by Mushiral Hasan, Vazira Zamindar, Urvashi Butalia, Alok Bhalla, and others, this provocative collection of nineteen interdisciplinary essays uses the hermeneutic lens of the Long Partition to demonstrate the 'messy identities' in today's descendants of the various 'looking-glass borders' attendant upon 1947. Drawing on trauma studies and oral narratives--and alert to the ongoing ramifications far beyond the Punjab and Bengal--this welcome consideration of collective memories and new art forms gives voice to women, ethno-religious minorities, and other marginalized populations. The book should prove to be a significant addition to South Asian studies.

For scholars and students alike, Revisiting India's Partitionwill remain as a key reference in the field, as well as generate questions and scholarly trajectories for the next generation of scholars brave enough to venture into studies of the long partition.

In this highly commendable volume, the editors have collected critically alert and morally engaged essays about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and its long term political and social consequences. The contributors make sophisticated and judicious use of different critical theories to offer intelligent readings of several Partition novels and films. The book is especially welcome for its well researched historical accounts of regions like Sindh, Kashmir and the Northeast that were also scarred by violent events but have received little scholarly attention.

Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture and Politics, edited by Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola, is a timely reminder of the 1947 Partition of India, filling several lacunae and expanding the growing field of Partition Studies. This magisterial volume is comprehensive in its spatial, temporal, and theoretical coverage of the multiple meanings and dimensions of Partition.... The book also breaks new ground through its engagement with the many Partitions prior to and after 1947.... The volume offers original insights into the effects of the Long Partition, including new essays on both canonical and more contemporary writers who have grappled with Partition.... All the essays are extraordinary in some way: in their engagement with uncharted dimensions of canonical fiction, their bringing to light of new writers who were not directly involved with documenting the Partition trauma, or in their movement into new territories such as graphic narratives.

The comprehensive introductory essay by the editors and the nineteen essays by scholars of literature, sociology, law, and peace and conflict studies underscore the far-reaching implications of Partition and 'the legacy of decolonization in South Asia.' Singh, Iyer, and Gairola write a concise but provocative overview of the event itself and the ensuing seven decades. . . .Revisiting India's Partition offers an important intervention against forgetting or revising history; and is this, the volume stands as a memorial of India's Partition and its seven decades of aftershocks on the subcontinent and beyond.

The many essays collected in this volume demonstrate the expanding scope of scholarly inquiry into the afterlives of the Partition of British India. They range across new territories and texts, explore less-known archives, and argue for the generative importance of the nation-making and nation-breaking events of 1947. Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of Partition studies.

About the Author

Amritjit Singh is Langston Hughes Professor of English & African American Studies
at Ohio University.

Nalini Iyer is professor of English at Seattle University.

Rahul K. Gairola is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.