Partitioned Lives

Description

The Partition of British India has many histories, which range from locating blame on different political leaders to communalism as the primary cause, or uncovering its gendered impact and the generation of alternative popular memories. Partitioned Lives reconfigures such narratives, and offers new perspectives in the histories of the Partition.   Haimanti Roy looks at the Partition not as a singular event, but as part of a process, which continued to shape national, regional, and local politics decades after 1947. With the Bengal Partition as its focus, she reveals how longterm cross border movement, biased national refugee policies, chronic small-scale violence, and emergence of a document regime led to the creation of skewed national identities. The study underlines the role and categorization of minorities in both India and East Pakistan as being central to the discourse of citizenship and the project of nation building.   This book argues that the identity of Indians and Pakistanis were constructed both through the arbitrary actions of lower-level officials and high-level government policies. In the process, it highlights, how state policies were negotiated, manipulated, and, sometimes, ignored by minorities, refugees, and ordinary people.   Bringing together an array of hitherto unexplored sources from Kolkata, Dhaka, New Delhi, and London which include Indian and Bangladeshi government files, police records, pamphlets, memoirs, contemporary popular media—this book untangles the complex threads of post-partition transitions in South Asia. It urges for a rethinking of the Bengal Partition, which continues to inform and shape contemporary politics in India and Bangladesh.