Search Results

Focusing on the figure of the abducted woman during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, this chapter analyzes not only the impact of communal violence on citizens as gendered but also the ways in which turmoil and horror allowed the nation-state to imagine and portray itself as the protector of a more rational, fundamentally purified, and by implication masculine, social order. It explores how hearsay and rumor tainted subsequent government fact-finding commissions and search-and-recovery operations, and highlights the ways in which elements of myth (dating back to epic depictions in the Ramayana and Mahabharata) and popular narrative or film circulated in an imaginary of social and sexual disorders that “created the conditions of possibility in which the state could be instituted as essentially a social contract between men charged with keeping male violence against women in abeyance”. It argues that the very demand for and mutual insistence on legislation intended to restore women to their families of origin sanctified a sexual contract as the counter-part of the social contract.

This chapter describes the author of the book and her grandmother’s conversation about the Batwara, or the Partition of India. The Partition of India was the partition of the British Indian Empire that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 15 August 1947. This Partition also resulted in communal riots that caused the deaths of more than 1 million Hindus and Muslims, and the displacement of about 20 million people. The grandmother, Gigi, narrates how she was separated from her husband Pitaji, because of the communal riots. She said that Pitaji chose to stay in Pakistan, hoping that the riot would subside.

This chapter provides a storied contemplation on the conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in cross-generational oral histories of refugees of India’s Partition. Refugees are persons without homes who are residing in between geographies and nationalities, and between border people and border identities. The chapter also narrates the author’s experience of being a refugee—moving from state to state with her father’s jobs, and living in boarding school for most of her adolescent life. She said that the concept of home can be understood in terms of “belonging”—items and artifacts of material culture that they choose to carry with them as they move.

This chapter describes how Labbi Devi and his family were attacked while traveling from Pakistan to India, a month after the Partition of India. In September 1947, Devi’s family together with seventeen family members were traveling on a train headed to Amritsar. A group of Muslim mobs attacked their train demanding some gold. When they could not find anything, they massacred eight of the adult family members. Devi’s family escaped by jumping off the train, leaving them injured on the rail tracks. Most of the family members were injured or murdered; only eight adults survived to reach Amritsar on the Indian side of the border.

This chapter describes how Kiran, a young female Sikh, searched for a Muslim religious man (maulvi) to request some books for her exam after the Partition of India. Since fleeing Rawalpindi in 1947, Kiran has spent her days volunteering at the refugee camp, writing and reading letters for other refugees. She has enrolled in the camp college to complete her final exams for a master’s degree in literature. Camp colleges mushroomed in refugee camps soon after the Partition, allowing students to complete their degrees. Kiran seemed oblivious to the dangers of the communal riot. She cycled around her neighborhood looking for the maulvi to borrow some books needed for her exam; but she never found him.

This chapter recounts the repression experienced by women in Pakistan and India because of communal riots following the Partition of India. During the Partition, women were tortured, raped, and kidnapped as a show of force by the rioting mobs of either community. Abducted women were either forcibly married to men from opposing communities or abandoned after being raped. Their families often refused to take them back since their culture dictates that their abduction would make them impure and a dishonor to their family. Hundreds of them languished in ashrams and died, hoping to be invited back home to their natal or marital families. Some refused to return to families who wanted them back because they were too ashamed.

This chapter discusses the importance of Urdu poetry for Mohanji and Roshanji, who were refugees of Partition of India. Urdu poetry provided a sense of “re-homing,” regret, and nostalgia for the refugees of Partition of India. Urdu verses can be found in Mohanji’s autobiography and Roshanji’s notebook. Mohanji wrote an autobiography, in which he combined the narration of his life with Urdu verses to create an interesting chronological and poetic account of his life. For him, Urdu is the language of emotion, the natural language of the self. On the other hand, Roshanji wrote poems of communal unity written in Hindi, Urdu, and English in his notebook to express his longing for his home.

This chapter discusses how the author’s father helped her in conducting research for this book. Her father served as her informant, interferer, and interlocutor during her fieldwork. Her father was the one who organized their schedule and arranged meetings with participants. He also gave some assistance to the author in giving questions to the participants. When the author noticed that her participants were struggling to describe their stance about the Partition of India, her father advised her to consider their old age, and to ask simple questions that they can answer. The author said that the research on the Partition of India was made easier with her father’s participation.

This chapter presents a meditation on the idea of Europe, postcolonial nationalism, the ethnic cleansing, Phil and Neo-Hellenism, the Indian Partition, and the Greek-Turkish population transfer, through a reading of the use of ekphrasis (the verbal description of an aesthetic object) in Quratulain Hyder's Ag ka Darya and River of Fire and Stratis Myrivilis's The Mermaid Madonna. It argues for the necessity of recognizing the mutual constitution and "porosity" of Europe and Asia and, more generally, North Africa.

The 1764 election of King Stanisław August touched off a thirty-year period of reform in Poland-Lithuania, threatening Russian, Prussian, and Austrian control. In response, they divided the country between themselves, initiating more than a century of foreign rule. In this new era, the Catholic Church in the Polish lands faced governments determined to reduce its influence and relieve it of its wealth. High-ranking Catholic officials typically were conservative loyalists, but growing numbers believed that Poles should be free to pursue their own political destiny. The Polish Catholic tradition was sometimes instrumentalized toward this end. At this time, impulses associated with Romanticism began to transform the culture of Catholicism in the Polish lands.

This division constructs a dialogue between the materiality of trauma and the postcolonial condition through a sustained focus on the establishment of new geographical borders during the 1947 Partition of British India. The border is treated as an assigned place without proper destination. The chapter pays particular attention to the ways in which the temporality and formation of forms of nation during the Partition situate the living being and subject as the center of interaction to the extent it challenges the western tradition’s ideological tendency to assume life as irremediably divided between its symbolic and empirical, material aspects. The case of the Partition makes clear that the event as it is governed by the axiological principle of the “always already” in the psychoanalytic conception of trauma is overcome by the emergence of partition as another regime of events that asserts a coincidence between the material and symbolic domains of life.