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This chapter lays out the scope of the book, asserting that the period between the partition of Bengal in 1907 and the Partition of India in 1947 was witness to a unique experience of imagining ‘nations’ in Bengal. The lynchpin for all these contesting nationalisms was the notion of ‘difference’. These alternative imaginings of the nation could hardly be deemed ‘anti-national’ even if the dominant discourse on the nation-state might wish to label them as such. Even within communities, the ties between nation and community were variously conceived by different strands and internal differences within communities generated multiple articulations of nationalism. The introduction then specifies one of the main objectives of the book, which is to explore the varied ways in which ‘difference’ was problematized, to move beyond the unwarrantedly essentialized form in which it is commonly understood, or, worse still, dismissed out of the domain of engaged historical scholarship.

By the new millennium sport was a ubiquitous presence in Ireland. It was a significant economic enterprise in its own right and its political importance was obvious in the manner in which it was funded by the state. The range of facilities had grown as the number of sports clubs grew. The partition of Ireland and later the Troubles provided the political context, but also important were the rise of the motor car, the changing media landscape with the advent of radio, followed by television and the Internet, the growth of secondary and tertiary education, the capacity of the Irish economy to oscillate from boom to bust, and the recurring drain of emigration. Irish sport was also increasingly influenced by global trends. This can be seen in the widespread commercialization of sport, in the growth of female involvement, and in ‘Sport for All’ campaigns in the 1970s.

The emergence of professionalized psychiatry created a milieu where a plethora of healing practices and beliefs were regarded as primitive and superstitious charlatanism. More recently, psychiatrists and psychologists have come to accept the significance of healing cultures to the local members of communities who had little or no access to Western medical treatment. It has been proven that faith, socio-religious practices, and healing are often essential for recovery and well-being of those suffering from mental illness. On the other hand, many psychiatric practices including that of lobotomy and ECT have become redundant. The book has attempted to bring together rather disjointed world views of ‘scientific’ and religious, institutionalised and non-institutionalised, and colonial and nationalistic ideas on curing madness.

Even with the birth of Pakistan after the Partition of 1947 cultural cohesion remained in an infantile stage. National self-defence became the obsession of the ruling establishment and there was a move towards administrative consolidation. Thus it is no surprise that the first general elections in Pakistan were held only in 1970. The Awami League of East Pakistan received an overwhelming verdict in the east and staked a claim to rule Pakistan. However, Yahya Khan’s government ordered a military crackdown on 25 March 1971 in East Pakistan. This work will revisit the war and pose questions about its place in memory and history. To understand the implications of the genocidal military crackdown by the army and the concomitant declaration of independence by East Pakistan and the aftermath of liberation, this book offers a close reading of memoirs, testimonies, and fiction that draw on memories of the war.

This chapter outlines the discourses emerging from 1971 and deals in a detailed manner with nationalist history and myth making relating to the foundational year in 1971. It examines the importance of the war as the second partition of the subcontinent. It also hints at the work to be done in the following chapters in closely analysing the strands of history, testimonial literature, and fiction to see how unbroken narratives of heroism and sacrifice are contested by memories of gratuitous violence and post-war humbling of those who believed that the golden age was on the horizon. The relevance of post-war developments in remembering 1971 and determining the ways in which the year is represented is also established in this chapter.

This chapter explores the ideological and political ideas of the Bengali Muslims around the themes of partition and swadeshi, and their multiple compromises between regional and religious identities. The Hindu discourse of swadeshi also reveals a deep engagement with the problem of difference before the nation. Nowhere in India during this time were identity issues so fiercely debated by the highest rungs of intelligentsia and the common people alike than in Bengal. The author suggests that the support for the partitioned province must not be seen as anti-nationalism but as differently positioned nationalisms charged by a multidimensional Bengali identity. The swadeshi movement, unfortunately enough, missed the opportunity to acknowledge the claims of difference from within a nation. Swadeshi Bengal therefore provides a unique case with such early expositions of identity discourse in the aftermath of a provincial partition.

This chapter examines how the questions surrounding social and cultural identity inevitably led to the debates on its political representation. Deriving political rewards on the basis of sociocultural identity became the guiding force within nationalism. Bengali Muslims, with their dual identities of religion and region, claimed a greater representation within the province while at the same time championing the ‘Bengal Line’ within the all-India Muslim politics. Both these identities had their roles in fierce debates about cultural representation, especially over the forms of Bengali language. It is during this period that the Bengali Hindus showed their greatest ideological flexibility on the question of difference: a few trends of accommodative and combinational nationalisms emerged, as did the ideas of the federal nation. Tagore’s ideological critique of nation, and Das’s political critique of nation through ‘Bengal Pact’ may be seen as the two most significant products of this ‘new nationalism’.

This chapter argues that the final years of colonialism in Bengal were not a ‘climax’ in the unfolding story of a head-on collision between ‘nationalism’ and ‘communalism’. First, the Bengali discourse of ‘Pakistan’ with its underlying openness to regional negotiation reveals that, although ‘communal’ politics grew over time, this was not the only and most defining trend. ‘Other’ trends survived and maintained fluidity in the political and ideological construction of nation until they were eclipsed by the abrupt solution of partition. Second, Bengal politics could no more be regional in nature, but had to succumb before the pressures of trans-regional forces. ‘Nation’ in Bengal therefore experienced an ‘anticlimax’ considering its earlier trajectory of dialogic engagement with the problem of difference. An over-decisive and centrally orchestrated process of decolonization foregrounded a unitary nation, discarding the alternative nationalisms Bengal had so far been experimenting with.

Multiple histories converge on the Irish border. Born of the wave of border creations that followed the First World War, it is the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts, rooted, at least in part, in the colonial and religious struggles which forged European modernity. Marking the line between belligerence and neutrality during the Second World War, it reached its zenith in the brief glimmer between one imperial sunset and the supposedly new dawn of European integration. Inter-state and divergent state–society relations were expressed through or otherwise impinged upon communities either side of the border, through which all of these processes were brought to life. The lived experience of the border, the opportunities and restrictions it produced, and the responses it invoked, provide a thread linking the grand topographies of national and international history to the most seemingly humdrum aspects of people’s lives.

The 1925 Irish Boundary Commission was a doomed attempt to iron out some of the border’s political, economic, and geographic anomalies. This was a time of transition, when the prospect of further changes continued to coexist with those recently wrought by partition. The commissioners interviewed more than five hundred witnesses on the written statements they had been invited to submit in advance. The submissions and the testimony offer insights into how the border was perceived and its impact in the years immediately following its creation. They reveal the tensions and conflicts that both shaped and blurred the boundary, between the impact and consequences of the border on one side and, on the other, those older frameworks of power, space, and history that it modified, absorbed, or displaced. Using the Boundary Commission records, this chapter considers that collision through two of their central themes—the interrelated references to space and time.

This chapter examines how by the 1950s the concept of population transfer had disappeared from the international policy agenda at the same time as the ‘minorities problem’ receded as an international issue. Failed attempts in the late 1940s to revive international interest in minorities protection within the framework of the United Nations illustrate this changed post-war climate. Three case studies from the Cold War and after (Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia) are then examined in order to demonstrate how the concept of population transfer was nevertheless implicit in all post-war partition proposals and present in the deliberations of international statesmen and policy-makers when all other alternatives seemed to have been exhausted. As an option of last resort at moments of extreme crisis, population transfer was, therefore, as accurate a barometer of political intractability in an era of human rights as it was during the forty-year ‘era of population transfer’.