Books

In the past decade or so, historians, activists, and literary scholars have recovered stories of survivors of Partition in order to understand its human side and multiple dimensions of the ways in which “partitioned subjects” reconstituted themselves in relation to the violence. These collections are useful not only in uncovering the hitherto buried creative writing inspired by Partition, they also disrupt the official and dominant accounts of Partition that marginalize the histories of people.

This exciting volume returns to such an archive by bringing together papers that explore how Partition is represented in literature, film, and the media, and through testimonies and oral histories. Moreover, it complicates and complements existing work on narrative histories of Partition by including aspects of Partition-related migration.

First, the papers challenge the notion that post-Partition migrations occurred only in the context of India-Pakistan border. They, therefore, discuss the partition of Punjab as well as of Bengal, and deal with migrations not only within the subcontinent, but to Western nations as well. Second, for the authors in the volume, the Partition was not necessarily only a past event but a material reality for the families involved–as migrations continued for decades to follow–even though the actual split had occurred many years earlier. In covering such wide ground, this volume draws upon myriad accounts by those who have, in one way or another, been touched by Partition and its memories.

The critical importance of this volume, thus, lies in connecting different facets of Partition to histories of migration and relocation, and the formation of complex—often “hyphenated”—cultural identities. The stories unpacked in this collection enhance our understanding of Partition-related scholarship in migration and diaspora, South Asian, postcolonial, and gender studies.