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I was inspired to take “Past Performed” by a class I took my first semester, “Hybrid Identities.” In this course, we explored contemporary conflicts of cultural identity and representation through academic writings on hybridity and authenticity, personal narratives, and self- reflection. We concluded the semester with a performance piece inspired by our own experiences of attempting to find, and maintain an “authentic” sense of self. I was particularly interested in the personal accounts we read, and the role they played in helping us understand, and ultimately creatively perform, interpretations of our own identity formation. Taking past performed seemed like a logical next step in further investigating issues of cultural identity, personal narratives, and the role of performance in the retelling of histories.
My initial reaction to the readings we discussed in the beginning of the semester was one of surprise. I came into the course with a basic understanding of partition, but I did not grasp the sheer magnitude of the demographic upheaval, and communal violence, that took place leading up to 1947. As we delved further into our research, I became acutely aware of how over simplified, and inaccurate my prior understanding of partition was. I have no memory of the conflict in India and Pakistan, the largest migration in human history, and the cause of over one million deaths, ever being brought up to me in educational setting; a fact that irked me as we read the stories of the victims of partition violence (Khan, 55).
The many factors that lead to the escalation of conflict, and ultimately to the brutal violence, and mass displacement in 1947, were hard for me to wrap my head around. I realized that the partition of India...
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...with the reality that behind all official histories, there are millions of personal stories. If we hear the voices of individuals-their tears, and laughter, and silences- we cannot remain immune to their suffering; we cannot forget they are human, and while we will never understand their pain, we cannot help but try (Jha,471).
Works Cited
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Print.
Jha, Sadan. "On Listening To Violence: Reflections of a Researcher of the Partition of India." Sarai Reader: Turbulence (2006): n. pag. Web. 1 May 2014.
Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.
Sarkar, Mahua. "Between Craft and Method: Meaning and Inter-subjectivity in Oral History Analysis." Journal of Historical Sociology 25.4 (2012): 578-600. Print.
Wars and conflicts between India and Pakistan. (n.d.). Princeton University. Retrieved February 10, 2014, from http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Wars_and_conflicts_between_India_and_Pakistan.html
The poorly-planned withdrawal of the British from its Indian ‘colony' left close to one million people dead and created chaos, hatred and violence that lasted over 50 years and forced Winston Churchill to condemn it as the ‘shameful flight.' These historical events complicated the histories of India, Britain and Pakistan because of the ill-informed partition program carried out by British authorities. The Shameful Flight covers the periods between the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942 and Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. In this book, Wolpert's thesis argues against the death of hundreds of thousands of people who died after the partition of India. For example, Wolpert believes that the catastrophe resulted from Mountbatten's rushed process of the nationhood in which the new border lines in the middle of Punjab and Bengal prompted murder, arson and violence that left over 10 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs displaced from their homes and over five hundred thousand dead.
4 # Stein, Burton (2001), a History of India, New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiv, 432, p.222
Pearson, M. N. The New Cambridge History of India. pt. 1, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 8 vols.
The partition of India left the subcontinent divided and devastated. Homes were dislocated as boundaries between the two countries were drawn. Scores of people were uprooted they had to leave behind all their material possessions and move on to be relocated. A couple of decades passed before the subcontinent could accept the reality of the two countries-one of them in two parts and separated by more than two thousand miles. From the late sixties differences between East and West Pakistan got aggravated and the burning cauldron finally exploded in 1971.
Posting the novel Riot amidst the morbid sectarian clashes in 1989 in North India, Shashi Tharoor explores the cultural diversity in Native India. Tharoor voices his assertive views on how culture is broken up due
Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan is a horrific read. Though the characters and the village of Mano Majra are both fictitious, the reality of the 1947 Partition is not. Approximately one million men, women and children died as a result of communal violence during that time. The cynical part of me says that religious feuds and riots have always been a reality of South Asia – even before the medieval times, so this should not be shocking. But then the rational part of me questions why there are millions of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and other religious communities living in peace today. If there really was a blood lust which we inherited from our ancestors, we would have all been dead a long time ago.
Train To Pakistan is a magnificent novel where Khushwant Singh tells the tragic tale of the partition of India and Pakistan and the events that followed which will be remembered as one of the blackest chapters of human history. Just on the eve of independence India was partitioned causing a great upheaval in the whole continent. Independence brought in its wake one of the bloodiest carnages in the history of India. The upshot of this was that twelve million people had to flee leaving their home; nearly half a million were killed. It is also on
Manto Hasan, Saadat. “Open It.” Stories about the Partition of India. Ed. Alok Bhalla. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1999.
Talking about Indo-Pak Partition, it was the most affecting event of the people in the history of the sub-continent. Hundreds and Thousands of people were killed and exploited in the name of a separate land. No other example comes close to brutality except this.
The most threatening conflict between Hindus and Muslims is the province of Kashmir. This is where the decision to divide India into India and Pakistan seems to have been a terrible mistake. Kashmir, which is the only Muslim majority city in India, lies between the divided India and Pakistan. After India’s independence in the 1940’s, Kashmir had to choose to either unite with India or Pakistan. The Prince of Kashmir chose India but Pakistan invaded the province soon after and have occupied part of Kashmir since then. Controversy still surrounds the province today because naturally, Muslims want to control it. While many Muslims relocated to Pakistan and the Hindus to India, half of the Muslim population was left in India and their relations did not improve after being partially separated.
In Urvashi Butalia’s book, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, she interviewed multiple people, specifically women, who lived through the horrific Partition of India. One significant woman who Butalia interviewed was Damyanti Sahgal. Butalia wrote that, along with being a victim of violence caused by the Partition, Damyanti later “worked for many years in the Indian State’s recovery and relief operation” (91). Damyanti’s detailed account offered significant insight into the true nature of the Central Recovery Operation. As Butalia described the broad account of what happened to women with statistics and general knowledge, Damyanti provided a first-hand account that truly illuminates the severity of the “recovery”
Until a child is eighteen years old, the parents have full responsibility. They provide a stable and loving environment for their children. As the leaders in a household, caring and loving parents also maintain the bonds that hold the family together. However, absence of loving parental guidance can create tension between family members. Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day shows how war, specifically the partition of India, affects a particular family. The partition of Indian in 1947 created the separate countries of India and Pakistan, consequently ripping families apart. The partition, initiated by India’s independence from Britain, attempted to accommodate irreconcilable religious differences between Muslims and Hindus by forming the Islamic Pakistan. In Clear Light of Day, the Das children’s relationship with their parents causes lasting sibling conflict that mirrors this social and political upheaval of India.
Urvashi Butalia in her book, The Other Side of Silence, attempts to analyze the partition in Indian society, through an oral history of Indian experiences. The collection of traumatic events from those people who lived through the partition gives insight on how history has enveloped these silences decades later. Furthermore, the movie 1947 Earth reveals the bitterness of partition and its effect of violence on certain characters. The most intriguing character which elucidates the silence of the partition is the child, Lenny. Lenny in particular the narrator of the story, serves as a medium to the intangibility created by the partition. The intangibility being love and violence, how can people who grew up together to love each other hate one another amidst religion? This question is best depicted through the innocence of a child, Lenny. Through her interactions with her friends, the doll, and the Lahore Park, we see silence elucidated as comfort of not knowing, or the pain from the separation of comfort and silence from an unspoken truth.
Marginalization of the people of this region could be seen in vogue in the historical writings as well as the theoretical framework of the intellectuals. Popular intellectuals of the academic circle such as Eric Wolf’s ‘people without history’, E.P Thompson’s ‘ unsung voices of history’, Genovese’s ‘ objects and subjects of history’, Ranajit Guha’s ‘Subaltern’, Lacan’s ‘ others’, Sharia’s ‘ hybrid histories’ and many other intellectuals continuously questions the validity of the existing orthodox historical discourses of the marginalized down through the ages. The mainstream society carries on a continuous, harsh and systematic attack on the social system of the Northeast, their culture, their tribal identity and their way of life. The debts of mainstream India to the efforts and struggles of the tribes of this region during the colonial regime and even in the pre- colonial days should be acknowledged by re- writing the history of our country. The history of their struggles is not only documented in their scripts but also in their folktales, dances and songs that passed on from one generation to the other. In sh...