The Partition of India in August, 1947 was a significant event in history that accounted for the separation of one of the world’s oldest civilization into two, independent nations – Pakistan and India. Like many other wars in history, The Partition of India was instigated by religious, political and social conflict. This resulted in violence, discrimination and the largest human displacement in contemporary history. While the Partition was well-studied, much of our understanding was focused on the political side of history, not the human side of it. This was why oral history played an important role in manifesting the complexity of a historical event. Our focus here is Maya Rani’s testimony from Butalia’s book, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (2000). Maya Rani’s testimony is a valuable contribution to our understanding of India as we examine a story of a Harijan woman from a minority group whose experience touched on a perspective that we ought to have seen before. Through her story, we are exposed to an entirely different view on the recurring themes of: violence, abduction, belonging and rumour.
Violence and disruption escalated as a consequence of Partition. Evident in Rani’s testimony, people were looting, stealing, killing and hacking each other (cited in Butalia, 2000, p.265). Her account of witnessing the whole Muslim neighbourhood set on fire was a common action that rivalry communities do to each other (cited in Butalia, 2000, p.266; Talbot & Singh, 2009, p.66). Furthermore, Rina’s testimony complemented the August-November 1947 violence that was now more ‘calculated and systematic’, ethnic cleansing. In historical context, the purpose of ethnic cleansing was to eliminate the ethnic minorit...
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...rical facts, it was important however, to acknowledge the fact that history does not only search for the truth, it also dwells into the lives of individuals, looking at what each event ‘meant’ to them.
Works Cited
Pandey, G. 2001, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Talbot, I & Singh, G 2009, The Partition of India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Menon, R &Bhasin, K 1998, Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, Rutgets University Press, New Brunswick
D’Costa, B. 2012, Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia, Routledge, Hoboken
Talbot, I. 2009, Partition of India: The Human Dimension: Introduction, Cultural and Social History, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 403-410
Butalia, U. 2000, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Duke University Press, Durham
Reflective of her post-colonial and post-feminist context, Rachel Perkins utilises her filmic medium in ‘One Night The Moon’ (2001) in order to create distinctive voices for the purposes such as the space between men and women, black and white and the different ways of knowing and seeing. Echoing Perkins interest in interrogating the spaces between men and women, Indira Gandhi, the first and only women prime minister of India, uses her 1966 ‘True Liberation of Women’ speech platform to give voice to an emerging feminist movement, as well as to raise awareness of the discrimination, including stereotyping, suffered by many women in order to promote the resilience and skills of Indian women. Hence, it is through distinctive voices that both Perkins and Gandhi uniquely position their audiences to reflect upon the factors
Veena Das’ Life and Words is an attempt to capture the way in which major “events” reside in the recesses of everyday life. Drawing mainly from the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947 and the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, Das explores the way violence leaves its mark on the people it touches, how it affects them at the immediate moment, and how it is carried through various forms of memory and silence into their everyday lives. Das also addresses that the manner in which the nation-state dealt with and constructed the violence of events also shapes the moments of and after violence, and the way these events inhabit the everyday life. The relation of the event and the everyday is understood in terms of how a number of dichotomous factors, related to the inside and the outside, interact and affect each other. In blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the eventful, Das is able to give significant insights into the interface between the individual and the collective, the self and the other, and the everyday and the event.
4 # Stein, Burton (2001), a History of India, New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiv, 432, p.222
India is the center of a very serious problem in the world today. It’s a very diverse place with people from many different religious backgrounds, who speak many different languages and come from many different regions. They are also separated economically. Two of the country’s religious sects, Muslims and Hindus, have been in conflict for hundreds of years. Their feelings of mistrust and hatred for each other are embedded in all those years and will not leave easily. What’s most disturbing is that there seems to be no plan for reconciliation available. There are numerous reasons for this conflict.
It was not until the Second World War when Gandhi proposed India had been brought into the war without having a choice, that Indians in the Navy, Air Force, and Army, took a stand against the British. These revolts forced the government to discuss the future of India under British rule, as it was becoming increasingly harder to provide the funds that would control India’s revolts, therefore, the only other solution was to begrudgingly allow India to become a free state, which finally happened in 1947. This provides evidence to suggest that the statement ‘when empires fall, it is always the case that internal decline precedes external attack,’ is not always correct. These fractures arose from the First World War, made even worse by the Second World War promoted internal decline. India did not achieve full independence until after the war when Britain was at its weakest and unable to stop dissent.
The decision to grant independence to India was not the logical culmination of errors in policy, neither was it as a consequence of a mass revolution forcing the British out of India, but rather, the decision was undertaken voluntarily. Patrick French argues that: “The British left India because they lost control over crucial areas of the administration, and lacked the will and the financial or military ability to recover that control”.
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
In the book Train to Pakistan, author Khushwant Singh recalls the brutal and unfortunate times when Muslims were being forced out of Mano Majra. They, along with the Hindu and Sikh population, were living in relative peace. But when there had to be change, chaos ensued. There were several key individuals that shared the total responsibility of the expulsion of Muslims from Mano Majra; Even though some had purer motives than others, they all took stock in the unfortunate process.
Train To Pakistan introduces us to the summer of 1947 which is not the same as the rest of the summers before as it was the year of independence. Though there was the sense of happiness all around but the partition put the barriers around the happiness of all Indians and Muslims. It is not the story of the individual but the all who suffered at the time of partition. Violence forced all the people to be theirselves being included in the battle which was going at the time of partition. Apart of the hustle and bustle going around in the Nation, Mano Majra, a village on the border of India and Pakistan does not mean much to the Sikhs and Muslims. There was no war and peace among all the people. Hindu, Muslims, Sikhs all lived together and respect each other . Muslims speak Punjabi language as there more population of Sikhs in Mano
Susan Bayly. (1999). Caste, Society and Politics in India: from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge University Press
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.
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.
... Pakistan to surrender during the Indo-Pakistani War helped the Bengalis establish a sovereign state for themselves. The distribution of the racist pamphlets against the minorities showed Shiv Sena's chauvinistic and fascist regime. Indira Gandhi's corrupt government, socialist regime and her controversial scandals such as giving her son's company government money and the 1971 Nagarwala scandal were also revealed. All of these political events influenced the background of the novel and the characters’ everyday lives. .
Riot (2001), Shashi Tharoor’s third novel is set in the context of a fictitious riot that has resemblance to the riot that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 1989 as an aftermath of the Babri Masjid- Ram Janmabhoomi controversy. Tharoor unravels the history of communal India from the fictional context of the investigation of the death of a twenty-four year old idealistic American girl, Priscilla Hart, who was slain in India in the riot. From its premises, Tharoor also communicates his ideas “about ownership of history, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth” (