Author: Suvier Kau
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 301
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240130
Description
Imaginatively written and grounded in painstaking scholarship, this book will stimulate great interest in Partition and India's recent history.
As nuclear bombs erupted under the ground in Pokharan in 1998, the earth and stones ironically melted and merged below the barbed wire that separates India from Pakistan. Echoes of the Partition of India can be heard to this day in the daily life of the subcontinent - each time India and Pakistan play a cricket match, or when their political leaders talk of 'unfinished business'. Sikhs who had to live through the pogrom following Indira Gandhi's assassination recall Partition, as do slum-dwelling Bengalis being forced to return to Bangladesh.
The essays in this book suggest ways in which the tangled skein of Partition might be unraveled. Two of them deal with culture and history in what is now a part of Pakistan. Other contributors range over issues as diverse as literary reactions to Partition; the relief and rehabilitation measures provided to Partition refugees; and the Dalit claim, at the prospect of Partition, to a separate political identity. The power of 'national' monuments to evoke a historical past, and the power of letters to evoke more immediately poignant pasts, are themes in some of the other essays.
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
SUVIR KAUL
Partition and the North West Frontier: Memories of Some Khudai Khidmatgars
MUKULIKA BANERJEE
Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947-50
JOYA CHATTERJI
Partition Politics and Achhut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and
Dalit Politics in UP, 1946-48
RAMNARAYAN S RAWAT
Qutb and Modern Memory
SUNIL KUMAR
Performing Partition in Lahore
RICHARD MCGILL MURPHY
An Archive with a Difference: Partition Letters
URVASHI BUTALIA
Bodies Inflicting Pain: Masculinity, Morality and Cultural Identity in Manto’s Cold Meat
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
Children and the Partition
NITA KUMAR