Author: Gyanendra Pandey
Publisher: Cambridge University press
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 218
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8175961090
Description
Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of event and interpretation, the author emphasizes both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours.
The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted, by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.
REVIEW
Pandey has produced an important and influential study which will for many years influence the agenda of the history from beneath approach to the history of partition.
-The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
By way of introduction
The three partitions of 1947
Historian's history
The evidence of the historian
Folding the local into the national: Garhmukhteshwar, November 1946
Folding the national into the local: Delhi 1947-1948
Disciplining difference
Constructing community
Select bibliography
Index