Dr Nandini Gooptu

The partition of the Indian subcontinent at the time of independence from colonial rule in August 1947 entailed the creation of two new sovereign states -- India and Pakistan, with the latter composed of areas where Muslims were in a numerical majority. Partition did not only involve the institution of separate administrative and political structures for the two newly independent states, but also a momentous upheaval of population migration, as well as unanticipated bloodshed and brutality among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on a scale that it is still considered both unimaginable and inexplicable. 12 to 14 million people were caught up in this process of mass migration; over one million were killed in violent encounters, and an estimated 75,000 women were abducted and subjected to sexual violence. Not only those directly affected by this population movement in what became the border regions between India and Pakistan, but millions others in other parts of India were affected too. In 1946 and 1947, the subcontinent was torn by Hindu-Muslim riots in an atmosphere of religious hatred inflamed by the emerging reality of partition.

Official versions of partition, history textbooks and scholarly analyses recount only its 'high politics': the constitutional and political negotiations between the British government, the Indian National Congress, and the Muslim League. On the Indian side, partition is portrayed as an aberration in India's heroic struggle for independence and her triumphant march to nationhood; partition is projected as the product of an act of betrayal of the national cause by so-called 'separatist' Muslims. On the Pakistani side, partition is seen as the necessary step towards the realisation of nationhood and a safe homeland for South Asian Muslims. The lived experience of partition and of the trauma of death, destruction, destitution, displacement and defilement have been shrouded in what some have recently called a tyranny of silence. The history of loss, suffering and uprootment, which is how the people of the subcontinent actually experienced partition, has hardly ever been aired in public in the first forty years following partition. Collective amnesia and denial appear to have been the ways in which this catastrophic experience of violence and displacement was psychologically and culturally negotiated. It is only very recently, in the context of the rise of a particularly hatred-ridden and xenophobic form of Hindu nationalism in India, and the escalation of violence against religious minorities and mounting hostility towards Pakistan, that historians and literary authors in India are for the first time trying to delve into the history and significance of partition, and to analyse the deep scars that it left on society and the long shadow it cast on politics.

The tyranny of silence about partition and the consequent absence of anything remotely like a formalised mechanism for reconciliation or public grieving and remembering, require an analytical exercise very different from the ones undertaken so far in this seminar series. Our focus in the past few weeks has been largely on formally constituted mechanisms or institutions to deal with past violence and atrocities, and with memories of conflict. But, India and Pakistan did not have any such mechanism, so I shall attempt today to unravel some of the other ways in which a difficult past was negotiated and discuss how these exercised an abiding and determining influence on post-colonial developments. I hope this would enable us to reflect comparatively on the significance and efficacy of formally constituted mechanisms. In my discussion, I shall concentrate mainly on the case of India, for which a new literature on partition is gradually emerging.

How was the memory of partition dealt with in India? Here I refer, of course, to public memory? With a deafening silence, as I have already mentioned. But why such silence and with what consequences? At least two salient reasons for silence are worth noting:

First, the need to construct a glorious biography of the nation, both for India and for Pakistan, required that such a biography should remain unsullied by the memory of the disaster of partition. Nations, especially nascent ones, need affirming histories, as William Beinart pointed out about South Africa, and they need triumphalist foundational myths. The agonising process of partition had to be rendered invisible to reinforce the myth of the triumph of Indian or Pakistani nationalism. The inextricable link between partition and the emergence of the two successor states had to be cast into oblivion and this could be done only by wholly denying partition any place in national political discourse. Partition could thus be remembered only and exclusively in terms of the culmination of a set of political and constitutional negotiations. The devastation and suffering wrought by territorial truncation and population movements had to be effaced from public memory, and relegated to the realm of private misery alone. There is not a single partition memorial in India.

Secondly, in an atmosphere of uncertainty, terror, panic, distrust and above all anxiety about betrayal generated by the partition migrations and riots, there were very few pure victims or pure perpetrators of violence. Violence was used by many both in self-defence and for aggression. So, a family privately mourning the death of a son in the aftermath of partition also probably harboured a secret sense of guilt for causing the destruction of someone else's property or the rape of someone else's daughter. Recent research has also shown cases of murder of women by men of their own families or communities to avoid the shame and dishonour of revealing that their own women had been sexually assaulted by men of other communities. For those who were embroiled in this violence, it marked the complete breakdown of all social norms not only for others (the so-called aggressors) but for themselves too. Public airing of the experience of partition would have meant admitting ones complicity in this social breakdown and also inevitably brought to light the culpability for violence of those who nursed or attempted to nurture a sense of victimhood as a means of coping with their suffering and loss. Collective silence then arose in no small measure from an inability to admit social breakdown and from the apprehension and fear of having to face up to a sense of guilt. It is very doubtful that if a South African style Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in India, anyone would have come forward to participate. Moreover, as in the case of South Africa's TRC, in India too cases of conflict within a particular community would have come to light, thus shattering the myth of unity and generating intra-community tensions.

The silence about partition, however, has not been a benign one, allowing private grieving and healing, even if not public mourning. The consequence of this silence has been ugly for relations between religious communities in India, especially Hindus and Muslims. Failure to grapple with the actual experience of violence has meant that the phenomenon of violence itself has been discursively externalised - imputed to 'others'. Violence, brutality and destruction are all attributed to those beyond the pale, to the other community. The self has been constructed as the victim, and the other - the Muslim, in this case, -- always seen as the aggressor or perpetrator. This has naturally had disastrous consequences for relations between religious communities in India, with Muslims considered the internal enemy, potentially able to sacrifice the national interest to the greater cause of Islam, and thus a perpetual threat to the nation and its majority Hindu citizens. This stereotypical image of the Muslim as a figure of hatred, although dating back to the colonial period, found its full crystallisation in the aftermath of partition. The failure to address grief and suffering in public gave rise to monstrous generalised myths about the Muslim other, upon whom the entire blame for partition and violence was heaped. Muslims came to be seen as inherently divisive and disloyal, and given to a habit of violence. Importantly and detrimentally, in this process, innumerable cases of genuine help, cooperation and mutuality between Hindus and Muslims during partition were also lost to public memory or wilfully suppressed, and the Muslim was ideologically constructed purely and solely as a figure of enmity. Ultimately, this has paved the way for the rise of Hindu nationalism in the past decade, which roots itself in the notion of a pathological antipathy between Hindus and Muslims, and calls for vengeance and retribution to right past wrongs perpetrated by Muslims. This Hindu-Muslim animosity, solidified by the partition experience, extends to international relations between India and Pakistan. Far more than the logic of national security or regional political stability, bilateral relations between the two states are driven by the sense of pathological animosity between two permanent enemies. The tragedy of partition is still being played out as the two countries continue to settle past scores.

The experience of partition was negotiated not only through silence and myth-making about Muslims, but also in other ways, which left lasting imprints on both national identity and on some crucial areas of public policy.

On national identity: In Pakistan, partition came to be conceived, not as a tragedy that claimed lives and destroyed families, but as the necessary step towards the goal of achieving nationhood and a homeland for Muslims. It then became imperative to forge a nationalist ideology which had Islam as its pivot, although this had played no notable part in the movement to create Pakistan in the late colonial period. There are many reasons for the Islamisation of the state in Pakistan, but the need to deal with the history of partition is arguably the primary one. In the Indian case, in the years after partition, the construction of a secular nationalist ideology was of utmost importance to deny the legitimacy of religious identity as the foundation of nationalism which Pakistan epitomised. So, the early Indian independent state sought to anchor nationalism to notions of secularism, democracy, national unity and development. For reasons explained earlier, this version of nationalism had to compete with anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism, with the latter now dominating the country.

It is in the context of the two opposing nationalisms of India and Pakistan attempting to gain primacy over each other that Kashmir emerged as the site of an ideological struggle at an early stage after partition. For India to prove its secular nationalist credential, it was imperative to incorporate the Muslim majority state of Kashmir, while for Pakistan, the loss of Kashmir was tantamount to a denial of its religious nationalism. Kashmir then is not merely a territorial conflict, but signifies for India and Pakistan a highly charged symbolic contest over meanings of nationalism. Not surprisingly, with such high ideological stakes, the problem has proved to be intractable.

National imagination in India has been dominated by some enduring tropes, which can be attributed to the experience of partition. First, the fixity and porosity of borders has been a major theme in Indian political discourse. While the nation's borders with its neighbours are seen to be notionally and ideologically inviolable and fixed, the very artificial and contrived nature of partition has also meant that cross-border migrations and periodic migrancy, legally or illegally, have been a reality. While Indians have had to accept and live with the practical violability of borders, the concept of the violation and insecurity of borders have fuelled obsessive national paranoia, haunted as Indians are by the spectre of redrawing of boundaries and attendant upheaval. The figure of the foreign or alien, especially Muslim, border infiltrator has exercised the national imagination, and fed into xenophobic, right-wing nationalism.

Secondly, the question of absorption of migrants or refugees at the time of partition and in subsequent decades has dominated Indian politics. The metaphors of insider/outsider unleashed by the partition experience have driven intense debates about the inclusion or exclusion of particular religious, linguistic or other minorities in the national community as legitimate citizens who are not alien outsiders. Linked to this is the centrality of the categories of majority and minority in national politics. Partition being seen as the product of a betrayal of the nation by a minority seeking to carve out its own homeland, national political struggles are frequently cast in terms of majoritarianism and the appeasement of minorities. While democratic politics in any country is likely to be exposed to such games of numbers, in the Indian case the majority-minority issue assumes an added significance and urgency in the light of partition.

Third, imaginations of the nation have been dominated by the metaphors of soil, land, territory and space, rather than by civic ideals of citizenship or representation. It is hardly surprising that the attempts of the early Indian independent state to define nationalism through ideals of democracy, secularism and development failed to take sufficient root and at present this version of nationalism appears to be engaged in a losing battle with Hindu nationalism which defines the Hindu majority as the sons of the soil and real inhabitants of the territory, and the Muslims as the alien interlopers with no historical claims to the land.

Fourth, the notion of an essential and somehow transcendent unity of Indian people amidst their ethnic and linguistic diversity has been advanced as the cement that holds the nation together. An over-arching monolithic notion of national unity has been touted by the central state in an attempt to subordinate regional and other identities to the national identity. Unable to emerge from the shadow of partition and driven by the fear of further territorial truncation, any sub- or counter-national political assertion has been demonised as anti-national, and subjected to repression in the name of national unity or national integration and the need to destroy fissiparous political tendencies. In these campaigns, which are often repressive and anti-democratic, successive governments have been able to carry with them a vast majority of the Indian population, who still harbour a deep anxiety about having to re-live the terror of mass migration, forcible uprootment and relocation of 'refugee' populations. The significance attached to national unity has also often encouraged authoritarian tendencies and a denial of political pluralism, not only in state structures but also in some sections of civil society.

Fifth and finally, the unchallenged and unchallengeable idea of national unity has exercised a significant determining influence in some key areas of public policy. Constituent Assembly debates in the early years after partition were dominated by a preoccupation with national unity, and many of the provisions of the Indian constitution and elements of its political system can traced to this. To take another example, let us take the case of the highly contested and politically most crucial debates in India about affirmative action and recognition or safeguard of cultural rights for 'minorities' and for those considered historically deprived or disadvantaged groups. These debates have not been fought over the liberal conundrum of incompatibility between individual and group rights, as one might expect from the vantage point of western liberal democracies and liberal political theory. Instead, these debates have been argued over the potentials of group preferential policies to unleash divisive tendencies and undermine national unity. The case for minority rights could be advanced in India only by demonstrating their capacity not to cause disunity. As a result, Muslims as a religious minority were deemed not to be deserving of preferential policies, but lower caste groups were.

To conclude briefly, the tyranny of silence about Indian partition has meant that instead of dealing with the experience through public acts of remembering and healing, it has vitiated many different areas of politics and social relations, and in particular contributed to continuing communal strife and at times fuelled authoritarian and repressive politics as well as right-wing nationalism and xenophobia. This could lead to the conclusion that the institution of specific mechanisms for public remembering, howsoever imperfect, may well serve a useful purpose. It is a moot point though whether such public remembering can be facilitated merely through institutional incentives, when there are very compelling social reasons to forget, or more accurately, to conceal and deny, as we have seen.

The above account heavily relies on the following:

Interventions: International Journal of Post-colonial Studies, Vol 1, No 2, 1999 (Special issue on the 'Partition of the Indian Subcontinent', edited by Ritu Menon)
Urvasi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the partition of India (2000)
Gyanendra Pandey, 'In defence of the fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim riots in India today, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, March 1991.