Sunil Khilnani on the Partition of India and Pakistan -- a model for historical journalism

Outlook India has a terrific article by Sunil Khilnani on the ways in which historians have reconceived the 1947 Partition experience. He writes:

In the great Amar Chitra Katha of the national imagination, Partition is an archetypal tale of tragic heroes and scheming villains, men who make sacrifices and others who betray. In this story Partition was a cataclysm visited upon the course of India's destined history -- those who brought it about were always others, conspiring leaders and impassioned mobs, who together diverted us from our path to freeom. The responsibility for Partition did not lie with us, but with them.

These sorts of archetypal stories, he argues, are perhaps appropriate to a nation's founding -- essential foundational myths -- but serious historians have a different perspective, in fact, several of them.

[R]ecent history-writing about Partition... has opened up a larger range of interpretative perspectives, which draw on a wider array of sources, than previously. From the constitutional documents of high politics to oral testimony and memoirs, historians have given us reason to reject the view of Partition as simply a conflict between the forces of secular nationalism and religious communalism. Nor is it convincing to think that it was something decided entirely in the political parlours of Delhi or London.

Historians have insisted on a wider range of actors—and, therefore, of responsibility—for what came about: on the role of the provinces and provincial politics, and on the contiguity and sometimes interpenetration of secular and religious ideas and personnel. Some have argued to good effect that the pressures for Partition were built not by religious disaffection but as the result of a political contest over the distribution of powers between the central and provincial governments—and that the creation of Pakistan as an independent state for India's Muslims was an unintended outcome of the argument of the Muslim League leadership. Others have demonstrated the role, in West Bengal, of the Hindu bhadralok and of the Congress there in pushing for Partition.

The larger point coming out of all of this work is that it is mistaken to presume the existence of the objects which, in the usual tale, are assumed to be the actors who clash. "Communalism", or even such monolithic categories as "Muslim", "Hindu" and "Sikh" were not pre-existent. Each of these were internally divided and differentiated; and much of the violence that made Partition was not so much directly caused by these entities, but was a necessary means to define and bring them into existence—needed in order to freeze these identities hard.

Partition was the outcome of immediate politics, not immemorial religious passions—it was a political event, which, no doubt, drew upon forms of religious self-identification, but also changed their character. As we set aside the simple vision, perhaps, we need to reframe the context, too.

We tend to think of Partition as a domestic event, caused by domestic conflicts. In fact, it was an international event, with international consequences; and to assess and understand it, we need to locate it in a much wider frame. The decade of the 1940s defines our modern era, not just in South Asia, but across the globe: the decade of total war, genocide, the atomic bomb, the division between East and West and the beginning of the Cold War.

This is a really important article integrating the perspectives of academic historians into current debates on matters of great contemporary significance and it can serve as a model for others who wish to get beyond the sort of pap PBS ladles out.

Read it! [here]