Friday, March 25th, 2011 Crafting a Parallel History of India's Partition

Description

The Partition of colonial India in 1947 resulted in more than half a million dead and the displacement of about 12 million people. Officially, 75,000 women were brutally abducted and raped and millions of children disappeared in the ‘civil war’ that accompanied the last years of the British colonial rule. The uprooted millions were transformed into official ‘refugees’. In this ‘civil war’, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs were engulfed in the ‘genocidal violence’, but they did not challenge the power of the departing colonial state, which was grounded in violence. The break-up of colonial India has been a subject of extensive historical research: from the ‘high politics’ leading to the Partition, to the story of 1946-1947 riots continuing till 1948, and more recently to the recovery of memories of victims, refugees and women’s narratives via alternative archives.

This talk explores the possibility of writing a parallel history of this violent historical event. It frames Partition and its prehistory within an individual subjectivity of a ‘non-refugee’ in a locality. It focuses on a human testimony (not legal) of a rural woman called Subhashini (1914-2003), an obscure colonial subject living in postcolonial times. Recalling not 1947, but 1942 as a violent rupture in her memory, the testimony moves beyond a historical event and established facts. This presentation offers a parallel history of ‘events’ and ‘non-events’, testimony and experience, and suggests the insertion of a small, unknown, unexplored history in the existing historical narration. Subhashini’s candid, conflicted, repetitive narrative reveals the shifts, ambiguities, silences in an individual memory and its intersection with and divergence from collective memory. The recreated narrative defies the opposition between subject and agent, victim and victimizer and unfolds an individual’s multiple and uncertain identities and subjectivities as a counterpoise to the notion of a unitary colonial subject. Partition is a moment of celebration, revenge, divine retribution, empathy, remorse, tragedy, and fear. This talk also engages with the notion of truth, fiction, archive, testimony, translation and narrative in the language of history-writing, and rethinks the relationship between history and memory and the historian’s craft.

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Dr Nonica Datta is currently Visiting Professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto from January to April 2011.She received her Ph.D from Cambridge University, UK after studying for her MA and M.Phil degrees at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is an Associate Professor of History at Miranda House in the University of Delhi. She was recently a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi and a Visiting Professor at the University of Humboldt, Berlin. Previously she has held positions at the Departments of History at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, where she was also Deputy Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies. Her publications include Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (Oxford University Press, 1999); and Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony (Oxford University Press, 2010 [2009]), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Award.