Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls

Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right.¹Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened;²they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India;³and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of "the burning plains of the Punjab" becoming a metaphor for partition itself.⁴

Another major advance has been characterized by a growing appreciation of just how widespread, and just how long-lasting, were the reverberations of partition. The focus was no longer on the events in the Punjab during the six months from March to December 1947. Pioneering work on Sindh,⁵East and West Bengal,⁶both Hyderabads (in India and Pakistan respectively),⁷Gujarat,⁸Kashmir,⁹Rajasthan,¹⁰and Delhi¹¹has established that the Punjab--with its cataclysmic violence (three-quarters of a million killed), contained within a tight time frame (six months); its massive exchanges of population (circa ten million); and the heavy involvement of the state in the protection, evacuation, and rehabilitation of refugees--was the exception rather than the rule for the course of partition in the subcontinent. Elsewhere, partition's impact was far more drawn-out, messy, and chaotic, more a set of festering sores than a single murderous blow. Long after 1947, we now realize, refugees and displacees continued to move within and across the new borders. The state, whether India or Pakistan, set its face against them and offered them little or no support. Such rehabilitation as they achieved was by their own efforts. Often refugees occupied property by force, regardless of to whom it belonged, whether government or other citizens. This involved a great deal of localized violence, and it displaced millions of vulnerable people. Many of these unfortunates were people of a different religious persuasion, and refugees challenged their right to stay on as minorities in the "wrong country." In the recent scholarly literature about refugees, then, they emerge in a new light. Once seen as hapless victims of profound trauma, peripheral (if sometimes heroic) figures who were...