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In this remarkable study based on more than two years of ethnographic and archival research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar argues that the combined interventions of the two postcolonial states were enormously important in shaping these massive displacements. She examines the long, contentious, and ambivalent process of drawing political boundaries and making distinct nation-states in the midst of this historic chaos.
Zamindar crosses political and conceptual boundaries to bring together oral histories with north Indian Muslim families divided between the two cities of Delhi and Karachi with extensive archival research in previously unexamined Urdu newspapers and government records of India and Pakistan. She juxtaposes the experiences of ordinary people against the bureaucratic interventions of both postcolonial states to manage and control refugees and administer refugee property. As a result, she reveals the surprising history of the making of the western Indo-Pak border, one of the most highly surveillanced in the world, which came to be instituted in response to this refugee crisis, in order to construct national difference where it was the most blurred.
In particular, Zamindar examines the "Muslim question" at the heart of Partition. From the margins and silences of national histories, she draws out the resistance, bewilderment, and marginalization of north Indian Muslims as they came to be pushed out and divided by both emergent nation-states. It is here that Zamindar asks us to stretch our understanding of "Partition violence" to include this long, and in some sense ongoing, bureaucratic violence of postcolonial nationhood, and to place Partition at the heart of a twentieth century of border-making and nation-state formation.
‘A product of outstanding historical-ethnographic research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar`s book tells like no one has done before the maddeningly tangled story of how, in the years after the partition of 1947, India and Pakistan actually came to separate their territories, properties, and peoples into two sovereign states. Zamindar`s ability to weave into a single narrative the national and the local, the administrative and the personal, the everyday and the epochal, is truly remarkable. This is a path breaking contribution to modern South Asian studies.’—Partha Chatterjee, author of The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World
‘A deeply moving account of the contingent category of the no-questions-asked natural citizen within the Indian and Pakistani nation-states, at birth and in their long, postnatal condition. The hurriedly fixed national boundaries here both necessitate and entice, contain and penalize crossings. Zamindar richly documents how for some minority groups travel, kinship ties, and a national longing have to be continually bared to lay claim to citizenship within a multireligious dispensation. An unsettling work that breaks through the chalk circles circumscribing the retellings of our separate and national pasts.’—Shahid Amin, author of Writing Alternative Histories: A View from India
‘A remarkable exercise of ethno-history from below. In addition to official sources, Zamindar has collected testimonies in archives and interviewed survivors of Partition to offer an original and significant chronicle of the nation-making process in both India and Pakistan.’—Christophe Jaffrelot, author of The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s
‘This is a significant and path-breaking book and is likely to become the standard study of the subject. It will be cited authoritatively or be argued with for some time to come.’—Aamir Mufti, author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture
ISBN - 9780670082056
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Pages : 304
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