book Review

4 Sugata Boses idea of the Indian Ocean as an interregional arena of political, economic, and cultural exchange is fully developed in his volume A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. 5 Quotations from Sanjay Subrahmanyams Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, pp 289-316. See extended quotation in Cross Currents and Community Networks, pp 101-02. 6 Sumatra from Samudra, presumably named by Sanskrit-speakers after the Ocean, p 105. 7 Large numbers of male field slaves became important in the 19th century Indian Ocean commercial plantations growing sugar, cloves, etc, for export markets. Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Ludden, David (2000): Area Studies in the Age of Globalisation, Frontiers, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, Winter, 1-22. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (1999): Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia in Victor Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

References
Bose, Sugata (2006): A Hundred Horizons: The Indian

A Rounded Understanding of Partition

Sarah Ansari

his compact but comprehensive i ntroduction to the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and its aftermath is to be warmly welcomed. Written in clear and accessible style, it synthesises existing developments within the field, bringing together what can sometimes seem like a fragmented set of stories into one coherent narrative. As such it helps its readers to negotiate their way through the complex twists and turns of Partitions history and historiography. It will, no doubt, become compulsory reading for students taking courses on 20th century south Asia as well as for others i nterested in more general aspects of i mperial withdrawal, communal violence, state-formation and the like.

The Partition of India by Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press), 2009; pp xvii + 206, Rs 695.

Lasting Legacy
Partition may have resolved the immediate question of how the British would leave India in August 1947, but it triggered a whole new range of problems that r emain with us to the present day, on all sides of the new international border. It is with great skill, therefore, that the authors of this study juggle the short and the l onger-term implications of Partition, weaving them into an overall picture that places developments in the Punjab (all too often the focus for Partition-related histories) in the wider subcontinental context. Likewise, they factor in mediations of gender, existing power structures, and caste and community considerations, which have gained greater academic currency in recent years, balancing high politics with the all-important popular dimension.

Chapter 1 (Understanding the Partition Historiography, pp 7-24) identifies the historiographical debates that have engaged with why and how Partition took place. As Talbot and Singh emphasise, no single interpretation can fully explain the complex developments surrounding I ndependence (p 8), and, by extension, Partition. Any set of explanations, they a rgue, must take account of not just the high politics of the period (that is, the constitutional negotiations that took place b etween Indians and the British) but also the history from below that highlights what Partition meant for the millions of ordinary people caught up in its upheavals, as well as the various provincial p erspectives that have tended to be overlooked in the past (for instance, bringing Bengal much more into the picture than was the case previously). New perspectives also acknowledge that Partition was more a process than an event, something that stretched on for many years after the subcontinent had been divided. L i kewise, recent scholarship questions assump t ions about the nature of the v iolence, drawing attention to the degree of organisation i nvolved.

Road to Partition
Chapter 2 (The Road to 1947, pp 25-59) examines the processes that culminated in the division of both the subcontinent and the two provinces of Punjab and

B engal. It begins first with the all-India d imension and contextualises the roots of Muslim separatism and the demand for Pakistan, before turning to the role of Congress and the British, respectively. As it demonstrates, the provinces, in particular Punjab and Bengal, had a crucial part to play in the way in which events unfolded, as did problems posed by how to integrate the princely states into the new p olitical arrangements. As this chapter underlines, Partition and the form that it eventually took were not inevitable outcomes of c ommunal differences but rather contingent on a particular set of historical c ircumstances that accompanied the ending of empire. Chapter 3 (Violence and the Partition, pp 60-89) engages with the very sensitive issue of violence, arguing that Partitionrelated violence was qualitatively different from earlier consensual communal r iots. It charts a cycle of violent events, spanning from August 1946 (The Great Calcutta Killing) to February-March 1950 (East and West Bengal), seeking to identify how far this represented spontaneous madness or organised mayhem. The i nvolvement of the representatives of the State policemen by and large proved to be a repeated feature of the violence, and this has prompted questions about how far the label of genocide can be applied to such atrocities. Either way, clear parallels have been drawn with later communal v iolence in the subcontinent, in particular that of the early 1980s and early 1990s, which helped to stimulate re-examinations of what had happened decades earlier d uring Partition. As Chapter 4 (Migration and Resettlement, pp 90-126) highlights, the sheer scale of the demographic upheaval that Partition set in motion was phenomenal: it was, as Talbot and Singh put it, the largest uprooting of people in the twentieth century (p 90). As in previous chapters,

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OCTOBER 23, 2010 vol xlv no 43 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

book Review

they draw attention to the ways in which earlier understandings of Partition have been revised in recent years, with experiences of forced migration and refugee r esettlement now acknowledged to be far from uniform. Part of the problem, they explain, derives from too much emphasis having been placed on what happened in Punjab. Most conventional assessments have also failed to take sufficient account of differences between rural and urban migrants and locations. Instead, what is now emerging is a much more rounded, 360 degree, appreciation of what Partition meant in practice, with longer timescales of migration and settlement. The aftermath of Partition is addressed in Chapter 5 (Partition Legacies Ethnic and Religious Nationalism, pp 127-53). The ways in which Partition-related migration played itself out laid the basis for subsequent ethnic conflict, and likewise contributed to, rather than preventing, the further consolidation of destabilising religious nationalisms in the region. On top of this were set in motion extreme forms of official, ideological nationalisms. Different groups across the subcontinent all staked an ideological claim to the new states in the making. In both India and P akistan, Partition became the national foundational myth (p 131), albeit with different spin-off associations. Nationalism and statecraft became indelibly marked

with the consequences of Partitions l ogic. As Talbot and Singh comment, The traumatic process of division of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 created new ethnic landscapes in the hinterlands of I ndia and Pakistan and troublesome borderlands that questioned the very essence of the nation- and state-building projects launched by the post-Independence elites in these two countries (p 153). Hence, Partition has to be viewed as very much an ongoing process that defies closure as well as being easy prey to reinvention and reconstruction (p 153).

A Blighted Relationship
The books final chapter (An Enduring R ivalry: India and Pakistan since 1947, p p 154-75) tackles one of Partitions most ominous legacies: the international rivalry between India and Pakistan that has blighted their relationship since independence. Introducing this dimension to the discussion is something that is often overlooked in broad accounts of Partition, and is to be welcomed since it locates the geopolitics of the region in relation to its r ecent past. South Asia today presents a contradictory picture of stability and i nstability democratic governance versus insecurity state (p 163). The rhetoric of Indo-Pakistani rivalry has spilled over into armed conflict on at least three major occasions, with minor altercations a

more-or-less permanent feature of the geo political landscape. But, despite this gloomy picture, Talbot and Singh find some hope for the future as the sub continent moves further into the early 21st century, away from the nuclear brink to a composite dialogue (p 170). This is a move that, they suggest, would surely strike a chord with Jinnah and Nehru who together hoped that the two dominions of Pakistan and India would eventually develop fraternal relations enabling them to overcome the initial hostility of separation and division (p 175). In sum, Talbot and Singh are to be congratulated for having squeezed, or eased, what is an enormous and complex topic into an easily-digestible general overview, which succeeds in introducing its readers to how Partition historiography has evolved over the last 60 plus years, and to, at least some of, the historical facts and figures on which this literature has rested. The result is an extremely well- balanced discussion that prepares readers for taking the plunge and engaging directly with the debates and case studies themselves. Partition, and how it has been u nderstood over time, will make a lot more sense if they read this book first!
Sarah Ansari (S.Ansari@rhul.ac.uk) teaches history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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