Institute For Ice Age Studies

In the light of the resurgence of a transnational linked communal violence since the 1960s in India, and the international rise of ethnic conflict in both Western and decolonized nations in the twentieth century, an urgent issue that demands scholarly attention is ethnic violence, and how it effects particular temporary and permanent migration and displacement of both individuals as well as communities, in its articulation with discourses of national as well as cultural unity, purity, and collectivities.

The largest migration of South Asians occurred in 1947, accompanying the partition of the sub-continent into two nations India and Pakistan on the basis on religion -on the basis of religious differences and anxieties about minoritization after independence. The partition of India into two countries, India and Pakistan, caused one of the most massive human convulsions in history.

Within the space of two months in 1947 more than 12 million people were displaced. A million died. More than seventy-five thousand women were abducted and raped. Countless children disappeared. Homes, villages, communities, families, and relationships were destroyed. Yet, more than half a century later little is known of the human dimensions of this event. The scale and nature of violence that India's partition involved makes it one of the most violent events in the history of nation-formation.

Yet, until the last decade or so, this mass migration—its social, political and cultural impact-has received little attention. This migration has been approached largely in the mode of documentary historical scholarship which has tended to focus on either the politics of Partition and the formation of the nation-state whose protagonists are the male, nationalist elites most often; the regional impact of this violence and displacement in the partitioned states of Punjab and Bengal.

More recently, revisionist historiography and anthropology, as well as state governments, have begun to examine the experience of refugees and migrants, focusing particularly on the experiences of ordinary people, women and children, who were witness to violence and who became refugees of Partition.

Pioneering works in anthropology and feminist historiography have investigated women's and refugee experiences of the violence in 1947; they have also attempted to map out the complex forms of agency at work in women's negotiation of memory, nationality, and state ideology and functioning in its aftermath.

However, these studies' focus on contemporary interviews and individual testimony as the primary form of evidence, need to be supplemented by studies of middle-class cultural production in the public sphere that negotiated this experience of displacement, in order to understand how these new cultural geographies enable us to rethink nationalism, and understand the public developments and discourses that shape the testimonies and memories of those interviewed.

Official history has always flinched from acknowledging the full extent of the human cost of Partition, but the suffering, the grief, the pain, and the bewilderment that resulted from the division of the subcontinent cannot be forgotten. Yet all around us, there was a different reality: partitions everywhere, communal tension, religious fundamentalism, continuing divisions on the basis of religion...
 
All of this seemed to emphasize that Partition could not so easily be put away, that its deep, personal meanings, its profound sense of rupture, the differences it engendered or strengthened, still lived on in so many people's lives; as Urvashi Butalia says: / began to realize that Partition was surely more than just a political divide, or a division of properties, of assets and liabilities.

It was also, to use a phrase that survivors use repeatedly, a "division of hearts" (Butalia, 2000). This article attempts to fill this gap by placing people-their individual experiences, their private pain-at the center of this epochal event mostly based on the first hand in-depth case studies.

This article attempts to explore and comprehend the experience of partition that shaped people’s lives, identities and salves.