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Narrating South Asian
Partition
Narrating
South Asian
Partition
Oral History, Literature, Cinema

A N I N DYA R AYC H AU DH U R I

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0 –​19–​024974–​8

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

To all those whose voices were never heard, in particular to my two
grandmothers—​Thamma and Dimma, and a lifetime of if-​onlys.
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

I N T RODUC T ION 1

1. “ WA SN ’ T I T G OL DE N? ”: Remembering the Lost Home 14

2. “MY O T H E R MO T H E R ”: Separated and Reconstructed Families 37

3. “ T H IS E IGH T-​Y E A R- ​O L D, H E ’S T OO L I T T L E ”: Children Taking

Back Control 59

4. “ T H E MOS T AW F U L T H I NG I WAT C H E D”: Partition and the Many

Meanings of Violence 81

5. “A L L T R A I NS S T OP T H E R E ”: The Icon of the Death Train 103

6. “I S T I L L DR E A M OF T H E PA DM A”: Changing Riverscapes

of Partition 127

7. “ T H E C AUSE ”: Working through the Memories of Partition 150

C ONC LUSION: The Vital Importance of the Word 178

Appendix 1: List of Interviewees 187

Appendix 2: Glossary of South Asian Words 191
Notes 193
Filmography 211
Bibliography 213
Index 219
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Acknowledgments

The first and greatest debt of gratitude I have is to all my interviewees. You gave
me your time, your most precious stories; you welcomed me with warmth,
food, and love. This book would not exist without you, and I hope that you
feel I have done justice to your stories. All of you who are featured in this
book, and the many of you who spoke to me but whom I could not find space
for in these pages—​I thank you. I cannot put into words how much your kind-
ness has meant to me. A few people have passed away before this book saw the
light of day, and I hope I have managed to honor their memory in these pages.
The second, and just as great a debt of gratitude is owed to the many, many
people who helped me with their time—​finding people I could interview, and
then taking me along to their homes. Thanks to this research, and to the un-
believable generosity on the part of far too many to name, I was not only able
to collect invaluable material, but I have also acquired good friends in Delhi,
Karachi, Kolkata, Lahore, and all over the United Kingdom—​many of whom
were strangers when I started this work. People gave of their spare time unhes-
itatingly, and immediately in a way that was completely unexpected. None of
you had to help me, none of you stood to gain anything from helping me, and
I do not know how to repay your generosity.
This research started life as Migrant Memories, a project run by Butetown
History & Arts Centre, and funded by the School of English, Communication,
and Philosophy, Cardiff University. I am very grateful to everyone involved in
both organizations. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to be awarded a British
Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, which allowed me to conduct interviews in
the United Kingdom and in south Asia. I am very grateful to the funders for
making this research possible.
Much of this book was written in libraries, and I am grateful to the staff
of Cardiff University library, University College London library, University of
St Andrews library, Edinburgh University library, the British Library, and the
National Library of Scotland.
I am very grateful to Nancy Toff and the many wonderful people at Oxford
University Press. Rob Perks first mooted the idea of this book, and it certainly
would not have happened without his support.
x |    A c k nowledgments

While I can never individually name everyone who helped me along the
way, there are some who I have worked with, and benefited immensely from,
and whom I cannot ignore. In particular, I am grateful to:
In Cardiff: Radhika Mohanram, Rhys Tranter, Aidan Tynan, Chris Weedon,
Jennifer Dawn Whitney.
In London: Juliette Atkinson, Kasia Boddy, Phil Horne, Pete Swaab, and
everyone else in the Department of English, University College London.
In St Andrews: Christina Alt, Matthew Augustine, Lorna Burns, Alex Davis,
Katie Garner, Clare Gill, Sam Haddow, Ben Hewitt, Tom Jones, Peter Mackay,
Andrew Murphy, Katie Muth, Gill Plain, Neil Rhodes, Susan Sellers, Jane
Stabler, and all the other wonderful people in the School of English. A spe-
cial mention is due to Hannah Fitzpatrick and Akhila Yechury for their many
comments, suggestions, in-​car conversations, and general support.
In Kolkata and West Bengal: Supurna Banerjee, Souvik Mukherjee, and
many others.
In LUMS, Lahore: Christine Habbard, Furrukh Khan, Nida Kirmani.
In Delhi: Maaz Bin Bilal, Seema Chisthi, Akshay Gururani.
Outside the world of universities, I am grateful to Butetown History & Arts
Centre, Cardiff; Faith Matters, London; and Sikh Sanjog, Edinburgh for their
help and support.
A number of people helped me to transcribe some of these interviews and
I am grateful for this help: Holly Fathi, Khadeeja Khalid, Eve Lavine, Claudia
Mak, and Aaminah Kulsum Patel.
Mrs. Bushra Asghar and family in Lahore, and Mr. Hirak Roychowdhury
and family in Delhi put me up and looked after me during fieldwork, and I am
very grateful.
I have presented aspects of this work in conferences at Royal Holloway
London; LUMS, Lahore; Jadavpur University Kolkata; the University of
Strathclyde; and the Crossroads conferences in Paris and Tampere, Finland,
and I have benefited from the useful feedback I have received at all of these
places.
Finally, and most important, Clare, and my parents—​Ma and Baba—​have
lived through this project just as much as I have and, again, I only hope the
results were worth the stress I have put them through.
 Introduction

At some point in the late 1980s, in a small suburban town about thirty miles
north of Kolkata, in what is today West Bengal, India, a woman was walking
home with her young child. On the way home, their conversation turned to
their family’s origins. The memory of this conversation is still surprisingly
vivid for this woman, Sipra,1 almost twenty-​five years later:

When my son was about six or seven years old, one day, the two of us
were walking back along the road. Then the conversation turned to
where I lived as a child, our—​where my parents used to live. While
talking about this, I said that Bangladesh was our real home, but when
the country was divided, it is no longer possible to go there. He asked
how it happened. Since he was really little, I told him that there was a
time when it was decided, the leaders decided to divide up the country
and make the two countries separate. After that, the two countries, in
the two countries, Hindus and Muslims would go their separate ways—​
Muslims would stay in Pakistan, most of the Muslims would stay in
Pakistan, and most of the Hindus would stay in India. And like this,
it divided in two. Then he asked, “After they were divided, you can’t go
from one country to another? You can’t go and live there?” I said, “No,
you can’t.” He came to a stop in the middle of the road, I can still see it
clearly—​standing in the middle of the road, he said, “That means, one
day someone can tell me, in Chandannagar [their home town] that you
can’t come here anymore, can’t live here in anymore. How can that be?”
I felt so bad hearing that. And I don’t know—​a fterwards, my son worked
on partition, perhaps the seeds of that work were sown in his mind all
those years ago.2

Now, there is nothing especially remarkable about this account. True, Sipra
reveals in her testimony images or themes that are common across a number
of different partition narratives but, apart from the fact that I have interviewed
2 |    N arrating S outh A sian P artition

a number of different members of this family as part of my research, there

would normally be little reason to open my book with this narrative. The
reason I start with Sipra’s story is primarily a selfish one—​she is my mother
and the little boy of the story is me. As detailed and vivid as Sipra’s memory of
this conversation is, however, I have no memory of it myself. If there is a link,
therefore, between that conversation then, and my decision to work on the
partition now, it is certainly not a conscious or deliberate one.
But it is not as if the two are completely unrelated either.3 And my decision
to start with this story is not merely self-​indulgent because Sipra’s testimony
highlights the complexity of the ways in which partition is remembered,
talked about, narrated, or, indeed, not talked about or forgotten. The memo-
rial legacy of partition is one of trauma, pain, and shared suffering, but it
is also always productive, not in the sense of it being a positive event for the
people who lived through it and its legacy but productive in the sense that it
helps to produce narratives. These take the form of literature and cinema and
visual art—​stories which together create both memories and ways of dealing
with memories. Partition also produces identities—​religious, national, po-
litical, professional—​partition changes how people think about themselves.
Sipra’s voice breaks down as she remembers her son’s pain, and the pain that
it caused her in turn. As I return to this testimony in the pages that follow,
I show how Sipra charts a familial inheritance of loss and grief—​from her
grandmother’s laments at the loss of a home to her desire to see her father
settled under his own roof to her young son’s discovery of the uncertainty
of the migrant. Within her own narrative, she explicitly constructs a direct,
causal relationship between her son’s feelings of confusion and uncertainty
then and his decision to work on partition narratives now. Memories, no
matter how painful or traumatic, become part of the life narrative that we
construct for ourselves, and which becomes our identity. This book is con-
cerned with both this memory of pain and trauma on the one hand and the
productivity of partition on the other.
As for myself, while it is true that I have no memory of this incident, in
many ways it is still where my partition story begins. Growing up in a refugee
family, I would sometimes get bored with the way grandparents and great-​
uncles and aunts would repeatedly visit our ancestral home in their stories.
As I grew older, and became a migrant in turn, choosing to leave India for
the United Kingdom, my own attachment to and interest in my familial roots
deepened, on both an emotional and an intellectual level. Like many scholars
who have come before me, my interest in partition ultimately stems from
my memories of these stories, some of which are represented in this book.
Following pioneering partition scholar Urvashi Butalia, I, too, can say: “This
story begins, as all stories inevitably do, with myself.”4 The original shock of
discovery—​t he moment that I learned about the ultimate instability of home,
the moment that caused me to stop in my tracks, according to my mother’s
 I ntroduction   | 3

narrative, may not have remained in my consciousness, but it has undeniably

persisted in terms of its effects on my identity as doubly displaced and has
made its presence felt in numerous ways, not least in my intellectual engage-
ment with partition and what it has meant for so many families.

Historical Context
In 1947, as British rule over the Indian subcontinent came to an end, the land
and its people were divided into two new states, broadly along religious lines.
Kashmir and Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east were divided in two.
West Punjab, along with Azaad Kashmir, Sindh, Baluchistan, North-​West
Frontier Province, and east Bengal, formed the new Muslim-​majority state of
Pakistan. This was a state of two halves, separated by hundreds of miles of
India, which had a Hindu majority. In 1971, East and West Pakistan divided
again, leading to the independence of Bangladesh.
The precise causes of this division are many and various. At various
points, various academic and non-​academic authorities have blamed, in
turn, Britain’s “Divide-​a nd-​R ule” policy, the intransigence of Hindu nation-
alist leaders, the personal and communal ambitions of the leaders of the
Muslim League, the militancy of the Sikh leadership, and treason and be-
trayal on the part of all of the above. What is certain is that, in time, par-
tition came to be a seismic event that completely transformed public and
private life all over the subcontinent. After partition, nothing would ever be
the same again.
In part this significance comes from the unprecedented levels of violence,
certainly in recent south Asian history, which accompanied the act of parti-
tion. Inevitably, perhaps, estimates of actual numbers of casualties remain
controversial. The most conservative figure of the number of deaths was that
suggested by the eyewitness account of British administrator Penderel Moon
who, in 1961, wrote that he believed only about 200,000 people were killed
in the Punjab.5 At the other end of the scale, Kavita Daiya is one of a number
of south Asian scholars who has put the figure at “at least two million.”6 Most
scholars, like Ian Talbot, believe that the number to be about 1,000,000—​in
short the exact number will probably be never known.7 What is generally ac-
cepted is that along with the death toll, the partition led to the largest forced
migration in human history, with an estimated 18 million people forced
to leave their homes forever.8 In addition between 100,0009 and 150,00010
women were abducted, raped, and often forced to convert religion.11 The
emotional losses were also huge, as people had to leave ancestral homes—​
communities where they had been living since time immemorial. Most were
unable to take any of their property with them; some deliberately chose to
leave everything behind because they were convinced they could come back at
a future date. Millions of people became destitute overnight. Returning home
4 |    N arrating S outh A sian P artition

proved impossible, as conflict between the two states intensified, leading to

multiple wars since independence.
The legacy of partition has been similarly contested, controversial, and,
at times, violent. The shockwaves have radiated outward through space and
time—​a ffecting both those who lived through the trauma, and those (like my-
self) who did not witness the events but carry with them stories of the horrors
that ensued. Every aspect of life in the subcontinent—​religious, regional, and
political identities; community relationships; cinema, art, and literature—​has
been indelibly marked by the events of 1947. Partition is at once the least
talked about and most cited event in south Asian history. From cricket matches
to religious riots to nationalist speeches to phony and real wars—​partition
continues to be used to justify the actions and the self-​construction of all the
post-​partition nation states.

Methodological Background
An overwhelmingly large majority of books on partition limit themselves to
studying the way partition was experienced along the western border (east and
west Punjab and Delhi). There are a smaller number of books that examine
the legacies of the Bengal partition12 and the effects on “other” communities
such as the Sindhis are even less well studied.13 There are, however, no book-​
length studies, especially in oral history, that attempt to include voices from
all the communities affected by partition. This segregation may well arise
from a laudable attempt at precise contextualized specificity, but the effect
it has had is to create an artificial and anachronistic divide between the two
halves of partition. As one of the first oral history and cultural studies ac-
counts to include both Punjab and Bengal, this book will begin to correct this
gap. This trend of small-​scale studies has led to a perhaps unintended and ar-
tificial understanding of partition as being single-​sited, involving two separate
continuous borders that do not need to be studied in the same scholarly space.
By examining the two partitions as being two components of one larger pro-
cess, I hope to enhance the way we understand partition.
Second, for all the excellence of the scholarship, there is, to date, no
full-​length study of partition that examines oral history and cultural rep-
resentation together. In the scholarship of partition, these domains remain
segregated, and they are usually populated by academics of very different pro-
fessional and disciplinary backgrounds. Far from being mutually exclusive,
however, these domains are always already in direct conversation with each
other. To understand how private memories and public representation work
together, they must be studied together. Partition and its memories are both
deeply intimate and glaringly public. What is the relationship between the
private form of testimony, the oral history narrative, and the public form of
cultural representation, literature, cinema, and visual art? How does one genre
 I ntroduction   | 5

influence another? What might be gained from studying these different types
of memorial narratives together? From the very beginning, then, this book
was conceived of as a way in which oral history testimonies could be compared
with cultural representation.14
The idea that private, personal memories of war and conflict are shaped
by “templates of war remembrance . . . [the] cultural narratives, myths and
tropes . . . through which later conflicts are understood”15 is now well estab-
lished, though the consequences of this argument have perhaps not been fully
applied to partition scholarship. There is a complex dialectical relationship
between the public representation and private memories of partition—​how
people’s memories are influenced by public discourse and how the creative
and critical practice of academics, artists, and activists is influenced by their
own direct and inherited memories. These lines of influence are not often di-
rect or explicitly chartable, though they sometimes are, but more often they
are nevertheless present in more diffuse forms. As Jill Ker Conway has put it,
“our culture gives us an inner script by which we live our lives.”16
Studying oral history and cultural representation helps to emphasize the
ways in which both of these types of narrative inhabit the present just as much
as they describe the past. In other words, my interest is emphatically not to un-
cover any kind of objective truth about the history of partition, even assuming
such a thing were to exist. I am not interested in whether or not the narratives
under discussion here are historically accurate but in how they are put to work
in various ways in the present. Mistakes, misrememberings, and inaccuracies
can be just as interesting and just as valuable to understanding the legacies of
partition.
The oral history material for this book is derived from 165 interviews, col-
lected over three and a half years in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom,
though I wasn’t able to include all the interviews here for reasons of space.
I had to cancel two planned trips to Bangladesh at the last moment due to po-
litical violence, so unfortunately there are very few voices here from those who
identify as Bangladeshi, although there are many who identify as east Bengali.
This cohort represents a diverse group in terms of religion, age, gender, na-
tional, and class backgrounds, though, and following a long tradition of oral
history, the cohort was never intended to be representative.17 The recruitment
process for participants was extremely organic—​a mixture of word-​of-​mouth
and personal contacts, official and semi-​official approaches to religious and
community groups, as well as more formal contact with various academic and
non-​academic organizations. I have, wherever possible, attempted to make
the cohort as diverse as possible but I have not set any selection criteria be-
yond a genuine desire on the part of the participant to be interviewed. As
such, I would be very suspicious of drawing any conclusions about collective
patterns of remembering based on these individual testimonies. As Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak has written, “There is no more dangerous pastime than
6 |    N arrating S outh A sian P artition

transposing proper names into common nouns, translating them, and using
them as sociological evidence.”18
Most of the interviews were conducted on an individual basis, but occa-
sionally it became necessary to conduct group interviews with multiple family
members at the same time. Although such group interviews often do raise
potentially troubling issues of power between the interviewees, it is also the
case that the group dynamic allows for different themes or topics to emerge
that might not in a more conventional one-​to-​one interview.19 This is espe-
cially the case in the south Asian context, where collective conversations
are perhaps more naturalized a part of everyday life than in Europe or
America. When I have had to conduct collective interviews, I have tried to
recreate the atmosphere of an adda—​“the practice of friends getting together
for long, informal, and unrigorous conversations,”20 in the words of Dipesh
Chakrabarty. There is something peculiarly non-​hierarchical in the institu-
tion of the adda which, when applied to the oral history interview, allows
people to hold diametrically opposite views without necessarily challenging
social hierarchies of gender, age, and class. At numerous times during many of
my group interviews, my participants have loudly disagreed with each other,
demonstrating the contested nature of memories in a direct way that would
not necessarily have been possible in a one-​to-​one interview. This does not
mean that my interviews are immune to such social hierarchies, but that these
issues affect one-​on-​one interviews just as much; in any event, in most cases
where I conducted group interviews, an individual, one-​on-​one interview was
simply not an option.
Of course, oral history interviews never exist outside the practical
contingencies of time and place. No interview is ever an ideal transmission of
information between the interviewer and interviewee, and the location and
physical context of an interview always has an effect on the nature of the
testimony.21 At numerous points during my fieldwork, my interviews were ad-
versely affected by issues such as equipment failure, sudden illnesses of an
often elderly cohort of participants, excessive extraneous noise, and the pres-
ence of overly interfering family members, to name but a few. Listening to
the recordings of the interviews, it is fascinating how often “real life” ends up
intruding, reminding me that the interview is hardly a pristine space. Captured
on my machine, along with the questions and answers that constitute the in-
terview, are also other voices, other conversations, repeated exhortations to
eat,22 traffic noises, and the ubiquitous fan. Some of these external influences
inevitably hampered the interview, but, whenever faced with less than ideal
circumstances, I always worked on the principle that an imperfect interview
was better than no interview at all and always tried to work around whatever
difficult scenario I was faced with.
During my interviews, I always tried to replicate, as much as possible, an
environment that would be familiar for my participant. Thus I almost always
 I ntroduction   | 7

interviewed in the participant’s home or another place where they would feel
comfortable. As most of my participants were much older, I would often at-
tempt to sit by their feet, in an effort to replicate a cross-​generational story-
telling dynamic, between grandparent and grandchild, for example.
My ethnographic work took the form of loose, semistructured interviews.
Where applicable, I tried to cover themes such as experience of violence, loss
of home, migration, rebuilding life, and divided loyalties, but these themes
were designed to be as broad as possible, and the narrative of the interview
was always directly led by the participant’s own story. Transcripts from the
interviews have been reproduced here as close to the original as possible.
Interviews that were conducted in English have been reproduced verbatim,
including grammatical “errors.” Interviews in other languages are my transla-
tion, unless stated otherwise, and I have tried to keep as close as possible to
the sense of the original. Translations from non-​A nglophone cultural sources
are also my own, unless otherwise stated.
Nevertheless, this work is certainly affected by the same problem of power
dynamic that most if not all ethnographic work has to face up to. At numerous
points during my research—​interviewing in what used to be refugee camps,23
crossing border checkposts easily by virtue of a British passport,24 being able
to make numerous fieldwork trips by virtue of a generous research fellowship,
hiring a car to interview in Karachi when the city was paralyzed by a general
strike 25—​I have been continually reminded of my own often privileged posi-
tion, relative to many of my interviewees.
These lines of power were noticeable in many of my own interviews, and
doubtless, can be felt in this book.26 It is notable, for example, that generally
speaking, my interviewees in India were much more forthright about their
dislike of Pakistan than vice versa, a phenomenon that is probably linked to
me being perceived as Indian. In other words, my Pakistani participants might
have felt that if they were honest about how they felt about India, they might
offend me as a guest. Indian interviewees did not consider me to be a foreign
visitor to the country, so did not feel the need to be polite.
Inevitably, not least because of my own family’s stories that appear in these
pages, the reader should always be aware of my own presence in the ethno-
graphic material that I present here. There is always a gap between ethno-
graphic fieldwork and the “finished product” in the form of this book. In other
words, in the selecting, editing, retelling, and interpreting, the voice that re-
mains the most privileged is my own. I have tried to be as faithful as possible
to the stories that I have been given, but the interpretation of those stories
remains mine and mine alone. I am deeply aware of my duty to be fair to all of
my participants but I am also keen to ensure that I am not “relinquishing our
responsibility to provide our own interpretation.”27
Consequently, when referring to the people whom I interviewed, I use the
words “participant” and “interviewee” interchangeably, mostly in order to
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8 |    N arrating S outh A sian P artition

highlight the fact that I am acutely conscious of the problematic nature of all
of these descriptive labels but that I am also aware that the power dynamic
runs deeper than simply finding the right word to describe them. In referring
to my interviewees in the pages of this book, I have typically provided a first
name, the year and place of birth, and a religious and regional identity.28 There
are, however, some notable exceptions. Some of my participants wanted to
rename anonymous, so in their cases I have used initials. One participant
agreed to take part on condition that I did not ask for her name. In that partic-
ular instance, I refer to her as X. I chose to do this rather than use pseudonyms
to give their desire for anonymity more direct, typographic emphasis. In other
cases, other participants have actively refused anonymity, urging me to iden-
tify them as authors of their stories. In those cases, and to respect their wishes,
I have used their full names. The differing attitudes of my participants toward
my project and their role in it reflects their immense diversity within my co-
hort, though I do not claim my cohort of interviewees to be representative of
all survivors of partition
If the oral histories are not to be read as representative, then neither is the
body of literature and cinema analyzed in these pages. Partition has spawned
a body of cultural representation in the form of literature, cinema, and per-
formative and visual art that is far too large to be tackled in any one book,
let alone one that attempts to compare it with oral history. While I appreciate
Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s call “to move beyond the scholarly preoccupation
with narrative modes of remembering Partition,”29 I think there remains a
need to study multiple forms of narrative together and to see how one genre
may illuminate another. The primary mode of memory remains narrative and
it is essential to see how these various narratives can both reinforce and under-
mine a notion of a centralized nationalist narrative that, in Kabir’s words, “a
scholarly field would consider itself politically at odds with.”30 Thus I compare
literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of partition with this body of
oral history testimonies in order to look at the ways in which the events of
partition are remembered, reinterpreted, and reconstructed, the themes that
are recycled in the narration, and the voices that remain elided. Of course, the
task of comparing memory narratives from so many different genres, periods,
and geographical backgrounds poses many challenges of its own. However,
I strongly feel that these challenges need to be faced. While it is important
to allow for the specificity of the way texts of each genre (literature, cinema,
oral history testimonies, etc.) are produced and received, it is equally impor-
tant to examine the multifaceted ways in which memory works in society—​
from the private sphere of the family and home to establishing transnational,
emotional relationships across space and time. Through my study of the var-
ious narratives, then, I identify common themes that appear in various dif-
ferent forms of representation and I examine how, through the ways in which
these texts negotiate these themes, they often help to undermine various
 I ntroduction   | 9

state-​endorsed myths of partition—​for example, the idea that partition led to

two oppositional, mutually exclusive nation states, and that people’s affective
relationship with people and land, their religious identity, and the sociopo-
litical space of these new nation states could all be aligned in a simple, un-
problematic manner. In turn, then, the book presents a different view on the
nature of the historiography of partition—​which allows for the articulation of
marginalized voices, not just as victims but also as active agents who, through
the narration of their stories, embody the desire to be seen as being in control
of their own histories.
Finally, a point about nomenclature. While I use the word “partition”
throughout this book for reasons of convenience, this name for the event is,
of course, not unproblematic. Hindi and Punjabi speaking people who ei-
ther stayed in India or traveled from Pakistan to India typically use the word
batwara (“sharing out” or “division”). People who made the reverse journey,
tend to use the Urdu word taqseem (perhaps the English word “distribution”
comes closest). As an expatriate Bengali, the word that speaks to me the most
is the word that is used almost universally by Bengalis—​deshbhag. An English
translation would have to be “division of the country,” though that would
not do justice to the complexity of the original. Bengalis use the word desh to
mean country (as in India), state (as in West Bengal), and, especially signifi-
cant for migrant populations, the original home, village, or town where the
family had to move from for economic or political reasons. So the word “par-
tition” should be read as attempting to represent all these meanings. Perhaps
as a result, I refrain from capitalizing the “P,” preferring the non-​deified lower
case instead. When I refer to places whose names have changed (Calcutta and
Kolkata, for example) I aim to use the name that was current at the time of
the events being discussed. The only exceptions are when I am quoting from
interviews or cultural texts, in which case I quote the name that was used in
the original.

Narrator as Agent
Given the power dynamic of ethnographic work, and given the undeniable
national and individual trauma, it is perhaps surprising that I am choosing
to focus on agency as the lens through which to analyze the textual material.
Whatever else it may have been, partition was, undeniably, a great human
tragedy and, moreover, one that is so immense that it seems to transcend the
powers of language. However, the overwhelming focus on the pain, trauma,
and loss does suggest that the only way in which marginalized voices can
enter the discourse of partition is as victims—​an implication that I find deeply
problematic.31
We need a more complex and nuanced conception of agency in order to
complicate the narrative of victimhood that so much oral history of partition
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