E3W Literature | University of Texas

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories
Columbia University Press, 2007
288 pages
$50

Reviewed by Amber Abbas

Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories appeared at the end of the sixtieth anniversary year commemorating India’s 1947 Partition. Despite its arrival after other books with similar titles, Zamindar’s historiographical project differs significantly from earlier scholarship on Partition. The Long Partition does not commemorate 1947 as a landmark, but redefines it by taking a longer view of Partition as an ongoing process of delineating the boundaries of statehood and citizenship. Zamindar refuses to see Partition as an event marked by the convulsions associated with the end of empire in India, or as the hopeful dawn of two newly independent states. Instead, she seeks to de-naturalize the nation-state itself by interrogating its narratives and the bureaucratic violence wrought by both India and Pakistan as they struggled to define the qualifications of citizenship and belonging.

The “Muslim question” was, asserts Zamindar, “at the heart of Partition,” and she further argues that the fate of India’s Muslims determined the boundaries of belonging for both India and Pakistan. It is an irony of Partition historiography that after the initial bureaucratic attention to Muslims, only more recently have Muslims become the focus of research on the Partition period. Most of the excellent historiography of Partition has examined the experiences of Hindus and Sikhs displaced from the territory that became Pakistan, especially West Punjab. This work has deliberately taken up the issue of Partition’s horrific violence as a way of filling official silences about Partition with stories of the complexity of individual experience.

Zamindar continues this trend insofar as she draws out the experiences of individuals to tell her story about nation-making, and she builds upon the work of Indian scholars who have, in recent years, problematized the category of “the Muslim” within the Indian state (particularly since the communal uprisings that started in the mid-1990s). The violence that concerns her, however, is not what took place in the streets of Lahore or Amritsar, but what took place in the offices of government ministries in India and Pakistan. Zamindar interrogates official correspondence in contested cases of citizenship. These are the stories of people whose families were divided by the border and who had been accustomed to moving freely in India. Their movement became constrained throughout the late 1940s and 1950s by an increasingly restrictive system of border permits, certificates and passports. The Long Partition is a history written in the space between the experiences of individuals whose status as “citizens” or “non-citizens” could not be easily addressed in either state, and the states themselves, struggling to define categories of belonging that remain in force today.

Zamindar combines ethnographic and oral historical research methods with archival investigation and she frequently addresses the difficulties of her work explicitly. A particular complication of the Indian Partition is that the archival sources, like the families Zamindar interviews, were divided between India, Pakistan and England, and those that survived the displacement and remain in the subcontinent are often incomplete or terribly damaged. Despite these obvious challenges, Zamindar has uncovered a rich, if troubling, history of negotiations and deliberations at the official level between the Indian and Pakistani governments over who may be considered an Indian or Pakistani citizen. Much of her story, then, is concerned with the relationship between privileges of movement and travel within and between states, and the privileges of citizenship allotted by each state.

To bring these bureaucratic wranglings to life, throughout the book Zamindar weaves the voices of people who were caught in the space between the states, people whose families were divided and who were faced with difficult decisions about loyalty to state and place as they had to choose whether to abandon old homes in pursuit of new ones. These words bring heartbreaking reality to the sometimes cold responses of government officials as they tried to determine whether a person was “dangerous from the security angle” or could be considered “a loyal citizen.” The Long Partition also exposes the particular vulnerability of Muslims in India who were less likely to be considered “loyal” than other minorities during the same period.

Through her examination of the negotiations over citizenship, Zamindar unpacks the notion that Pakistan could be a “homeland” for India’s Muslims. Throughout this period, Pakistani leaders tried repeatedly to stem the flow of Muslims from India. Not all Muslims could become Pakistanis, not only because of the realities of space and sustainability. Zamindar shows that Muslims from certain areas, especially the highly contested Punjab, and of a certain class, especially the elite, had a better chance of being welcomed because they “sacrificed” for Pakistan. But the exclusion of other Muslims, while necessary, was fraught by the idea that Pakistan was imagined as a safe haven for all of India’s Muslims. Pakistan the idea, she shows, was very different from Pakistan in reality.

There was no even exchange of populations between the states, and the migrations that took place in the midst of Partition’s violence in the late summer and fall of 1947 were not necessarily intended to be permanent. Zamindar investigates the construction of categories such as “evacuees” (those who were leaving) and “refugees” (those who were coming) and the interplay between them in negotiations over property and compensation. Each state faced the unforeseen challenge of protecting “evacuee” property while simultaneously accommodating and rehabilitating incoming “refugees” from the other side. Through the evacuee property laws, Zamindar argues, “the ‘evacuee’ became a refugee category that began to encompass entire religious communities and not just those who had been displaced by violence.” She shows how this “piecemeal process” resulted in people being displaced from their homes and properties without ever leaving them.

Throughout these processes, Zamindar carefully points out, the states made some exceptions for “humanitarian” reasons when cases were too legally complicated to be subjected to multiple and sometimes conflicting rules. Not surprisingly, those caught in the most difficult situations were often poor, illiterate, or women. By letting the sources speak for themselves, Zamindar reveals this without much overt theorizing on the relationships of power at stake in these negotiations.

The Long Partition doesn’t pander to those already familiar with gendered readings of history, but at the same time, in her effort to let the sources speak, Zamindar may rely too heavily on the reader’s understanding of the South Asian milieu. She introduces many of the people involved in these cases only cursorily, without a clear explanation of their caste or class status. Furthermore, though her work has lately turned towards divided Bengal and the trauma of the 1971 independence of Bangladesh, this book, like most other Partition studies, is primarily about West Pakistan and New Delhi. Refreshingly, it is not about the oft-discussed Punjab, but more attention to the eastern border would have been welcome.

While many of the concerns here are particular to South Asia, the issue of nation-making involving the definition of “insiders” and “outsiders” that is the focus of The Long Partition will be of interest to anyone concerned with the studies of post-colonial states. Scholars of South Asia should recognize the landscape of Partition-period India and Pakistan, but familiarity with the region is not vital to appreciate the value of Zamindar’s work. Her view of a long Partition allows her to treat the nation-states of India and Pakistan as contingent entities, formed through negotiations over the belonging of marked individuals and communities. As post-war and post-colonial states increasingly show signs of fracturing into ethnic and linguistic enclaves, and especially considering the traumatic independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, contestations over belonging remain salient.