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Voices From the Partition of India (1998)

In India, there is no institutional memory of Partition: the State has not seen fit to construct any memorials, to mark any particular places - as has been done, say, in the case of Holocaust memorials or memorials for the Vietnam War. There is nothing at the border that marks it as a place where millions of people crossed, no plaque or memorial at any of the sites of the camps, nothing that marks a particular spot as a place where Partition memories are collected. Partition was the dark side of independence: the question then is, how can it be memorialized by the State without the State recognizing its own complicity? It is true that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of Partition. A half century later, you might well be able to read them as martyrs to the cause of forging a new nation. But alongside there is also the other, inescapable reality that millions of people were killed and in many families where there were deaths there were probably also murders. How do you memorialize such a history? What do you commemorate? For people, for the State, what is at stake in remembering? To what do you have to be true in order to remember? It was not only that people killed those of the 'other' religion, but in hundreds of instances they killed people of their own families; it was not only that men of one religion raped women of the other, but in hundreds of instances men of the same religion raped women of the same religion. What can you do to mark such a history as anything other than a history of shame? No matter how much Indian politicians, members of the Congress, tried to see themselves as reluctant players in the game, they could not escape the knowledge that they accepted Partition as the cost of freedom. Such histories are not easily memorialized.

In many countries in the world today there are memorials to moments of conflict and upheaval. Either with State support or otherwise, scholars have painstakingly built up meticulous archives of people's testimonies, of photographs, letters, documents, memoirs, books in which such historical moments are represented. Very little of this exists for Partition. Until recently, little attempt has been made even to collect people's accounts. Visual representations of Partition - despite the rich archive of photographs that must exist in many newspapers and magazines - remain limited, and while a half century of Indian independence has called for all manner of celebratory events, little has been done to mark this important event in the history of India.

But while there is no public memory of Partition, inside homes and families the memory is kept alive through remembrance rituals and stories that mark particular events. When Mangal Singh and his two brothers came away from their village carrying with them the burden of the death of seventeen of their family members, they built a commemorative plaque with all seventeen names on it, and had it placed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. An annual forty-eight-hour reading of the Sikh scriptures was held to mark the occasion of their deaths, to commemorate their martyrdom. Till they were alive, Mangal Singh's brothers attended the ritual with him each year. After their deaths he went to it, usually alone, and sometimes accompanied by Trilok Singh, the sole survivor of the family deaths. When I asked Mangal Singh, many years later, how he had lived with these memories, he pointed around him to the fertile fields of Punjab. He said: 'All of us who came from there, Partition refugees, we have put all our forgetting into working this land, into making it prosper.'

Credit: Excerpted from The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Copyright © Duke University Press, Durham, 2000 .

Biography:

Urvashi Butalia was born in Ambala India in 1952. She earned an Honours Literature B.A. from Miranda House College, Delhi University in 1971, a Masters in Literature from Delhi University in 1973 and a Masters in South Asian Studies from the University of London in 1977. She has worked as an editor at the Oxford University Press and ZedBooks. Urvashi Butalia is the Director and Co-founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers including the Guardian, The Statesmen, the Times of India and several magazines including Outlook, the new Internationalist and India Today. Ms. Butalia is very active in India's women's movement, she is a consultant for Oxfam India and she holds the position of Reader at the College of Vocational Studies at the University of Delhi. Her main areas of research are partition and oral histories. She has also written on gender, communalism, fundamentalism and media.

Bibliography:

Making a Difference: Feminist Publishing in the South, Chestnut Hill, MA: Bellagio, Pub. Network, 1995.

Women and the Hindu Right: A collection of essays, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995.

Women and Right Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, London: Zed Books, 1995.

In Other Words: New Writing by Indian Women, Boulder, Westview Press, 1994.

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