Gyan Pandey - Remembering Partition, Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2002).pdf - Historia - Indie - MMarkMMark

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Remembering Partition

Violence, Nationalism and History in India

Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of

British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and mem-

ory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways

in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to en-

sure the unity of the collective subject – community or nation. Stressing

the continuous entanglement of ‘event’ and ‘interpretation’, the author

emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting

meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the

procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the ques-

tion of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are consti-

tuted and reconstituted by the experience and representation of violent

events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political

community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and

events like it.

GYANENDRA PANDEY is Professor of Anthropology and History at

Johns Hopkins University. He was a founder member of the Subaltern

Studies group and is the author of many publications including The Con-

struction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and, as editor,

Hindus and Others: the Question of Identity in India Today (1993).

Contemporary South Asia 7

Editorial board

Jan Breman, G.P. Hawthorn, Ayesha Jalal, Patricia Jeffery, Atul Kohli

Contemporary South Asia has been established to publish books on

the politics, society and culture of South Asia since 1947. In acces-

sible and comprehensive studies, authors who are already engaged in

researching speciﬁc aspects of South Asian society explore a wide vari-

ety of broad-ranging and topical themes. The series will be of interest

to anyone who is concerned with the study of South Asia and with the

legacy of its colonial past.

1 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia:

A Comparative and Historical Perspective

2 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy

3 Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery, Population, Gender and Politics:

Demographic Change in Rural North India

4 Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables:

Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India

5 Robert Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India

6 Atul Kohli (ed.), The Success of India’s Democracy

Gyan Pandey - Remembering Partition, Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2002).pdf