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Date :  2000-11-02
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Birth of a Nation

Source :  Ranabir Samaddar


Not a leaf in the archives, but a rogue past


Fifty years ago our leader had declared at the stroke of midnight the birth of a new nation. In the fiftieth year of independence the nation remembered that it was born through partition and glanced back at that tragic happening through which the nation was born -- the partition of the country. In a vicious turn and very abruptly taken the inadequate nation had been made adequate. A partition had made the nation supposedly complete so that the subject could now become the citizen and the nation could now fly into the full panoply of state. This desperate effort to be adequate was to weigh heavily on the nation's behaviour subsequently. Hereafter, nationalist strategies would become revisionist. They were to be the testimonies of a perennially inadequate nation trying to be adequate through revolutions, passive revolutions and other defining tools, namely territoriality, modernity, federality and the tools of war and peace.

Not unnaturally, therefore, in recent times there has been a surge of interest in the partition of the sub continent, though historical scholarship has continued to argue along predictable lines. Nationalists say, this was the ultimate betrayal to the ideal of composite secularism that had been all along the main basis of the anti-colonial movement. To some historians, partition was the most damning testimony on the nation that had failed in coming to be, and the nationalist history of such a nation can not bring out the history of the violence, sufferings and trauma still retained in the memory of the masses. The Left has gone on arguing (ironically though few had put their faith in the argument of the Left whose position had become less convincing in the sub-continent following the collapse of the Soviet Union, recently the Left has been enjoying a renewed interest of the politically aware people in their argument) that partition was a particular form of decolonization of the region, the retreat of a great power, the way of ensuring the residuary existence of the colonial mode of power, and the final ascendency of the bourgeoisie in the region defeating the upsurge of the anti colonial radical masses in the period 1945-47. Yet in this last argument, we have more political explanations and little history and thus the radical explanatory argument becomes a history with big spaces and gaps. And interestingly all these arguments which link the destiny of the nationalist movement with the movement for a separate identity, and the arrival of independence, have to rely as necessity, as matter of imperative, on history -- and therefore the question of political particularity escapes all of them. This indeed remains at the bottom of the intriguing and thus the interesting conjecture, i.e., the arousal of interest today in partition and the stranglehold of history the event -- the watershed in our region's experiences of de-colonisation and the consequential failure in understanding the continuities and discontinuities in the subsequent biography of the nation.

Writing on partition therefore means understanding the birth of a nation -- a birth that was not simply a synonym of independence, but indicative of a more fundamental process of de-colonisation. Anything less than full engagement with that specificity is unlikely to `explain' the event -- the transition -- and will not do if we do not want to end by assuming the very thing that needs to be explained, i.e., assuming in circular fashion its prior existence. Since the event is linked to a `transition' -- transition from colonialism to independence/post-coloniality, transition from nationalist secularism to separatism and communalism, and from a united entity to a vivisected region, we have here all the peculiarities of a transition debate, namely the characteristics of tautology. This characteristic of tautology in discussions on the birth of the independent nation leaves the particularity of the birth all the more un-addressed, particularly as the dynamics of de-colonisation of South Asia is now laid bare after all these fifty years. It is this dissatisfaction with the birth which remains at the root of the arousal of memory, the strivings for different possibilities of the same history, the deliberate construction of a region called South Asia, and what Anthony Giddens has noted, ` the heavily counter factual nature of future-oriented thought -- an essential element of the reflexivity of modernity' . A `modern' India today is patently dissatisfied with its origin in 1947: the three wars with her neighbour, her own insecurities and insecurity syndrome, the permanent division of the nation into majorities and minorities, the failure of a state induced capitalist developmental agenda, insubordination of the permanently underprivileged classes, and a refusal to accept the modernist consummation -- from all sides, the right, centre, the left, all demanding a redefining of the agenda of modern nation, all these fuelling dissatisfaction with the origin.

And all this is likely to `reopen' the partition question. The official position so long had been that communal violence was `madness', partition was rational; now as genealogical dissatisfaction spreads, partition's legitimacy no longer remains unaffected or can no longer escape the gaze. Its rationality now appears as strictly contingent (thus disputing the inevitability argument); this contingency in turn reactivating memory, creating new regions and sub regions, problematizing trans border human movements in the region, provoking alternative discourses of nationhood. Not unnaturally therefore we find the rationalist explanation of partition being interrogated, `reason's externalisation', i.e., partition, being investigated by the genealogical heretics, the project of modernising the nation, making it adequate being dragged into the court of critical consciousness.

We can point to a deep paradox around the idea of the birth of a nation. The paradox springs from the dialectic of the familiar and unfamiliar. The idea that political and national unit should be congruent is familiar to the people, it appears as natural. But the experiences of such a `congruency' are unfamiliar, they have been to say the least shocking, traumatic. Nation will mean minorities; each ethnic structure will have `historic background'; nationalism will present themselves in terms of language and cultural rights; suppressed identities will mean `new majority' or `new minority'; and finally communication as a strategy will appear as the key to inter ethnic conflicts and inter community relations. The unfamiliarity of these experiences, particularly in terms of their congealed form and rationalisation, drags the nation back to partition. The `stability' of fifty years leads our gaze to the most unstable event of this century in our part of the world. The paradox produces not mere intellectual curiosity, but a `rogue' past, and a genealogical heresy spreading remorselessly in the society.

The received history is clearly inadequate in understanding the situation. Even when all details of partition are excavated, dissatisfaction in terms of `explanation' will be incessantly produced. Such dissatisfaction is because of the transformations produced by partition: from a colonial state to a welfare state; from subject to citizen; nation as a locus of desire to one of depravity; tropes of respectability to those of malign; from `our nationalism' to `their' sectarianism; and finally from the language of commonness to one of grievance. Partitioned independence has been the `imaginative trigger' -- it has triggered claims to permanently ascribed communal and secular discourses. The structures and rhetoric in the separation of one from the other discourse have underpinned the distinctions in the sub continent. Partition thus will be never a settled fact in the sense of settling something, settling the birth of a nation, settling disorder; in producing the differences it will remain unsettled, unsettling, provoking the `others' in the sub continent. Even while receding into a past of half century, partition therefore it remains a reality, more so as partition becomes a concentrated metaphor of violence, fear, domination, difference, separation, unsatisfactory resolution of the problems, in one word, past. A past that goes on making the present inadequate.


Birth and recovery of memory

Ayesha Jalal has recently taken to task some historians for neglecting in their study of partition the elite politics of communalism which was so much associated with the birth of two nations in the sub-continent. According to her, the politics of the elite became at one point the mass politics of communalism. She criticises the overemphasis on the feelings of the masses in the times of violence, separation, and carnage and the simultaneous neglect of the fundamental political forces represented by major political parties and personalities; she criticises also for failing `to un-package the notion of an all-India Muslim `communalism' to create analytical space for the conflicting regional strands in Muslim politics which fashioned the League's demands'. The radical historians, she has argued, have been so involved in `the question of the inability of the `nation' to come into its own', that it was `trifle awkward' for them `to recognise the subjecthood of the `Muslim Other''. She has criticised the simplistic belief that the history of the masses in 1947 can be recovered through a historiographical emphasis on the recurring episodes of violence in Indian history and on a specific moment of violence like 1947, because in this notion all violence that is not state violence becomes an undifferentiated category. While she admits that there may be a need to write a history of partition and of its violence that is not assimilated and subordinated to the career of the Indian nation-state, she has warned this historiographical argument cannot be over-stressed. Communal consciousness in the subaltern mind has to be dissected, fundamental political forces have to be analysed; historical investigation `of the high level of politics and the areas of state (becomes) indispensable in unravelling the dynamics of the post-colonial transition'. Implied in this criticism of Jalal is a rejection of the new methods and points of analysis which will lay more stress on memory, oral history, experiences of violence, contingency, and a basic rejection of the rationality represented by the nation-state.

We need not judge Ayesha Jalal's views in the context of this book. But her criticisms provide an occasion to bring into light certain problems inherent in a genealogical writing on the birth of a nation. First, events like partition show, how the `hard history' of a time trying explain the event ends up in being baffled with the particularity of the event. For instance, the historiography of communalism in India has spoken of communalism, secularism, nationalism, separatism -- everything; yet it has rarely spoken of how in a country like India traditional religion works in an ethnic context, in other words how with ethnic integration (of certain communities/societies), legitimation and mobilisation, religion becomes `civil religion' and a mode of articulating civil and traditional rights; how coupled with a concurrence of certain circumstances, the civil religion becomes the occasion of `events' like partition (and will continue to remain so). In other words, we shall have history -- but as history of explanations. Still lacking in complex levels of understanding, the context will not be the text. Furthermore in stressing the context, we face a kind of elite closure. As we have seen in the case of the official language of secularism, this over contextualization silences certain things, evoking others. The language of contextualization has power over the subject-positions, exercises authoritative modalities, can strategically refuse to answer some crucial questions, and thereby can refuse the text. In this milieu of over-contextualization the birth of the nation remains the most enigmatic chapter in the nation's life.

The second problem emanating out of Ayesha Jalal's views of what we should have as our historical understanding of partition is more fundamental. If the argument is that in order to understand the event, i.e., partition, we have to move to kind of event-less macro-history of the longue duree, how are we to understand the actions and the actors which `culminate' in the interconnections of material conditions, identities, social relations, shared beliefs and experiences, collective interactions and the reordering of power? Obviously it is not enough to say that we have to move from an `eventful history' to an `events-in-history' argument that bases itself on some master process. For, as partition shows, as against events-in-history, we also witness history-in-event, in other words, as against a history that had never anticipated partition, we now have a history of the region created by partition and a history that lives under it. This is true of all contentious politics, particularly the contentious politics of the forties.

Third, it may be accepted for argument's sake that the event is only the surface of the fundamental. But how does one recover the fundamental? How is one to be assured that the given method of history will recover the event as people saw, experienced, lived, found themselves victimised by and being perished under? I can anticipate two criticisms to this poser. It may be said, this is a valorisation of the event and such valorisation is also a construction later on put onto the happening; also, this is a mystification of the event, for by suggesting that by resorting to extra-historical methods one can recover the event, one actually ends up by invoking the ephemeral only, like in this case, memory. To the first criticism, it can be reasonably replied that it is not some particular method that privileges the event in this case, but the history that this event creates in its wake that continues to privilege it. On the second criticism we need to devote some attention. Why does the retrieval of popular attitudes involved in the event become so crucial in recovering the fundamental? Because, the given history of partition has left very little space for its political neutering. A political history of partition that throws light on the transformations in the process of power will have to throw light above all on whom power was to be exercised. Hence the importance of all which speak of them, their memory, their attitude, their literature, in other words the repertoire. And again it is not memory per se, that is important, but the politics of the contemporary time which evokes memory -- the politcs of oral history. As one recent analysis of the reminiscences of the refugees from East Pakistan after the partition shows, people talk of the past so as to distinguish `now' from a different `then' in a way that often underlines, that every `now' is the consequence of many `then', of vastly different duration in an amalgam characteristic to each person experiencing it. Recovery of memory is thus not a clinical practice producing trauma stories. It is a historical practice. To put it in a political language, we can recall the words of Alessandro Portelli, the oral historian of the working class movement of Italy, `to tell a story is to take arms against the threat of time ... the telling of a story preserves the teller from oblivion.' `Told as it must be at a specific time and in a phase of irreversible time, the tale itself creates a special time, ` a time outside time'. Time is one of the essential things stories are about.'

Therefore making sense of the time of partition, the time which it created, and the time when it is recounted means the acknowledgement of coexistent times. This sub continent's past without partition, of a partition, a partition that creates its biography, i.e., its reality as a possible instrument against the present, a reality that governs relations, a reality that the present wants to avoid -- these are the coexistent phenomena which a conventional history fails to grasp. Paul Ricoeur had somewhere defined event with almost an ideal emphasis on contingency, uniqueness and individuality. He could have added that each such event then creates a structure, a structure governing the present, and its narratives of the past. It is this close link between the narrative form and historical knowledge which Ayesha Jalal seems to have missed.

This is not to suggest that representations of past-ness have some unique linguistic status. To grasp their historical intent we need to view the representations of past-ness as literature, to grasp their literary mode we need to view them as part of social action; and that means viewing them in terms of historical intent. In other words, in the historicization of the event of the birth of a nation we have all the elements of a strategy: authors and their authorisations, the structure of accounts, temporality, i.e., narrators and their times, truthfulness, and finally the dialectic that if memory makes us we also make memory. Thus a genealogical account of nation is fundamentally a case of recall and social reproduction of knowledge, a case of flexible relational boundary between history as lived and history as recounted or written, a relation between cognition and history, that is politics. The hour of birth seems destined to remain as that dark hour of mystery which will keep on inviting the chroniclers, narrators and the interrogators throughout the life of the nation.


The lost home where the nation was born

Now of course beyond the intellectual arguments about the required history of the birth of a nation, there is today the partitioned region of South Asia -- de-colonised and arranged into a states system. De-colonisation through partition has ensured a particular continuity of colonial relations and ways of power. The transmogrification, expressed in the familiar word `post-coloniality' remains a daily reality as relations between nations, states, communities, and sub-regions in this part of the globe continue to be influenced by that fateful event of 1947, even as globalisation overwhelms it as it does with respect to other regions. Indeed, it will not be irrelevant to remind ourselves that globalisation is mediated here through the order ushered in by partition.

With partition, we have today South Asia, what was earlier only Hindustan, or simply the sub-continent whose margin vanished imperceptibly into another region -- the Turco-Persian part of the continent. That indefinability is gone forever, the home where the nation was born is now lost and a region that has been constructed on the reality of vivisection now suffers from its raison d'etre which is partition. Yet that home remains, ironically only in form of others, others previously part of us; it was a home that is gone and is able to relive only in form of reflexive images, more accurately in form of reflexive nationalism.

The question is, how will this home of today tackle the phenomenon of reflexive nationalism that lie beneath it? This reflexivity is evident in the character of the nations who define themselves in respect to each other. Moreover, it implies that South Asia's own identity is in fact constituted by the other. Now that partition and the succeeding fifty years has ruled out the easy or programmatic solutions of either complete reunification or total dispersion, the implication is both universality and difference, for old pre partition times containing many values were never enough to ensure respect to each other. Europe these days is increasingly talking of reunion. South east Asia is talking of union in form of association. People here are learning from them and want South Asia to `return in its history and geography like one who is returning home'. But returning where? To a common cultural space? But culture would mean, first of all, identity, i.e., difference with others, and then difference with (in) itself. How then to accommodate the differences, the permanent process of `otherization'? To a common economic space? But the truth is that, marked by multiple colonial linkages and the exclusion of the majority from the `economy' it had never been a common economic space at all; this common economic space can arguably be created but we cannot return to it. To a common historic space? But this historic space includes partition, and today we cannot return to it excluding that epoch. Like every history, this history of partition, i.e., the history that created it and the history that it created, can be summarised. Then how can we include this summary in this other history of commonness, whose summary will have other movement, memory, promise, identity? All this simply means we cannot `return', we can only `turn' on an acknowledgement of differences, the differences of a unity, in unity, with other unity.

We have yet other reasons to enquire into the way partition has marked the regionalization of South Asia. In this regionalization, interestingly there is rediscovery of old fault-lines. Orthodox and fanatic Islam, backward sub regions, non patriotic frontier tribes, small neighbours prone to blackmailing the stable and strong nation, historic connections with other regions, natural area of influence -- all these are being rediscovered, much in the same way fault-lines are being rediscovered in Eastern Europe in the process of Europe's regionalization today. The irony, therefore, is briefly this: in regionalization of South Asia unity is the theme, that is how the nation is to return home. But in forging a policy of uniting, it rediscovers the old fault-lines -- in fact the nation has to mark these out, redefine them in order to erect the new political-economic and security arrangements. Therefore designations of underdevelopment, permanent fundamentalist threats to liberal values and civilised existence, backwardness, etc., are found out and they become the reinforcing material for a neo-modernisation theory which can map out the cultural region of South Asia -- the home of this nation. That is how the core of the region is built. In the resultant marginalization of certain elements to build the core of a region, partition still remains the reference point. The agenda of finding back the home seems to have an inviolable validity, so too remains the validity of partition -- the most stringent event or theme contradicting the former exercise.

In short, we have not one, but two declarations of independence and de-colonisation, which we celebrate in recalling the birth of a nation. One celebrates the advent of independence of nations, the rise of South Asia as a distinct region, the beginning of de-colonisation; the other announces the commencement of the journey of a fractured region, the validation and legalisation of the conservative approach to community empowerment, the strategic success of a policy of weakening the Left, the creation of a milieu that will allow strong residues of colonial ways of power, and finally the strengthening of the rhetoric of `besieged fortress' that will be the justification of call by the new right to support traditional values and cultural homogeneity. These two declarations of independence have sanctified a political scene which is dominated by the issue of collective representation and consequently reactionary demagogues are given a clear advantage and legitimacy. The result is a strict policing of community's mores, a paranoid suspicion of other groups -- the easiest way to create a sense of national and/or communitarian unity. In short this janus faced independence gave South Asia political power, democracy and an assurance that the dream of ethnic liberation is worth pursuing; it also created communities of the afflicted and aliens in their homeland -- both.

Yet why is there still such a naive belief that 1947 was not a janus faced event, that it only created two (subsequently three) independent states, it may have been unfortunate, but that accommodation between the states will undo the contradictory aspects thereof? If, as seems clear, minority categories (religion, language, territory, tribe, etc.,) in this region, called the "home of the nation", are historically formed and continuously in the process of formation, then there cannot be an easy recourse to an administrative or statist solution to such contradiction, assuming that such categories are fixed points of descriptive reference. In the absolutization of such categories, there is a populist substitution by what they are `today' in place of the more complex accounts of their historical location, differential access, internal cleavages, and potentialities of transformations. The breakdown of such categories as entities therefore always appears as sudden with eternally unlearnable experiences, the analysis of the institutional operation of the partitioning categories remaining always unsatisfactory.

More important in this context is the psychological framework of a populist right. The partition provided an abiding lesson to the populist right namely that the politics of identity is not necessarily a threat to conservative goals and constituencies. The cooptation of identity politics by the populist right since 1947 has presented the Left with three major problems: (a) conservative constituencies have proved well suited for a `cultural war' in which different communities fight for their mutually exclusive empowerment; (b) their success has stemmed from the fact that a populist mixture of reactionary ideology and anti establishment feelings and posture has been undeniably empowering in the sense that a community's empowerment has become synonymous to the increase of the prestige and power of its leaders; (c) and the liberals in the long run have been pushed to the right. This new right basing itself on populism achieves success because its programme is moralistic, it is a loosely organized movement, strongly anti-intellectual, opposed to `establishment', and finally communal, nationalist, often xenophobic. This success again was clearly demonstrated in the agenda and act of partition and has capitalised on that experience.

Partition, in other words, has become a signifier of the duality of our nationhood, independence and democracy, also of the potentialities of its fascisization, of the viability of the new right. We have of course a conflation of two meanings here. It signifies certain things, it also has the capacity to create other signs of politics -- in short partition has become a part in the symbolic order of politics in South Asia.

It would be wrong to find in partition only the rise of the populist right in the post colonial modern politics of South Asia. At a more fundamental level we have in this birth of our nation the question of a modern representative politics in conditions of South Asian post coloniality. The question classically stated may be like this: representative political system is based on representation of necessity, identity and the self, in other words interest. Where interest has been articulated around mostly group or a collectivity, representational problematic will be, how to organize the hierarchies of representations. On one hand, representational politics will validate the nation which is the highest group or community, on the other hand it has to give space to other interests, hierarchically, for by according supremacy to the nation it has admitted the logic of hierarchy. Therefore the genealogy of the citizen in South Asia is caught in the representational bind. If citizenship in South Asia has been thus a transactional identity only, based on the necessity of exchange of unequally endowed individuals, and of unequal agencies, it should not cause surprise, for the language of citizenship in South Asia has been too long embedded in collectivities of various kinds to be discarded by any liberal rhetoric about a clean birth of the nation. We shall return to this theme in greater detail in the later part of this book.

It has been rightly noted that `the history of thinking about citizenship, like that about the state, belongs to the vast category of things ancient made modern by their adaptation first by Christians and then by medieval Italian urbanites -- the difference being that when we use `state', we intend the modern definition, whereas when we use `citizen', we intend the ancient, anachronism notwithstanding'. Partition was the instrumentalist solution (reason of state) to these dilemmas of hierarchy, anachronism and necessity, because it was thought that by partitioning the polity (hence the society as well) the problematic of representation would achieve the most drastic, and the most modern, solution -- though as can be seen now, the problem retains itself at the heart of the solution. Partition has exposed the nation to the deep instability in the notion of representation and citizenship. Globalization has not minimized the instabilities, by accentuating the particularities of both self and the communities it has accentuated them. Salman Rushdie has commented that writing of homeland from abroad is like being obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. He may not know, to the inhabiting citizen also it is a life of dealing in broken mirrors.


A place under the sun, else a place in the shade

Of course, inspite of being battered from within, where all problems faced by the nation seem to have both internal and external links, the nation must have a place under the sun, if not then `a place in the shade'. Buffeted by the simultaneous process of rapid globalization and massive regionalization in various parts of the globe, the nation in India finds itself in a world which is unfamiliar and deeply disturbing. The political parties also realize their limited influence in this process of regionalization, as they had been working since partition almost solely under national laws and national terms and frames. Economic dissatisfaction and political alienation have led to local self government movements or movements based on local identity. The `local' is now being redefined, its locus rediscovered often leading to new regionalizing links, mistakenly called the `sub-regional' links. In this milieu, the notion of territory is assuming increasing importance. Again we can mark the hour of its birth as the beginning of a territorialist consciousness.

Upto the fifties and may be part of sixties, the leaders of this nation had ambitions of having a place under the sun -- the glory of an independent nation had not still rusted, to remain European was a possibility. But world events, the decline and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union, the increasing irrelevance of the non-aligned movement, the crisis of a bureaucratic-capitalist economy, and the increasing realization that the area of South Asia cannot made into a `national lake' of India brought into open the limits of a South Asian power. The ambitious actor's role remained cruelly unfulfilled. Ironically the realization of the impossibility of being a world actor led to the `alternative', i.e., being a major power of Asia, the hegemon of South Asia which in effect meant may mean sometimee being the green helmet of the peace-keeping/enforcing/ or punishing forces everywhere.

Almost three hundred years back, Montesquieu had pointed out the difference between kingdoms and republics, namely that, kingdoms want to achieve glory through international action, while republics pursue long term interests. But parliamentary regimes and today's republics follow in many cases the policy of the kingdoms of the olden days. George Bush wanted America to recover from defeatism and regain self-esteem through the Gulf war. In South Asia too glory has become the objective of the republics. Territorialism has become an essential part of the policy to attain glory and this territorialist consciousness, we can say, almost begins with partition. Inevitably therefore, a foreign policy based on territorialism and aimed at glory and prestige and healing national frustrations has brought back to surface the very differences in the historic heritages that had begot these same frustrations and had resulted in territorial losses and shrinkages fifty years ago. The political project of a South Asian unity is therefore an impossibility, unless the problem of territorialism is solved democratically, or through the conquering sword as of Prussia or through an axis. The current impossibility of non-entanglement of the territorial problem prevents the nation from embarking onto `grand politics' -- the type of politics which jolts the imagination of the masses and provides glory, standing, rank. The acknowledgement of this inadequacy to do `grand politics' has led it to try for the second best -- if not a place under the sun, at least for a place in the shade.

There is always a danger in seeking this place however. For, it means ignoring the past of partition and the unclean birth. Jurgen Habermas has insisted on the singularity of the Auschwitz experience and has seen in the attempt at its banalization the danger of a derivation towards a sonderweg -- a seperate path. Similarly we are now faced with the banalization of our past, the past of partition, and a desire to develop our `own' geopolitics, ignoring that it was the event that first led to this search.

It is like pushing the frontier back, enlarging one's own area of security, eternally defining the cordon sanitaire. What is then this cordon or frontier? It may be a mythic exercise, but in being so, very real. It is the cutting edge between `civilized' and `uncivilized land', between `settled' and the area of `epidemic' which provides sustenance to the unsettling elements, it is a geographical concept eternally being adapted to an imaginative exercise. This exercise orients the post colonial history of this nation to one dominated by space rather than by time. In such a mythic region, the fungoid territory is eternally contracting for some, expanding for other. The green helmets remain the frontiersmen who know `what partition signifies for the frontier', their potency being derived from the frontier myths as of everywhere, i.e., struggle of the frontiersmen against savages and rebellious races, and the marauding tribes from outside.

It is necessary, however, to understand the issue of territorialism as the product of partition in a more concrete way. By cutting the territory, also by making the task of guarding the territory defined by the colonial rulers as `India' (we have to only think of the British frontier policy in the sub continent) an imperative, partition has accentuated the territorialist consciousness in the region. The logic of territory, namely standardization, formalization, centralization and configuration, euphemistically called in the region as `territorial integrity', has now turned into a statist strategy to rationalize, affect, influence and control. Originating from an `unclean partition', the territorialist consciousness of the nation in the sub continent will eternally disturb the neatly segmented universe of the standard political map of this region of South Asia, the home of this nation. For, the result of 1947 was not only a partition of the territory, but the foundation of a new states-system in the region, prone to be revised again and again. The super imposing maps of dreamland states drawn by Chaudhuri Rehmat Ali now hung in the Lahore Museum speak of the strength of the geopolitical imagination active in the subcontinent. What is surprising therefore is not the uniqueness of Rehmat Ali's imagination, but the extraordinary similarity of the spirit of those maps with the inherent instability of the geopolitical imagination of the nation in South Asia.


Framing history, silencing voices

A definitive history of the birth of this nation is therefore ruled out, though attempts to frame a history will continue. Indeed, greater more the embarrassment with the counter voices (that is, counter to the political essence of partition), extinct and extant, greater will be the despair to frame a history. It is important to note that one of the most clever attempts to silence these counter voices is today taking the form of an argument which in the name of advocating the specific history of each third world country almost denies the universality of the experiences of these countries -- the experience of being subject to colonialism, again the almost universal experiences of the process of partition and decolonization, the destruction of indigenous social and often political institutions, the universality of poverty, underdevelopment and neoimperial control, and the problematic fate of the agenda of building nationhood under the conditions stated above. If India or Pakistan or Bangladesh has suffered from partition, bloodshed, mass eviction, so too have suffered other third world countries in a more or less similar way. Partition in this sense has been one of the earliest chapters in the universal history of decolonization -- which has been so specific an experience of the colonized countries. It is this specificity of colonization and decolonization that is now being sought to be denied in the name denying universalization of third world experiences. In the name of `political specificity', `longue duree history', `indigenous patterns of inequality', and `absence of feudal structures', we are now being told that we shall have to substitute the universal categories of colonialism, racism, decolonization, nationalism, and neocolonial domination, by a specific `discursive genre of politics' which will bring out our political specificities, the regimes of power in our countries, the governing paradigm that enables the governing of subjects, who we are told in a strange recourse to Foucault, are `subjects because they belong to, behave as both an element of and an actor in a global process whose development defines the current field of possible experiences, inside of which the fact of being subject can only be situated'. This is not to deny that countries of the third world have specificities, that one is distinct from the other, that universalist categories are insufficient to explain the political histories of the states and patterns of rule in these countries. Yet if we are told that partition, a very specific experience of South Asia, can be studied without the perspective of decolonization, agenda of nation-making, etc., it will imply in effect silencing the very specificity of the histories of partition -- the first step towards silencing the counter voices.

The backdoor entry of the developmentalist discourse of third world politics has had pervasive results in our own political thinking. Thus partition is still a result of `weak indigenous political institutions', a `weak civil society', `the refusal of the society to go along the rationalist path of a secular nation building'. In all these arguments the common refrain is the disjunction between state and society which supposedly led to the partition of the country. By implication it is also argued that this country had no long tradition of statehood, state was only a colonial gift/result, hence the state broke down not unexpectedly during such times of disorder. And indeed, as the argument stretches a little, since the indigenous state is incapable of conflict resolution on such scale, either we may not as well have a state (the radical version) or `they' should come to train us in statecraft (the conservative version). One need not be a statist to see through the hollowness of such a revised developmentalist argument. Its only relevance as an argument lies in silencing the specificity of the context of partition (and other similar events, the current situation in Bosnia being an obvious one more example, where restoration of peace has to be accompanied by a compulsive agenda of new state building) -- a context wherefrom the counter-voices stem and in fact were a part of that context.

Framing a history to silence certain voices -- exactly what do we mean by this in the context of our effort to understand the secret hour of the nation's birth? We can end this discussion only after trying an answer to the poser, for the history of the partition of India remains incomplete without the narrative of how this history is built upon silencing the counter voices. The rise of the various radical movements since 1942 is too well known to be recounted here. There is now enough documentation on the activist and rebellious mood of the masses and the radical mass upsurges during 1945-50. It is curious, that those who should have been most proud of this legacy and of the fact that this had characterized the times of partition, are embarrassed by it and hesitate to accept them as the countervoices to the particular process of decolonization through partition. And those who speak of the specific experiences of the people during the times of partition donot speak of the experiences of their uprisings, and their defeat at the hands of the state, the colonial power and the forces soon to assume power. And, expectedly, those obsessed with the search for a history of secularism versus communalism with the defeat of the former donot link these events at all, they are an embarrassment to all. It is not apposite for a history of the mass psychology of the people, for a secularist history, for a developmentalist history, in short for a positive history of the birth of a nation. It is however worthwhile to remember that this exclusionary framing, premature narrative closure, and the mythification of certain aspects of the event were inevitable to the process of partition and decolonization itself, in short to the genesis of the nation.

Victor Turner had suggested by the now known word `liminality' a moment in which `the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one's own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements'. The silence about the complexities in partition, about the extraordinary coincidence of the radical upsurges and the turn of the radical mood of the Muslim masses into a communal activism (in East Bengal it was said, what Tebhaga? Why fight for it? With Tebhaga you get only a share, with Pakistan you get the whole.), about the `peasant utopia', suggests the reaction to a liminality in form of premature closure by a straightjacket history, by the social and displicinary forces of political and ideological establishment, by information management and an ensuing collective self-censorship. We shall require a great amount of research into the discourse of partition in all the three countries, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, to come to a full understanding of the silencing process. Without this aspect, very difficult now to recover, the birth of this nation remains a theoretically knowable but actually unknown historical story, which makes the consideration of the various versions of the event a part of the history of the event itself.

That story is now happily closed for all except for some impossible dreamers, and is now regarded as an aberration of catastrophic measure. The nation seems to have learnt the lessons well, it is now determined that the catastrophy must not be allowed to repeat, which indeed by succeeding to be seen as such has silenced those countervoices. The passive revolution was complete not only by a change of guards and a very active event of bloodbath, but also by a pursuasive silencing of the discourses of all other possibilities of that time.

That is how the history of the birth of a nation has prepared the nation for its own subsequent history.


Notes

1. This has been noted by one of the perceptive commentators on the `transition debate'. See, Ellen Meiksins Wood, `Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeios Revolution -- Reflections on the Brenner Debate and Its Sequel', International Review of Social History, Vol 41, part 2, August 1996, pp 209-32.
2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity ), p 154.
3. These are indeed the issues `discovered' in the East European landscape today. See for example, Jana Plichtova (ed.), Minorities in Politics -- Cultural and Language Rights (Bratislava: Czechoslovak Committee of the European Cultural Foundation, 1992).
4. Ayesha Jalal, `Secularists, Subalterns and Stigma of `Communalism': Partition Historiography Revisited', Modern Asian Studies, 30 (3), July 1996, pp 681-689.
5. I am indebted to Norman Fairclough's Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989) for my understanding of elite closure effected through the language of contextualization.
6 . For a helpful discussion, Sidney Tarrow, `The People's Two Rhythms: Charles Tilly and the Study of Contentious Politics', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (3), July 1996, pp 586-600.
7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, `Remembered Villages -- Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition', Economic and Political Weekly, 10 August, 1996, pp 2143-2151; however, in the context of what I am arguing here I shall draw attention to works like Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries -- Women in India's Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), Urbashi Butalia, "Community, State and Gender -- On Women's Agency During Partition", Economic and Political Weekly, 28 (17), 24 April, 1993.
8. Alessandro Portelli, `The time of my Life -- Function of Time in Oral History', International Journal of Oral History, 2 (3), 1981, p 162.
9. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts -- The Social Reconstruction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p 9.
10. On the construction of a region and its relation to nation, I have written earlier, Whose Asia Is It Anyway -- Region and the Nation in South Asia (Calcutta: M. A. K. Azad Institute of Asian Studies/Pearl Publishers, 1996), chap 3.
11. On a similar question concerning Europe, Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading -- Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp 4-20.
12. The best instance of such rediscovery is of course S.P. Huntington, `The Clash of Civilizations?', Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 1993, pp 22-49; Huntington, `If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post Cold War World', Foreign Affairs, 72(5), 1993, pp 186-194. On an analysis of such paradigms in regionalizing Europe, Elizabeth H. Prodromou, `Paradigms, Power and Identity: Rediscovering Orthodoxy and Regionalizing Europe', European Journal of Political Research, 30(2), September, 1996, pp 125-154.
13. I am indebted for this idea of a janus faced independence to Michael Rogin's essay, `The Two Declarations of American Independence', Representations, 55, Summer 1996, pp 13-30.
14. Peter N. Miller, `Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern Europe', Journal of the History of Ideas, 57(4), 1997, p 728.
15. Salman Rushdie, `Imaginary Homelands' in his Imaginary Homelands -- Essays and Criticism 1981-91 (London: Penguin, 1992), pp 9-21.
16. Harry Blair has recently argued for the relevance of the locals and sub-regions cutting, across the boundaries of the states, in a democratic solution of the problems like that of forests, waters, and areas, emanating from the territorial division of the sub continent and for common property resource management. See, `Democracy, Equity and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Subcontinent', Development and Change, 27, 1996, pp475-499.
17. I am indebted to Giuseppe Sacco's essay on the problems of European foreign policy, `A Place in the Shade', The European Journal of International Affairs, 12(2), 1991, pp 5-23.
18. Even perceptive observers miss the role of 1947 in the development of Indian geopolitical thinking -- an event that marked the shift of the nation from marking out a cultural region/area to a geopolitical area as its `natural habitat'. See for example a RAND study by George K. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought -- An Interpretative Essay (Santa Monica, CA: National Defense Research Institute, 1992).
19. These maps are of `Pakistan in 1757', `Pakistan in 1847', `Pakistan, Dravidstan, Bangastan, Uttarstan', etc,.
20. For example, Jean Francois Bayart, `Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory' in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Thirld World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), pp 51-71.
21I am grateful to Partha Chatterjee for drawing our attention to similar attempts, though in a different context. See Nation and Fragments -- Colonial and Post Colonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 2.
22. Bayart, `Finishing with the Idea of the Third World', p 67.
23. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), p 13.
24. Taj ul Hashmi in speaking of Pakistan -- A Peasant Utopia (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1994) discusses the dynamics of the development of the Pakistan consciousness, and the coexistence of the radical agrarian consciousness in East Bengal, but does not adequately discuss the relation and the link between them and how in fact the former succeeds in coopting and eventually silencing the latter. Partha Chatterjee also in drawing to a close his discussions on Bengal The Land Question: 1927-47 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1985) does not explicate the issue of the coexistence of these and how the latter is subsumed by the former, and keeps the question suspended. Possibly we shall need much more detailed accounts of the ground level experiences of the fate of the movements (of both types, and of the mixed ones) in East Bengal in the period 1935-50, to have a surer answer to this important question. Fortunately, after 1971 in Bangladesh we have now the autobiographical and biographical accounts easily surpassing fifty, some examples being the accounts of Jasimuddin Mandal, Hatem Ali Khan, Amulya Sen, Satyen Sen, Maulana Bhasani, Maulavi Hannan, Jatin Mukherjee, Abdul Matin, Md.Toha, etc. We have also now more and more analytical reports throwing light on the said coexistence, like the first two volumes of the 6 volume series of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies on the language movement in East Pakistan, Bhasha Andolan: Tatparja O Bichar, ed. by Atiur Rehman and Azad Lenin (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1995).
25. With 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh, we can say that one of the possibilities of 1947 was realized, and one of the counter voices was ultimately heard. See in this context the writings of Abul Hashim or Abul Mansur Ahmed. But this does not alter my argument.
26. In an essay on the passive resolution in India Sudipta Kaviraj discusses the coalitional relations of ruling classes, seen particularly in terms of a crucial initial stage of political realignments, and as phases of experimentation, consolidation and instability. The formation of a ruling bloc was certainly important in the strategy of a passive revolution. Yet he does not discuss in the otherwise detailed essay the role of force in "passivity" and the particular nature of decolonisation of the sub-continent in the unfolding of the strategy of building the state. Here again it seems that the orthodox Left arguments have stood the test of time better. See his "A Critique of Passive Revolution in India" in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp 45-88.



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