Placing Partition: Alternative Histories of 1947 in India

In the memories of survivors, the meaning of the 1947 Indian Partition lies in the disruption of personal geographies and networks of relationships that defined the meaning of place. Though much historical attention has focused on the violence that affected the fifteen million people who crossed newly drawn borders in Punjab and Bengal, partition also resonated deeply into India’s interior. The archive of spatial experience that emerges from oral histories suggests alternative histories of partition that formed far from the disturbed borders. The residential Aligarh University, an institution dedicated to preparing elite Muslim boys for public service was a key site of pro-Pakistan activism, but for former students who chose not to migrate and remained in India, the creation of Pakistan was an ironic and distant reality that disturbed their place in community as well as in independent India. As former students describe their efforts to create new personal geographies by avoiding sites of danger they create new contexts for belonging and demonstrate the impact of national changes on local environments. Partition brought a profound and traumatic alienation as they sought to navigate the areas around their campus, familiar places now fraught with danger. These narrators did not experience the violence of the borders, they did not migrate to a new homeland, but the upheavals of partition permanently disturbed the networks of relationships and meaning through which they understood particular places: cinema halls, train cars, and the railway lines that cut across subcontinental landscapes. These disturbances became the context in which they defined the experience of belonging, and even after seventy years, the awareness of danger remains.