Living through Partition: Continuity and Change in the Subcontinent

When the British left in 1947, India emerged as an independent state flanked by the two-winged Pakistan. By 1971, East Pakistan sought and won its independence from the West to become Bangladesh, thus undermining the logic by which Pakistan had been created as a unified homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent. The independence of Bangladesh is but one of the episodes that exposes the need to examine the long episode of India’s independence and partition and the ways in which the post-partition states have struggled to serve all of their citizens, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

            Oral histories I collected in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh from 2005-2010 shed light on the connections between local and national struggles over belonging for Muslims who survived the partition. Though the narrators all emerged from the same educational environment—the Aligarh Muslim University outside Delhi—they chose different futures.Having opted to migrate towards the initial promises of Pakistan or remain rooted in India, informants in all three post-partition states have continued to struggle with questions of belonging and the conflict between their own identities and official state narratives that define the meaning of partition. For these narrators, expectations of independence were determined and conditioned by the particularity of the place in which they were educated, and their vision for independence and the role of the state was tied directly to their experience there. Seventy years on, their memories of the lived experience of decolonization—read: partition—reveal that the reality of independence has fallen far short of these expectations. By examining the continuity and change over time and space, represented by the scaling of the analysis from the local to the transnational, new histories of partition emerge that redefine the experience of decolonization in India.