Much of the scholarship on Bangladesh’s founding places it within a narrative of repetition. It either repeats the partitions of 1905 or 1947 or the creation of India and Pakistan as postcolonial states. This paper argues instead for the novelty of Bangladesh’s creation against the postcolonial state, suggesting that it opened up a new history at the global level in which decolonisation was replaced by civil war as the founding narrative for new states.

This article will take as its case study the 1947 India/Pakistan partition, and is based on a large oral history project, which took place over the last five years. In this article, I focus on selected excerpts from some of my interviews, examining the ways in which people describe religious belief, practice, prejudice and violence as corporeal experiences, with markers of religiosity often inscribed on the body. I examine how the corporeality of religious violence was not an aberration from everyday religious practices, but in effect an extension of religion as an embodied entity.

The 1947 Partition of India has recently re-emerged as a thematic concern of many South Asian films about nationalism in popular and parallel cinema. These films invoke the 1947 Partition in both productive and troubling ways: they connect it to the contemplation of the role of religion in the contemporary nation-state, and of the impact of religious ethnicity, terrorism and gender on the experience of citizenship in both India and Pakistan.

India and Pakistan will celebrate their 74th Independence Day this year. Both the countries have come far from their situation on the eve of independence, in terms of infrastructure, economy, globalization and overall development. Yet, the ghost of horrendous partition continues to haunt both nations, with the relationship between India and Pakistan still strained after more than half a century. It is finally time to understand the totality of partition to overcome these differences and come to terms with the past.