This paper brings out some dimensions of the crucial political relationship between Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Though this relationship had far-reaching consequences in shaping the contours of the subcontinent's turbulent history, it has not been adequately studied in partition histories.
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 experience of partition as a political and territorial separation of groups and societies is shared by a number of states in contemporary times. As many societies have been shaped in significant yet uniquely different ways by partition, this essay examines its relevance in facilitating conversations across cultures. In moving beyond contexts and cultural specificities, this essay searches for comparative insights and approaches with the potential for fruitful dialogue.
"This paper attempts to delineate and focus on the common narrative thread running through subsequent cinematic treatises on the situation of women during the Partition, particularly those kidnapped and sexually violated during the vivisection. It proposes to construct a cultural and memorialized history of the Partition through a reading of mediated representations of literary engagements with the event, particularly the narrativization of the cinematic trope of the ‘radicalized’ Muslim and his involvement in the abduction of “chaste” Hindu women during the cataclysmic event.
This paper unearths an alternative paradigm through which to consider the discussions and debates between members of the Indian public, government bureaucrats and Congress Party politicians about the rights and interests of Indian citizens both before and immediately after India's Independence in 1947. It argues that much of the recent historical work on citizenship during this period has been preoccupied with issues of nationality and religious community as a result of the fallout from Partition.
