Abstract
Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India by Anjali Gera Roy is a work that probes the memory of middle-class and upper-caste Hindu and Sikh survivors and eyewitnesses of India’s Partition in 1947. Roy examines the ethics of remembrance by asking, “How good is the memory archive in view of memory being fallible, selective, affective, intuitive, and corporeal?” (Butalia, 1998: 13). Given the unreliability of memory/oral storytelling, how is it that there has been an upward trend in using stories to reconstruct the larger picture and the history of Partition? Most importantly, how does one bring forth these stories within the traditional understanding of history and not appropriate them?
The Partition happened in 1947, and hence, it is imperative to collect, record, and archive the oral histories of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent as these stories might soon vanish. This is an admirable effort by Roy to highlight the value of memory and its narratives and the historical narrative. The author stands tall on the arguments and theories of stalwarts in the field of memory and postmemory which gave a much-needed push to Partition studies, which is otherwise drenched with political debates around the transfer of power.
Roy’s work is grounded in the debates around memory, history, postmemory, and trauma to paint a clear picture of the afterlife of the Partition. Scholars of Partition like Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, and Veena Das (including Roy) have created another narrative of India’s 1947 Partition that consists of lost stories of common people who were displaced by the violence of Partition in and around 1947. Such scholarly works have tried to compensate for the scarcity of such micro-histories in Partition’s official histories that are still all about the Indian subcontinent achieving freedom from the British colonial power. Political histories have almost always focused on the history of elite individuals or groups, unlike the narrative produced by Partition scholars that focuses more on local events and ordinary people. Roy is highlighting the small voices that have been mostly absent from the records of the nation-state.
Ricoeur, in his work Memory, History, and Forgetting (2006), talked about oral historians’ resurrection of forgotten memories which raises important issues about the relationship between remembering, forgetting, and memory. Roy talks about how oral historians have tried to ascertain a victimhood plot in the chronicles of Partition by focusing on the incidents of barbarism and misery. With the help of application of trauma theory in oral histories (Butalia, 1998), poststructuralist theories on the unspeakability of the suffering in fictional representations (Das, 1990; Kamra, 2002), and of nationhood rhetoric in statist discourses (Tai and Kudaisya 2004), why survivors choose not to remember has been explained.
Through her work, Roy has leaned on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (2008) to scrutinize the afterlife of the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent. She has done this by relying on the stories and narratives of people who were children at the time of Partition. Hence, they grew up listening to stories of times before Partition and during the process of Partition, and they saw life after-Partition. By doing so, this work attempts to assess the various repercussions of Partition violence by bringing to light the harrowing experiences of Partition survivors and how they were displaced and resettled. This is a shared experience of different generations of Partition survivors.
The first chapter titled, “History, memory, forgetting,” discusses how memory has been used rather effectively through the oral histories of Partition in order to “supplement, complement, and interrupt nationalist histories of Independence” (p.14). This chapter also inspects numerous narratives of ordinary people to emphasize and underline the importance of memory in retrieving the unknown stories of Partition, which would otherwise have been lost. Stories of mourning were unearthed as opposed to the tales of celebration that have forever hogged the limelight when one talks about August 15th 1947. These experiences of uncertainty and melancholy were covered under the umbrella of sunshine and hope of India’s independence.
“Intangible violence,” Chapter 2, lays great emphasis on various kinds of violence experienced by the survivors of Partition and their children in the years after Partition. This chapter has highlighted Partition’s impalpable violence by assimilating structural, cultural, and direct violence, which resulted in the lessening or rather closure of opportunities to the “lost generation” of Partition which mainly consisted of teenage survivors who migrated into a new alien land and therefore sought to re-build their lives from the beginning.
The third chapter, “Scripting their own lives,” talks about how oral history was also considered dubious and distrustful evidence in traditional history since it is “based on memory, oral, subjective, and biased” (p. 80). However, since the 1980s, Roy says that oral history has been a focal point for historical testimony (as an act of memory) because it brings to light an alternative history. From then on, such narratives have been given a worthy status since they were eyewitnesses of events, and hence, their testimony is most authentic. However, as Roy rightly puts it, “eyewitnesses” and survivors’ accounts often betray both a dramatization and narrativization that enables them to script themselves into the macro narrative of the nation as agents rather than victims” (p. 67). This relationship between experience and knowledge wherein eyewitness testimonies/memories are deliberated is said to be an exclusive form of knowledge. Therefore, overall, this chapter concentrates on how memory and postmemory are used to chronicle an experience. Memory and postmemory involve a careful selection and elimination, giving prominence to some details and ultimately imposing a structure that closes the gaps between imagined stories and real-remembered ones. Thus, by telling and re-telling these stories, we often find that postmemory transforms wretched violent tales into untroubled legends of survival.
The fourth chapter, “They stuttered: Non-narratives of the unsayable,” is full of testimonies of various Partition survivors. Roy uses trauma theories to explain the silence of survivors. The violent events leading to the 1947 Partition are surrounded by a silence that relies upon the nation’s manufactured memories, which challenges non-violent and nationalist ideologies. This is hushed so as to bring forth the idea of a unified and accomplished narrative of nation formation and independence. Roy uses Das’s (2007) idea of the unsayable and Deleuze’s (1998) concept of language as a stutter to fill in the gaps in Partition narratives available for the intergenerational transmission. Memory chooses to ignore traumatic experiences while narrating stories, but it sometimes comes up in the form of a stammer or stutter. This jumbled speech demands attention to the unsayable and unscripted parts of the narratives, often lost in a rehearsed telling of one’s experiences. Roy has particularly mentioned the works of Sadat Hasan Manto and how he problematizes the inability of language in exhibiting the violence of Partition in 1947. Das (1995) observes that Manto’s “mutilation of language testifies to an essential truth about the annihilating violence and terror” of the Partition era is reiterated by a number of scholars (p. 184).
Coming to the fifth chapter, “Not at home” centers around the feeling of unheimlichkeit or homelessness, feeling outlandish even in familiar places, which makes one uncomfortable and bamboozled. Gera Roy argues how the newly displaced people from West Punjab would get a feeling of “not being at home” in a strange land which was supposed to be their new home, not by choice, though. “Memories of lost homes” is the 6th chapter where Roy examines the survivor’s reconstruction of lost homes by using the concept of effective geography, which allows the researcher to uncover the non-cognitive and the inexpressible. Mention of an event, city, person etc. triggers the survivor and produces an effect in their body, then transferred onto the interviewer.
The seventh chapter, “Resettled homes,” has Roy argue how the psychosomatic and social experience of displacement and resettlement are more or less neglected and have only been largely neglected or partially addressed in fictional and testimonial literature. As a result, Gera Roy contemplates the various factors like linguistic, physical, and cultural spaces that involve the process of homemaking in a novel land. She emphasizes that home is restructured in everyday practices and in language as well as in culture. Roy uses the case of a North Indian city called Lucknow to elaborate further on this point. Trying to ascertain and retrieve memories of pre-partition days through material culture is a recent development. Apart from the uber-long sentences which are scattered all over this work, this book leaves no stone unturned to highlight the individual experiences and memories of Partition and produce new ethics of displacement.
The chapter, “Moving on,” argues that Partition survivors’ struggle to take charge of their lives and start afresh took away the superfluity of grieving and bereavement. Thus, lamentation and mourning were postponed indefinitely. Roy says that the main motive of the newly displaced Partition survivors was to survive, which made them leave their past behind and forced them to assimilate into the local culture in order to try their luck at achieving some level of success. This, in turn, cost their language and culture in many instances. The Partition scholars observe the multitude of sacrifices made by Partition refugees so that the nation could attain freedom which also put at stake their claims to “rehabilitation and citizenship by the newly formed Indian state.”
In the end, the author discusses in detail how the term refugee was brought into use after Partition, and the literal Hindi translation “sharanarthi” was used by the receiving population and was considered derogatory by the Partition survivors.
This work by Anjali Gera Roy is seminal in the field of Partition studies as it chose to focus on the memory and postmemory aspects of Partition. This is something that has been absent from the traditional debates of history. The usage of memory and oral interviews as a legitimate source of authentic history has either been ignored or ridiculed by traditionalist historians as being biased and not up to the same standard as archival sources. The book is a result of extensive research and derives from innumerable testimonies of Partition survivors. It is perfect for South Asian history enthusiasts and readers of Indian history.