Historians of Partition have written of the ‘overtly “communal” violence’ that ‘erupted in terrifying proportions’ from August 1946. As Sumit Sarkar puts it, ‘the whole Indian scene was rapidly transformed by communal riots on an unprecedented scale: starting with Calcutta on 16–19 August, touching Bombay from 1 September, spreading to Noakhali in East Bengal (10 October), Bihar (25 October), Garmukteswar in UP (November), and engulfing the Punjab from March 1947 onwards’.

I want, in this chapter, to deal with one minor place that finds mention in this reconstructed arc: Garhmukhteshwar, alternatively described as a ‘small town’ or ‘village’ in the Meerut district of western UP, the site of a massacre of Muslims on the occasion of an annual fair (the Kartik Purnima mela) held in November 1946. Like Calcutta, Noakhali, Bihar and Punjab, Garhmukhteshwar has become a metaphor for the atrocities of Partition; and Partition itself a metaphor for the kind of extraordinary, genocidal violence that was not witnessed again in India, perhaps until 1984: so that in a curious and little explored way, ‘Garhmukhteshwar’ (or ‘Noakhali’, or ‘Bihar’, or ‘Punjab’), ‘Partition’ and ‘violence’ come to stand in for one another.

Among the numerous ways of stripping events of their historical significance, I have suggested, one is that of localising them, another that of banishing them to the domain of an alien nation or community's history. The process of ‘localising’ – or ‘nationalising’ – however, requires further discussion.