Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T07:09:47.168Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

David Gilmartin
Get access

Extract

Few events have been more important to the history of modern South Asia than the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The coming of partition has cast a powerful shadow on historical reconstructions of the decades before 1947, while the ramifications of partition have continued to leave their mark on subcontinental politics fifty years after the event.

Yet, neither scholars of British India nor scholars of Indian nationalism have been able to find a compelling place for partition within their larger historical narratives (Pandey 1994, 204–5). For many British empire historians, partition has been treated as an illustration of the failure of the “modernizing” impact of colonial rule, an unpleasant blip on the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial worlds. For many nationalist Indian historians, it resulted from the distorting impact of colonialism itself on the transition to nationalism and modernity, “the unfortunate outcome of sectarian and separatist politics,” and “a tragic accompaniment to the exhilaration and promise of a freedom fought for with courage and valour” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 3).

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , November 1998 , pp. 1068 - 1095
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Ahmad, Jamil-Ud-Din, ed. 1947. Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah. Vol. 2. Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf.Google Scholar
Ahmed, Akbar S. 1997.Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Aiyar, Swarna. 1995. “August Anarchy': The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947.” South Asia 18, Special Issue: 13–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhalla, Alok. 1994. Introduction to Stories About the Partition of India. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Indus.Google Scholar
Brasted, H. V., and Bridge, Carl. 1994. “The Transfer of Power in South Asia: An Historiographical Review.”; South Asia 17(1): 93–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buehler, Arthur. 1998. Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund, and Lapidus, Ira, eds. 1988. Islam, Politics and Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Butalia, Urvashi. 1993. “Community, State and Gender: On Women's Agency during Partition.” Economic and Political Weekly 28(17): WS-13–24Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1995. “Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu- Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition.”; South Asia, 18, Special Issue: 109–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993 The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterji, Joya. 1994. Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932 47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damodaran, Vinita. 1995. “Bihar in the 1940s: Communities, Riots and the State.”; South Asia 18, Special Issue: 153–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Das, Suranjan. 1991. Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905-1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Devji, Faisal. 1991 “Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women's Reform in Muslim India, 1857-1900.”; South Asia 14(1): 141–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eaton, Richard. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francisco, Jason. 1996. “In the Heat of Fratricide: The Literature of India's Partition Burning Freshly.”; Annual of Urdu Studies 11: 227–50.Google Scholar
Freitag, Sandria B. 1989 Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmartin, David. 1991. “Democracy, Nationalism and the Public: A Speculation on Colonial Muslim Politics.”; South Asia 14(1): 123–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmartin, David. 1994. “Biraderi and Bureaucracy: The Politics of Muslim Kinship Solidarity in 20th Century Punjab.”; International Journal of Punjab Studies 1(1): 1–29Google Scholar
Gilmartin, David 1998. “A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Electoral Process in the Punjab.”; Comparative Studies in Society and History 40(3): 415–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Peter. 1972. The Muslims of British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harun-Or-Rashid, . 1987. The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim Politics, 1936-1947. Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.Google Scholar
Hasan, Mushirul. 1994. Introduction to India's Partition: Process, Strategy, Mobilization. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hashmi, Taj Ul-Islam. 1992. Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920-47. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Jalal, Ayesha. 1985. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jalal, Ayesha. 1991 “The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State in Pakistan.”; In Women, Islam and the State, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Kenneth, ed. 1992. Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, andConflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khudaisya, Gyanesh. 1995. “The Demographic Upheaval of Partition: Refugees and Agricultural Resettlement in India, 1947-67.”; South Asia 18, Special Issue: 73–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Low, D. A., ed. 1991. The Political Inheritance of Pakistan. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Major, Andrew. 1995. “The Chief Sufferers': Abduction of Women During the Partition of Punjab.”; South Asia 18, Special Issue: 57–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1994. “Toba Tek Singh.”; Translated by Hasan, Khalid. In India's Partition: Process, Strategy, Mobilization, edited by Hasan, Mushirul. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Maskiell, Michelle. 1984. Women Between Cultures: The Lives of Kinnaird College Alumnae in British India. Syracuse, N.Y.: Maxwell School, Syracuse University.Google Scholar
Menon, Ritu, and Bhasin, Kamla. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Metcalf, Barbara Daly. 1982. “Islam and Custom in Nineteenth Century India.” Contributions to Asian Studies 17(10): 62–77.Google Scholar
Metcalf, Barbara Daly. 1990. Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi's Bihisti Zewar. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metcalf, Barbara Daly. 1996. “Women, Rights, Islam.” Lecture to the University of Chicago Humanities Institute, November 14.Google Scholar
Metcalf, Barbara Daly. Forthcoming. “Nationalism, Modernity and Muslim Identity before 1947.”; In The Religious Morality of the Nation-State, edited by Lehmann, Hartmut and Veer, Peter van der. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Minault, Gail. 1982. The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Minault, Gail. 1997. Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mirza, Sarfaraz. 1969. Women's Role in the Pakistan Movement. Lahore: Research Society of Pakistan, University of the Punjab.Google Scholar
Mirza, Sarfaraz. ed. 1988–89. Muslim Students and the Pakistan Movement: Selected Documents. Lahore: Pakistan Studies Center, University of the Punjab.Google Scholar
O'hanlon, Rosalind. 1993 “Historical Approaches to Communalism: Perspectives from Western India.”; In Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History, edited by Robb, Peter. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1984. “Encounters and Calamities': The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century.”; In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Guha, Ranajit. Vol. 3. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1992. “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.”; Representations 37(Winter): 27–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1994. “The Prose of Otherness.”; In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Arnold, David and Hardiman, David. Vol. 8. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Government, Punjab. 1907. Gazetteer of the Chenab Colony, 1904. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press.Google Scholar
Rouse, Shahnaz. 1996. “Gender, Nationalism(s) and Cultural Identity.”; In Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South Asia, edited by Jayawardena, Kumari and Malathi de, Alwis. New Delhi: Kali for Women.Google Scholar
Roy, Asim. 1990. “The High Politics of India's Partition: The Revisionist Perspective.”; Modern Asian Studies 24(2): 385–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanyal, Usha. 1996. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870-1920. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shaikh, Farzana. 1989 Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860-1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Talbot, Ian 1988. Provincial Politics and the Pakistan Movement: The Growth of the Muslim League in North-West and North-East India, 1937-47. Karachi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Talbot, Ian. 1996. Freedom's Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India. Karachi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, David, and Yapp, Malcolm, eds. 1979. Political Identity in South Asia. London: Curzon Press.Google Scholar
Tharu, Susie. 1994. “Rendering Account of the Nation: Partition Narratives and Other Genres of the Passive Revolution.”; The Oxford Literary Review 16: 69–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorp, John P. 1978. Power among the Farmers of Daripalla: A Bangladesh Village Study. Dacca: Caritas Bangladesh.Google Scholar
Thursby, G. R. 1975. Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India. Leiden: E. J. Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Der Veer, Peter. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Der Veer, Peter. 1996. “Writing Violence.”; In Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India, edited by Ludden, David. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Waseem, Muhammad. 1997. “Electoral Democracy in Pakistan.”; Paper presented to AIPS conference, “Pakistan: Fifty Years as a Nation.”; Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 28 August-1 September.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Willmer, David. 1996. “Women as Participants in the Pakistan Movement: Modernization and the Promise of a Moral State.”; Modern Asian Studies 30(3): 573–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yadav, Kripal C. 1987. Elections in the Panjab, 1920–1947. New Delhi: Manohar.Google Scholar
Zaman, Mukhtar. 1978. Students' Role in the Pakistan Movement. Karachi: Quaid-i-Azam Academy.Google Scholar