Victimhood, Ressentiment and the Crisis of Meaning

One of the most significant contributions this book makes to the field of Partition Studies is its analysis of the discourse of purusharth and suffering as a form of sacrifice. My discussion of this discourse offers important insights into the politics of self-making. Older ethnographies of the Partition such as G. Pandey (2001), Butalia (2000), Menon and Bhasin (1998), Das (2007) and N. Nair (2011) show that while Partition survivors resented politicians and identified their lust for power as the cause of their suffering, the notion of personal suffering as a form of sacrifice for the nation was yet to be articulated. So when did this shift occur? Understanding this requires a brief examination of the history of Hindu politics in Punjab alongside the events and afterlife of the Partition.

The transition to a Hindu nationalist identity among Punjabi refugees was not straightforward. This has a lot to do with the pre- Partition demography, social structures and dominant politics of Punjab which tended to be assemblages of multiple communities. The kinship system of biraderi functioned as the beating heart of the local community in Punjab. Derived from the Persian word birader (brother), biraderi is a system of patrilinear kinship that is common to the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs of West Punjab (Anjali Roy 2019). While biraderi denotes a broad descent group that includes all those among whom common descent can be traced in the paternal line across the generations, the boundaries, form and size of specific biraderis were products of their social and political contexts (Gilmartin 1994).

Although biraderi provided the foundation for the imagination of the ‘nation-as-family’ in Punjab (Gilmartin 1994; Anjali Roy 2019), the shift to nationalist thinking was partly a consequence of colonial policies of land use and broader shifts in Indian politics. Predictably, the rivers of Punjab feature prominently in this story, providing the land its name (and thereby identity) – a composite of the Persian words panj (five) and ab (river) – and functioning as the locus of wider socioeconomic exchanges.

David Gilmartin (2015b) has compared the Indus canal system to the printing press as the facilitator of the imagination of a broader community that could transcend the social constraints of a community based on real physical contact.