Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T04:10:19.127Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Editor's Preface: Commentaries on the Partition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2014

Get access

Extract

The February 2014 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies opened with a section made up of two brief “Reflections” on partition—the traumatic South Asian developments of the late 1940s that accompanied the end of British rule over the subcontinent and led to the founding of India and Pakistan as separate nation-states. The first of this pair of short pieces was an introductory look at partition by Gerald James Larson, which I asked this prominent scholar of religion to write. I suggested that it take the form of an at-most lightly footnoted overview of the topic, which would provide basic information of a sort that would help nonspecialists understand the historical background of the partition and would serve to frame the main commentary to follow. That second piece, a meditation on memory and loss by historian Manan Ahmed Asif, was experimental in form for an academic article (a hallmark of the Journal's one-year-old “Reflections” genre) and accompanied by photographs. The trio of essays that follow here, titled “Further Reflections on Partition,” are part of a two-stage effort to respond to and carry forward discussion of issues raised in the earlier pieces. This sort of sequel to previously published work is unusual for the JAS, and is not something I expect to run with any regularity as editor, so some further remarks are in order.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2014 

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.)