[Music] [Music] good morning and welcome back to the lecture series on partition of india in print media and cinema we are talking about home and nostalgia so when we talk about home and nostalgia we need to understand the concept of borderline how the border lines that define the nation politic are ah fraught with a sense of localized struggle they have fluid meanings overlapping meanings and we understand that borders are thereby inscribed through some you know some some violent acts or borders are rather imposed on the common people so the production of national identity is itself ah a process entailing a lot of struggle and contestation so struggle is involved in producing the citizen subject out of unmanageable accounts by common people and these unmanageable accounts we see how much of these these accounts ah can be included as part of the modern history ah how much of the accounts ah you know coming from the common people can be included in in history in the modern times is something that needs to be ah something that needs to be examined so in the discourse that for shapes that citizen what is being ah represented ah being visibilized and discussed and what is being left out is also something that needs to be needs to be ah studied so in india this process ah of etching out borders of of leaving out some and including others that are of leaving out others and including some that are you know legitimized as or or that are attacked as legitimate subjects ah this entire process is accompanied by an enormous degree of violence which a violence happening both at violence happening both at the physical and epistemic level and this is not only in the case of india this is the process of ah state formation this is the process of building the nation so universality of cartographic metaphors the production of this inside outside rhetoric or the insider outside a rhetoric ah that enables the border that that that justifies the functioning of the border of a given country reveals some sort of epistemic and physical violence which accompanies the enterprise called the nation building so the encounter the nation actually churns out of this encounter happening between the state and its people more so the people inhabiting the frontiers and these encounters are suggestive of the disputed nature of a country's sovereign identity so cartographic anxiety as a facet of a larger postcolonial anxiety right so um after ah the colony after ah you know the colonization is no more after the british people quit what becomes of the nation how does it ah evolve how does it mute it how does it respond to the immediate crisis and the crisis you know and and the subsequent crisis so ah critics call this situation as suspended between ah suspended between a space of or a state of being a former colony and ah trying to become the nation but not yet a nation so so a kind of in betweenness a kind of liminal state which ah further aggravates ah for further you know ah escalates the tension and and aggravates the confusion so ah we were already talking about how after partition there until a certain period ah the leaders themselves were not aware of what ah how much of geopolitical land you know india encompassed and how much of land was encompassed by pakistan so there were a lot of overlapping areas where ah violence ah was consciously being enacted in order to ah in order to dispel ah the minority population from that given land so ah we see krishna uh observing that as a physical map of india gains ubiquity or universality as an iconic representation of the body politic it becomes the terrain for ah competing efforts to define and possess the self so ah when ah the map we were talking about the cartography when the map defines or tends to define claims to define all people ah the the ah multifarious meanings ah have the compulsion to converge and ah you know contribute to ah and fatten a kind of meta narrative a grand narrative about the self the self which constitutes this nation nationhood and the process of nation building so ah and this actually happens the the process of defining happens at the cost of some people some re some ethnicity some languages being eclipsed this is a forever phenomenon in all nations so ah when we talk of nation we are constantly we need to probe about the question of human rights the question of minority protection question of women's protection you know question of protecting the women and the the less able bodied subjects so the operation of this inside outside antimony serves not so much to prevent ah foreign infiltration so when we try to define who is insider as opposed to the outsider it's also a process of domesticating the self is the process of disciplining and producing the self vis-a-vis the other the self is defined essentially in terms of not being the other ah and that's the definition ah you know that that sustains ah a nation more than anything else so people's lives when we look at these lives along the borders of india pakistan bangladesh these lives are obstructed by the these lives are abstracted by the discourses of citizenship sovereignty and an everyday life process which is ah deeply you know scarred and informed by terror so fluid definitions of space and place ah prevail amid the nation trying to hegemonize its territory so ganondorf ganandra pandey observes that preoccupation with status status history is a process of overlooking the experiences of ordinary people in the partition and post partition you know in the partition episode and beyond the partition and what we do in the process is something that we have already seen in tamils and we see in so many you know art works on partition commenting on partition it is that the normal lives are reduced to lifeless numbers how many people had died how much worth property have you lost ah so when we try to smoothen and flatten struggle and loss in in terms of numbers we are trying to ah manage the the unmanageable we are trying to work on the edges the the rough edges that are frightening to deal with basically we do not deal with human pain because history perhaps does not have the language or the objectivity of history cannot contain human pain it can only contain lifeless statistics so ah tan and coracia notes ah tan and kudasia note that the topography of places transformed due to the partition i mean can be read such that the localities and places become meaningful as socially constructed entities that are invested with a range of meanings so local spaces or and places ah have different meanings ah how they are centrally looked at and understood and how the local people understand these places ah how much once again going back to my earlier question how much ah can the map ah cover from its top view from an on and all encompassing and all you know ah pervading all engulfing point of view how much can be covered do we cover the local narrative can we cover the mini stories ah so ah these stories actually emerge from the population that inhabit the lands so so many meanings ah actually ah cross a path they they cross they are so a land is actually at the crossing roads of different meanings now peoples ah association with their places which post partition existed only in the realm of memory powerfully shaped their conscious their subsequent life how people relate to their land what memories they carry of their land tend to shape an individual's personality and individuals identity ah and and self-perception even so the cross migration of the communities especially about we are talking about hindus and muslims here had far reaching repercussions and mal adjustments which impacted the industrial economy so the the partition and subsequent population exchange did have did have its ah you know uh effects its negative effects on uh the industrial economy ah so the the entire fabric of the society of a given society ah changed and i mean people were not prepared for it so ah people also when we talk about journeys ah talking about home nostalgia we talk about journeys short journeys that are geographically considered as short became ah you know everlasting psychic journeys i mean lahore and amritsar geographically speaking are abutting they are not very far away ah yet they became interminable journeys as people were traversing the uprooted people were traversing an unknown path in terms of what they were undergoing inside of them ah it it was a path filled with apprehensions where they would land up ah it was the fear of the unknown of the uh you know the the host society and so ah they were actually making a move towards an unseen future where they would be ah i mean where they would be turned from ah from respected river gentlemen to ah to refugees they would have to carry the stigma of being refugees and for the poorer section they would be actually reduced to poppers so a homeless humanity ah seeking rehabilitation ah from being uh you know from being a elite people to becoming a nobody in a new nation this journey cannot be ah gauged only through its geographical distance from one ah point to the other its also a tireless ah and in fact uh and an incisioned psychic journey ah that takes away everything from the uprooted so amarthasen notes that the varying interpretations of indians indian identity share an inclusionary reading of indian identity which tolerates protects and indeed celebrates diversity within a pluralist india so when people were trying to interpret what india the free india is going to look like or what it is going to be like ah they were these interpretations shared a general refusal to privilege any kind of narrowly circumscribed perspective based on religious approach so the idea of the nation was challenged or undermined from the very inception as the cohesiveness of the nation would be jeopardized would be jeopardized by the nationalist discourses that shaped it so the official indian historiography worked at erasing the violence of partition and this is something we see ganindra pandey repeating ah in so many of his works this is this has been a basic uh you know premise of his arguments that ah history happens through ah you know ah smoothening the jagged edges so ah and so the event partition had suddenly a partition would be thought of as something anomalous the indian people from various communities not capable of doing although it was done and it was before people's eyes the statistics were they p i mean ah post partition india was in ah a state of amnesia partial amnesia and in a state of denial ah not ready and not willing to confess and and realize how much how much of atrocity ah had taken place so ah so when we talk of building the nation it is also showing the good sides of the nation celebrating the good science and not discussing sweeping under the carpet every uncomfortable topic ah that that tends to take away the glory so ah statistics made in the mid 1930s reveal that 97 percent of the congress members were hindus and during that time gandhi himself was invoking hindu imagery in his public speeches in order to gather new followers so congress also mutates there is a journey that congress undergoes and ah through this journey a lot of its members don't see themselves included don't see their own reflection in the congress ideologies as congress matures and grows up it it ah although it upholds its ah secular ideologies we see gandhi gandhi's uh prayer song for example ah gandhi often uses uh you know ah the the famous song ah raghupathira rakh of raja ram so he is talking about rama the king and the ideal polity ah that's when the mistrust might ah you know start building within congress and people ah don't see themselves themselves enough represented within this discourse within this language ah so ah when religious iconography ah you know inspires ah the the congrecite ideals the seemingly secular leaders were walking the same footsteps as the bengali nationalists who developed their political and cultural ethos based on ah wong kim chatterjee's poem ah vande mataram which inspired the anthem of the congress party too so ah when the mataram as we have discussed in one of our earliest lectures is celebrating the motherland calling it celebrating india as the motherland envisioning india as the mother the mother figure and in the end there are there is uh in kind there are incantations uh uh uh that that uh invoke goddess durga the goddess of warrior and that's the point where nationalism and religious fervor hindu religious further merge and it becomes a little exclusive where people where a lot of members from other communities start falling out ah from such from such imagination because they do not see themselves included in in this discourse so ah because and that's how ah and that actually leads to the question of having another nation defined through another religious uh you know through another religions signifiers the question of having ah a land uh a nation uh made by the muslims and and uh and shaped through uh islamic uh tenets ah islamic uh principles and and the islamic uh you know uh value system and and juridical systems so there was a kind of misunderstanding maybe for a while that the free india would become a land of hindus a land that that you know primarily harbored the hindus and saw the hindus as the first citizens more than others so indian government tried ah to marginalize this tragedy this rift among people through focusing ah on ah the secular ideals and not so much on what went amiss where was the lapse and where secularism was falling short perhaps so so by denying this legacy of communitarian violence as a way of smoothing out cultural and religious differences and thereby showing that everything had always been right all the while the government was fueling some kind of collective amnesia it was encouraging amnesia and prevented the nation from confronting its collective trauma and ah thereby confronting not only confronting but also confessing and working through the trauma actually ah this was never done in a bid to celebrate the glories so ah biased and displaced forms of partition violence permeated cultural productions so whenever partition came back in the official discourse it would often come back through a lopsided with a lopsided picture where ah one coming community's imagination ah would privilege at the expense of silencing the other and that's how partition ah resurfaced resurfaced on the social political stage so the distinction between ah ah so the distinction between ah secular nationalism and religious nationalism ah secular nationalism referring to ah the the the imagination or the ideals ah originally proposed by congress and religious nationalism as has always been represented by the muslim league ah we see that this distinction after a point gets blurred especially in the late 1930s and 1940s when ah several communal forces join the ranks of secular congress party at the provincial and local levels and so we see ah just going back to ah garmukteshwar rat and how people were committing um you know ah hindus were committing crimes against the muslims and they were wearing the gandhi cap and they said that this was this was not against the the principles of ah you know gandhian ah these these acts are not against what gandhi teaches so they were also ah in a way vilifying gandhi although ah not only gandhi but the entire congress when at its inception had completely different vision so we see that a section of muslims that have generationally been congressmen ah fall out they they feel betrayed and that's when uh we see muslim league and the concept of muslim nation as a possibility ah comes to the horizon it it becomes a reality from which there is no looking back because those muslims that were part of congress also start supporting they become members of the muslim league in order to ah you know find some sense of belonging you know get hold of some sense of identity for themselves in amor notes that personal relationships and kinship loyalties were not destroyed by partition but they underwent forced readjustments as refugees had to adapt adopt the new parameters of their lives ah so all the languages and cultures mostly ah would be similar if not the same ah when compared with the local population the host ah society is populists ah however the refugee crisis would uh live on and and it uh it would live on through the identity classifications and the the the reality of ah the refugees struggling on an everyday basis struggling to survive rather you know rather than to belong so the question of belonging to the nation state of becoming full-fledged citizen subjects came much that emerged much later initially it was ah only the question of survival till a certain time ravinder core notes this tension between differing experiences which did not create a unity in their misfortune for example i mean its very difficult like we have said to understand a refugee crisis outside you know the specific cases the localized realities so unless we look at the historical and the macro social processes that that that a people a given refugee population deal with interface with we cannot understand what they have gone through so silha kirkov in this regard studies the situation of the bengali refugees and muslim settlers in jharkhand areas for example ah who were not even directly affected by partitions so ah experiences are diverse and they are never uniform and some experiences get precedence over the other owing to who is writing who is the mouthpiece in the case of bengal the affluent bhadra lok refugees or it would be better to call them as immigrants the affluent local class immigrants ah have mostly penned the memories on their experiences following a independence and that's the lens that has for until uh the until very recent time that has been the the the uh persistent you know lens ah that that that explained ah the crisis of the bengali refugees although that is that has been ah that has been problematized questioned and challenged by now and so the canon canon of bengal partition literature is being visited in order to advantage other kinds of viewpoints so ah so hindu vadrilok's and the hindu elites were able to record their own experiences and this was not a privilege still till sometime for the the mass of illiterate population to whom you know ah it was to for whom it was not possible to document ah what they witnessed what they underwent so their versions are coming after regeneration which is why partition is still a burning issue its far from over far from a closed chapter a lot of people that ah have now become literate can start reminiscing and they they are reminiscing they are going back to their childhood experiences they are many of them from ah dalit sections and they are writing about their refugees so ah we as meghna gohotakuta notes the continuous migration in the case of bengal has not only had ah a very ah peculiar makeup a very peculiar effect on the social makeup of the region but the motives of the compelled migrations in the east ah would conveniently be used by this state to discriminate ah and and differentially treat the displeased persons not all displeased persons were given similar privileges so ah we see that partition refugees were technically not outside the country of their nationality until the radcliffe award was announced they were still indians regardless of where they were because everything was india before the radcliff ah lines or the ratcliffe award and suddenly they found themselves without a nationality and outside the country of their ah residence the the outside you know what ah outside uh so there were suddenly there was suddenly this crisis of a bifurcation between what they would what they ha they they were used to know ah what they were used to know as their homeland their motherland their home and what was to become their nation so the refugee also complicated this official notion of displacement a trope that ah recurs throughout the partition literature and compels an inquiry into what and how we can define place home and belonging these are categories these are you know these are let us say notions or or these are ah the question of whom the question of space ah are fraught with a lot of complexity and difficulty so in bengali for example people use two separate words i mean ah a lot of refugees have the tendency even they don't even if they have their permanent house which they have bought and which is rightfully theirs ah in india they tend to call it as their basha ah so ah the basha or or where they are living ah it almost the word basha reminds us of the birds nest and there is something temporary about it something fragile about it ah versus a body when they talk about body ah an invisible uh you know uh thing that would that i mean it's it's something that they might have never seen it was their grandfather's property or their father's property but that is still referred to alluded as the permanent home the home across the border so that's the permanent home where they would never live which they can never occupy and claim versus the basha or the the nest that they have ah so the alternate narrative of partition is difficult to analyze due to the vast scale of voiceless citizens and a significant majority of these were illiterate they were unable to ah document their own ah memoirs ah and so marginalized groups such as women had traditional roles too so although they were some of them assembly trade some of them had little education and could write ah they were ah dictated by the you know patriarchal uh authority uh by the by the uh pit you know male centric ah rules of the society where they had to you know serve or they had to fit into traditional roles and this limited their expressions of freedom it it would be unthinkable for many refugee women many refugee women to just sit down and pen down their thoughts ah you know ah write a book about their experience right and ah autobiography when they had which would be which might be seen as ah neglecting one's ah domestic duties a domestic chores vidhu chakravarti states that it is evident that the high politics of partition constituted the background of the majority of the stories that we have on partition and the focus on the upper and the middle classes within newer contexts family units were renegotiated and so this the customs were also changing this is also something we have we have discussed while ah reading ah rashel weber russian weber ah notes how the the space for from the uh you know erstwhile sprawling mentions the ah many of the refugees well of refugees are made to live in colony houses where there are no separate ah you know rooms there are no separate zones or domains for men and women there is no kachari and there is no under mahal so the general relations accordingly change a lot of customs are severed and the traditions are remolded accordingly so identities are constantly in flux and layered apart from ones linguistic geographical and economic background the refugees now have to carry a new dimension of their identity which is their identity marker as as the uprooted and then ah beyond ah language geographical economic you know facets of ones being the religious identity marker has always been privileged by the partition discourse everyday effects of partition cannot be achieved enough through official letters ah statistics and documents they are limited so we see besides economy and politics human dimension adds anthropological sociological and psychological angles to the narrative personal narratives are imbued with gender and class connotations too social classifications this dictate the level of exposure to the effects of partitions so we understand the partition is not only a story of two religions there is more to it and this is only possible when we hear voices from below and not only from above the psychological state of refugees was significantly impacted by the their deplorable living and health care provisions they were forced to ah regress into what elamor calls as the hobassian state of nature wherein life became nasty brutish and short for a long time i mean for some it was a short period for others it was longer refugees were living in sub-human existences ah mostly the population that had moved from rural areas to uh to the hub of the urban metropolis ah you know many would many confess later on that they would be allured ah by the glamour of city life they had not seen ah people wearing shoes they have they had not seen ah you know a gramophone so refugees dalit refugees are often stereotyped as you know increasing uh the the the the incidence of theft robbery ah you know crime ah in a city after they arrive so this is the kind of pejorative you know stereotype that the dalit refugee especially has to constantly deal with someone that is not able to ah rehabilitate itself successfully at the same time what is very remarkable is that within the same family from a similar background some some members go on to become very successful others cannot achieve as much and there is so we see these gaps emerging within the families too where some family members that have not been able to make make it big not even been able to find suitable jobs in the city after ah after after immigration they are not mentioned in the in the family narrative their names are kind of covered up because it is they become a source of shame and embarrassment for the family so the the narrative of the refugee rebounding ah you know the narrative of the refugees resilience and and getting you know refurbishing what has been taken away by partition can only be fed by the handful of successful family members within the family we see hierarchy hierarchies very interesting hierarchies ah emerging and the family narrative is very selective in its representation who gets to permeate and become a protagonist a mem you know a character in that narrative is also something ah that needs to be studied further so ah the formation of group consciousness among the refugees became politicized as soon as they came under the influence of left-wing groups who were to have a profound effect on government policies this is something we see in the case of bengal partition i mean how the left wing at that time they were opposition they were an opposition party they had started influencing the refugees especially as there there was an increasing anti-congress sentiment ah a sense of betrayal by the congress party the left-wing groups started having profound effect and and they actually formed their government in west bengal in 1977 through the support of the bengali refugees ah many of them ah many of these refugees like we can see would hail not only from the upper and middle classes but also from the dalit sections ah with this ah i would like to come to i would like to ah so with this i would like to stop today today's lecture with this i would like to stop today's lecture and we will meet again ah for the next lecture thank you [Music] hey [Music] you