Unforgetting Partition: Overcoming a state of amnesia

On the eve of India’s 75th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that August 14 would henceforth be observed as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”. The announcement immediately kicked up a political row. On the one hand, senior ministers in the government and senior RSS pracharaks celebrated it as a samvedansheel (sensitive) gesture by the Prime Minister to pay tribute to the struggles and sacrifices of the people who suffered allegedly due to the Congress’ ‘appeasement politics.’ On the other hand, members of the Opposition and secularists called it a political ploy to consolidate Hindu votes ahead of the UP elections.

Why, one may ask, is it necessary to remember an event so painful as the Partition? Does it merely achieve petty political agenda or is there value in commemoration?

When Aristotle claimed in his Politics that man is the only animal endowed with the gift of speech, he clearly missed out on mentioning memory as the other important gift. Unlike other species, human beings engage with memory not just by way of instinct but also as a conscious process by which they construct their own identities.

Partition, one of the largest forced migrations of people in human history, led to the displacement of around 15 million people from their original homelands and the deaths of over one million. Many of those who survived the debacle, as well as their successive generations, continue to construct their subjectivities along the lines of having become uprooted from a land they called their own.

The injustice inflicted on the survivors has been manifold: first, the horrors of a violent displacement for no fault of their own; second, the inadequacy of the State to provide for a dignified resettlement and livelihood; and third, the expectation from the State that they forget their pain and trauma for the sake of a cosmetic nation-building project. In a situation in which the very act of remembrance becomes a function of privilege, the near-eclipse of State records of conflict, violence, displacement and pain can lead to a permanent state of numbness.

In recent decades, while there has been an explosion of scholarly research on Partition by historians, anthropologists and sociologists, there is negligible commemoration in the public realm of the horrors of the catastrophe. The existing scholarly literature, too, reveals multiple biases in the selection of events, their documentation and narration. While a majority of the work focuses on the western side of Partition (Punjab), a few studies devoted to the story on the eastern side primarily focus on Bengal. There is very little documentation, for instance, of Partition in Assam. Then, there are meta-cleavages and meta-stories that are clearly privileged over micro-histories that involved relatively smaller groups of the population. Stories of displacement which were accompanied by bloody and violent events in the form of deaths and rapes were clearly privileged over those where violence was perceived to be either absent or of low-intensity.

The dominant Partition narrative was also restricted largely to the Hindu-Muslim binary and there was barely any reflection on how a large section of the refugee communities became the victims of internal ethno-linguistic politics within the Indian State. Some scholars have attributed the erasure of such events from public memory to the attitude of the Indian State, which deliberately chose to put the traumas of Partition behind as it went about building a new nation.

The failure of the Indian State in preserving some of these micro-histories becomes glaring when one compares the ways in which the Holocaust has been memorialised across the world. A variety of Holocaust memorials and museums have been built across 45 countries across the globe. Germany alone has more than 20 memorials, while Israel has 15. Whether it is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin or the Victory Monument in Israel, or the Iron Shoes on the Danube Bank, these serve to continuously remind us about the horrors of that Shoah. Many of these memorials have not only preserved names of places, people, events, concentration camps, important dates, letters, memoirs and photographs, but also relics like hair, clothes, shoes, nails and bones of those impacted by this horrific genocide. Several countries have passed laws that make it mandatory for school curricula to include information about the events of the Holocaust so that students are sensitised to the gross violation of human rights.

In contrast, India’s first and only Partition memorial was built after 70 years of the country’s Independence in 2017 in the city of Amritsar in Punjab. This, too, was the outcome of civil society efforts and solely funded by the common public, mostly by those who had survived the event. Similar initiatives on the eastern side include the establishment of the Kolkata Partition Museum Project Trust in 2018, dedicated to memorialise the specificity of Bengal’s Partition.

However, these are far and few and incomparable with the monumental edifices mentioned above. School textbooks pay lip-service to the history of Partition and deliberately refrain from narrating episodes of violence and trauma. The refrain of the Indian State has always been that engaging with the violent past is potentially dangerous as it may fragment an already fragile society even further. While this may be true, history has revealed that the suppression of pain has only exacerbated feelings of hatred and animosity between communities.

Edyta Roszko suggests that commemorations are not always desirable as they tend to sanitise the messy history lived by actors and often help create, modify or legitimise “the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration”. And yet, commemorations have their own value; they help provide closure to unhealed wounds and help build the foundation for reconciliation and for more nuanced and creative modes of cultural memory to be recovered.

In this context, while the recent announcement by the Prime Minister is a refreshing symbolic gesture that for the very first time manifests the Indian State’s willingness to acknowledge the pain of those who suffered due to Partition, one hopes that this is not a mere token symbol to garner the support of any one community and that it will spur a more serious engagement with an event that permanently altered the lives of millions in the subcontinent.

(Malini Bhattacharjee is faculty at the School of Public Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)