Partition and Its Afterlives

The Partition of India was a cataclysmic event that lives on beyond 1947 in the collective memory of South Asians from different parts of the subcontinent. A large body of work across multiple media, e.g. literature, film, art, and music, depicts the human dimension of this event and the multiple partitions it generated across the subcontinent. The long shadow of a long Partition is visible not only in the way nations were created or subsumed, but also in the collective memory of communities spawned by it and dispersed both within South Asia and across the world. While the business of assigning people to the “right” country continues today, the afterlives of Partition occur in the collective memory, post-memory, and post-amnesia of multiple generations of South Asians. Scholars working across disciplines attempt to address questions such as these: How do we imagine and memorialize the Long Partition in the age of the instant and the digital? How do we make sense of fragmented archives, whose materiality varies from the tangible and the intangible, the perishable and the durable, and the official to the subaltern? What are the precise contours and textures of silence associated with different legacies of Partition? How has “Partition” itself evolved into an established and predictable narrative, and how do we then bypass this tired terrain to examine its afterlives more meaningfully and productively? In doing so, we hope to understand the human, social, and cultural dimensions of Partition that resonate in our world today.

Faculty involved: Nazia Akhtar, Sushmita Banerji, Isha Dubey