A common theme of Indian works of this genre is to apportion “blame” for the Partition. The phrase the “high politics” of Partition has become shorthand for this type of focus. The seasoned American scholar Stanley Wolpert, in contrast, swims against the new academic tide in providing an account that focuses on the constitutional developments which culminated in Partition. Moreover, she is not content to establish an elite narrative of Punjabi migration and resettlement, but turns to the neglected experience of Untouchables who, despite Urvashi Butalia’s pioneering efforts in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998), remain largely hidden from the Partition discourse. She brings out well the internalization of Punjabi notions of self-reliance and reluctance to accept “charity,” which inform both official accounts of resettlement and the firsthand accounts of migrants. Kaur provides detailed studies of refugee lives in both the new purpose built localities, such as Lajpat Nagar, and in areas that had been former Muslim localities, such as Karol Bagh. It examines its “human face” through a narrative of the experiences of Punjabi Hindu and Sikh migrants from Pakistan who resettled in Delhi. One of the works under review, by the up-and-coming scholar Ravinder Kaur, fits firmly in this new approach to Partition.
This “new history” of Partition was pioneered by feminist writers and activists who emerged from the early 1980s political milieu of increasing communal violence in India and who were intellectually influenced by the currents of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
The contemporary thrust of scholarship is to disrupt master narratives of the causes and consequences of Partition with emphasis on the locality and the subaltern experience of the great divide of 1947. Indeed, so many works have now appeared on this subject that one could almost consider Partition studies as forming a genre of modern South Asian history. Six decades later, the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent continues to form the focus of scholarly analysis and debate.
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