The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia
Subtitle: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Cultures of History)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: October 18, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780231138468
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: postwar, from c 1945 -; India - History; South Asia - History; Social Science; Archaeology / Anthropology; History - General History; Sociology; Asia - India; Asia - Pakistan; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Anthropology - General; Asia - India & South Asia; Sociology - General; Boundaries; India; Pakistan; Refugees
Description: "Nation-states often shape the boundaries of historical enquiry, and thus silence the very histories that have sutured nations to territorial states. "India" and "Pakistan" were drawn onto maps in the midst of Partition's genocidal violence and one of the largest displacements of people in the twentieth century. Yet this historical specificity of decolonization on the very making of a nationalized cartography of modern South Asia has largely gone unexamined. In this remarkable study based on more than two years of ethnographic and archival research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar argues that the combined interventions of the two postcolonial states were enormously important in shaping these massive displacements. She examines the long, contentious, and ambivalent process of drawing political boundaries and making distinct nation-states in the midst of this historic chaos. Zamindar crosses political and conceptual boundaries to bring together oral histories with north Indian Muslim families divided between the two cities of Delhi and Karachi with extensive archival research in previously unexamined Urdu newspapers and government records of India and Pakistan. She juxtaposes the experiences of ordinary people against the bureaucratic interventions of both postcolonial states to manage and control refugees and administer refugee property."--Book cover.