H-NET REVIEW (July 6, 2003)

_The Partition Omnibus_.  New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.  1398
pp. 14 halftones and 1 map.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-565850-7.

Reviewed for H-Asia by Farina Mir (farinamir@hotmail.com), Department of
History, University of Michigan (as of 9/1/03)

Partition Redux

The fiftieth anniversary of India and Pakistan's independence from British
colonial rule in 1997 brought forth renewed interest in the roots of the
separation of these intrinsically-related, yet consistently antagonistic
nation-states.  The partition of British India into two (and subsequently
three) nation-states has become, in the few short years since its fiftieth
anniversary, the focus of much new scholarship, a trend some have referred
to as the "Partition industry."[1]  Anthropologists, historians, and
literary critics have applied new methods of study to the subject, pushing
the parameters of existing scholarship to view the partition from multiple
political, social, and cultural perspectives.  These new approaches include
an exploration of the gendered impact of the partition, an examination of
the links between more contemporary incidents of communal riots and
partition violence, and analyses of the political influence and experiences
of the vast population directly impacted by the division of land and
communities.[2]  In the process, the partition of British India has become
the subject of some of the most interesting and innovative contemporary
scholarship on South Asia.

The continuing publication of volumes on the partition suggests that
neither scholarly nor popular interest in the subject has waned.  The
publication of _The Partition Omnibus_ is a case in point.  _The Partition
Omnibus_ is comprised of four previously published books: David Page's
_Prelude to Partition_ (1982); Anita Inder Singh's _The Origins of the
Partition of India _ (1987); Penderel Moon's  _Divide and Quit_ (1961); and
G.D. Khosla's _A Stern Reckoning_ (1949?).  The volume's introduction has
been written by Mushirul Hasan, himself an author and editor of numerous
books on the partition of India.[3]  Hasan's deep knowledge of the subject
is evident in his introductory essay where he locates the work of these
four authors in both historical and historiographical perspective.  Hasan
interestingly concentrates his analysis on M.K. Gandhi's role in and
reaction to the partition, an area often left unexplored by historians of
the event.  "One almost gets a sense, in the writings of many historians,
of Gandhi's premature demise well before his assassination on 30 January
1948," Hasan writes (xii).  Hasan's reassessment of Gandhi's role
identifies some important points of inquiry for scholars of partition, such
as "how and why a man, having dominated the political scene for three
decades, could do so little to influence the Congress to take firm and
effective steps to contain violence," or why he became, in his own words,
"a spent bullet," "a back number"  (xii).  Hasan also artfully addresses
the broader political context of the period immediately preceding and
following India's independence, providing an important historical context
for the books in _The Partition Omnibus_.

Hasan's introduction also places the books republished in this volume in
historiographical context.  This is particularly important since there have
been dramatic methodological changes in the study of the partition in the
last ten years.  Hasan writes that: "A sense is abroad that the Partition
story, hitherto dominated by grand narratives, needs to be told
differently.  Attention is drawn to comparisons across space and time, to
theoretical issues of import well beyond the confines of South Asia, and to
partitions restructuring the sources of conflicts across borders, refugees
and diasporas.  There is even talk of the need for a new language to deal
with the historical traumas of the past, of rethinking 'Partition',
necessitated by the shift away from high political histories" (ix-x).  None
of the four works in _The Partition Omnibus_, however, takes account of
these historiographical changes.  Instead, the scholarship collected in
_The Partition Omnibus_ serves more to record methods and modes of inquiry
long since surpassed in the field.  While Hasan argues that _The Partition
Omnibus_ illustrates "the evolution and changing trends in partition
historiography" (xxiv), it does so only to a limited extent.  Page and
Singh provide analyses of India's high politics in the decades preceding
partition, Moon's is an eyewitness account of a colonial official, and
Khosla records the findings of a Government of India inquiry on partition
violence.  While each of these books made an important contribution to
partition scholarship when it was published, taken together, and given the
current state of the field, they provide a historiographically staid
perspective on India's partition.

The four books in _The Partition Omnibus_ can be grouped into two sets of
two.  The Page and Singh volumes are studies of high politics and work well
with one another.  _Prelude to Partition_ is based on Page's 1974 doctoral
dissertation and analyzes politics during the years from 1920 to 1932.  In
this work Page argues that the structure of colonial politics established
during this period through constitutional reforms laid the foundation for
the partition of India in 1947.  Page's arguments bypass politics at the
all-India level and emphasize both the provincialization of Indian politics
and the role of Muslim politicians in the Muslim majority provinces.  As an
earlier reviewer also noted, Page's study is valuable for its detailed
account of constitutional politics and its exposition of the importance of
the Punjab.[4]  The study is limited, however, by its concentration on a
small number of prominent political figures and a teleological view of the
partition's inevitability.  Both of these limitations were noted by
reviewers when the work was published, [5] but they seem more glaring in
light of current historiographical trends that have moved away from the
study of high politics on the one hand, and efforts to avoid reading the
partition back into South Asia's early-twentieth-century history on the
other.

Anita Inder Singh's _The Origins of the Partition of India_ is a good
complement to Page's work in both style and content.  Based on her D. Phil.
thesis at Oxford University, Singh's book concentrates on the interplay
between the British, the Indian National Congress, and the Muslim League in
the years following immediately on from Page's study, 1936-1947.  In a
field rife with studies of the interplay between these three actors, Singh
attempts to carve a niche for herself by evaluating Jinnah's culpability
for the partition of India.  She is clearly sympathetic to the Congress in
her analysis, however, and concludes that Jinnah's intransigence in
political negotiations and his commitment to extracting a sovereign
Pakistan from the British and the Congress at any cost was responsible for
the partition.[6]  Singh's study makes good use of the colonial
documentation newly available when she conducted her research, and provides
a sequential account of the main political events and negotiations of the
period that is relatively easy to follow.  This work, however, presents few
insights on Jinnah's political motivations (perhaps due, in part, to its
limited access to the Jinnah and Muslim League papers).[7]  Given Jinnah's
central role in Singh's narrative, the absence of a convincing argument
about his motivations gives the reader little sense of why the political
"endgame" in India resulted in partition.  Both Page's and Singh's works in
the _The Partition Omnibus_ provide the reader with a careful study of the
high politics of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.  While these works contribute
to the historiography by virtue of their record--in painstaking detail--of
the constitutional negotiations that constitute the high politics of the
period, Page's narrow focus and telos towards India's partition and Singh's
limited analysis of the "endgame" diminish their value as political
histories of the partition.

The other two works in _The Partition Omnibus_ are Penderel Moon's _Divide
and Quit_ and G.D. Khosla's _A Stern Reckoning_.  While one might quibble
with the perspectives presented in these works, they continue to be of
interest as the earliest available attempts to systematically document how
partition was experienced by vast numbers of Indians and Pakistanis.  Moon
was a civil servant with extensive experience in the Punjab who joined the
service of the Nawab of Bahawalpur, a Muslim princely state (to the south
of Punjab), prior to independence.  _Divide and Quit_ as published in _The
Partition Omnibus_ is the 1989 edition, which includes an only mildly
interesting introduction by Mark Tully and the illuminating essay
"Re-reading _Divide and Quit_" by Tapan Raychaudhuri.  The first half of
Moon's memoir is an analysis of the political events that led to the
partition.  Although an astute administrative officer, Moon's analysis
provides few insights to the contemporary reader.  Additionally, this
portion of the book is often tedious reading due to Moon's frequent
colonialist bias.  The second half of the book makes up for the limitations
of the first, however.  Here Moon provides a narrative of events as they
unfolded in Bahawalpur State in the months surrounding the partition.
Although the violence in Bahawalpur was not nearly as widespread as in East
or West Punjab, this memoir is one of the few early attempts to record the
plight of common individuals as a result of the partition.  Moon's
documentation of the violence of the period as it unfolded in an area
otherwise understudied, despite its elite perspective and the lack of
theoretical framework, gives his memoir historical and historiographical
significance.[8]

Unlike Moon's account, which was penned approximately a decade after the
events it recounts, Khosla's _A Stern Reckoning_ is an account of partition
violence produced in the immediate aftermath of independence.  According to
Khosla's forward, the book is largely based on the report of a Fact Finding
Organisation established in early 1948 by the Government of India in
response to Government of Pakistan denials that fleeing Hindus and Sikhs
were the victims of violence (v).  The opening chapters of the book portray
the political events that resulted in the partition.  These chapters are
laden with nationalist sentiment, making them more interesting as a
historical record of nationalist antagonisms in the wake of partition than
for their historical analysis.  The remainder of the book is a compilation
of the information garnered by the Fact Finding Organization's interviews
with approximately 15,000 refugees from Pakistan and documents atrocities
committed against them in West Punjab, Sind, and the North West Frontier
Province.  Though uncritically one-sided in its approach, _A Stern
Reckoning_ is valuable for its recounting of incidents of partition
violence while the scars of violence and forced migration were still fresh.
  In this regard, photographs published in the first edition but not
republished in this volume would have been welcome.  The absence of any
analysis of the violence documented makes this book repetitious and
tedious, but it is precisely this shortcoming that makes the volume of
continuing interest.  _A Stern Reckoning_ provides today's reader with a
window onto the sentiments and raw emotions of the immediate aftermath of
the partition and its violence before the cool gaze of analysis was possible.

Each book in the _The Partition Omnibus_ made a contribution to partition
literature when it was first published.  For those with broader knowledge
of partition scholarship, each of these books provides an interesting
example of how modes of historiographical inquiry have shifted in the
decades since India's partition.[9]  For those not familiar with the
ever-increasing body of scholarship on the partition, this volume can only
provide an antiquated view of the subject.  Outmoded for scholars and
students of South Asian history, too detailed for those with only a passing
interest in the subject, and unable to compete with the excellent and more
theoretically sophisticated studies on the subject currently widely
available in India and the United States, this volume is likely to generate
only limited interest.

[1]. In his recent edited volume on the partition, Suvir Kaul argues that
such remarks are misguided.  He writes that the scholarly (and film)
production of the last few years represents "a scratching of the surface
rather than the systematic exploration that this historic experience
demands."  See his "Introduction," _Partitions of Memory_, ed. Suvir Kaul
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001) 4.

[2]. See, for example, Urvashi Butalia, _The Other Side of Silence_ (New
Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, _Borders and
Boundaries: Women in India's Partition_ (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998);
David Gilmartin, "Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search
of a Narrative," _Journal of Asian Studies_ 57.4 (1998): 1068-1095;
Gyanendra Pandey, "In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim
Riots in India Today,"  _Representations_ 37 (1992): 27-55; Gyanendra
Pandey, _Remembering Partition_ (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001).

[3].  See his _Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since
Independence_ (1997; New Delhi, Oxford UP, 2001); and his edited volumes
_Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India_ (New
Delhi: Oxford UP, 2000), _India's Partition: Process, Strategy and
Mobilisation_ (1983; New Delhi, Oxford UP, 2001), and _India Partitioned_ ,
2 vols. (1995; New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1997).

[4]. See David Lelyveld, review of _Prelude to Partition_, by David Page,
_American Historical Review_ 89.2 (April 1984): 506.

[5]. ibid.  Also see David Kopf, review of _Prelude to Partition_, by David
Page, _The Historian_ 46 (August 1984): 626-28.

[6]. Her bias toward the Congress is noted in: Lionel Carter, review of
_The Origins of the Partition of India 1936-1947_, by Anita Inder Singh,
_Asian Affairs_ 19 (June 1988): 205-6.

[7]. This absence is raised in Judith Brown, review of _The Origins of the
Partition of India 1936-1947_, by Anita Inder Singh, _American Historical
Review_ 94.3 (June 1989): 832.  The volume was also reviewed, rather
critically, by D.A. Low.  See his review of _The Origins of the Partition
of India 1936-1947_, by Anita Inder Singh, _The English Historical Review_
106.418 (January 1991): 265-6.

[8]. More recent scholarship has provided very many instances of firsthand
accounts of partition violence--often from survivors--and places these
recollections in a theoretical framework much more useful to the
contemporary reader.  See, for example: Butalia, _Silence_; Menon and
Bhasin, _Borders and Boundaries_; and Pandey, _Remembering Partition_.

[9]. See Gilmartin, "Partition."

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