Memory, lived and forgotten
Ravinder Kaur's work breaks new ground in the study of Partition to understand
how it still affects its inheritors
by Urvashi Butalia (The Financial Express, April 1, 2007)
[Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi
by Ravinder Kaur
Oxford University Press, 2007]
Among the recent spate of books on the Partition of India, Ravinder
Kaur's stands out for its meticulous attention to detail and its wealth
of information. Her focus on the city of Delhi, and within that three
resettlement colonies, and a specific time period stretching from 1947
(not August but March when the actual movement of people began as a
result of the early disturbances) to 1965, the year the rehabilitation
programme was officially closed, both marks this book as different and
enables a close, detailed examination of one aspect of this
multi-layered history.
Kaur turns her attention to the lived experience of Partition among
refugees who arrived in and made the city of Delhi their home. She
examines how the shape of the city changed and how the process of such
change, impacted the lives of the migrants. Taking the widely accepted
image of the Punjabi refugee as enterprising, dynamic, proud, and
hardworking, she asks why it was that Delhi, for example, did not see
the kind of violence that Karachi fell into very shortly after the
influx of refugees there. Why was it that the Punjabi refugee in Delhi
was more acceptable than his/her counterpart in Karachi?
But more, Kaur's work breaks new ground in the now increasingly
important study of Partition and memory. Looking at the link between
private and collective memory, Kaur shows how the two influence and
shape each other. Partition refugees often personalize stories of
general violence and trauma, telling, and feeling them to be their own,
and marking the shifts in political climate, location, as felt,
personal things. Her introductory chapter explores this in detail,
pointing out that many Partition studies have looked at the then and
after of Partition refugees, but have not necessarily addressed the
process that went into the making of a refugee, and into the making of
his or her life thereafter.
She further complicates the discussion of memory by showing how the
fragemented ways in which memory is stored in an individual's mind can
often turn, in the narrating of such accounts, into a linear narrative
where the connections can be borrowed from the received collective
recounting of the meta narrative of that event. In this way, according
to her, the meta and micro narratives overlap and inform each other.
The whole question of the definition of who is or who is not a refugee
is also discussed. People who had already left their homes for one
reason or another, before the events of August 1947 and who were
subsequently unable to return, became, willy nilly, refugees. But the
official definition of refugee did not have the space to accommodate
them, for in order for it to do so, they would have had to have fled
across an international border. The arbitrariness of dates and state
definitions touched people's lives in profound ways.
Supplementing this question is another key area of enquiry: what does
it mean to speak of refugees being well settled. Who defines what being
settled is, and Kaur suggests that any attempt at definition must
engage with the local groups that have emerged out of this 'critical
event' (to borrow Veena Das's formulation), and the new modes of action
and behaviour that came in with them, for, according to her, the
pre-history of critical events is as important as the event itself.
Kaur's conclusions support much of what has been learned and offered by
recent enquiries into Partition and its multiple histories. As more and
more fields of enquiry open up, it becomes increasingly clear that
there is no longer one, single, undifferentiated narrative of
Partition. Rather, such a major historical event contains within it
multiple, layered and nuanced narratives - which are in turn encoded
within various layers of silence dictated by class, location, gender,
majority or minority status and so on and which enable us to seek out
its multiple histories. In that sense this book is a welcome addition
to the increasing body of literature that is engaged in this important
exercise.