Abstract
The volume under review by Nonica Datta deserves close attention from scholars from varied disciplines, such as, oral history, social anthropology, memory studies and literary criticism, who are attempting in different ways to come to terms with the traumatic events leading up to, and during, the partition of 1947. Datta’s turn to local and micro-history, based on extended interviews with her primary source, Subhashini, allows for an exploration of issues that have increasingly begun to be addressed in partition historiography. The impact of partition processes on identity formation and memory in the wake of trauma and rupture on local communities such as the inhabitants of Bhainswal Kalan village, in what later became Haryana, comes to the fore in this study.
The volume is prefaced by an introduction which recounts Subhashini’s life history, her Arya Samaj upbringing and conflicts within the family, and the critical event of her father Phool Singh’s murder by ‘Mussalman Rangars’ in 1942. The consecration of Bhagat Phool Singh as martyr leads to the plan to avenge his death, finally executed in 1947 with the wiping out of the Muslim population of the area by the Jats. (It was after this that Subhashini believed her Kanya gurukul would be safe from further attack.) Datta also uncovers the ‘parallel’ history of conflicts between Muslim pastoralists (the Rangars, branded a ‘criminal’ tribe by the British) and Jat peasants as an aspect of the prehistory to the wiping out of disarmed pastoralists by armed peasants in 1947. The pretext for this was the assassination of Bhagat Phool Singh on 14 August 1942, described by Datta as a hidden history. The scandal of an illicit relationship across community lines, to which Bhagatji was opposed, culminated in his killing; this became the backdrop to the escalation of collective anxieties and vindictive rage leading to ethnic cleansing of local Muslims in 1947. For Datta, Subhashini’s non-linear testimony thus becomes a historical source, providing a sense of the spectacle of carnage during 1947. Although for Subhashini in her individual remembrance, the moment of 1942 is the moment of rupture rather than 1947.
The middle section of the book features the ‘testimony’ of Subhashini, which spirals back and forth in time, and is marked by interruptions and discontinuities. Unusually, the author closes with an open letter to Subhashini (who has since passed away), in which Datta reflects further on the experience of uncovering this lost history. The author juxtaposes this narrative with that of two Punjabi migrants: Vash, a ‘faceless’ woman who settled in Karnal, and Amrita Pritam, the well-known Punjabi writer. For migrants from west Punjab like them, 1947 was the moment of apocalyptic rupture, in contrast to Subhashini.
This last section of the book, to me, is somewhat disappointing insofar as the canvas is restricted to an imaginary dialogue with the now-departed source, which risks becoming self-indulgent. Instead, a more rigorous theoretical excursus on the difficulty of negotiating with the mirror-box of memory, especially memories of perpetrator communities, might have been useful. While Subhashini may not have participated herself in ethnic cleansing, her persistent rationalisation of the elimination of the Muslims of her village (despite the occasional acknowledgement of wrong-doing) is disturbing. Such arrant self-righteousness in the wake of ethnic cleansing/genocidal violence reminded this reviewer of Robert Jay Lifton’s description of the way perpetrator groups come to deny death as a perverse way of asserting their own life as a community or group. For such groups, the act of killing becomes morally justifiable, an act of virtue, even as they resort to modes of false witnessing (Caruth 1999).
Furthermore, Subhashini’s paranoia about attacks by Muslims on the gurukul (which never actually happened between 1942 and 1947, as far as the narrative goes) is reminiscent of Sudhir Kakar’s (1996) account of pathological fears amongst Hindu women about Muslim sexual aggression. There may be a basis for this in the history of Hindu–Muslim antagonism, feuding and violence (as demonstrated by Amrita Pritam in Pinjar). Such traumatic histories undoubtedly leave behind scars and residual effects such as humiliated fury. Subhashini’s story does not really give us a sense of an ability to move beyond vendetta and such ‘righteous’ justifications of massacres, and hints at a pervasive acceptance of such views. The absence of any eyewitness account of the Muslim Rangars’ situation or their point of view is understandable (most were killed—even so, some did convert during the violence of 1947). However, this lacuna required further discussion and needed to be taken on board in the concluding section to ensure that a more balanced view appears. Furthermore, the comparison of Subhashini’s narrative with that of Amrita Pritam and Vash is under-developed. This strand should have been strengthened to enable an effective reckoning with the limitations of Subhashini’s story as ‘testimony’. For, in Pritam’s novella Pinjar, we do get an imaginative representation of the different stages through which a survivor of traumatic violence passes before reconciliation might be possible.
Datta’s study does highlight the complicity of common people in collective violence during what Paul Brass (2006) called episodes of retributive genocide during the partition. Such holes in individual and collective memory and ambiguous responses to traumatic events deserve further investigation. Researchers like Datta may at times risk getting too close to their subjects, and being trapped in the mirror-box of memory. Rather than the model of the epistle, such materials call for a more rigorous analytical engagement with the debris of the past, while avoiding impressionistic sentences like ‘Avenge (sic) Remorse Forget Silence Transcendence’ (p. 210). This might enable the secondary witness/historian to resist a transferential relation to the subject, even while acknowledging the inevitability of the double bind that may result.