THE PLIGHT OF COMMON PEOPLE IN THE PARTITION LITERATURE OF INDIAN SUBCONTINENT

Author(s):  
Aijaz Ahmad Ganie ◽  
M. S. Rathor

The sources of history and literature witnessed that few people on the name of religion divided the subcontinent and created severe problems in all regions of the subcontinent that people still are facing even after seventy years of partition. If we go through the pages of Indian History and Partition Literature many admirable characters will come alive in front of us. About numerous events and disasters we can learn from the books of historians and literary giants who portrayed all the situations, disasters and predicaments faced by the people before, during and after partition. Partition of India is still a darkest period in the history of subcontinent and it has left indelible marks on the pages of Indian history. Many writers have attempted to represent the trauma of partition skilfully through their writings. Britishers before leaving the subcontinent tried to break the unity of religions on the name of partition, many people were shocked as they were aware about the consequences of this division. After partition, the people who earlier were friends, neighbours, colleagues were labelled as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians and became thirsty of each others’ blood. They acted as savages; they forgot the respect for elders and women, love towards children. To represent the people who on the name of religion killed millions of precious lives, many writers of the Indian subcontinent produced a literature called Partition Literature. The partition led to huge movements and disastrous conflicts across Indo-Pak border. About ten million Hindus and Sikhs were expelled from Pakistan and nearly seven million Muslims from India to Pakistan and thousands of people were killed in this conflict. Though, independence for Indian subcontinent was an event of celebration, but it was celebrated in the shape of mourning, tears, separation, exile, crying, bloodshed, abduction, rape, murder etc. India was the one of the largest colonies of Great Britain and was granted freedom after a long period of subjugation, however resulted into the partition of country which caused a big destruction to the subcontinent in the form of ethnic and religious riots. This paper aims to explore the voice of people and their plight, who badly suffered during the cataclysmic event of partition.

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-478
Author(s):  
Nadezhda G. Mikhnovets ◽  

The article examines the history of formation and development of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “soil concepts” in the 1860s in the light of his close attention to the work of Alexander Ostrovsky. Previously, researchers did not correlate the different positions of Ostrovsky and Dostoevsky in the writers’ shared process of the cognition of folk life. The main focus of the article is centered on revealing the dynamics of changes in Dostoevsky’s attitude towards the work of Ostrovsky: from the recognition of impartiality of the playwright’s portrayal of the Russian people to the belief of his misunderstanding of foundations of folk life and the conviction of the gradual increase in accusatory tones in its coverage, starting from the final resolution of the play Thunderstorm. The article identifies the areas of synchronicities and disagreements of the two writers from a problem-thematic standpoint. The work concludes that the main point of divergence in the writers’ understanding of the Russian people was, on the one hand, Dostoevsky’s certainty of the monolithic unity of the Russian people, anchored in the Orthodox faith, and, on the other, Ostrovsky’s idea that the fundamental crises of the mid-19th century encompass all strata of Russian society, without any exceptions. The idea of the significance of the Last Judgment in the life of the common people is identified as essential for Ostrovsky.


2019 ◽  
Vol 244 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coast

Abstract The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Ionuț Costea

"The General History of the Middle Ages at the V. Babeş University of Cluj (1951-1952). The 1948 education reform represented, besides a new institutional architecture transposed in accordance with the model of the soviet universities, a process of recycling professors. The process of changing the teaching staff was carried out on at least two levels – the definitive or temporary elimination (sometimes accompanied by incarceration) from the education system on the one hand, and the exertion of severe surveillance and intimidation, thus remodelling the discourse and the behaviour in the spirit of the socialist realist “cultural revolution” on the other hand. The study shed light on a method that led to the expulsion of the professors was the public defamation, the accusation of immorality and of their lack of understanding of the new political transformations of the country, thus labelling the professors as “enemies of the people”. The atmosphere of fear and humiliation was sustained through press campaigns of defamation. Especially the younger university professors were instructed to attack, in the press, the more professionally well reputed and publicly well-known professors. These articles contained not only analyses of the professors’ works and ideas, but also their dismantling, their “exposé” and their human undermining. This paper is a case study on a professor from medieval department of Cluj university, Francisc Pall at the beginning of 1950s years. Keywords: Communism, Romania, education reform, cultural revolution, violence, surveillance. "


Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar

This chapter discusses conflict and violence in Lakhipathar, over a period of two decades, drawing on oral histories from the people of Lakhipathar. Listening to the narratives of past sufferings here has worked not merely a tool to know what happened to the narrators in the past but it also gives a key to analyse why and how they live in the present. Apart from offering evidence towards the larger argument of the work, this part of the book has also aimed towards opening a conversation on some buried and forgotten moments in the history of the Indian state that resemble what could be called an Agambenian ‘state of exception’. The dense narratives give a picture of the collaboration and deceit, revenge and violence, suspicion and fear in war-torn Lakhipathar and how the common people negotiated their ways through these.


Worldview ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Eugene Smith

The emergence of an official policy of secularism in Bangladesh must be viewed as a major ideological landmark in the recent history of the Indian subcontinent. Analyzed in terms of legitimizing symbols, the abrupt change from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to the secular People's Republic of Bangladesh is a significant event. It is axiomatic that revolutionary changes in the symbols of statehood need not be, and generally are not, accompanied by corresponding attitudinal changes among the masses of the people. The symbols, after all, are formulated by a small political elite or even by one leader. But it is important to understand both what the leaders are trying to express by the symbols they choose and how these symbols are related to the political process and the general culture.


Author(s):  
P. C. Barat

Since the beginning of the present century students of Indian history have been making strenuous efforts to collect such materials as would help them to reconstruct the early history of Bengal. But so far they have not succeeded in ascertaining definitely even the dates of those kings of the Sena Dynasty who governed dominions of large extent and took rank among the great powers. The discovery of the era with which is associated the name of Laksmana Sena Deva induced several well-known archaeologists to bring its initial date to bear on the history of Bengal. From the scanty data which were then available the late Professor Kielhorn after much laborious calculation definitely settled that the Lakṣmaṇa Samvat or La-Sam began in A.D. 1119–20. According to him the La-Sam was an ordinary Southern (Kārttikādi) year with Amānta scheme of lunar fortnights; and the first date of the era was October 7, A.D. 1119. As this date has not been made use of in reconstructing the chronology of the Sena kings, it may be accepted for the present; and time will show whether the conclusion of the learned doctor is right or wrong. But the assertion of the historians that the initial date of the Lakṣmaṇa Sena era synchronizes with the commencement of Lakṣmaṇa Sena's reign is quite untenable and can never be accepted as true. In Indian history there is no era which does not commemorate some epoch-making event which affected the people of the country in general. And ordinary succession to the throne in its normal course, as was the case with Lakṣmaṇa Sena Deva, does not justify the inauguration of an era in place of the usual regnal years to which the people in those days were accustomed.


1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER HILL

They tell us that the Pharoahs built the pyramids. Well, the Pharoahs didn't lift their little fingers. The pyramids were built by thousands of anonymous slaves . . . and it's the same thing for the Second World War. There were masses of books on the subject. But what was the war like for those who lived it, who fought? I want to hear their stories.Writing about international relations is in part a history of writing about the people. The subject sprang from a desire to prevent the horrors of the Great War once again being visited upon the masses and since then some of its main themes have been international cooperation, decolonisation, poverty and development, and more recently issues of gender.


1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Umar Memon

In an interview given in July 1974, Intiz̤ār Ḥusain, one of the most perceptive creative writers of Pakistan, had this to say about the experience of migration that was the direct outcome of the Partition of India in 1947:A decade ago when I was talking about the experience of migration and the articles I wrote concerning it, I was in a state of great hope and optimism. It was then my feeling that in the process of the Partition we had sudenly, almost by accident, regained a lost, great experience—namely, the experience of migration, hijrat, which has a place all its own in the history of the Muslims—and that it will give us a lot. But today, after our political ups and downs, I find myself in a different mood. Now I feel that sometimes a great experience comes to be lost to a nation; often nations forget their history. I do not mean that a nation does, or has to, keep its history alive in its memory in every period. There also comes a time when a nation completely forgets its past. So, that experience, I mean the experience of migration, is unfortunately lost to us and on us. And the great expectation that we had of making something out of it at a creative level and of exploiting it in developing a new consciousness and sensibility—that bright expectation has now faded and gone.


1843 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 84-91
Author(s):  
Stevenson

The study of the vernacular languages of India is every day becoming a subject of more and more importance. The Government, yielding to the voice of reason, has decreed, that in every province the language of the people shall be the language of their rulers. Christians and philanthropists, in every district of the country, are preparing books and communicating the elements of learning to the native inhabitants, in their own dialects. Grammars and dictionaries of the principal vernacular tongues, exist either printed or in manuscript; and the speech of the common people instead of being despised as a jargon, is every where cultivated as a language.


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