“All trains stop there”

This chapter focuses on what is probably the most popular icon of partition narratives—that of refugee trains being attacked and turned into “death trains.” There is hardly a single partition narrative in any genre that does not mention trains in some form or another. This chapter charts the ways in which train journeys have been represented in literature, cinema, and oral history testimonies in an attempt to explain the reason for this predominance. If we see partition as a violent re-inscribing of social hierarchies, then the icon of the “death train” becomes a space within which individual and collective agency can be expressed, as the dynamic between state and non-state forces is played out in this microcosm of the nation.

“This eight-year-old, he’s too little”

This chapter focuses on the construction of childhood in stories of partition. A surprisingly large proportion of the cultural production of partition takes the form of the coming-of-age narrative, so that partition is presented through the child’s gaze. Here, the child’s view is often used to reinforce particular adult political positions through which the child can be socialized into accepting these positions as desirable and natural. As a result the body of narrative becomes a contested space for adult and childhood control. This dynamic is mirrored in the oral history testimony, which is also contested between the child who experienced the event, and the adult who remembers it. Children’s insistence on their ability to understand the situation, the ability to mourn losses on their own terms, and the reinforcing of particular childhood losses as equally important to the apparently more important adult losses becomes a key aspect through which childhood narrators are able to exert control over their experiences and memories.

“My other mother”

This chapter looks at one of the most iconic forms of loss—that of families separated across the borders. Stories of separated families can be found in almost every literary and cinematic representation of partition, most often as an example of powerlessness in the face of wider events over which one has no control. This chapter identifies a powerful radical potential in the emotional connections that survivors experience with people, places and objects – connections that extend beyond, and are sometimes more powerful than, their relationships with their family. Identifying this potential is particularly important in the way one conceptualizes the long shadow that partition and the separation of families has cast over private and public life in south Asia, and the ways in which people try (or refuse to try) to find and reconcile with missing family members.

“Wasn’t it golden?”

This chapter examines how we construct ideas of home and homeliness in various ways within diverse memory narratives. Apart from oral history testimonies, the chapter focuses on visual art, literature, and the cinema of partition. The chapter examines the many meanings that the concept of home has in people’s memory. It looks at the powerful emotional connection that people experience and preserve in their memories of the lost home. Analyzing these meanings and emotions, the chapter goes on to make the case that the memories of the lost home, and the ways in which these memories become part of one’s life-narrative can be a powerful force in transcending and undermining national borders and statist narratives of history.

“I still dream of the Padma”

One of the features that links the two regions most directly affected by partition, Punjab and Bengal, is that they are both topographically defined by rivers. As a result, many of the partition narratives help construct emotional relationships with rivers which assume particular significance during the trauma of partition. This chapter examines the complex constructions of rivers that can be seen in the various representations of partition in Bengal and Punjab. Riverscapes become spaces in which the events of partition are enacted, in the process changing how the rivers are perceived and remembered. Rivers survive in memory as both places of comforting familiarity, and horrifying sites of violence. Through the act of narration, rivers manage to signify both continuities and discontinuities, both the homely and the unhomely.

“The Cause”

This chapter looks at people whose professional identities have been shaped by their own and inherited memories of partition. Using extracts from oral history interviews with artists, writers, academics, community activists, and rehabilitation workers, as well as other interviews and formal autobiographical work, it examines how people’s experiences of partition create particular economic challenges and opportunities in the post-partition world, which, in turn, allow people to create new professional practices and identities. These economic practices range from working in refugee-rehabilitation immediately after partition to illegitimate or illegal activities on the part of refugees attempting to rebuild their lives. Over the years since partition, this form of agency widens to encompass literary and artistic practices, academic work, and community activism. A closer look at how these people mobilize their memories and family stories will show that partition needs to also be seen as a productive event, in the sense that it not only helped to produce identities (“Indian” and “Pakistani”) but it also helped to produce “work” in the form of academic research, artistic production, and social and political activism—all of which provide examples of the articulation of agency on the part of the narrating subjects.

Introduction

This chapter provides a brief historical outline of the events of partition, and an introduction to the theoretical framework that underpins the book’s central themes. The historical context is read through the lens of the politics of memory and representation—in particular focusing on the ways in which state-endorsed narratives of history are used to reinforce contemporary domestic and foreign policy. The chapter begins to outline the ways in the narratives that are the focus of this book engage with and challenge such “official” views of partition. This introductory chapter also sets out the current scholarship of partition—concentrating on memory and oral history—and marks out the space in existing scholarship where this book sits.

Conclusion

This chapter teases out the theoretical conclusions of the book, reinforcing the ways in which a study of the cultural and memorial legacy of partition can be used to complicate the story and, in the process, undermine state-endorsed historic narratives. Reading narratives of partition as examples of individual and collective agency also allows for a more complex conceptualization of agency. Remembering and narrating the moment when new nations came into being, many of the public and private forms of representation that this book examines provide examples of people trying to exert agency over the ways in which the spaces to which they belonged and which were being reorganized around them into new nation states. Agency through narration can then be seen as ways of trying to find new ways of belonging and articulating new forms of citizenship.

“The most awful thing I watched”

While every single scholarly account of partition features accounts of violence, very few studies have focused on the use of space in the way in which violence is remembered and narrated. Using a detailed study of a number of oral history testimonies, as well as literature and cinema, this chapter examines how people maintain the sanctity of the home in memory by relegating the violence of partition to the margins. This insistence on a physical separation between the nostalgically reconstructed center of the happy home and the threatening violence from the margins is noticeable across partition narratives, and helps to construct an imaginary geography which allows for the complexities of an event remembered.