Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India Book

Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey
A disruptive moment in human civilization attracts the historian's attention. But more often than not, the discipline of history as narrated by the historian is enmeshed with the regimes of State, Nation and Politics. Gyanendra Pandey differentiates the disciplinary form of history to draw a parallel viewpoint which offers new perspective to look at history itself. Pandey takes the Partition of South Asia to bring into account the human dimension of event that has been overshadowed by the political events shrouding the liberation of India and Pakistan. He enfolds the local into the national by focusing on events at Garhmukhteshwar, and then restructures the national into the local by talking about the riot-ridden days in Delhi following the Partition. The national, according to Pandey, is homogeneous in its configuration that disciplines the socio-ethnic differences in a linear theoretical framework. The local instead appears as a spatial configuration that is heterogeneous in nature. The monolithic narration of disciplinary history is interrogated in this book as Pandey reminisces the days of the Partition. His accounts of history are based on the interviews that he had collected. These discussions open up new spaces in Partition studies that scholars can delve deep into in order to understand the history of the Partition'an event that corresponds with the independence of India and formation of Pakistan.