Gyanendra Pandey - Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India

Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of `event' and `interpretation', the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.

GYANENDRA PANDEY is Professor of Anthropology and History at Johns Hopkins University. He was a founder member of the Subaltern Studies group and is the author of many publications including The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and, as editor, Hindus and Others: the Question of Identity in India Today (1993).

Jan Breman, G.P. Hawthorn, Ayesha Jalal, Patricia Jeffery, Atul Kohli

Contemporary South Asia has been established to publish books on the politics, society and culture of South Asia since 1947. In accessible and comprehensive studies, authors who are already engaged in researching specific aspects of South Asian society explore a wide variety of broad-ranging and topical themes. The series will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the study of South Asia and with the legacy of its colonial past.

1 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective

2 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy

3 Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery, Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India

4 Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India

5 Robert Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India

6 Atul Kohli (ed.), The Success of India's Democracy

Gyanendra Pandey

Johns Hopkins University