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August 09, 2007

Exit Wounds: The legacy of Indian partition

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker:

Screenhunter_08_aug_09_0150Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority’s right to rule. British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable.

This was a deeper tragedy than is commonly realized—and not only because India today has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In a land where cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities, few people had defined themselves exclusively through their ancestral faith. The Pashto-speaking Muslim in the North-West Frontier province (later the nursery of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) had little in common with the Bangla-speaking Muslim in the eastern province of Bengal. (Even today, a Sunni Muslim from Lahore has less in common with a Sunni Muslim from Dhaka than he has with a Hindu Brahmin from New Delhi, who, in turn, may find alien the language, food, and dress of a low-caste Hindu from Chennai.) The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: “Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.”

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 01:49 AM | Permalink

Comments

I read "Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra not long ago and he deals with the Partition throughout the book. I had heard that it was a bad and harrowing time but the book really hammered home how terrible it must have been.

I hate trying to draw parallels between Iraq and other situations in history, but the splintering of Iraq into religious groups and tribes, and my country's continued tacit support of the splintering, is unsettling.

Posted by: Maurice Reeves | Aug 9, 2007 9:29:13 AM

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