Welcome back. In this section we're going to be talking about partition and nation-states, and partition really as a technology of modernity. So, when you look at the violence of partition and the impact of partition on a variety of other places, we can think about Africa, we can think about the Middle East, we can think about Northern Ireland. You would wonder why this is seen as a good way to manage nation-states. So in the previous section, we discussed the moment of independence for India and Pakistan. In this section, we'll think a little bit generally about what partition actually means for the states that emerge out of it. In terms of an introduction, if you think for example at the moment you have this Islamic State, which aims to create a caliphate in parts of the Middle East. But one of the things that they're actually on record as saying is that they want to destroy or obliterate the Sykes-Picot Line, which is the basic way in which colonial powers divided up the Middle East, they carved up the Middle East. That is one of the things that they want to obliterate. That colonial legacy is what they want to destroy. And if you look at Africa and the way in which borders were drawn in Africa, a continent which was where people, often people who were pastoral and who moved freely between various parts of the continent, all of a sudden became confined within borders that they definitely saw as artificial. And a variety of the wars fought in Africa have been really because of borders that were not recognised, and not understood by the people who were confined in them. And so an interesting thing about modernity is, modernity is really about creating homogeneous rational entities. Lines that will, you know, divide up places rationally on a map, rather than the truth that people may have been moving across these areas in a free manner, and will not really suddenly recognise lines drawn on a map. In the Australian context, you could think about, for example, all of the Indonesian fisherman up in the sea the East Timor Sea, who used to fish in that area for generations, and when the maritime borders were extended, suddenly found that they were illegal. So these borders and partitions in the creation of nation-states are really artifices, they're fictions to unite populations. And the fictions may be based on religion, on language, ethnicity, race, territory, shared histories, whatever, but they are fictional, they are attempts to rationalise and homogenise situations which are neither rational or easily domesticated, or easily organised into something which is reasonable and neat and tidy, if you like. So, this construction of nation-states certainly by modern states and powers is an idealised nexus between territory and identity. So somebody in a nation, so the nation of India, we're all Indians, that's our identity rather than, you know, Hindus, or Muslims, or Christians, or Bengalis, or Madrasis, or Kannadigas. Our identity is Indian. So for Pakistan, for people in Pakistan, citizens of Pakistan, their identity is Pakistani. It may not be Muslims, it may not be Balochi. So this is a characteristic of global modernity, and one of the great challenges to the nation-state and challenges to this notion of global modernity is for most people, the refusal to maintain this one single identity. The refusal to take the national identity as overriding every other identity. And in the case, certainly in the 21st century, you can see, in fact, that the Islamic identity for a variety of people overrides all other kinds of identity, including national identity. So, you can see very clearly how or rather how unsuccessful this notion of this this nexus between territory and identity has been. So partition, when it happened in 1947, for India and Pakistan, a lot of people were on record saying, oh, this is an irrational, explicable aberration. This is atavistic. This is why it has created all this violence. And this is not something which is normal. Obviously, of course, it wasn't normal, but it's not something which we could have expected. But the whole idea of basing nations on religious difference is in a sense a sign of the arrival of societies into the modern. It's a sign of societies accepting those terms of modernity. And a really well-known scholar in India, Ashis Nandy, who has worked a lot on partitions, has gone on record as saying that, sure, the British partitioned the Indian subcontinent, and okay, that may have not been a wise thing to do, but they didn't tell us to kill each other. That was not something that the British did. That is something that the people of the Indian subcontinent did all by themselves. And when you think about you know, for example, the killing of Jews during the Nazi time in Second World War. Or you think about the violence in Northern Ireland. Or you think about the attacks on the Yazidis, or Christians in Iraq - these are people who have lived in those areas for generations, hundreds of years. Why and how do they suddenly become the enemy? And this is a question that we need to ask of the techniques that nation-states use to bolster themselves - it that these techniques of modernity are often accompanied by massive violence. So this extraordinary violence is really because the people have to make efforts or the system has to make an effort to make the ground reality conform to an idealised map. So the ground reality is, Hindus cannot live together in subcontinent, Muslims should live in Pakistan, Hindus should live in India. But there were a large number of Hindus who remained in Pakistan, and a huge number of Muslims who remained back in India. So how do we make those ground realities, the fact that we have all of these different - we have these people of this other religion living within the campus of the nation-state of India to conform to this idealised map that India is for Hindus and Pakistan is for Muslims. India dealt with it in a particular way by nominating themselves as a secular state. But even so, the fact that the majority of Indians were Hindus was always in a sense, the the default position of that nation-state. So what happens in this context is that rather than citizenship of a nation being a civic one - so a citizen of a nation has a civic role, a civic duty, a civic identity, which is based on a certain shed or premises of the rule of the law or or living together in harmony, tolerance of other people's beliefs and practices - all of these ideals become discounted through that identity, through that ideal of different identity. So citizenship is about your religious identity, or any other form of identity that the state may decree. And attempts to define nationalism through democracy, secularism, development, are contested. Because if your identity is bound up, particularly in religion, or in ethnicity, or in any of those things, then in fact, the attempt to define a nation in terms of democracy, or in terms of a secular identity, which is comfortable with different identity and religions are all contested. And the national imagination then becomes dominated by the metaphors of land, territory, soil, those sorts of things rather than those civic ideals of citizenship. And this, of course, has an enormous impact on minorities, because if you attempt to homogenise territory and identity, then you create a hierarchy of communities that is, minority communities, majority communities. What kind of rights are possible in these contexts? And minorities are inevitably judged by their approximation to the authentic nationality. So in India, Muslim minorities are often judged, or often seen as not being patriotic or not being pro-India, or they support Pakistan if there's an India-Pakistan cricket match. Those sorts of ideas become very prevalent. And this idea of national versus communal, that is the national priority versus communal rights, certainly in South Asia and in India, it delegitimises minorities, so minorities are denied full membership in the imagined community of the nation. Because they have to always prove that they are authentically nationalist, authentically patriotic. In the next section, we'll discuss the political, social, and culture amnesia associated with partition in the subcontinent.
