1.4 Partition and nation-states: a technology of modernity

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From the course by The University of Melbourne

Contemporary India

29 ratings

The University of Melbourne

Contemporary India

29 ratings

This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view. While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment. No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course. This course is taught in English. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb

From the lesson

Contemporary India's history

We begin this course by discussing the history of pre-partition India i.e. before 1947. We will trace the trajectory of British rule from its inception in India and discuss important events like the mutiny of 1857, the formation of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, the divide and rule policy of the British, the idea of separate electorates and how it paved the way for partition in the subcontinent. You will be able to appreciate the devastation that partition brought to the region with millions of people killed, displaced and made refugees overnight. We will try to impress upon the fact that such a momentous event in world history, which involved ethnic cleansing in huge numbers, has been almost forgotten or is not remembered often enough; nor are the lessons learnt. The week concludes by discussing how partition still continues to affect community relations, relations between states and the very foundational ideas of the two nations: India and Pakistan.

1.1 Colonial history: British rule in India12:10

1.2 Pre-partition history7:58

1.3 The tryst with destiny9:38

1.4 Partition and nation-states: a technology of modernity11:10

1.5 Partition and amnesia12:33

1.6 Ghosts of partition: contemporary India 18:32

1.7 Ghosts of partition: contemporary India 212:39

Meet the Instructors

Anthony D'Costa
Professor
School of Social and Political Sciences

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.

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