What does history make happen?: Teaching the Partition in 2021
The Partition is not dead or forgotten. On the contrary, that gash on the subcontinent has spawned a prolific industry—films, novels, poetry, academic articles, journalism, commentaries, documentaries, museum installations, oral histories, paintings, music, diaries, memoirs, short stories. It seems we will not forget the Partition, or perhaps, more accurately, we cannot forget it. We seek to record it, analyse it, understand it.
Yet, while the Partition seems to fairly saturate our popular culture, our schools barely gloss over it. The history of how one freedom struggle resulted in the creation of two Independence Day celebrations is not an easy one to narrate. It stumbles through dangerous terrain, among the swamps of religion, nation, justice and freedom.
In February 2020, I was approached by the ReReeti Foundation to create a workshop on the Partition for middle- and high-school students, primarily in South India. The ReReeti Foundation is a Bengaluru-based organisation that works to revitalise museums and the teaching of history in schools. I was ambivalent. What would be the motivation to expose young people to a concatenation of the horrors, the murders and rapes, the abductions, the pain of betrayal, the loss of home, the grief, and the suffering that is the Partition? Would they be able to stomach it, to keep it at the distance that allows analysis? Should they be able to? There would have to be an essential reason to pass on the trauma of the event, even if at second, or fifth, or eighteenth remove. Yes, there were stories of great courage and heart, stories of love and friendship, of unflinching bravery, but the overall landscape seemed to be coloured with red.
Besides, I wondered, with so much having been already said about it, what new things were left to be discovered? The poet WH Auden in his poem—“In Memory of W B Yeats”—famously said “poetry makes nothing happen.” What, I wondered, could history make happen? Like any story of human-created horror—of which there are far too many to choose from—the question was, is knowledge of these painful events an absolute good in itself? I did not think so. The question I would have to think through was—of what kind of story was the Partition an essential protagonist?
The original brief called for a Bengaluru-centric approach to the subject, as it was aimed at students in Bengaluru. It sought to set right the notion that the Partition, primarily of the Punjab, had hardly any impact on South India in general and Bengaluru in particular. As such, it imagined Partition as a relatively non-controversial affair—even though there were stories of Sindhis and Punjabis fleeing Rawalpindi and Karachi, the main focus of the brief was on their successful integration into the cultural and economic life of the city, the introduction of chhole bhature and the salwar-kameez, for example. During our research on how to teach the Partition in Karnataka, we found there were also a few stories of people leaving the state to go to cities in Pakistan, but these tended to be peaceful departures, undertaken some years after the formation of the new country. Particularly intriguing was the story of the creation of a Bangalore Town housing society in Karachi, complete with a signboard announcing the availability of “masala dosa.” However, in explaining Partition, it was impossible to interpret the larger frame of the story as a peaceful one.
Even then, when we asked the students what they knew about Partition, the story started out tidily in the mouths of middle-school children: two groups were not getting along, they decided to distribute their land so that each group got a country to themselves to call home, everyone had a place that they belonged to and so there was happiness. The idea that geography and “a people” went together, the idea that “like” belonged to “like” appeared commonsensical to the students. The joy of independence from the British lived seamlessly with the joy of creating and finding a “home of one’s own” in this telling.
It did not take long for the neat logic to fray. What aspects of “like” do you choose to alight on when making categories? Are farmers a group? Are women? Surely those who could speak the same language needed to live together? Should all those who disavow formal religious affiliation be consigned to an island somewhere, altogether? If masala dosa and the sounds of Kannada were components of home, could “home” be recreated among people who did not know either Kannada or the masala dosa? It turned out that behind the apparent obviousness of which people “belonged” together lay a lot of confusion—as true for the statesmen who drew the lines that made India and Pakistan, as for us, seventy years later, studying it in a virtual classroom in South India.
Questions about belonging and identity cropped up when we looked more closely at the historical record of migration—in this case, of refugee-creation. What does it mean to tell people who have been going about their everyday lives—cleaning vegetables, husking rice, getting married, cultivating their land for generations—to move to where they “belong”? What makes “a people”—food, language, customs, friendships, a shared knowledge of the seasons and landscape? If a bindi or a topi, judiciously placed at the right moment saved your life, were you now that new identity? Does one decide on an allegiance, or does one slip into a ready-made one available at birth? Was your identity a matter of which cricket team you cheered for? Or whose nuclear weapons made you feel happy and proud?
A short drama exercise attempted to convey the immediacy of the experience by asking students what they would take and leave behind, and where they would go, if, right now, in the middle of their online class, while their lunch was being prepared and while they were chatting with their friends, there was an announcement that they had to pack up and leave. Middle- and high-school students struggled to fit what they heard into a familiar frame, and found themselves unable to. “Anger,” “fear” and “helplessness” is how they described what they were feeling.
Questions about the Partition emerged from the students. “Why didn’t people take to the streets to protest? Why didn’t they refuse to move out of their homes?” Stories of folks forced out of their homes and told to go where they belong left students bewildered. It was difficult for protected English-speaking children, schooled in the idea that India is a democracy, to reconcile themselves to the fact that lives could be upturned just like that and that the people had no say in it.
In part, these questions also came readily to the students because they were in conversation with the zeitgeist of our current political moment. Questions of who was a citizen, who “belonged” and who did not and who made those decisions, were very much in the air during the conception and teaching of the course from June to September 2020. The protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and news of the Black Lives Matter movement had been splashed all over the headlines; the steady migration of COVID-19 refugees across the country had begun.
Students realised that the freedom of which they had been taught to be so proud was intimately intertwined with the grief of millions, that Independence Day and the Partition were inseparable. This had not been emphasised in the history of the nation taught in schools, in the school celebrations held on 15 August and 26 January every year. The knowledge of that history, the personal stories of some of the many whose lives had been devastated—often even younger than the students were now—the fact that their nation had a negotiated shape born of deliberation and compromise, led to reflection. Hopefully, it gave them a broader understanding of what it meant to be a part of a nation, of this nation. Students were encouraged to think on their individual relationship with such a collective—is the nation’s “enemy” your enemy, are its heroes your heroes; and when it protects itself are you being protected?
The COVID-19 migrations drove home the point powerfully and non-verbally. Photographs of people moving, walking, riding on bicycles, on the tops of trains, in bullock carts, on railways tracks and highways, with their belongings heaped high, little children perched on shoulders, resembled nothing so much as the pictures of Partition refugees.
Except now we were all supposed to belong to the “same” nation—how could one be a refugee in a place that was supposed to be home? Partition history served to show the audacity of the question. The bloodshed and grief of that period was predicated on the idea that those who stayed behind in these two nations were “home.” But the COVID-19 migrations served to dislodge the idea of India as a pre-ordained entity where everyone belonged equally, it emphasised the degree to which it remained a work in progress.
The connection between Bengaluru and the Partition had not been immediately evident; it required research to cobble together a narrative that could be taught in the classroom. However, no such difficulty presented itself when we conducted another online workshop on the Partition for a group of Pakistani and Indian undergraduate students of design later over December 2020 and January 2021. It was facilitated by two of us, an anthropologist and a designer. In such a workshop, we focussed on the “shared heritage” of Indians and Pakistanis. The problem here became one of excess—what does one leave out of such a story?
We grappled with how to broach the history of the Partition when teaching Pakistanis and Indians together. The story of the Partition—how it came about, the motivations and inclinations of the major figures, indeed how to decide who were the major figures, the ideas of heroes and villains—all had to be refigured in the context of our audience. The teaching of this history raised awkward crags on the path to friendship and understanding. These included the birth of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League; Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s move from being an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” to his disappointment with the “moth eaten” Pakistan he’d been given; the presence of Maulana Azad, a major Muslim leader in the Congress party, who took a firm stance against the Muslim League; and Jawaharlal Nehru’s celebrated “tryst with destiny” speech.
It is not that the crags were insurmountable. On both sides, the students were young people aware of the dangers of the division, eager to learn about life for their counterparts across the border, full of goodwill for them. Invoking a “shared heritage” between Pakistanis and Indians typically makes poets of some of us—we rhapsodise about music and poetry, about food, films, literature, a sense of humour, romance, solidarity, of Ghalib and Amir Khusrau, of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Iqbal Bano and Manto, not to mention the Taj. In a formal gathering of Pakistanis and Indians, especially one formed around the Partition, the problem was that all the beauty and grace of that shared heritage seemed to have culminated in horror and inconsolable grief.
Seen through one lens, the best way to deal with competing attributions of aggression and defence, of heroes and villains, seemed to be to acknowledge the differences squarely. Among the possible learning aids was a history e-textbook from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, or UNESCO, titled “Partitioned Histories: The Other Side of Your Story.” It carried both Pakistani and Indian versions of the major events of the freedom movement, cheek to cheek, as it were.
But why do the work of learning slanted histories only to take them apart, to disregard them so that we could move forward? Historical wisdom has it that one cannot move ahead without first taking a hard look back. To which a question could be asked, how far back should one extend oneself in this sizing up history? Any historical point is determined by various factors, from logistical—the very existence of a historical record—to ideological. In this case, our choice of frame was decided by the desire to underscore a shared, rather than divided, experience.
However, conversations—written and otherwise—that focus on how similar Pakistani and Indian cultures are can be problematic because we already know that that particular story ends in slaughter. So why not simply jettison a deeply divided record and begin at the true moment of sharing, the moment when the Partition became a fait accompli, an experience that both Indians and Pakistanis had to live through?
That is why our course on the Partition taught to a joint group of Pakistani-Indian students began with the moment of refugee creation. They heard and read experiences from refugees fleeing in haste and terror without knowing where they were headed. Participants were not told names of people or of regions. Later, talking about it, students—from Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Nagpur, Thane, Indore, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad—expressed amazement at the sameness of stories; the religious affiliation of those fleeing did not make any difference to the content of the narrative. It is one thing to know this rationally, and another to have it confirmed in story after story.
As the young people in the course got to know each other better, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the emphasis needed to be less on shared history and more on their shared contemporary reality. As individuals acted upon by the same global economic and ideological forces, they did not have to look very deep to discover a common language—a language of Coke, of McDonalds and YouTube and Whatsapp, not to mention Coke Studio, Hindi films and a whole parallel universe of digital apps.
Not only were they subjected to the same economic and ideological systems, but where we were truly indistinguishable was at the species level. Peering even further down the chain, we emphasised that we were all participants in the natural world. How did students relate to this world? Through these stories a different narrative of sharedness emerged. Yes, the peacock may be the “national bird” of India, but it does not mean that it does not dance in Pakistan. Nor does COVID-19 stop at immigration counters.
In March and April 2020, the migrants marched, criss-crossing the country, resembling those same nightmarish journeys taken seventy-odd years ago. And from there it was a quick step to talking of the refugees created by the climate crisis—a realm where the narrative of nationalism should break down, and typically, sadly, does not.
It may be in the teaching of it that one becomes most acutely aware of the relationship of history to contemporary context, of its way of heightening or subduing forces at play in the moment. In teaching the Partition in Bangalore to middle- and high-school students, I wanted them to see the nation—their nation, India—in a historical frame. To see something—a person, a community, a nation, a song—historically is to demystify the thing, to strip it of its glamour and to lay it subject to questioning. When the mood of our current moment seems to be to conflate the constructed idea of a nation with that of a natural pre-existing organism, un-constructed and eternal, to teach the Partition is to show students that this idea is not accurate. It is to suggest that students can contribute meaningfully to the idea of India; it is to ask students to be less nationalistic, and more empathetic.
Conversely, when talking of the Partition to an older group of Pakistani-Indian students, I was keen that we not spend too much of our valuable time together with the “historical.” In this case too, it meant going beyond the idea of a nation state, albeit from a different angle. For instance, the nation state as a paradigm through which to respond to the climate catastrophe is clearly ineffective. So, what does history make happen when faced with an unprecedented crisis like the climate crisis? Perhaps it points the way negatively, to show us the limits of history.
As the writer James Baldwin said in a conversation with the anthropologist Margaret Mead, “It takes a long time to understand anything at all about what we call the past—and begin to be liberated from it.”