BiblioVault - Books about Partition

32 Counties

The Failure of Partition and the Case for a United Ireland

Kieran Allen

Pluto Press, 2021

'This is Irish history seen anew, from below, bristling with practical lessons for working-class struggle today' - Eamonn McCann

The 32 counties of Ireland were divided through imperial terror and gerrymandering. Partition was borne from a Tory strategy to defend the British Empire and has spawned a 'carnival of reaction' in Irish politics ever since. Over the last 100 years, conservative forces have dominated both states offering religious identity as a diversion from economic failures and inequality.

Through a sharp analysis of the history of partition, Kieran Allen rejects the view that the 'two cultures' of Catholic and Protestant communities lock people into permanent antagonism. Instead, the sectarian states have kept its citizens divided through political and economic measures like austerity, competition for reduced services and low wages.

Overturning conventional narratives, 32 Counties evokes the tradition of James Connolly and calls for an Irish unity movement from below to forge the North and the Republic into a secular, socialist and united Ireland.

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Borders and Boundaries

How Women Experienced the Partition of India

Ritu Menon

Rutgers University Press, 1998

As an event of shattering consequence, the Partition of India remains significant today. While Partition sounds smooth on paper, the reality was horrific. More than eight million people migrated and one million died in the process. The forced migration, violence between Hindus and Muslims, and mass widowhood were unprecedented and well-documented. What was less obvious but equally real was that millions of people had to realign their identities, uncertain about who they thought they were. The rending of the social and emotional fabric that took place in 1947 is still far from mended.

While there are plenty of official accounts of Partition, there are few social histories and no feminist histories. Borders and Boundaries changes that, providing first-hand accounts and memoirs, juxtaposed alongside official government accounts. The authors make women not only visible but central. They explore what country, nation, and religious identity meant for women, and they address the question of the nation-state and the gendering of citizenship.

In the largest ever peace-time mass migration of people, violence against women became the norm. Thousands of women committed suicide or were done to death by their own kinsmen. Nearly 100,000 women were "abducted" during the migration. A young woman might have been separated from her family when a convoy was ambushed, abducted by people of another religion, forced to convert, and forced into marriage or cohabitation. After bearing a child, she would be offered the opportunity to return only if she left her child behind and if she could face shame in her natal community. These stories do not paint their subjects as victims. Theirs are the stories of battles over gender, the body, sexuality, and nationalism-stories of women fighting for identity.

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Changing Homelands

Hindu Politics and the Partition of India

Neeti Nair

Harvard University Press, 2011

Changing Homelands offers a startling new perspective on what was and was not politically possible in late colonial India. In this highly readable account of the partition in the Punjab, Neeti Nair rejects the idea that essential differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities made political settlement impossible. Far from being an inevitable solution, the idea of partition was a very late, stunning surprise to the majority of Hindus in the region.

In tracing the political and social history of the Punjab from the early years of the twentieth century, Nair overturns the entrenched view that Muslims were responsible for the partition of India. Some powerful Punjabi Hindus also preferred partition and contributed to its adoption. Almost no one, however, foresaw the deaths and devastation that would follow in its wake.

Though much has been written on the politics of the Muslim and Sikh communities in the Punjab, Nair is the first historian to focus on the Hindu minority, both before and long after the divide of 1947. She engages with politics in post-Partition India by drawing from oral histories that reveal the complex relationship between memory and history—a relationship that continues to inform politics between India and Pakistan.

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Labour and Partition

The Belfast Working Class 1905-1923

Austen Morgan

Pluto Press, 1987

Mourning the Nation

Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition

Bhaskar Sarkar

Duke University Press, 2009

What remains of the “national” when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography.

Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.

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Partition

How and Why Ireland was Divided

Ivan Gibbons

Haus Publishing, 2022

Gibbons uncovers the origins of the Partition of Ireland.

The Partition of Ireland in 1921, which established Northern Ireland and saw it incorporated into the United Kingdom, sparked immediate civil war and a century of unrest. Today, the Partition remains the single most contentious issue in Irish politics, but its origins—how and why the British divided the island—remain obscured by decades of ensuing struggle.

Cutting through the partisan divide, Partition takes readers back to the first days of the twentieth century to uncover the concerns at the heart of the original conflict. Drawing on extensive primary research, Ivan Gibbons reveals how the idea to divide Ireland came about and gained popular support as well as why its implementation proved so controversial and left a century of troubles in its wake.

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Three Germanies

From Partition to Unification and Beyond, Second Expanded Edition

Michael Gehler

Reaktion Books, 2021

Following the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany has experienced recurring turmoil and reinvention. In this ambitious book, Michael Gehler explores the political path Germany has taken since the Yalta Conference, observing the different Germanies against the background of the Cold War, European integration, and international relations. Written from an independent perspective, it provides a valuable assessment of our own times, as he shows how the three Germanies (Bonn, Pankow, and today’s “Berlin Republic”) sought to establish governments that could create stable states.

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Violent Belongings

Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India

Kavita Daiya

Temple University Press, 2008

Focusing on the historical and contemporary narration of the Partition of India, Violent Belongings examines transnational South Asian culture from 1947 onwards. Spanning the Indian subcontinent and its diasporas in the United Kingdom and the United States, it asks how postcolonial/diasporic literature (eg., Rushdie, Mistry, Sidwa and Lahiri), Bollywood film, personal testimonies and journalism represent the violence, migration and questions of national belonging unleashed by that pivotal event during which two million people died and sixteen million were displaced.

In addition to challenging the official narratives of independence and Partition, these narratives challenge our contemporary understanding of gender and ethnicity in history and politics. Violent Belongings argues that both male and female bodies, and heterosexual coupledom, became symbols of the nation in public life. In the newly independent Indian nation both men and women were transformed into ideal citizens or troubling bodies, immigrants or refugees, depending on whether they were ethnically Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Sikh. The divisions set in motion during Partition continue into our own time and account for ethnic violence in South Asia.

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