Introduction: Death and the Problem of Theodicy

Summary

This book is primarily about death and suffering. It is an ethnography of the memory of the 1947 Partition of India and how its survivors make sense of the Partition's death and suffering decades after the fact. Although I worked with close to 50 informants while compiling this book, there was one person who was instrumental in the conceptualisation of this overarching theme: my late grandaunt Sneh.

My grandaunt Sneh died on the night of 7 June 2018. Her death came as a complete shock. Earlier that night, we had spoken on the phone and made plans for the following day. But it was not to be. She had a heart attack later that night and by the time her children drove her to the hospital, it was already too late. It was all over in a little less than an hour.

Through the course of my fieldwork, she and I had become quite close. She was the last surviving sibling of my late maternal grandmother. But growing up, I had not had the chance to spend much time with her. That year that I spent living in Delhi, she affectionately imposed a grandmotherly relationship on me. She would call me frequently to check up on me and would get annoyed if we went a week without talking on the phone. It was almost always my fault!

Sneh, or Nani Masi as I used to call her, was born in 1946 in Rajanpur, a small town in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan (now in Punjab, Pakistan). She was only an infant during the Partition. The youngest of four siblings (by quite a distance), she was relatively shielded from the chaos of the time. She remembered growing up in Kingsway Camp (Delhi) and later in the resettlement colony of Palwal, a satellite town 60 kilometres from Delhi. Her father – my great-grandfather – Chaudhry Pooran Chand was a renowned lawyer in his time. He was even appointed the resettlement commissioner of this area. Until as late as 2018, a certain generation of people in Palwal still remembered how he had spearheaded the resettlement process in this area. As his last surviving child, Nani Masi quietly embodied his legacy.

In her youth, she had been something of a rebel.