Prologue: The Linguistic Context

Summary

The Partition of India remains the largest episode of retributive genocide and mass displacement in history (Aiyar 1995). It is estimated that between 200,000 and 2 million people were killed in the retributive violence that ensued, while between 10 and 17 million people were displaced in a haphazard transfer of population. In the process, approximately 3.4 million refugees went missing (Brass 2003b; Khwaja, Bharadwaj and Mian 2009). What began as a haphazard migration for safety – as people found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the border – was later formalised between India and Pakistan as a transfer of population (Bharadwaj and Mirza 2019).

This book is an ethnography of the memory of this historical rupture – its afterlife. It is based on 14 months of intensive fieldwork in Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region where I located and worked with over 50 first-hand survivors of the 1947 Partition of India. My research specifically focuses on Hindu refugees from the north-western Pakistani districts of Mianwali, Dera Ghazi Khan, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Quetta (Balochistan), Multan and Mianwali. Barring a brief trip to Dehradun, the overwhelming majority of Partition survivors I spoke to live in Delhi and its surroundings.

For the most part my fieldwork involved drinking copious amounts of tea with my informants as we discussed politics, history and their everyday lives. As a project that combines oral history with participant observation, this book relies heavily on the recording, transcription, interpretation and translation of the words of my informants. It is for this reason that detailing the ethnic and linguistic setting of my research gains added relevance.

Being a third-generation Partition migrant, my connection to the Partition is deeply intimate. Delhi was the obvious site for my fieldwork because my family's Partition survivors and their friends are settled there. This personal connection is visible throughout my research, shaping my search for informants as well as my engagement with theory. Due to the snowballing nature of my search for informants – that branched out into the kith and kin networks of my family's elders – all of my informants hail from the Derajat region and the North-West Frontier Province. All my informants were aged 80 and above at the time of interviews (2017–2018). Most of the people who find a mention in this book were close to 85 years of age.