Conference: Midnight's Images: Spatial and Artistic Imaginings around a Contested Border
17-Mar-2011
This conference
re-examines conflicted meanings of the borders that divided British
India at
the stroke of midnight on August
14-15, 1947 to produce the new states of India
and Pakistan. British India’s partition, and the violence that
surrounded it,
has been the subject of considerable scholarship and debate among a
range of
scholars across the social sciences and the humanities. This
inter-disciplinary
conference seeks to bring together scholars who work on the textual and
image
archives generated around this contentious event to explore themes and
issues
shared by the verbal and visual registers, as well as the divergences,
silences
and invisibilities. Our goal is to understand the conflicted imaginings
that
shaped the boundaries that were produced by partition, boundaries that
both
made possible—and disrupted—the imagining of the new Indian and
Pakistani
nations. It has an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together scholars
who work
on both countries in history, religion, literature, and art history.
Further
enquiries may be addressed to the conference co-organizers David
Gilmartin (david_gilmartin@ncsu.edu)
and
Sumathi Ramaswamy (sr76@duke.edu).
Friday,
April 15
Abstracts and bios below.
9:30 am: Introduction by David Gilmartin and Sumathi Ramaswamy
Session 1:
Drawing Lines
Chair: Afroz Taj, UNC, Chapel Hill
10:00-10:45:
Lucy Chester, University of Colorado at Boulder
"Ambiguous Cartographies: Uncertainty and Danger in the Mapping of the
1947 Partition"
10:45-11:30: David
Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
"Maps, Property and Civilization"
11:30-11:45: Coffee Break
11:45-12:30:
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University
“Art on the Line"
12:30-1 pm: Discussion
LUNCH: 1-2:30
Session 2: Artful
Imaginings
Chair: Judith Ernst, Independent Artist, Chapel Hill
2:30-3:15: Gayatri
Sinha, Independent curator and art critic, New Delhi
"Partition and the Patriarchal State: Images in Indian Art from the
1940s to the Present"
3:15-4:00: Iftikhar
Dadi, Cornell University
"Zainul Abedin and Competing Nationalisms in South Asia"
4:00-4:15 Coffee Break
4:15-5:00: Hammad
Nasar, Curator, Green Cardamom, London
"Lines of Control: The Productive Capacity of India's Partition"
5:00-5:30 pm: Discussion
Film
screening, Amar Kanwar's "A Season Outside" (1998)
Saturday,
April 16
Session 3:
The Lay of the Land
Chair: Matthew Cook, NCCU
9:30-10:15: Vinayak Chaturvedi, University of California, Irvine
"Hindutva Beyond the Borders"
10:15-11:00:
Venkat
Dhulipala, University of North Carolina-Wilmington
"Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan"
11:00-11:15: Coffee Break
11:15-11:45: Discussion
LUNCH: 11:45-1:15
Session
4: Performing Loss
Chair: Rich Freeman, Duke University
1:15-2:00:
Anna Bigelow, NCSU
"Partition without Parting: Devotional Islam in Indian Punjab"
2:00-2:45 Vazira
Zamindar, Brown University
"Qaum, Tārī aur Zabān: Representing the Muslim Journey from Delhi to
Karachi"
2:45-3:15: Discussion
3:15-3:30: Coffee Break
Session 5:
Sounds and Visions
Chair: Sandria B. Freitag, NCSU
3:30-4:15: Pavitra Sundar, Kettering University
"Aural History: Sounds of Partition in Hindi Cinema"
4:15-5:00: Bhaskar
Sarkar, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Mourning Becomes Reflexive: Historical Consciousness in Mammo
and Zubeida"
Partition without Parting: Devotional Islam in Indian Punjab
In spite of the
partition of 1947, Islam and Muslims are still present in Indian Punjab
through the persistence and popularity of devotional traditions of the
saints. This is especially evident in Malerkotla, where there is a
continuing Muslim population. This town is almost fetishized by media,
visitors, and pilgrims as an authentically Muslim place and as a place
where the idealized pre-Partition Punjabi atmosphere is still
accessible. However, in places like Faridkot or Sri Hargobindpur where
there is little or no native Punjabi Muslim population, the absent
Muslim is still a necessary presence in the rituals and narratives of
the shrines that animate these towns. Even with few or no Muslims, there
is an Islamic imaginary that provides a spectral, but essential,
authority to the places and practices around these devotional centers.
ANNA
BIGELOW is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of
Philosophy and Religious Studies at NC State University where she won
the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the College of Humanities and
Social Sciences in 2009. She received her MA from Columbia University
and PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara with a focus on South
Asian Islam. Her book, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in
Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a
Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and
civic spaces in that community. Bigelow's current research, funded by
the Scholars Program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, involves
further study of contested and cooperatively patronized multi-religious
sacred sites in South Asia and the Middle East, focusing on the
inter-religious dynamics that complicate or ameliorate these relations
in plural communities around the globe. She speaks and writes frequently
on religious extremism, religion and conflict, and the role of Islam in
the world today.
Hindutva Beyond the Borders
As one of the intellectual founders of
Hindu nationalism, V.D. Savarkar provided a key discussion of the
territorial boundaries of the Hindu nation in his seminal political
treatise Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, published in 1923. Hindutva
is often cited as the most influential text in the Hindu nationalist
cannon in defining a Hindu as a person who identifies the nation between
the Indus River and the seas as both the ‘father-land’ and the
‘holy-land’. Savarkar’s followers have interpreted his arguments in Hindutva
as asserting a timeless fixity to the geography of the Hindu nation,
which was destroyed with the partition of the nation in 1947 and the
creation of Pakistan. In contrast, in this paper, I will examine
Savarkar’s unpublished writings from the 1930s-1940s as a way to
reconsider his own rethinking of the Hindu nation beyond the boundaries
he defined in Hindutva. I will consider Savarkar’s
interpretations of ‘Asia’ and the ‘pan-Hindu-Buddhist alliance’ that
provide critiques of his own arguments about the geography of the Hindu
nation, while laying out an agenda for the global role of Hindu
nationalism after the end of empires in the twentieth century.
VINAYAK CHATURVEDI is an Associate
Professor in the Department of History at the University of California,
Irvine. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History
and Memory in Western
India (2007) and the editor
of Mapping
Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (2000). He is presently working
on a book on the
intellectual history of V.D. Savarkar and Hindu nationalism.
Ambiguous Cartographies: Uncertainty and Danger in the Mapping of the 1947 Partition
This paper examines the
role of uncertainty in maps and other images of India, Pakistan, and
their shared boundary. For example, maps published in newspapers in the
days after partition were small-scale, some showing broad boundaries
that covered swathes of territory over four miles wide. What were the
effects of images created by citizens, nationalists, and British
officials in the months before and after Partition? In what ways did
they clarify the shaping of the new Indo-Pakistani boundaries? In what
ways did they obscure them? Drawing on an array of primary sources,
including nationalist statements, newspaper articles, advertisements,
and government documents, I will examine both the illusion of clarity
created by such maps and the reality of ambiguity—and danger—experienced
by residents of divided areas, as well as those who lived in other
parts of the subcontinent.
LUCY
CHESTER
is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. She
is the author of Borders and
Conflict in
South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of
Punjab
(Manchester UP, 2009). She is currently
at work on a book-length study of connections between British India and
the
Palestine Mandate in the decades leading up to Britain's withdrawal.
The first fruits of this project appeared in
her article “Factors Impeding the Effectiveness of Partition in South
Asia and
the Palestine Mandate,” published in an edited volume on Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge UP, 2008) and in “Boundary
Commissions as Tools to Safeguard British Interests at the End of
Empire,” Journal of Historical
Geography 34:3
(Jul 2008): 494-515.
Zainul Abedin and competing nationalisms in South Asia
Born in East Bengal, the artist
Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) began artistic practice in Calcutta where he
produced an influential series of drawings on the Bengal Famine in 1943,
and whose circulation in a communist publication was suppressed by the
colonial authorities. After Partition in 1947, he moved to Dhaka to set
up an art school, and worked as a Pakistani state employee even while
developing his practice and pedagogy with reference to East Bengali
concerns. After the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, he was viewed as a
foundational figure of Bangladeshi art. This paper will situate Abedin’s
formal concerns in an extended ensemble of contradictory historical,
social, and aesthetic forces, which include the marginality of the
largely Muslim East Bengal in the Bengali intellectual and cultural
renaissance from the late nineteenth century, competing nationalisms
before and after 1947, aesthetic developments at Santiniketan, and the
influential consolidation of modernism in South Asia around 1947. The
larger question this paper will ask from Abedin’s work is the problem of
the adequacy of artistic forms in addressing historical and epistemic
crises attending decolonization. IFTIKHAR DADI is Associate Professor at Cornell University
in the Department of History of Art, and Interim Chair of the Department of
Art. Research interests include postcolonial theory, and modern and
contemporary art with emphasis on South and West Asia. Recent publications
include the book Modernism and the Art of
Muslim South Asia (2010). As an artist he
collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi and has shown widely
internationally.
Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India
This paper explores the imagination of
Pakistan in the thought of Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. A senior alim
at Deoband, Usmani broke away from the Jamiatul-Ulama-i-Hind to form
the Jamiatul-Ulama-i-Islam, which provided crucial support to the ML
during the elections of 1945-46 that were a referendum on Pakistan.
Usmani’s imagination of Pakistan combined secular conceptions of
territory with theological conceptions of utopian space for he
envisioned Pakistan as not just a sovereign state located in the Muslim
majority provinces of British India, but as a new Medina where
an equal brotherhood of Islam would be created making it worthy of
emulation throughout the Islamic world. In therefore defending the idea
of Pakistan against its many critics, Usmani on the one hand
highlighted its natural resources, infrastructural assets, strategic
location with contiguous Muslim allies in the Middle East, besides
portraying Pakistan as a potent sovereign guarantor that would protect
the rights and interests of Muslims staying behind in post-colonial
Hindu India. More importantly though, Usmani provided theological
justifications for Pakistan thus providing it cover against relentless
attacks by Deobandi ulama sympathetic to the Congress and its
idea of a united India. He therefore glorified Pakistan as the first
Islamic state in history that would reconstruct the Islamic utopia that
had first been established by the Prophet in Medina. Invoking powerful
metaphors from Islamic history Usmani compared the sacrifices of
minority provinces Muslims towards creating Pakistan, to those made by
the muhajirin in building Medina. Indeed, just as Medina had
provided a base for the eventual victory of Islam in Arabia and beyond,
Usmani predicted that Pakistan would pave the way for the triumphal
return of Islam as the ruling power all over the subcontinent. The new
political vocabulary intertwining both the religious and secular
arguments for Pakistan that Usmani fashioned, was also used by both the ulama
and the ML political elite to rouse popular enthusiasm for Pakistan. A
symbiotic relationship that developed between them was based on the
understanding that an Islamic Pakistan could be achieved only gradually,
on the basis of mutual dialogue and negotiation. The paper suggests
that it is the deferral of this resolution that explains the continuing
mutual cohabitation, negotiations, and struggles between and within
these two groups over the definition of Pakistan’s postcolonial
identity. VENKAT
DHULIPALA
is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North
Carolina, Wilmington. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute
for
Historical Studies at the University of Texas, Austin where is working
on a
book manuscript titled Creating a New
Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial
North
India.
Maps, Property and Civilization
This paper will explore the
connections between property mapping, community, and the meaning of
India’s partition. The concept of “partition” was one legally grounded
in 20th century India in the notion of the breaking up of the
collectively held “commons” into individual plots. This in turn was
deeply embedded in the structuring of British property law and in the
demarcation of individual property rights on the ground. Property was,
however, a concept with multiple valences in British India. It was, as
the concept of “partition” suggests, on one level a concept that defined
the conflicting claims of the individual and the community as these
were demarcated on maps. But on another level, property was also
associated with competing definitions of freedom and autonomy. It was,
on one level, the foundation for the imagining of the autonomous
individual subject associated with a powerful vision of “modern”
civilization, a vision in which boundaries and dominion over land and
nature were central. Yet it was also, on another level, associated with
the sundering of the affective bonds of civilization holding community
together. By taking the history of property and mapping in India as a
starting point, this paper will explore some of the contradictions
marking the events of 1947.
DAVID GILMARTIN joined the faculty at North
Carolina State University in 1983. His
Ph. D. was revised and published as Empire
and Islam: Punjab and the Making of
Pakistan. His later research focused
on the history and politics of irrigation and water control in the Indus
basin,
on which he has published many articles.
His most recent research looks at the evolution of election law in
colonial and postcolonial India. Along
with Bruce Lawrence, he has co-edited Beyond
Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia
(2000).
Lines of Control: The Productive Capacity of India’s Partition.
This paper sets out the terrain being explored in the ongoing Lines of Control project. A long-term, exhibition-led enquiry of partitions as productive spaces: where nations are made through forging new identities and relationships; reconfiguring memory and creative forgetting; and through the creation and patrolling of physical and psychological borders.
In my paper I will examine the place of myth, memory and the ideal in strategies adopted by selected contemporary artists working in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to wrestle with this complex issue over the last two decades. The 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque, the fifty years of independence/partition in 1997 and the fallout of the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 serve as trigger points for a younger generation of artists, those not necessarily having lived through it, but looking at contemporary sectarian politics of identity and belonging at least partly through the lens of partition.
Artistic collaborations across groups (for example the Aar Paar project initiated in 1998) or individual artists (Ifitkhar Dadi and Nalini Malani’s Bloodlines) acted as catalysts in the artistic discourse around partition. This has been developed by individuals zooming in, through long-term engagement, on a variety of social levers: Naeem Mohaiemen’s exploration of Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam’s legacy and across time and place; Bani Abidi’s look at the performative elements of identity through her photographs and video works; on the place of home in memory in Sophie Ernst’s complex video installations; and the films of Amar Kanwar that meditate on violence, protest, memory and visual strategies of conveying the unspeakable.
Collectively these artistic practices provide evidence for the
search for alternative spaces and languages for crossing partitions’
lines of control: a fruitful activity at a time where ever more lines of
control are being created – from Kosovo to South Ossetia to Sudan. HAMMAD NASAR is a
curator, writer and co-founder of the London-based arts organisation
Green
Cardamom. He was a Fellow of the
Clore Leadership Programme for 2006-7,
Research Fellow at Goldsmith's College, and Arts Director for the UK’s
Festival
of Muslim Cultures (2006-07). He has lectured at, curated exhibitions
for and
contributed to public programmes at numerous museums and universities
around
the world. He has also contributed essays to numerous catalogues and
arts
publications internationally. Recent projects include Safavids
Revisited at
the British Museum, London; Where Three
Dreams
Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh at
the Whitechapel Gallery, London and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Beyond
the Page: The Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art from Pakistan at
the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California, and Manchester Art
Gallery; Drawn
from Life
at Abbot Hall Museum & Gallery, Kendal, UK; and Fatah
jay Aassay Paassay-In the Milieu of Fatah Halepoto at the Sindh
Museum, Hyderabad and VM Art Gallery, Karachi. His ongoing curatorial
projects
include Lines of Control:
Partition as a Productive Space and Mashq:
Repetition, Meditation, Mediation.
Lines of Power, Contours of Yearning: The Imperialism of the Line in the Indian Subcontinent
The Italian sculptor Gilberto Zorio once insisted, “A boundary is the imaginary line that draws attention to itself by violence.” In my presentation, I reflect on this evocative insistence by considering how and why lines, dashes, and contours on a piece of paper (or sometimes, parchment or cloth) have had such profound, even violent, consequences in our times by reaching deep into our lives to shape the physical spaces we inhabit. Beginning with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 when an imaginary line was drawn down the Atlantic Ocean to parcel out the globe between two emergent empires, through the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 when other lines were drawn on pieces of paper laid out on a table in Europe that decided the fate of a continent elsewhere, to the bloody partitions of the past century (Ireland, India, Palestine, to name the most prominent of them), the act of bounding off spaces has produced a new object through what is essentially an act of violence. I call this new object produced by the science of cartography a “geo-coded realm,” following the work of Gunnar Olsson and John Pickles. My goal is to show how such geo-coded realms produced through the violent work of modern science and states, also become the space of desire and yearning that leads to other acts of violence, displacement, but also, mourning.
In the complex inter-disciplinary
scholarship on the partition of British India in 1947, the cartographic
implications of this violent act of drawing lines of power on sheets of
paper remain under-explored. Yet this scholarship has also in recent
years demonstrated that the partitioning of lands and lives cannot just
be seen as statist acts of drawing lines, but was accompanied by
imaginative labors ranging from the literary to the cinematic. In my
essay, I focus on the visual work of artists of the street and bazaar
who through their “barefoot” cartographic efforts challenge the science
of cartography and its “lines of power.” Do these alternative
imaginations produce maps of longing that speak “truth” back to the maps
of power produced to violently partition lands and lives? Do they offer
a counter-poetics of inclusion to statist claims of proprietorship and
sovereignty? Or are they indeed also caught up in the inescapable
imperialism of the line ushered in by the modern science of cartography? SUMATHI
RAMASWAMY
is Professor of History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina
and Executive Director of the North Carolina Consortium for South Asian
Studies. She is the author of The
Goddess
and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Duke University Press, 2010), The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous
Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (University of California Press, 2004),
and Passions of the Tongue:
Language
Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (University of California Press,
1997). Her edited volumes include Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida
Husain and the Idea of India (Routledge, 2010), and Beyond
Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India
(Sage, 2003). She is currently working on a project entitled “Global
Itineraries: The Indian Travels of a Worldly Object.” She is co-founder
of a
trans-national digital network for popular South Asian visual culture
called
Tasveer Ghar (House of Pictures) (www.tasveerghar.net)
Mourning Becomes Reflexive: Historical Consciousness in Mammo and Zubeida
The variegated history of Partition’s appearance in cinema indexes a complex arc of cultural mourning work. From the fragmented, implicit, even allegorical traces of the first three decades to the more explicit representations after the mid-1980s, it is possible to assemble a hermeneutic of mourning. One possible account would move from an initial period of melancholic silence to the eventual return of the repressed leading to a veritable “Partition industry” by 1997, the event’s fiftieth anniversary. But such a hermeneutic must, of necessity, be a tenuous one: not only are acts of remembering characterized by gaps, recursions, and skips, both intended and unintended, but also the work of mourning itself remains an enigma, proceeding along puzzling routes toward unpredictable outcomes. As films like Lahore (1949), Chhalia (1960) or Ritwik Ghatak’s “Partition trilogy” (1960-62) testify, the early cultural “silence” was never complete; moreover, the trauma insinuated itself into scores of film narratives in unexpected ways.
Drawing on the two films Mammo (1994) and Zubeida (2001), my presentation will seek to identify a reflexive turn within this hermeneutic of mourning that acknowledges and performs its singular vicissitudes. By the mid-1990s, there was a large body of historiographic and pop-cultural works dwelling on Partition. If the event had entered public discourse with a vengeance, a large part of that discourse was intent on producing a reductive understanding of the entire experience in the service of narrow sectarian politics. The paired films--directed by Shyam Benegal, based on interlinked, semi-autobiographical scripts by Khaled Mohammed—reflect back on the production of Partition discourse, especially in cinema, to complicate the popular understanding of the event and to counter limiting forms of mourning and the insidious politics they mobilize.
I will argue that the reflexivity of
the two films congeal around three major issues. First, the temporality
of the entire experience of Partition is complicated in terms of
narratives that jump around in time (1990s ->1970s ->1940s ->
1950s -> 1990s), and which feature moments that cannot be easily
assimilated within a linear reordering of events. Such a thick and
discontinuous temporality challenges hegemonic and reductive versions of
Partition history. Second, the films record their own conditions of
possibility in terms of an affective hagiography of Bombay cinema
(including the effect Partition had on the industry and its personnel)
and attention to historical forces that have only garnered substantial
attention in recent years (most notably, the role played by the Princely
States in the endgames of empire and subsequently within the
independent but truncated polity). Third, what emerges is a contemporary
form of historical consciousness comprising the post-memory of
generations who grew up after 1947, a consciousness shaped as much by
the affective accounts of popular mediations as by nationalist
historiography with their willful elisions. I hope to demonstrate that
this reflexive turn in mourning the Partition seeks (in sharp contrast
to popular films such as Border [1997] and Gadar [2001])
to forge a politics of anamnesis with mutuality, understanding, and
cohabitation as its objectives.
BHASKAR SARKAR, Associate Professor, Department
of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara, is
co-convener of the research cluster,
Speculative Globalities; author of
Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of partition (Duke
University
Press, 2009); co-editor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of
Suffering
(Routledge, 2009); co-editor of a special issue of the journal, Postcolonial Studies, on “The Subaltern
and the Popular”; and author of various essays on visuality, sound, film
genres, and "plastic" nationalisms.
Partition and the Patriarchal state: Images in Indian Art from the 1940s to the Present
The Partition of India in 1947 not only serves as an intersection for the century, but also serves to mark the division of India’s colonial past with her new found independence, the feudal with the modern. The abrupt and traumatic division of Punjab, with its intense and fraught migration, and the slow bleed of Bengal – where the migration across porous borders continued for decades – is mirrored in different kinds of art practices. Within independent India, the response of Punjabi artists such as Satish Gujral, PN Mago, Harkrishen Lal and SL Parasher devolved around individual and communitarian loss and mourning. In Bengal Somnath Hore and Zainul Abedin followed by Jogen Chowdhury and Ganesh Pyne – (all refugees from the former East Bengal) – elide the Partition with a more generalized engagement with the Bengal famine, Naxalism and other dominant political tropes of the state.
The phenomenon of Partition however is
not limited to an India/ Pakistan binary nor is it located in time and
historical space. In contemporary art, its unresolved and lingering
questions – reinvoked through oral histories, land and revenue concerns,
familial history and artistic subjectivity have led to a continuing
body of artistic engagement. Broadly, one stream devolving around the
figure of Gandhi and the questions of patrimony, his role as father of
the nation/and illustrious son of India, has been imaged and critiqued
by artists like Atul Dodiya and Ashim Purkayastha. The other unresolved
site with its locus in the Partion of India remains Kashmir, with
particular reference to the work of Nilima Sheikh and Amar Kanwar. The
internalization of Partition then, even as it has moved into different
subsets of artistic concerns, is an ongoing process.
GAYATRI SINHA is an art critic and curator based
in New Delhi. Her primary areas of enquiry are around the structures of gender
and iconography, media, economics and social history. As curator her
work has
cited the domains of photography and lens based work from archival and
contemporary sources. She has edited Voices
of
Change: 20 Indian Artists (Marg 2010), Art and Visual Culture
in India 1857- 2007 (Marg Publications,
2009); Indian Art: an Overview (Rupa
Books, 2003); Woman/Goddess (1998); Expressions and
Evocations: Contemporary
Indian Women Artists of India (Marg Publications,
1996). She has curated
extensively in India and abroad including at the India Art Summit and
the
Korean International Art Fair (2009), Newark Museum, and the Minneapolis
Institute of Art (2008-09), Fotographie Forum, Frankfurt (2006), the
National
Museum, New Delhi (2004), the Festival of India in Bangladesh (1997),
The
National Gallery of Modern Art (1996). As an art critic she wrote a
column for
the Indian Express and The Hindu, and has written monographs on the
artists
Krishen Khanna and Himmat Shah. She has lectured on Indian art at the
Tate
Modern, Tate Britain, National Museum, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, Asian
Art
Museum, Singapore etc.
Aural
History: Sounds of Partition in Hindi Cinema
For long it was believed that mainstream Hindi cinema was “silent” on the issue of Partition until the release M. S. Sathyu’s landmark film Garam Hawa (1973). However, recent work on Partition and cinema (particularly by Bhaskar Sarkar) suggests that references to Partition were not absent in cinema prior to Garam Hawa so much as displaced and allegorized. That is, while films in the immediate post-1947 period were not “about” Partition in any obvious way, the pain of that foundational event marked them in significant ways. The trauma of partitioned communities, families, and land was palpable in film plots driven by chance, accidents and natural disasters, separation, loss, amnesia, doubling, and illegitimate children, as well as in the “achingly sad” film songs of the period (Sarkar 118). The few films that explicitly addressed Partition eschewed (visual) realism in favor of highly stylized representations of violence, some of which were accompanied by narrative voice-overs and songs commenting on the social destruction and apparent loss of humanity. My research suggests that even in a recent film like Khamosh Pani (2003), the sound of the fragmented flashback sequence plays a critical role in expressing the trauma of Partition and, in particular, of the intimate sexual violence directed against women.
My question then is: do sound and
music, as potent sites of affect or feeling, bear a particularly
significant burden in cinematic representations of Partition? To what
extent does the aural domain of cinema allow audiences to not just
relive the past, but engage with issues of sameness and difference that
continue to mark life on the subcontinent? In other words, how can we
think of sound and music as not just “expressing” traumatic past, but
also, simultaneously, shaping our understanding of that past and of the
present? More generally, I am interested in the relationship of the
aural to the linguistic and visual in cinema. What can music do that
other elements of cinema cannot accomplish? I propose that film music
cannot simply be dismissed as a medium for melodrama and sentimentality.
Music can tap into, articulate, and shape a collective wellspring of
emotion. My essay will thus demonstrate the importance of listening—and
not just reading or looking—for “midnight’s images.” PAVITRA
SUNDAR
is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Kettering University. Her
research and teaching interests span postcolonial film and literary
studies,
South Asian studies, and U.S. third world and transnational feminisms.
She is
currently working on a book project on the musical construction of
identity in
Hindi film soundtracks.
VAZIRA FAZILA-YACOOBALI ZAMINDAR
Qaum, Tārīḵẖ aur Zabãn: Representing the Muslim Journey From Delhi to Karachi
When Khwaja Moinuddin’s plays, "Mirza Ghalib Bundar Road Par" and “Lal Qilae se Lalukhet tak” were performed on stage in Karachi in the 1950s, they were extremely popular. For a city teeming with refugees, the plays represent a north Indian Muslim journey from Delhi to Karachi and struggles with the dislocation of qaum (community/nation), history and the Urdu language. I will focus on specifically “Mirza Ghalib Bundar Road Par,” as it was performed in the late 1950s in Hormusji Katrak Hall on Bundar Road in Karachi, and its later televised dramatization. Narrated in part through the eyes of the nineteenth century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, the play traverses the lives of Muslims who stay on in Delhi as well as those who leave for the streets of Karachi, and thus provides a window into a political and cultural imagination of nation that encompasses both cities, and accompanying geographies of loss.VAZIRA FAZILA-YACOOBALI ZAMINDAR is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, and author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia Univ. Press, 2007). Although she is now working on the history of archaeology and war on the Indo-Afghan borderlands, this paper draws on research that was conducted a decade ago on Karachi and Delhi and the Partition of 1947.
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