1. Cracking and splitting of empires and kingdoms in the pre-Partition era were not rare and were hardly associated with population movements. It is only with partition that population movement becomes an essential part of the process. On the one hand, such cracking and splitting would take place along a culturally continuous space. On the other hand, the state was regarded more as the custodian and upholder of social order than an agent of social change and transformation.

2. Partition gives unto each state the nationalism unique to itself. Partitions create their own nationalisms and contribute to state formation. It is only with partition that territorial borders of a state are expected to coincide with the cultural borders.

3. While partition evidently upsets and shatters the preexisting ‘way of life’, it also gradually becomes ‘a way of life’ itself. People driven by the utopia of a new land tend to ‘select’ their nations and states ‘naturally’. Partition thus makes ‘natural selection’ of population possible. Partition narratives are also marked by an acute desire of reuniting with one’s own people in a new land. Many elderly people simply considered it ‘immoral’ to continue to remain in a land where they might have lived for generations but this, according to them, had already become an alien land by the act of partition.

4. The utopia of a new land stands in a rather uneasy relationship to the nostalgic yearning for the past. The utopia and the nostalgia also point to two very different kinds of social relationships and the latter marks the arrival of the nation.

5. Partition also imposes on the people the obligation of making a choice from out of a menu of nations being partitioned or national alternatives. Non-national alternatives are clearly ruled out. One is obliged to belong to either of the two newly formed nations and cannot choose to remain stateless and without any nation in the wake of partition.

6. One partition creates and hides many other partitions. At one level, it instead of mitigating the Hindu-Muslim divide, has sharpened and exacerbated it. At another, it turns us away from what is called the ‘denationalized peoples’ perspective’ – including the gender perspective on that epochal event. Insofar as contemporary feminist writings seek to recover women’s voices from the prevailing nationalist perspectives, the same event of partition offers an altogether different perspective. The line between the nationalized and the denationalized perspectives coincides with that between men and women and keeps them apart.

7. Now that the ethnicities and nationalities within each nation-state have become relatively free from the control of nation-states – thanks to the forces and processes of globalization – their assertions too are couched in the demand for partition. The demand for partition reenacts the territoriality of the nation-state as much as the demand also subverts it. We define ‘sub-territoriality’ as a space situated within the territory of a state that has been for all practical purposes rendered ethnically homogeneous by a particular community or an organization claiming to represent it. Sub-territoriality also contests state territoriality.

References

Etienne Balibar, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class – Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991)
B.S. Chimni, International Refugee Law – A Reader (Sage Publications, 2003), section 5
Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Peace Studies I (Sage Publications, 2004), chapters 7-8, 13-14
Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Refugees and the State (Sage Publications, 2003), chapters 1-3, 6, 9
Ranabir Samaddar, The Marginal Nation (Sage Publications, 1999), chapters 1-4, 13
REFUGEE WATCH, “Scrutinising the Land Settlement Scheme in Bhutan”, No. 9, March 2000
REFUGEE WATCH, “Displacing the People the Nation Marches Ahead in Sri Lanka”, No. 15, September 2001

Web-based

1. RW.: Displacing the People the Nation Marches Ahead inSri Lanka
http://www.safhr.org/refugee_watch15_7.htm

2. RW.: Mohajirs : The Refugees By Choice
http://www.safhr.org/refugee_watch14_5.htm