Framing Partition: Empire and Violence in 1947 India

December 18th, 2007

The competing nationalist accounts of India’s partition, each trying to present its own party as an innocent victim, fail to explain the intense and complex violence of the event (Bose & Jalal, 135). The division of communities and the violence itself were inextricably linked—animosity contributed to both, and both contributed to animosity—so one cannot understand either in isolation. The first portion of this essay (which addresses division) must therefore be read with the understanding that the splitting of the land and of the communities bound religion to identity, making possible the framework for later ‘cleansing’ and group-based retribution. The emergent picture among the manifold causes of partition violence reveals that the British rhetorical construction of stark community divisions was a critical driving force behind the slaughter.