University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Neeti Nair, “The Problem of Belonging after the Partition of India”

March 5, 2021

Neeti Nair

Associate Professor

Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

** Seminar:  March 5, 2021:  The Problem of Belonging after the Partition of India

 

The Problem of Belonging After the Partition of India

 

Did the Partition of the Indian subcontinent resolve the problem of belonging for minority religious communities – in India as well as Pakistan? If Pakistan was supposed to be a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, was India meant to serve as a homeland for the Hindus? How did the Hindus of Pakistan and the Muslims of India learn to live and build community in these newly majoritarian countries? In ‘The Problem of Belonging after the Partition of India’, I examine some of these questions through the writings of the playwright and scholar Asghar Wajahat.

 

Both in his most famous 1988 play Jis ne Lahore na dekhya (One who has not seen Lahore) as well as in the more recent Godse @ Gandhi.com (2012), Wajahat’s protagonists find themselves forced into situations where they have to build relationships in shared, intimate spaces, that are fraught with tension, as a consequence of the Partition. It is through the process of living together that his characters are able to eventually work their way out of the deep mistrust that pervades relations between, and also within, Hindu and Muslim religious communities. Both plays are set in the immediate aftermath of the partition. However, in short stories set in the wake of organized violence against Muslims in 2002, Main Hindu Hoon (I am a Hindu) and ‘The Spirits of Shah Alam Camp’, living together is no longer possible. Wajahat’s fiction reflects the shrinking space for religious minorities in contemporary India. This talk is part of a longer book length project on India’s Partition: Politics, Culture, Memory.

 

 

 

Neeti Nair is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2011 and has coedited a special issue of Asian Affairs titled ‘Ghosts from the Past? Assessing Recent Developments in Religious Freedom in South Asia’ in 2018. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Modern Asian StudiesIndian Economic and Social History Review, and the Economic and Political Weekly, as well as in media outlets such as the Indian Express, The Print, and India Today. She is currently working on two monographs: one on Hurt Sentiments and State Ideology in South Asia and the other on India’s Partition: Politics, Culture, Memory. Nair has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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