Abstract: India has had a very different history of violence and conflict from South Africa's, yet each democracy has had to face questions of how to deal with memories of past suffering, which bear directly on the quality of political life in the present. In India, the dream of national independence in 1947 rapidly changed into a nightmare of religious and ethnic violence. Britain's empire in the sub-continent was divided into two countries, Muslim-based Pakistan and constitutionally secular India, amid horrific massacres of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs.
Abstract: This essay is based on my engagement with the Sindhi-speaking Hindu minority of Sindh that migrated to India in and around 1947, when the province of Sindh became a part of Pakistan. It privileges therefore a specific religious group and its response and negotiation to a specific moment. My current research on Sindhi-speaking Muslims along the border interrogates the classification of ‘Sindhis’ as a spatially fixed identity, and revisits the state-endorsed premises of irrevocability and border-formation.
Abstract: During the 1947 Partition of India, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted by members of other religious communities – to be raped and murdered, sold into prostitution, or forced into marriage. In response to this crisis, the governments of India and Pakistan initiated a bilateral recovery programme whose objective it was to return ‘abducted persons’ to their natal or conjugal families. Over the last decade or so, however, criticism of this programme has become increasingly vociferous.