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bushraboblai's review
5.0
The simple truth remains that history is always personal and always tied to real people with ordinary concerns, loves, and human longings.
The fact that the Partition is only discussed as a triumphant effort, that so much state propaganda is tied up in what we consider a modern nation needs to be studied by everyone. It should NOT require this much digging and parseing to construct a credible narrative.
Tragedies of recent history affect how we treat immigrants who do not pass the paperback litmus test and whose childhood and humanity is acceptable and whose makes a good sacrifice in the quest for capitalist state power and the accumulation of wealth.
This book is a necessary read and a conversation that is long overdue.
The fact that the Partition is only discussed as a triumphant effort, that so much state propaganda is tied up in what we consider a modern nation needs to be studied by everyone. It should NOT require this much digging and parseing to construct a credible narrative.
Tragedies of recent history affect how we treat immigrants who do not pass the paperback litmus test and whose childhood and humanity is acceptable and whose makes a good sacrifice in the quest for capitalist state power and the accumulation of wealth.
This book is a necessary read and a conversation that is long overdue.
tanya_mahadwar's review
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.5
A deeply reflective, emotionally affecting chronicle of “modern” India’s geography. The central thesis of this book is that borders can and often, are, remade and shaped for political purposes - despite the violent legacies they leave behind.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual violence, Suicide, Child abuse, Classism, Racism, Gaslighting, Misogyny, Rape, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Gore, Hate crime, Colonisation, Deportation, Genocide, Islamophobia, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Xenophobia, Medical trauma, Racial slurs, Self harm, and Sexism
cloudss's review
informative
medium-paced
5.0
History of India in a way I've never encountered. Concerning borderlands leading up to and after partition. Wish it was longer.
nehasavant's review
4.0
There’s a whole lot of history that I didn’t learn about India, and I appreciate Vijayan’s text for uplifting stories that are usually not heard in dominant tellings of modern history of India and Partition. Vijayan’s unique experience as someone whose family has experienced state violence and an Indian woman makes her an ideal observer to capture the nuances of the stories told to her. She’s able to read between the lines, provide the systemic/infrastructural context when needed, and offer her human response to the atrocities she bears witness to.
Her project also clearly illustrates the phenomenon of the center and the externalities. The dominant narrative that borders are necessary is to protect the comfort and well-being of those in the center from the “illegal” “criminals”. When in fact it’s the borders themselves both physical and inside our minds that create the strife and conditions to produce “illegals”.
I didn’t always like her writing style, it’s unclear at times and generalizing at times. And I really wish she’d had inserted labeled maps in the text, I found myself exploring Google maps on my phone while reading (which maybe was her intention?). She mentions that the perspective from Pakistan is missing and I grieve it’s omission. As a woman of the South Asian diaspora who is often far from family stories, I resonated a lot with the last chapter.
Quotes
There’s so much contained in the quotes of this book, I copied those that stood out to me below and wrote them down in my “activity logs” while reading.
“By the end of six hours of interviews, the stories of fear and anguish merged into each other. Almost all people of these ppl had moved multiple times got multiple reasons. The Barpeta massacre, and the flooding that made the once fertile Bhramaputra region uncultivatable, displaced many of them. Almost all of them are illiterate and the women often changed their name during marriage. Names were misspelled; docs lost either as a result of violence or flooding, or were too old and damaged to be of use. They were all lost in the labyrinth of the state bureaucracy, subjected to corrupt lawyers, and forced to endure whimsical abuse by petty officials. They feared the unfathomable legal systems, and the impending knock on the door in the middle of the night.” - pg. 170
“We lost something else too,” he said. “I spoke Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu, and Parsi. These languages did not belong to one person back then, [they] belonged to all of us. The food my mother made that I remember was not Punjabi. Instead, our Sindhi Muslim neighbors who had lived next to us for generations influenced it. Today you can live in a city of a million people and still not meet people unlike you. We have become small minded people; where you are born, your religion, and the language you speak define everything. Urdu is now a Muslim language. Like it’s people, the language is also exiled in the ghettos. Parsi is no longer the language of the educated. No one learns it. The borders have made our minds smaller, our languages die without care, and our people petty.” - pg 253-254
List of massacres discussed at length in this book:
- Nellie massacre (1983, Assam)
- Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919, Punjab)
- Barpeta massacre (1993, Assam)
Her project also clearly illustrates the phenomenon of the center and the externalities. The dominant narrative that borders are necessary is to protect the comfort and well-being of those in the center from the “illegal” “criminals”. When in fact it’s the borders themselves both physical and inside our minds that create the strife and conditions to produce “illegals”.
I didn’t always like her writing style, it’s unclear at times and generalizing at times. And I really wish she’d had inserted labeled maps in the text, I found myself exploring Google maps on my phone while reading (which maybe was her intention?). She mentions that the perspective from Pakistan is missing and I grieve it’s omission. As a woman of the South Asian diaspora who is often far from family stories, I resonated a lot with the last chapter.
Quotes
There’s so much contained in the quotes of this book, I copied those that stood out to me below and wrote them down in my “activity logs” while reading.
“By the end of six hours of interviews, the stories of fear and anguish merged into each other. Almost all people of these ppl had moved multiple times got multiple reasons. The Barpeta massacre, and the flooding that made the once fertile Bhramaputra region uncultivatable, displaced many of them. Almost all of them are illiterate and the women often changed their name during marriage. Names were misspelled; docs lost either as a result of violence or flooding, or were too old and damaged to be of use. They were all lost in the labyrinth of the state bureaucracy, subjected to corrupt lawyers, and forced to endure whimsical abuse by petty officials. They feared the unfathomable legal systems, and the impending knock on the door in the middle of the night.” - pg. 170
“We lost something else too,” he said. “I spoke Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu, and Parsi. These languages did not belong to one person back then, [they] belonged to all of us. The food my mother made that I remember was not Punjabi. Instead, our Sindhi Muslim neighbors who had lived next to us for generations influenced it. Today you can live in a city of a million people and still not meet people unlike you. We have become small minded people; where you are born, your religion, and the language you speak define everything. Urdu is now a Muslim language. Like it’s people, the language is also exiled in the ghettos. Parsi is no longer the language of the educated. No one learns it. The borders have made our minds smaller, our languages die without care, and our people petty.” - pg 253-254
List of massacres discussed at length in this book:
- Nellie massacre (1983, Assam)
- Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919, Punjab)
- Barpeta massacre (1993, Assam)