Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Abducted Women, Africa, Ashis Nandy, Babri Masjid, Bengal, Bengal Famine, Calcutta, Colonialism, Concentration Camps, Cyprus, Development, Dispossession, Empire, Gandhi, Gandhian, Genocdie, Gujarat, Gurkhas, Hindu, Hindu Militants, Hindu Nationailsm, Hinduism, Holocaust, Hybridity, Imperialism, India, Ireland, Islam, Lahore, Middle Class, Migration, Modernity, Muslim, Nazi, Oppression, Pakistan, Palestine, Partition of Bengal, Patriarchy, Postcolonial, Punjab, Racism, Rajputs, Saadat Hassan Manto, Sikhs, South Asia, Victims, White Supremacy
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Source: Manas
Outside South Asia, the partition of India evokes little recognition. As the British left India, the largest single migration in history took place: well over ten million, and perhaps as many as fifteen million, people crossed borders, and a million or more became the victims of murderous assaults. Both the Governments of India and Pakistan established commissions for the “recovery” of abducted women who numbered in several tens of thousands. Numbing as these figures are, they barely register in world histories: perhaps that indifference to the calamity that afflicted India and Pakistan betokens the view that (more…)
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Anticolonial Nationalism, Azad, Bengal, Colonialism, Divide and Rule, Gandhi, Genocide, Hindu, Imperialism, Independence, India, Modernity, Muslim, Nation-State, National Liberation, Nationalism, Pakistan, Partition, Punjab, Racism, Self-Determination, Violence, White Supremacy
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Source: Sarai
Independence did not come to South Asia as a single, identifiable event in 1947, though that is way most South Asians like to remember it. The slow, painful process of dismantling British India began with the great Calcutta riots and ended with the genocide in Punjab.
I was (more…)
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Anticolonial Nationalism, Colonialism, Gandhi, Genocide, Hindu, Imperialism, Independence, India, Modernity, Muslim, Nation-State, National Liberation, Nationalism, Pakistan, Partition, Racism, Self-Determination, Violence, White Supremacy
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Source: Sanhati
A sketch of Ashis Nandy’s recent lecture at UC Berkeley. March 13, 2009
It was not hatred, but a strong undercurrent of humanity, that was the surprising finding of research on the traumatic bloodbath of the Partition, iconoclastic Indian researcher Ashis Nandy told an audience March 3 at the University of California.
Nandy made some unconventional points: Even in the terrible bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions, as many as one in four people among survivors said they were saved by the other community, and their fondest memories were still of (more…)
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Bajrang Dal, Communalism, Congress Party, Gandhi, Gujrati Urban Middle Class, Gujurat Elections, M A Jinnah, Narendra Modi, Propaganda, Rajiv Gandhi, Sangh Parivar, Secularism, Sikh Militancy, V D Savarkar, Vishwa Hindu Parishad
BJP Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, at a rally in Bangalore on 6 May 2008
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( Dated Article – 14 January, 2008 )
Times Of India
Now that the dust has settled over the Gujarat elections, we can afford to defy the pundits and admit that, even if Narendra Modi had lost the last elections, it would not have made much difference to the culture of Gujarat politics. Modi had already done his job. Most of the state’s urban middle class would have remained mired in its inane versions of communalism and parochialism and the VHP and the Bajrang Dal would have continued to set the tone of state politics. Forty years of dedicated propaganda does pay dividends, electorally and socially.
The Hindus and the Muslims of the state — once bonded so conspicuously by language, culture and commerce — have met the demands of both V D Savarkar and M A Jinnah. They now face each other as two hostile (more…)
