itizenship, memories, sense of belonging, emotions of exuberance and gloom, despair and melancholy aside, the politics of identity and majoritarianism surrounding the partition of India for the creation of Pakistan and later partition of Pakistan for the creation of Bangladesh not only evoke the sustenance of past but also inform and influence the making of policies aimed at regulating the living realities of billions across borders in South Asia. This was made more evident in the passing of a Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution of India and its particular interpretations by its supporters and critics.

Likewise, the partitions—whether of 1947 or 1971—have suffused the discourse of the present and the past of its general people, the affected ones, literature, media and electioneering speeches of the politicians across South Asia.

Two recently published special issues, Asian Affairs (2022) and India Review (2022), have made a significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge on the vast and varied partition historiography, including Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition, Vazira Fazila’s The Long Partition, Rabia Umar Ali’s Empire in Retreat, Ishtiaq Ahmed’s Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Ian Talbot’s People on the Move and Stanley Wolpert’s Shameful Flight. Both special issues include articles from across disciplines and national boundaries. The latest is India Review, published by Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group and edited by Amit Ranjan and Farooq Sulehria. The issue attempts to understand partition through the unconventional medium of textbooks, literature, media and films through which all three ‘countries help the manufacturing of consent’ aligned to majoritarian groups.

This issue tries to look at why the cultural differences that created communal tensions in British India continue to be a matter of concern for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It looks at how mass media, films and textbooks in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have produced, reproduced and constructed the partition. Specifically, the contributions to this special issue attempt to answer the questions that include inter alia: how were Hindi and Urdu languages communalised and appropriated exclusively by two major religious communities; how textbooks produced, reproduced and narrated the partition of India; how mass media in India and Pakistan recreate and present partition; and how have the film industries in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh portrayed partition. It was the feature film Viceroy’s House by Gurinder Chadha that prompted the publication in 2020 of an important title The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab by Marina Wheeler.

The first paper in the issue is by Amit Ranjan, one of the editors. It investigates the construction of communal identities through the medium of language: Hindi appropriated as the language of Hindus and Urdu as the identity marker of South Asian Muslims in the colonial context. In the second, Ritika Verma and Anjali Gera Roy have explored the absence, silence and presence of partition in mainstream Bollywood cinema. Movies produced to exhibit cultural loss and nationalistic fervour include Veer Zara (2014), Bajrangi Bhaijan (2015), PK (2014) and Uri: The Surgical Strikes (2019). The authors argue that these movies make a case for communal identities and nationalism. In the third paper, Devika Mittal traces the partition narratives produced and circulated through Indian state-approved curricula and textbooks. It analyses how the Indian state has built the narrative of partition, the events that led to it and its repercussions. Mittal makes the case study of history textbooks of two boards: the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education.

Covering Pakistan’s side of the discourse, Mazhar Abbas untangles the process of reimagining and reproducing two partitions, i.e., of India in 1947 and of Pakistan in 1971 through social studies and Pakistan studies textbooks from Grade IV to Grade X compiled by the Punjab Textbook Board during the authoritarian regimes of Zia-ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf. The study argues that the state-patronised curricula fostered religious nationalism that encouraged majoritarian religious nationalism and alienation of minority groups. The fifth paper by Qaisar Abbas explores the upheavals faced by a middle-class Muslim family when it entered Pakistan after going through the ordeal of events surrounding partition. It argues that a conservative state ideology triumphed in the national state and strengthened a deep-rooted patriarchal structure in society.

The sixth paper, by Farooq Sulehria, analyses the partition theme-specific Lahore-based film industry. He concludes that Lollywood rarely explored the uneasy topic of partition of India or of Pakistan and that although being one of the ten largest film industries, it only produced nearly ten films on themes related to partition of India. The theme of the last two papers of this volume is the making of Bangladesh. In the seventh paper, Femid-ul Haq argues that different art forms have portrayed the partitions of 1947 and 1971 and both have shaped the political and cultural contours of the state and society in Bangladesh. The article investigates an important question: why have there been a large number of films on the events of 1971 and so few on 1947? The eighth paper, by Afroja Shama, observes that although the partitions of 1947 and of 1971 have been different events, many researchers have intertwined those. She asks do the Bengalis recognise the liberation war as an extension of the partition of India. To excavate the collective memory, she analyses twelve Bengali novels focusing on the partition and war of liberation as the literature is considered a great archive of shared memory.

The other special issue is Citizenship, Belonging and the Partition of India, edited by Neeti Nair and published in Asian Affairs by Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group. Nair has authored an important book titled Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (2011). In this issue, the papers have been coherently arranged along spatial order starting from Assam in the east towards the north-western side of South Asia. In the case of Assam, Antara Datta has focused on the way the military crackdown in Dhaka on March 25, 1971, shook the fragile demographic balance in the border-state. She analyses various responses of Assam and West Bengal governments to the exodus of refugees and then traces the link between 1971 and the recent passing of the CAA.

Farhana Ibrahim focuses in her paper on the centrality of 1971 to understand the framing of citizenship rules and the experience of belonging in the district of Kutch in Sindh in Pakistan. Her attention to caste and gender in the making of Indian citizenship enriches our understanding about the putatively secular Indian nation-state. Ibrahim’s ethnographic study alerts us to how Hindu migrants from Tharparkar who stayed in Pakistan at the time of partition reviewed their decision and sought to move to India after they were perceived as spies following the 1965 war between India and Pakistan.

Uttara Shahani’s paper disentangles the history of Sindhi Hindus who stayed out of Sindh after the division of Bombay presidency and the creation of Sindh as a new province in 1936. Afterwards, during the partition of India, Sindh went to Pakistan undivided resulting in nearly a million non-Muslim refugees in India who demanded that Sindhi languages be included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian constitution. Shahani’s paper highlights lesser-known effects of the partition on the constitution of India. Mehr Farooqi’s paper explicates the place of Urdu modernism as a meeting point for writers in both India and Pakistan. It is interesting, however, that whereas Urdu writers in India feel exiled from their language because of official neglect, the writers in Pakistan feel exiled as their connection with the civilisational foundations was severed by the partition of India. The writer has explored different themes of the novel Basti by Intezar Husain.

Sarah Waheed’s study examines the effects of waves of migrations after partition in the wake of army actions that facilitated the annexation of Hyderabad. A few years back, there was a debate around the issue of celebrations of independence by Hyderabad’s Muslims because for them, August 15 was irrelevant. Shahla Hussain’s and Athar Zia’s papers on Kashmir draw on UN archives and discuss Kashmiris’ sense of belonging amidst the bureaucratic regimes of India and Pakistan. Arsalan Khan’s paper focuses on the paradox of state Islamisation. Khan analyses Tablighi Jamaat’s blasphemy politics in his nuanced study as well. Taken together, these papers by historians, anthropologists and writers enable readers to form longer and deeper perspectives about the partition of India in 1947 and of Pakistan in 1971. These issues are relevant to academics, policymakers and students of history, politics and social studies alike to conceptualise and understand how deeply South Asian history has been and continues to be informed and influenced by both these turbulent partitions.

The writer has a PhD in history from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, and is the head of History Department at the University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com and tweets@AbrarZahoor1.