Partition: Violence, Citizenship and the Making of Modern South Asia

Catalog description

This course examines the Partition of British India as both a historical event and an ongoing process that reshaped the political, social, and legal landscape of modern South Asia. Moving beyond nationalist narratives, it situates Partition within broader debates on nationalism, religion, caste, gender, violence, migration, and citizenship. The course analyzes how India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh emerged not only through territorial division and war, but also through the management of refugees, the codification of citizenship, and the regulation of social and religious difference. Drawing on historiography, oral testimony, legal documents, and interdisciplinary scholarship, students will investigate how colonial residues and postcolonial imaginaries continue to structure state formation and belonging in the region. We begin by examining how Partition has been narrated, archived, and remembered, asking how history itself is written and contested. We then turn to the lived experience of violence, displacement, caste, and social rupture, tracing how communities were transformed in the moment of division. We then explore how postcolonial states sought to govern difference through refugee policy, constitutional design, citizenship law, and the management of minorities and majorities. Finally, we consider secession, internment, and unresolved conflicts, including those of 1971 and Kashmir, in order to understand the enduring afterlives of Partition in contemporary South Asia. (ASIAN-SC)