Writing the legacies of a partition: a conversation with Joya Chatterji
WITH UTTARA SHAHANI AND SOHINI CHATTOPADHYAY
At the Lahore train station, coils of barbed wire separate the waiting areas; a photo from the archives of the Chicago Sun-Times, 1947. Source: Frances Pritchett’s MELEAC Collections.
In the past few years, the study of refugees and citizenship in South Asia has taken a new turn, where legal and social historians reimagine the history of South Asia beyond 1947. Joya Chatterji in many ways pioneered these inquiries. Her most recent book, Partition’s Legacies, published by Permanent Black is a collection of essays on partition, migration, citizenship, and the making of refugees in South Asia. In this interview, Joya Chatterji tells fellow historian of partition Uttara Shahani and Borderlines editor Sohini Chattopadhyay about her foray into research, her interlocutors, and the implications of her work on global policies and transnational histories (A longer version of this interview can be found on the publisher’s blog: http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/)
Uttara Shahani: Why did you become a historian? Let’s start at the very beginning . . .
Joya Chatterji:. . . A very good place to start. But before I launch into my answer, I want to thank you both for such excellent questions. They all force (or encourage) me to reflect on a lifetime of work. From a personal standpoint, this is a great moment for me to think backwards and ask myself: what did it all add up to? So I am grateful for your critical but generous-spirited questions.
Why History? Why indeed. My relationship with the subject is best likened to a love affair. I was introduced to a primary source at an impressionable age, and that was that. I read science and mathematics at school, with enjoyment mind you, but my passion for History was already so serious that during the break I would ask my friend who had gone to History lessons what she had learned that day. I am not joking, even though it’s hilarious in retrospect.
Who can explain an attraction of this intensity? It had something to do with the unfamiliarity of the past: it involved a sense of travel of a different kind, the sudden access to a novel, jaw-dropping, fascinating, vistas. That is all I can say. I don’t understand it myself. But it has been a steadfast companion, the most constant of friends.
Uttara: How did you come to choose what you would focus on for your doctoral thesis, which became the basis of your first book Bengal Divided, now a canonical text in Partition Studies? The book questioned several decades of existing historiography that had disproportionately made the Muslim League the sole arbiter of Partition. Why Hindu bhadralok communalism in Bengal and why Partition?
Joya: That was, to begin with, an accident of research. I started on my PhD intending to investigate a (perceived) decline in the influence of Bengal in India’s politics after the 1920s. It was, after all, the largest province/presidency, so there seemed to be a question to answer. (I turned back to it later, in The Spoils of Partition.)
But then I stumbled across some files in Teen Murti Library’s research room, in my second year of research. They were mislabeled, or rather the index entry was misleading, (probably because the material was mainly in cursive Bangla). The index entry was unexciting, but I thought I would requisition some of these files, just because there were so many of them. These contained thousands of letters and petitions signed by Hindus, all demanding the partition of Bengal. In a word, the opposite of what I had expected to find.
So then I changed direction in my PhD research – it happens all the time, I have since realized! I tried to dig for the roots of this movement. And Bengal Divided was the outcome of my research, and of mulling over my sources. You must understand, I was as surprised by what I learned as those Hindu, and Hindu Bengali readers who have been furious with me ever since. (I am not generalizing here, don’t get me wrong. But I have experienced verbal attacks, death threats, and more insidious forms of academic marginalization since the book was published. I continue to receive threats to this day.) But I paid attention, then, to the sources, not least because it was part of my training to be as true as one can be to the voices of the past; even if what they are saying makes one uncomfortable and forces us to question everything we thought we ‘knew’.
That’s why I am always buried in files, (or photographs, or maps, or paintings, or interview transcripts) myself; and why I encourage my students to have the same deep engagement with those traces of the past, above all when they challenge us.
As for my method of engagement with sources: I was trained (at Cambridge) to read to pay attention to context, authorship, type of source, self-representation, who was trying to influence who and how, their relationship to power, and so on. I had read Marx, Althusser, Hegel, E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Foucault, and Hayden White, Pierre Bourdieu, James Scott, the Frankfurt School, and a lot of Hannah Arendt by the time I started my PhD and was much influenced by them as a young scholar. (Spoils’s architecture is based on Hayden White’s notion of tropes – you might have noticed it’s used the trope of irony.) But I was not trained to position myself theoretically (or at least to trumpet that location) as historians are under pressure to do now. My line is quite simple here. History challenges theory, however great. History is messy whereas theory is tidy, and, for the most part, seamless. History has its work to do, and that is, fundamentally, to stand in opposition to, and in a critical location towards, theory. We must allow the ‘mess’ to come through. If I have grown ever more concerned with chaotic agency, this is the reason why.
The other ‘method’ I pursue and encourage students to pursue, is to recognize the importance of the variety of types of sources. No single source (or run of sources of the same type) represents the ‘truth’: it only represents what appears to be true from one angle of vision. The juxtaposition of a range of sources reveals a variety of views about ‘what is going on’. Then you, as a historian, try to make sense of the babel of voices to impose something like a pattern that feels true to the sound, and the sudden silences. That’s my ‘method’.
I should admit that in my process of listening to the sounds of the past, I have a politics. I am attentive, and I hope sensitive, to the weak, the marginalized, those whose sounds are barely discernible. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in my work in The Bengal Diaspora and the recent articles on immobility, but it has been there from the start. You will find that every historian has a politics, however quiet or understated. Even those whose only claim is to be ‘impartial’ are locating themselves, willy nilly, within the politics of knowledge.
Uttara: Your anger at the harsh conditions Partition’s refugees had to confront and what passed for government ‘relief and rehabilitation’ policy is palpable. At the same time, you refuse to ever see refugees as passive victims. Apart from demonstrating how caste, class, and gender mediated the experience of migration at Partition, you show how refugees were always doing something, even if refugee agency was never completely free. They participated in street battles to win ‘rehabilitation’ as a right, resisted government attempts to ‘disperse’ them and occupied evacuee property. You demonstrate how refugees changed and shaped a rapidly changing legal, social, and political landscape ‘from below’, sometimes violently. This persistent emphasis of yours, on refugees as active and not always sympathetic characters can be at odds with other accounts of Partition. Why do you think that the Partition refugee is so often cast as a passive subject?
Joya: Partition refugees suffered a great deal due to ‘critical events’ over which they had little control. One must recognize that suffering and bewilderment, and the sense they shared of a loss of grip over their own lives. Refugees often (though not always) represent their histories in this way: Partition happened to them. In that sentence, the refugee is not a subject. The refugee herself is denying her agency to convey to the researcher her sense of confusion, her loss of control. Historians have listened to that, and paid great attention to it. It is very important, and I give credit to all the scholars who have made that the focus of their story. My anger derives from my empathy with that subjectivity.
But that was the personal narrative of the refugee. It has come to us through the memoir, or the personal interview (as in Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence.) These represent only one kind of source. Going back to my ‘method’, I have always tried to gather a variety of types of sources, and their ‘truth’ was different. In those sources I saw refugees at their angriest, most belligerent and violent. I don’t think it’s an either/or: a sense of lost of control can make one not just, or not only, a passive object, but an angry citizen, demanding a particular type of citizenship. That’s what I have been trying to get at.
Uttara: Some might take exception to your assertion that ‘forced migrations’ caused by political upheavals such as Partition are not fundamentally different phenomena from the ‘economic migrations’ driven by the demands of labour markets. They might point to situations such as communal riots that force people to move. Why and how did it become clear to you that there are no definite conceptual divides between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ migrants - between ‘illegal immigrants’ and refugees and between ‘economic’ migration and ‘forced migration’?
Joya: My argument is a little more subtle than the way you put it, and perhaps that’s why it has sometimes been misunderstood. I suggest that people who later became refugees or ‘forced migrants’ were often the very same people who moved, historically, in response to labor markets (in the broadest sense.) These people already had in place the physical capacity, intellectual capital and social networks needed to move when they faced political upheavals and violence. They had what I describe as mobility capital already in reserve. This allowed them to flee and become refugees in response to persecution. Those who did not have such capital to begin with were in a far more precarious position, because they could not leave sites of violence: they lacked the wherewithal so to do. They were ‘stuck’.
That’s the nub of the argument. It links the study of migrants with refugees over a longer durèe, not just at the moment of crisis. I think if you shift your focus of study from crisis to crisis, or study only critical events (as many sociologists and aid organizations are prone to do) without seeing the place and people through the historical lens, you miss this other, and quite critical, dimension.
Uttara: In ‘Migration Myths’ you critically analyse two histories ‘written with a view to enabling the ‘assimilation’ of the community they claimed to speak for, and to seek rights and recognition for that ‘community’ in its place of settlement’. Those histories are very different from the ones you write. Yet, as a historian of migration, frontiers, minority-formation, and citizenship, you are, albeit from a significantly different angle, also constantly striving for a sort of recognition for your subjects whether migrated or stuck. Your work seems to be driven by an intense impulse to enrich your readers’ understanding of why people are where they are. What drives this impulse? Do you see in your oeuvre an ongoing argument against the modern nation-state that seeks to control movement and render certain categories of people lesser citizens or ‘illegal’?
You are right. This is what I meant by my politics: I have been drawn to certain themes for much of my academic life. Yes, there is an ongoing critique in my work of the modern nation state and its relationship to equality and dignity. I am no fan of ‘national sovereignty’ which expresses itself by putting people in cages at borders, ghettoising religious (or other) minorities and pitting them against (constantly constructed) majorities. I was disillusioned by nationalism long before most of my contemporaries. Moving from India to Britain to live with a ‘brown’ son, I experienced, in my gut, what it meant to be seen as ‘lesser’ every day, having to talk to my son gently about how to negotiate this landscape, and to live in a society that condoned this. So my intellectual preoccupations were further energized by personal experience. It has driven not only my academic work, to date, but also my public engagement activities (e.g. the ‘Bangla Stories’ and ‘Our Migration Stories’ work on curriculum development). I felt it was vital for British children of all stripes to learn ‘why people are why they are’ from a very young age, before they learnt the harsh stereotypes about migrants and are immersed in the discourses about migration that waft around them.
If I have achieved anything tangible in my life, it is this work, I believe, that will count.
Uttara: The West has been the focus of new theories of diaspora, but it is in the global south that the vast majority of the world’s migrants live. What are some of the implications of this focus on the West for research on migration and what are some of the questions you think scholars of diaspora and the global south should be addressing?
Joya: I have found it very hard, even without my own University, to raise funds for a ‘strategic research initiative’ tackling this problem; this reality, and the series of questions it raises. The West seems obsessed with what it sees as its own ‘migrant crisis’, and to have little concern, even at an intellectual level, in ‘elsewhere’. Some of us located here will continue to try to put together a global team to work on this problem. I hope, going forward, that it will include me. Until such bids succeed, scholars must start working on their patch on this subject, but in conversation with colleagues around the world.
I cannot draw up a manifesto for such research at this stage. But my questions – those that intrigue me – are about issues of physical debility and mental health, as well as provision of care to persons and places, which I concluded were vital elements of ‘being stuck’. There are ways in which, therefore, this research has connections with the history of medicine in the global South, and also the growing field of the economy and cultures of ‘care-work’.
Uttara: Could you speak about the work of some other historians, or scholars from any field, you think your writing is in conversation with or building upon?
Joya: This is tricky territory. It’s been so long, so I will talk about on-going work only, if I may. I am lucky to have had the most generous and critical of sounding boards: Tanika Sarkar, David Washbrook, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Peter Mandler have read each chapter or essay I thrust upon them and told me what was wrong with it.
My work on citizenship is in conversation with that of legal historians, not only of South Asia but of Africa and the old White Dominions, or settler colonies, as well as historians of immigration to Britain. I would not describe myself as a legal historian though, and in that tension lies the trade-off, in my view. Off the top of my head, there’s Rohit De and you, Uttara, as well as Emma Hunter, Caitlin Anderson, Adam McKeown, David Feldman, and Keechang Kim, and – since citizenship and sovereignty are so intimately connected – Lauren Benton. More recently, the contribution of Alison Bashford, Lake and Reynolds, M. Karatani, and Radhika Mongia has been useful for me to think with, and around. And then there’s always the majestic Zolberg.
On the chaotic resistance of the refugees, we could start with Partha Chatterjee (although I have been having a conversation with him in my head since I was writing Bengal Divided. I am not sure he has participated in it, though!). Hannah Arendt was a huge influence here. Vazira Zamindar, Uditi Sen, and Anjali Bhardwaj Datta each put forward different and exciting models of refugee agency, and they have helped inform my notion of mobility capital.
On the immobile, I have drawn on the work of historians and anthropologists of medicine in sub-Saharan Africa, (Julie Livingstone and Megan Vaughan) and ‘care-work’ (Samita Sen). This is still a conversation waiting to develop, I think. Thinking about its converse, mobility, the work of labor historians has been an influence, Ravi Ahuja and Raj Chandavarkar in their different ways, as also Henri Lefebvre. Willem van Schendel has been a constant interlocutor: we seem to be drawn to the same subject from different perspectives.
The sociologist Claire Alexander has been my comrade-in-arms for many years; together we have tried to bring to the history of ‘the migration crisis’ in Britain with the study of migration in the ‘source’ regions, in the same analytical framework. We have also been collaborators in public engagement and curriculum development in Britain, although since I grew more ill, Claire has borne more and more of the load. Working with her for fifteen years has changed me. I leave you to judge whether that change has been for the better or the worse!
Sohini Chattopadhyay: I’ll draw upon your reference to historians of medicine and labor here. You note how the Bengal Government after Partition expressed the need for able-bodied men to work and not subsist on charity. This resonates with famine relief programs of the colonial government in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies in the late nineteenth century where able-bodied men came to cities to work in the factories. These parallels tell us about the enduring relationship between famine, labor history, and citizenship (or claims to urban spaces). The desire to pick able-bodied men of course tells us about how famine set in mass debility among others, particularly women and children. How does one accommodate the history of debility, ‘weakness’, and morbidity into the history of citizenship in postcolonial India and Pakistan?
There are many ways to approach this. Note the rights (or lack of them) of people with certain listed diseases to travel, or marry, and to exert other forms of autonomy. Epilepsy and leprosy still figure as barriers to mobility, in and of themselves. It gives you an idea of what manner of ‘rights-bearing subject’ the disabled person is, and has been for centuries. (Bashford is illuminating on this point.) Note the access to the ‘goods’ of citizenship: the right to serve in the army (height and weight rules have applied, and continue to apply), or access to rations at low prices (proof of identity and place of residence are needed to avail these provisions). How does a displaced and disabled woman vote? (It is hard enough for the elite woman to exercise this right freely.) How does an orphan child, displaced by riots in Gujarat, say, gain access to these goods (or ‘BPL’ provisions) since she cannot prove either her identity or place of residence? This child will become weaker, and ever more debilitated, to the point that she cannot even do days of work now guaranteed by the NREGA scheme.
From the lens of caste, one can begin to build up a picture of what it is to be a ‘bare citizen’ (or something close to that). Citizenship is not an either/or quality but a spectrum of rights and capabilities. Many people find themselves on the wrong end of this spectrum, because of their gender, disability, debility, or history of displacement.
Sohini: Your projects are deeply marked by the ‘minutiae of events’, as David Washbrook has characterized it. What global parallels have the minutiae revealed? I am thinking of historians on citizenship and refugee making such as Frederick Cooper (whom you cite on p. 492 in Partition’s Legacies) Zolberg and Benda, (p. 222), Engseng Ho (p. 226) in other decolonized countries. What makes the South Asian case study distinct?
Joya: The obvious factor in the South Asian case is Partition. In this sense, its closest parallel is with Israel. Students of mine who have worked on refugee camps in Israel have observed similar dynamics within them. (One observes similar processes of minority formation post-Partition concerning the Arab population that stayed on: Arab–Israeli scholars have noted a similar grab of ‘evacuee property’ and ghettoization of Arab communities). Lisa Malkki’s work on Hutu refugees in Tanzania is most revealing too. South Sudan and divided Eritrea may well be witnessing similar processes on the ground. I have not yet seen any granular study of the horn of Africa, perhaps it is still too early and unsafe.
That is not often the realm of historians, amongst whom only a handful examine the ‘minutiae of events’ with as much zeal as I do. Anthropologists, like Malkki, do stay close to the ground, attending to little people and each acts; so it will take scholars working in many fields to build up meaningful comparisons. I am talking of early signs here – conference papers still unpublished – on Israel, and so on.
But I think that if you were to read these studies together, the South Asian example will not appear so distinct after all. Several post-colonial nation-states were born while societies were being ripped apart: they bear similar (though not identical) scars.
Sohini: You have noted how the terms ‘transnationalism’, ‘hybridity’, and ‘networks’ cloud the increasingly firm clasp of nation-states in sealing and controlling its borders. As someone living in New York at the time of the coronavirus pandemic, I have noticed how nation-states micro-manage their immigrant population even within their borders: through policing, counting, and withholding access to basic health rights and economic resources. Simultaneously, migrants evade the state by giving up on resources and evading documentations. Migrants slip out of official records, only captured in our archives when the nation-state reigns them back in. Are migrants then the true transnational subjects? How does one write these slippery characters back into history?
Joya: There’s been excellent work on the paperwork of citizenship and access to its goods (for instance Kamal Sadiq’s Paper Citizens). He finds that ‘paper’ is quite easy to get, forged documents can be bought all the time. (I found the same with the permit papers issues for cross-border movement between India and Pakistan.) But do not over-emphasize official bureaucratic paperwork if you want to ‘see’ these migrants, particularly those the state is trying to get rid of, and those who are trying to evade its clutches. For the very reasons that you suggest, the state’s ‘biopolitics’ can never be as powerful as some belief it to be, because ‘little people’ are resourceful and determined. You might see them in news coverage of small skirmishes at borders, where say, India, is trying to push ‘East Bengali (read Muslim)’ ‘migrants’ across the border. These people often have all the papers, they even have graves, to prove domicile. The state disregards this. See court cases, which often yield rich personal biographies of ‘absconders’. Go to borderlands, where they tend to cluster: take life histories. These people are the transnational subjects of our time since most have far-flung networks and attachments in all sorts of places. You are right, and courageous, to be pushing at this question. The study of elite transnational sojourners continues to throw up much to think about, (see, for instance, Tim Harper’s recent Underground Asia). But without unearthing the transnational lives of the poorer migrants, who are a vast and ballooning population, we are never going to get our heads around this subject.
Joya Chatterji is a Fellow of Trinity College and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Modern Asian Studies. She also is a member of the editorial board of the Historical Journal, the Journal of Contemporary History , and Economic and Political Weekly. Until very recently, she was the Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Asiatic Society. At present, Professor Chatterji is writing a monograph on the global history of South Asian citizenship, and a substantial general work on 'the South Asian Twentieth Century'.
Uttara Shahani is a historian of South Asia with a primary focus on Sindh and the Sindh diaspora. Her PhD thesis was on Sindh and the partition of India. Her current research is focused on the Sindh diaspora in the UK. More broadly, Uttara works on histories of partitions, citizenship, refugees, migration, and ecumenical traditions of religious practice. She is currently an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University. She is affiliated to the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and is a postdoctoral affiliate at Trinity College, Cambridge.