The partition of British India was a two step process.  First in 1947, Pakistan and India became independent nations.  For over the next twenty years, however, a very uneasy relationship existed between the two culturally and linguistically very different wings of Pakistan—East and West Pakistan.  In 1971 war broke out leading to the creation of Bangladesh and the end of what had previously been East Pakistan.  Like countless others with roots in the region of Bengal, Ananya Kabir’s family ended up being split across the nations of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.  Trained as an expert in medieval literature and now a professor at King’s College London, it was the 50th anniversary of partition in 1997 that inspired Ananya to shift course and begin to look at the cultural entanglements that continue to bind the peoples of South Asia.  Her first book on the region took up the contested territory of Kashmir—Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009).  Her second book, Partition’s Post-Amnesia: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013) is a study of the cultural connections between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.  It is both a scholarly study of the making, unmaking, and remaking of national identities across two partitions as well as a personal account of her own family’s relationship to the region across this sweep of history.  

When Ananya decided to turn her scholarly attention to South Asia it was a time of tremendous change for the emerging field of partition studies.  It was through the pioneering work of Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Urvashi Butalia that the story of partition, once limited to male dominated, top-down, nationalist narratives featuring the great men of history, opened to include stories about how women and marginalized groups experienced the events of 1947.  While references were made to Bangladesh, much of this new scholarship focused on the region of the Punjab on the western side of the subcontinent.  Ananya was interested in bringing her skills of critical cultural analysis to the region where her family was from, Bengal, on the opposite, eastern side of the subcontinent. 

As a scholar of English literature interested in using her training to understand partition, Ananya explains that the field of Holocaust Studies was especially useful.  Methods used in Holocaust Studies, such as psychoanalysis, symptomatic and close reading, were familiar to her and ones she could use to study partition.  She could use this tool kit to offer another perspective on the experience of partition.  It was through this awareness of what she could bring to partition studies as a professor of literature that she began her work on South Asia in the 1990s.  

As a literature expert, Ananya was also keenly aware of the limitations of novels as a narrative form of expression.  Narratives inevitably convey a particular perspective.  Narratives are trapped within a linear structure with a beginning, middle, and end.  In trying to approach the memory of partition from a different perspective, Ananya was interested in looking at non-narrative forms of cultural expression.  Songs, paintings, photos, maps, sculptures, for example, can evoke powerful memories of times, places, and people without being constrained by the limitations of narrative forms of cultural expression.  Non-narrative cultural forms offer valuable means of reconciliation because they allow us to retain and assert our emotional attachments to places which may now be located in another country.  

Indeed, the historian, the cultural producer, and the literary critic seeking to comment and analyse the work of her peers: we are all Partition’s grandchildren, whether Pakistani, Indian, or Bangladeshi. Although we displace our own curiosities and compulsions on to a range of ‘others’ – be it the characters of the novels we write, the lacuna of historiography we choose to fill, or the subjects for literary critical reading we privilege – we are unable to sever our personal connection to the material of memory.  Ananya Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia

In novels such as A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, set in post-independence Bangladesh, maps are a reminder of how the present is entangled in the past of East Pakistan.  Anam includes a map in the opening pages of her novel to recall the peculiar relationship between East and West Pakistan between 1947-1971.  Non-contiguous, separated by thousands of miles of Indian territory, the easiest way to bridge the divide was by plane.  Maps are a means of remembering a past by writers whose grandparents lived through partition.  Ananya Kabir refers to this cohort as the post-amnesia generation because of their desire and need to remember a forgotten or repressed past.  

The Bengali singer Firoza Begam is an another example of how non-narrative forms of cultural expression have a special power to recall earlier times and attachments.  Originally from the city of Fardipur, Begam began her career as a singer in Calcutta, which Ananya describes as the “cultural center of pre-Partition Bengal.”  When questioned in an interview about how she ended up back in Fardipur, in what became East Pakistan after partition in 1947, Firoza’s recollections become hazy and imprecise.  She only remembers being one of the artists who helped inaugurate Radio Pakistan’s broadcasts in Dhaka and how she had to abandon Bengali music to sing in Urdu.  Pakistanis, however, have vivid recollections of Begum’s songs in Urdu which continue to circulate on the internet.  While Begum’s own personal narrative draws a sharp line between pre and post-independence Bangladesh, her songs in Urdu continue to resonate for Pakistanis, despite the national borders and bitter memories of civil war that now separate the two countries.  In short, non-narrative forms of cultural expression, such as music, have the power to transcend national divisions and promote reconciliation and healing by reminding all sides of shared cultural connections.

In the early years of Pakistan, archeology was a field of research which offered the possibility of unearthing a usable past to unite the disparate wings of the new nation.  Figuring most prominently in this history was Ahmed Hasan Dani (1920-2009).  Just a few years prior to partition Dani became the first Mulsim graduate of Benaras Hindu University but was barred from teaching there because of his region.  He would go on to discover the ancient remains of a Stone Age culture in the caves of Sanghao in Northwestern Pakistan.  Dani’s findings suggested that the roots of ancient South Asian civilizations like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro might be in West Pakistan.   At age 42 he was given the job of establishing the first department of archeology for Pakistan’s University of Peshawar.  Dani used his new position and the financial support from the government of Pakistan to undertake a wealth of research on the Gandhara period in the Peshawar region.  Flourishing between the 1st and 2nd millennium BCE, Gandhara Civilization was Buddhist with later Greek cultural influences rooted in Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region. Terracotta vases, reliefs, and sculptures were a core feature of Gandhara cultural expression.  For the nascent state of Pakistan, Gandhara civilization and its terracotta culture held the promise of uniting the very different cultures of East and West Pakistan through an even older common Buddhist cultural heritage.  

With the civil war that ended the union of East and West Pakistan, the countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan rewrote their national narratives.  For Pakistan, hopes for union through a shared ancient Buddhist past and terra cotta culture were abandoned in favor of a newly crafted national identity rooted in an imagined Islamic past.  Prominent national monuments erected in Pakistan after 1971, such as Teen Talwar (Three Swords) in Karachi, evoke the importance of this Islamic past through their emphasis on Arabic script.  In the case of post-independence Bangladesh national monuments convey a desire to forget the period of union between East and West Pakistan through an emphasis on the events and people surrounding and leading to independence in 1971 or what Ananya labels as “the sealed moment.”  The jaytio sriti (National Monument) at Savar,  the Rayerbajar brick monument dedicated to Bengali intellectuals killed by the Pakistani army on 14 December 1971, and the shadhinota stombho (Independence Pillar) are all devoted to a singular moment in time divorced from a larger shared past. 

One of the roles played by contemporary South Asian artists is to question and sometimes ridicule these imagined national histories.  Pakistani visual artists, Bani Abidi, for example, took aim at one of the most prominent national icons in Pakistan, Muhammad-bin-Qasim.  A military commander from the Umayyad Caliphate in the 7th century, Muhammad-bin-Qasim is credited with bringing Islam to Pakistan through the conquest of the Sindh region which contains the capital of Karachi.  In the post-1971 era he became a central figure in the government’s effort to anchor the national history to an Islamic past.  Abidi used a series of photos of a warrior on horseback dressed in Middle Eastern garb and photoshopped in front of prominent national monuments in the capital to poke fun at the distortion of the nation’s past.  

Bani Abidi, like Ananya Kabir, is in her fifties and is a member of what Ananya describes as the post-amnesia generation.  This is the third generation after partition.  First generation cultural actors like the archeologist Ahmed Hasan Dani did the work of trying to build memories of a past that might connect and sustain the wings of East and West Pakistan.  When this project failed the forgetting came as Pakistan and Bangladesh each tried to reinvent new national histories and narratives.  While divorced by time and space from the lived experience of partition, this third generation of cultural actors retains powerful emotional ties to their ancestral homes.  It is their desire to better understand the places and cultures experienced by their grandparents’ generation that drives a new round of memory work.  Often living outside of South Asia in the diaspora, with women playing a disproportionate role, these cultural actors are connected through social media and better able to communicate and collaborate across what are now hardened national borders.  Their work may hold the promise of uncovering or rediscovering the shared culture that unites a now divided region.