The further we get from the events of Partition, the more the art of writing about it changes. Memories fade and change, its custodians no longer those who were direct participants as they have aged. In the Language of Remembering looks at the implications of these flows through a carefully collated selection of interviews both with those who lived through the traumatic events of the mid-20th century in South Asia and their descendants.
It is now generally accepted that the Partition of India happened in two quite different ways. In the West, it was short, swift, extremely violent, and quite definitive, while in the East the process was prolonged, fluid, and relatively less bloody. Thus, the historians have termed the Partition in East India as the ‘Long Partition’. Another difference between these two processes of Partition seems to be associated with the dual process of forgetting and remembrance.
Declaring India to be an independent nation in 1947 encapsulated fundamental historical changes. India was no longer a collection of kingdoms as it had been before it was colonized, nor were the people of India any longer subjects of the British crown as under colonial rule. We were now a sovereign democratic state whose population consisted of free and autonomous citizens of a nation.
Commentarial traditions and language-centred interpretive conventions were arguably the most important modes of knowledge production in India for much of the second millennium CE. This practice commenced in all earnest in the eighth century CE, although we know of several instances of earlier commentaries too, including Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya that is older than the first century BCE. Modern scholarship has relied upon these works for a long time, and works such as Sāyaṇa’s commentary on the Rigvēda and the ones on the bṛhattraya texts (Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya, Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha and Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhīyacarita) have been indispensable in producing critical editions of the respective texts.
Conference volumes are not easy to review as the essays do not always cohere to form a clear and lucid narrative. The volume under review, however, does partially better on this count as it reflects on a plethora of writings—travel accounts, professional histories, women’s memoirs—to index the shifts in the way India was represented by Europeans from the late 16th to the mid-19th century. Consequently, while the subject of representing India, in itself, is hardly new, given the number of books that have been written to make sense of the way India was constructed and staged by Europeans, the volume manages to bring fresh perspectives.
The book is a collection of essays on varied themes comprising the concept of India in Alberuni, Hindu chiefs in Sultanate polity, economic theories during the period, economic implications of political disintegration and Shaikh Abdul Quddus Gangohi’s relations with political authorities. Even as these essays focus on the study of thought, polity and economy, they investigate the history of India during the period 1000-1500 CE with particular reference to the Delhi Sultanate. It relates valuable paradigms of the period that gave the Delhi Sultanate a different character notwithstanding its Islamic identity.