Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: 'Recasting The Region: Language, Culture And Islam In Colonial Bengal', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

The origins and growth of Bengali Muslim identity have been the center of several studies till date. Most have concentrated on the politics of Muslim separatism in the 1930s with the politicization of the eastern Bengal’s peasantry and subsequent support for the Pakistan Movement. Neilesh Bose, in his Recasting the Region: Language Culture and Islam in Colonial Bengal shifts focus from politics to the Bengali literary sphere where Bengali Muslim intellectuals created a particular regional identity distinct from both mainstream Urdu Muslim and Hindu Bengali culture. This particular Bengali Muslim identity, Bose argues, was produced and established through writings of …

Review: 'Hindu Muslim Riots', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

Communal violence in India, especially between Hindus and Muslims, have for long been the center of scholarly research. From the 1990s, historians, and anthropologists have innovatively analyzed colonial and Partition related riots to understand why and how they happened and the contextual development of communal identities. Political scientists have put forth thought-provoking paradigms of urban communal rioting in the wake of the Hindu Muslim riots of 1992 and 2002. All, it would seem, owe an intellectual debt to sociologist Richard Lambert’s much-cited dissertation of 1951, now published six decades later. Given that the publication is mostly an unchanged version of …

Paper Rights: The Emergence Of Documentary Identities In Post-Colonial India, 1950–67, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

This essay contextualises the emergence of a document regime which regulated routine travel through the deployment of the India–Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme in 1952. It suggests that such travel documents were useful for the new Indian state to delineate citizenship and the nationality of migrants and individual travellers from Pakistan. The bureaucratic and legal mediations under the Scheme helped the Indian state to frame itself before its new citizens as the sole certifier of some of their rights as Indians. In contrast, applicants for these documents viewed them as utilitarian, meant to facilitate their travel across the new borders. …

Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens In India And Pakistan, 1947-65, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

Partitioned States offers new perspective in the histories of Partition and its aftermath by connecting it to the long, drawn out and skewed formation of new national entities: India and East Pakistan. The book focuses on the Bengal Partition and locates its narrative within the intersection of long term cross border movement, chronic small-scale violence, the emergence of a document regime, and biased national refugee policies, all of which contributed to the formation of national citizenships in India and East Pakistan.

This book argues that minorities -- Hindus in East Pakistan, Muslims in eastern India -- and the discourse over …

The Tear That Does Not Mend: A Review Of 'Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India And Independence', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

Academic attention on Indian Independence and Partition has hitherto been focused mainly on the political and the "sheer teleology to the climax in August 1947 when British power was formally transferred." Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence, in the view of its editors as well as its contributors, is an attempt to examine other developments, no less momentous, during this period. The book, which is a collection of 12 essays by different authors dealing with various aspects of the Partition of 1947, attempts, as the title suggests, to document the "trauma" and find the "continuities" following "freedom."