Dilip Simeon's blog

NB:  'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' - Big Brother, in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. DS What is the purpose of remembrance? Revenge? Remorse? Restitution? Reconciliation? Rekindling the dying embers of mindless hate? Reapportioning blame? Remembering? Or, reminding oneself, “never again”? Before asking our prime minister to explain what he wants to be remembered, let me, as a displaced Midnight’s Child, briefly recount what I recall as a six-year-old at partition. My father was in Lahore where he had sought refuge and a career 20 years earlier, in 1927, from anti-Brahminism in his home province. Do I recall the glistening blade of the dagger aimed at him as dawn broke on August 17, 1947, or the kindness of the Muslim grocer, who held the knife without plunging it in, after keeping my father well-supplied over the previous awful week?  And, what am I to do with the image that haunts me - of my father watching ...

" Nobody in my family had ever gone through horrors of the Partition in particular as an actor in it but I never understood why I always felt deeply and was always lured by the stories, visuals or events of '47. One of the biggest migration and movement that was forcibly acted upon the common people of South Asia, clearly based on the lines of their religion. As ridiculous it sounds, it was more haunting to me as a legacy of 'Colonization' and a never fading away scar on the soul of the Sub-continent. Out of all the histories, be it political or economical. What mattered to the most was shattering of the 'Hope'- breaking down of the idea of being a  Human. .. The idea of bargaining and bartering of fellow humans on some negotiation table, talking of their exchanges and movement. I would not even hesitate to say that History of south-asia is nothing but certainly in the post-partition era, where we still find 14th August 1947 as our reference point for various p...

NB : The Sangh Parivar have been repeating this lie for decades. Modi said it in his 2013 campaign; and in the 2019 campaign, a BJP candidate said if Nehru had allowed Jinnah to be made PM, partition would not have happened. Since Amit Shah is now an expert historian of Partition, let us recall that in placing all responsibility for partition on the Congress, he and Modi were repeating what Jaswant Singh had said in his book. Why then did Modi ban Jaswant Singh's book in Gujarat! (August 2009). In fact Jaswant was accused of slandering Sardar Patel! Maybe someone reminded them that Patel was a high-level leader of the Congress. Media memory is so short that nobody raised this question. See  Gujarat govt bans Jaswant's book on Jinnah  (The  ban was lifted  by the High Court).  Unfortunately the level of historical awareness - in parliament and outside it - is so abysmal that this deceitful propaganda is repeated by the mass media, and endorsed by some...

Dhaka Tribune - August 14, 2017 by Afsan Chowdhury In Bangladesh, 1947 is a distant memory, erased by the bloody 1971 liberation war against Pakistan It was May 16, 1971, when soldiers from the Pakistan army rounded up all the Hindu men in Jogisu village in the Rajshahi district, about 300km from Dhaka, the capital of what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. There were 42 in total. They were all shot dead and the Muslim villagers were ordered to dig a hole in which their bodies would be dumped. Nine widows in white saris recounted the scene for a show I was filming on the atrocities committed during the Bangladesh war of independence, fought between Pakistan, then known as West Pakistan, and East Pakistan and India. “The soldiers then urinated on the grave,” one of the widows, 60-year-old Sri Shundar, recalled. Jogisu was one of the thousands of villages that faced such a fate. An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971 But were the even...

Sohaib I. Khan on Venkat Dhulipala’s Creating a New Medina Dhulipala’s methodological posture is a refreshing departure from academic histories in which the saga of partition only unfolds through the hidden motives and intrigues of nationalist elites. At the very outset of the book, he therefore rejects the famous  “bargaining counter” thesis  that sees Pakistan as the unintended outcome of a failed political bargain by its founder  Pakistan’s descent into violent forms of religious extremism has recently become the subject of  best-selling books . Causal explanations for the country’s current state of crisis rely on either one or some combination of the following: incomplete modernization, persistent  religious dogma and super-stition  as impediments to secularization, disruptions in democratic rule by a strong  military junta ,  American interventionism  and surrogate warfare,...

Venkat Dhulipala’s book,  Creating A New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest forPakistan in Late Colonial North India demolishes the existing scholarship on Muhammad Ali Jinnah that his demand for Pakistan was a mere bargaining chip, that it was the reason why he deliberately kept the idea of Pakistan vague, and that Pakistan was merely an obsession of the Muslim political elite. Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and Visiting Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, Dhulipala revisits the debate on Partition from a new perspective.  Excerpts from the interview: You have demolished existing theories about Partition. Were these theories constructed because historians wanted to portray Jinnah as modern and secular? You need to look at the context of the historians who focused on elite politics and portrayed Jinnah as wanting to create a modern secular Republic. This context included the creation of Bangladesh, ...

“I have suffered every single one of my stories. I have experienced them in such a way that my characters often appear to be nothing but reflections of my own being. Even when I am no more, I am sure I will remain alive by virtue of my characters. The grain of life is the same, after all. And if it is so, where do people go after they have lived through their own lives?... I went on slipping naturally into the open so that I may realize the desire of my own life in the lives of others.” This was Joginder Paul writing about his short story collection  Khula ( Open ), published in 1989. His death on April 23, 2016, marks the passing of an era in the short history of the modern Urdu short story. With his debut collection of short stories,  Dharti ka Kaal  ( The Famine of the Earth , 1961) and his very first novel  Ek Boond Lahu Ki  ( A Drop of Blood , 1962), Paul began his writing career when the great age of the progressive writers was on the decline. Saa...

Intizar Husain (December 21, 1925- February 2, 2016) passed away in a Lahore hospital due to complications from pneumonia, high blood sugar and a heart attack. The news is fresh and raw still, but with time, his loss will prove to be irreplaceable — both to the world of Urdu literature and to the India-Pakistan relationship. There is no denying that Intizar sahab’s contribution as a storyteller is enormous, especially in the genre of Partition narratives. If Saadat Hasan Manto laid bare the ugliness of 1947 and its immediate, brutish aftermath with the urgency of a field surgeon, Intizar Husain probed those wounds ever so gingerly, peeling away layers from old memories to reveal wounds that have still not healed and may never heal, at least not when fresh wounds are repeatedly inflicted on skin that is still sore and tender. And both countries — India and Pakistan — have lost a true friend, for Intizar sahab remained till his last breath, I suspect, a wellwisher of both the old ho...

NB: This is another document related to the history of Indian independence. It contains the Communist Party of India's understanding of the controversial Cabinet Mission scheme of 1946; and takes a close look at the military and political implications of that scheme. DS The document is titled  File CPI-99 (1947) ; and forms part of the  P.C. Joshi Archives  at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  The full text in PDF, may be downloaded here:  https://tinyurl.com/zezcm2f Here is an extract from the Preface by Romesh Chandra: At every stage, at which the national movement has raised a new threat to imperialism and taken a new stride towards freedom, imperialism has jockeyed the Princes into a new position… The Princes were the key to the Federal Constitution of the Act of 1935… The Cripps offer had the Princes as also at its core as imperialism’s safeguard. The Congress’ reasons for rejecting the offer had at their head the continued use of P...