Introduction
In this paper, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s writings in A Thousand Plateaus, I explore the two spatial relations of striations and nomadism and their respective methodological emergence in the state and the war machine.Footnote 1 I argue that in spite of the turn to space and spatiality in International Relations (IR), spatial imagination largely continues to adhere to, and reproduce, statist understanding of phenomena, at the expense of the indeterminacy at the heart of spatial becoming. To challenge this productive bias, I advance an exploration of the erosive spatial becoming of the war machine in the movement of violence in the Indian Partition of 1947. Following Deleuze and Guattari, state here does not refer to identified institutional entities that wield authority but ‘one of the ways life expresses itself – as is the war machine as its immanent Other’.Footnote 2 While the former inscribes productive unities in space, the latter marshals the subtractive force of space and disassembles unities. Thus, while the state is a principle of seeing and forging the world, in actualised, materialised outcomes, the war machine is the force that works with immaterial potential to variation, or virtuality, that informs the process of becoming.
While disciplinary beginnings of IR, shrouded as they were in pessimistic abstractions, engaged with space primarily in its container function of yielding universal insides opposed to an anarchical outside,Footnote 3 much of this earlier theoretical containment is now being challenged by the turn to productive space and spatiality. There is a committed turn within the discipline towards addressing its core abstractions through a spatial lens. Borders,Footnote 4 order,Footnote 5 territory,Footnote 6 and violenceFootnote 7 are some such concepts which have been deployed as scaffolding for legitimating space as a theoretical tool. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, space itself is emerging as a core theoretical concern in IR, prompting a number of studies that explore the analytical purchase that space can hold in the discipline.Footnote 8 Relatedly, there is also growing interest in the different kinds of spaces that proliferate within the international, and the political, social, cultural phenomena that produce these spaces. Some such spaces include everyday space,Footnote 9 security space,Footnote 10 liminal space,Footnote 11 and climate space,Footnote 12 to name a few.
Notwithstanding the analytical depth that space is being afforded, the imagination of the concept remains largely limited to the socially produced space. This is space continuously constituted and (re)produced by the practices, discourses, and interactions that make it meaningful to the actors and agents circulating within it. While the urgency for such a socially produced space comes from the need to challenge the originary disciplinary binary of inside/outside, I contend that arguments for productive space ground the ontological primacy of striated space. The normative positivity afforded to meaningful production within spatial analyses reaffirms the value of partitioned space.
Further, challenging this normative insistence on (re)production, I want to demonstrate how space exceeds the grasp of social production and striation and scatters, obtrudes, protrudes, and distends becoming in ways that often cannot be distilled into meaningful narratives of human social production. To do this, I foreground nomadism, which is the potential of bodiesFootnote 13 – elemental, physical, affective, immaterial – to come into indeterminate relations and materialise unanticipated encounters in space. Conceptual recognition of nomadism is necessary to dispel the persistent methodological myth of making all phenomena fit into ontologically striated formations.
I choose the historical moment of the Indian Partition of 1947, particularly the all-engulfing violence in the frontier region of Punjab, to follow the nomadic emergence and movement of the war machine because it presents a particularly stark moment of competition between the imposed striated meanings on space and the decompositional effects of nomadism. The Partition of India and Pakistan, orchestrated alongside and in tandem with the departure of the British Empire from the Indian subcontinent, opened a categorically ‘empty’ space where striations had been located but were yet to take concrete shape.Footnote 14 In the weeks and months before and after the moment of Partition, a seismic violence erupted in Punjab, which was ‘decentralized and diffused across the body politic’,Footnote 15 and which was compelled by the singular aim of ‘the wholesale destruction of communities’.Footnote 16 Thus, alongside one of the largest mass migrations in human history was unfolding a terrible and enduring force of violence that saw previously coexisting communities of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs engage in brutal acts of violence and grotesquery against one another.
While the violence has been variously rationalised,Footnote 17 I want to eschew focus on its causes and paradoxes, to instead ‘analyze tendencies and poles, the nature of the movements’ in its becoming.Footnote 18 Honing insights from the field of Partition Studies,Footnote 19 I argue that the violence articulated a nomadic response in the emergence of the war machine to the spatial foreclosure of the state. This response is neither peculiar to the subcontinent, nor to the Partition, but infinitesimally thrives beneath the visible, congealed surfaces of relations in all space. It is important to clarify at the outset that I do not offer a historical analysis of the violence in Punjab, nor do I claim to produce an alternative explanation for the violence. In this sense, I also refrain from suggesting that there is an empirical argument here about partitions per se, i.e. about the histories and political causes and eventualities of determinate acts of demarcating territory. My intention is to demonstrate tendencies in space that remain largely overshadowed due to the continued theoretical valuation of productive partitions in space, even within critical literatures. Thus, I want to follow the becoming of a spatial event without adding it up within a complete framework of explanation.
As such, this paper contributes to the growing acknowledgement within IR of the need for working with ‘disruptive’,Footnote 20 even ‘destructive’ potentials.Footnote 21 A substantial body of work in IR thinks these potentials by working with the philosophical directions of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari.Footnote 22 However, a number of works taking recourse to Deleuze and Guattati’s writings in IR often perform a bounded reading of their concepts, at the expense of the overspilling ongoingness of process that this framing demands.Footnote 23 Strikingly, this larger analytical valuation of boundedness has been highlighted in vocabularies of spatial closure. For instance, Eun diagnoses this as the problem of ‘closed territoriality’ in IR, such that ‘its territories and codes remain narrowly confined within a few lines of strata’ which can only articulate explanations and analysis within bounded frames of reference.Footnote 24 Similarly, Rajaram recognises this in the ‘abiding importance of the territorial imagination in the epistemic categories of international relations’.Footnote 25 Space and analysis thus inhibit each other, suggesting that space is not just a conceptual construct but an analytical scaffolding that informs core epistemological choices in the discipline. Following Eun’s call for ‘IR as becoming-rhizomatic’,Footnote 26 I eschew theoretical preoccupation with constructed space to take up the method of nomadism. This entails following the infinite possibility of movement and change underwriting space, instead of identifying how meaning comes to rest within locations. As such, the premise of this argument is analytical, suggesting that engaging nomadic space allows lived indeterminacy to seep into analyses and methodologies, making predetermined outcomes and prescriptions unfeasible.
I perform my argument through four moves: in the next section, I demonstrate how dominant critical approaches to space remain partial to the logic of bounded space through an enduring emphasis on production of meaning. In the following section, I expand on Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of striated and smooth space to point out what socially produced space in IR misses – the possibility of nomadic movement that underwrites, and holds the potential to override, bounded space. Next, I turn to the demonstration of such an instance of overriding in the movement of violence in Punjab in 1947, where nomadic space came to the fore in the emergence of the war machine, which upturned space and its recognisable contents and relations. I then tie up the concepts together in following the paradigmatic movement of Partition violence – the carnage on trains carrying refugees to each side – to consider how the war machine disassembles the illusion of productive meaning in space. In the concluding section, I revisit the argument and briefly return to the analytical implications of thinking with nomadic space in IR.
Space and IR
Traditionally, IR has viewed space as a stable and divisible repository of territorial ambitions and claims, treating it as a conceptual and metaphorical chronicle of territorial histories and politics of nation-states. This ‘culture of spatial chasms’ in IR determined the location of coherent politics within the ‘inside’ space of the nation, assigning disorder and disequilibrium to the ‘outside’ space of the international.Footnote 27 The purchase of this theoretical culture continues undiminished within realist IR in the so-called partition debate, for instance, which contends on the value of partition as a policy ‘solution’ for ‘policymakers in states such as the United States’ in resolving ‘ethnic’ conflicts in troubled states.Footnote 28 In the larger context of such colonial legacies, Ranabir Samaddar has argued that the ‘postcolonial times’ are better described as ‘partitioned times’.Footnote 29 The continued relevance of this description is visible not only in the recurrent ‘ethnic’ and ‘communal’ wars in those parts of the world where partitions forcibly circumscribed communities within marked territories, but also in the continued legacy of advancing partition as a colonial, racialised ‘solution’ to ‘resolve, or at least stabilise, ethno-national conflicts’.Footnote 30
Rejecting the container categorisation of space which sustains notions of territorial partitions as solution, a distinct body of critical work has emerged in IR that has been provisionally recognised as constituting a ‘spatial turn’ and makes way ‘for understanding space as constituted socially, politically and discursively, as well as consideration of how space and place shape, and are shaped by, human agency’.Footnote 31 This turn counters the Cartesian construction of ‘empty’ space by situating space as a constructed set of practices, performances, and discourses that is ‘pregnant with meaning’.Footnote 32 This literature, largely mobilising the works of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja, rather uniformly approaches space through ‘a social lens’ and attends to ‘interpretations and understandings’ that constitute space.Footnote 33
This ‘spatial turn’ can be observed to be concretising into an emergent, normative thrust on making space intelligible in and through meaningful outcomes of social processes. My contention here is not that the meanings produced out of this excessive focus on ‘the process of space making’ are normative,Footnote 34 but more fundamentally, that this singular methodological emphasis on constructed meaning normatively favours outcomes over process, thus reproducing a bounded orientation towards phenomena. The underlying assumption of lack regarding the Cartesian model of empty space, which socially produced space seeks to recuperate, comes from the idea that ‘space was robbed of substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates’.Footnote 35 The pivot on which critical space turns is the need to overcome this emptiness, which, by virtue of being pitched against, and criticised through, an insistence on the concrete production and organisation of meaning,Footnote 36 signifies a lack of (human) meaning and hence ‘space without politics’.Footnote 37 Interestingly, this is not a theoretically unified literature, but critical orientations to space from varying angles, including Critical Border Studies, Mobility Studies, and Critical Security Studies, which converge on the centrality of social construction and (re)production. Thus, whether it is the micropolitics of defensive architecture,Footnote 38 or the macropolitics of regional integration,Footnote 39 or the affective geographies of securitised spaces,Footnote 40 space is analysed as a product of practices and discourses of organisation; actions and flows within it are productively employed into the ‘transformation of matter into meaning, content into expression, the social process into a signifying system’.Footnote 41
While the scholarship ostensibly distances itself from the territorial model of space by privileging open-ended processes and practices of spatial construction, it nonetheless makes space meaningful or coherent through what Lövbrand and Stripple have recognised as the ‘activity’ of territorialisation, which deploys the ‘bounding of space’ to engender, or in this case reveal and analyse, social consequences.Footnote 42 The spatial turn, despite its insistence on the processual nature of space, reproduces the ‘territorial imagination’ or methodology of space which proceeds by binding.Footnote 43 To be sure, there is no claim of assigning a fixed meaning to space, and the scholarship brings into focus the varied and variable ways in which space becomes intelligible. Yet meaning is recognised by binding it within a concretised moment. The necessity of meaningful production of space, and the need to meaningfully narrativise space, evokes Doreen Massey’s recognition that much of Western spatial analysis and its ‘accustomed ways of imagining space have been attempts to tame it’.Footnote 44
Nisha Shah’s reckoning of ‘the territorial trap of the territorial trap’ is instructive here.Footnote 45 Shah argues that the recurrent metaphor in globalisation theories of ‘overcoming’ the territorial state through the more circulatory, mobile, and interconnected spaces of the globalised world betrays the implicit assumption of the state being a territorially grounded entity in the first place.Footnote 46 Extending the image of the double territorial trap to the theorisation of space in IR, it is possible to see how the territorialising activity of bounding continues to inform critical approaches to space.
For instance, Solomon and Steele’s micropolitical space as a ‘grounding’ for macropolitics is demonstrative of this proclivity towards territorialising assumptions and moves within critical IR.Footnote 47 Micropolitical space is described here as the possibility of ‘evaluating and appraising smaller enclosures where politics is practised as demonstrating both macro-/molar-politics but also their reversibility (the possibility of something different than the broader cultural, social or spatial competition that defines that relationship)’.Footnote 48 Thus, while the argument seeks to attune political analyses to the ‘sensations, resonance, movement, flow’ that outrun and overspill macropolitical structures,Footnote 49 the disruptions of micro-tendencies are still enclosed within partitioned blocks of meaning where co-presences are aggregated into new collective identities positioned against power. Indeed, Solomon and Steele emphasise the importance of the analytical exercise of ‘ontologiz(ing) the micropolitical formation, demarcating the scope (affective, spatial, and temporal) of the entity being examined’.Footnote 50 The binding activity of demarcation reads here as being necessary in validating a spatial event’s scope as ‘socially meaningful’.Footnote 51 In examining the performative reclaiming of space as sites of protest in the Occupy movement, for instance, Solomon and Steele’s focus is on underlining how ‘new symbolic meanings’ of dissenting spaces are produced.Footnote 52 This results in the enlarging of micropolitical tendencies of affect, rhythm, and space into ‘outlinable objects whose contextual variants can be explored in controlled, that is, repeatable circumstances’,Footnote 53 and eventually typified into the binary choice of power or resistance to power.
Emerging out of this normative affirmation of meaningful space is the posturing of socially produced space as ‘sites of political significance’.Footnote 54 This normative recognition of the political quite aptly represents what Chris Hesketh identifies as the ‘coloniality of space in IR’.Footnote 55 Hesketh argues that the epistemological foundation of space in IR excludes and negates ‘other imaginaries of the world that are contrary to the hegemonic order’ and thus is lodged in colonial practices of material and epistemological dispossession.Footnote 56 The equivalence of political significance with meaning marshals implicit assumptions about what constitutes meaning and hence what gets counted as political.
Indeed, Hesketh’s analysis of the appropriation of factions of Indigenous liberation and resistance into the support of resource-based nationalism in Bolivia is precisely demonstrative of the susceptibility of meaning to the erasures, appropriations, and imbrications of narrativisation.Footnote 57 The pointed recovery of space within a (re)productive logic of meaningful agential actions and interactions risks entrenching the coloniality of space in IR by privileging only such ontologised formations and values as analyses can meaningfully recognise, name, and organise in space. The positivity associated with the value of meaning and production in spatial analyses is the problem of a particular ontology that favours the specificity of space by grounding even its disruptive potentials into sites, locations, and wholes. I now turn to showing how such a representation only presents half the picture of space, the one which can be visualised and easily recognised. Echoing Amoore, what this fails to recognise is that ‘amid the life that is attached to given subjects and objects, there is already present a life in potentiality, a surprising and unanticipated life that has capacity to interrupt’ reproductive orders of meaning-making.Footnote 58
The tendencies of space: Striated and smooth
While Deleuze and Guattari do not necessarily offer a theory of space, their expansive project in A Thousand Plateaus not only ‘abounds in references to spatiality’Footnote 59 but also spatially articulates the flux of becoming. Concepts in the text are immaterially spatial, advancing in spatial terms while giving space to the intangible, the infinitesimally continuous, and the virtual. In the plateau ‘Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine’, Deleuze and Guattari siphon the functions of actual/virtual, arboreal/rhizomatic, state/nomadism into two relations or tendencies – striated or statist space and smooth or nomadic space.Footnote 60 Striated space, as the name suggests, is space marked out by lines, borders, plots, tracings. It is a measured and bounded space for identified and identifiable things, bodies, and claims, occupied by the statist imperative to classify and identify. Smooth space, on the other hand, names the possibility in space to supersede, circumvent, pass through, and invent connections across, beyond, and most significantly, in spite of striations. Space is smooth in the sense that it is open to endless possibility of indeterminate composition and decomposition.
Striated space and smooth space do not exist as different physical planes that possess different actualised properties. They are coexisting relations in space that shape the total movement of life. Deleuze and Guattari describe the two relations as follows: in the case of the striated space, ‘space is counted in order to be occupied’, whereas in the case of smooth space, ‘space is counted without being occupied’.Footnote 61 The former assigns decipherable value in space, seeking to close space off to its own indeterminate extensions by imposing conditioned orders of meaning on it. These partitions or striations depend on space to cede that ‘which is extractable’ in it,Footnote 62 to generate the possibility of meaningful action in it, action that can be readily narrativised and reproduced. Concrete driveways slice up a usable patch of space and mark off public space from private property; the specific arrangements of furniture in our dwelling spaces impart meaning and pattern to our everyday habitation practices; the roof above my head separates me from the vagaries of the environment. Striations thus engender occupation of space through the productive facilitation of repeatability and narrativisation of that which can be directly perceived – a steady replication of outcomes and actions made possible through the extraction of the most clear-cut outlines of phenomena and their stabilisation into actualised knowledge. Thus, in striated space objects, bodies, and locations can be meaningfully perceived and simplified, and importantly, this is the statist approach to life. Statist here does not refer to state agencies and structures but the method of ontologising phenomena to make habits and patterns possible and recognisable within it.
On the other hand, smooth space is the virtual space in-between concrete outlines, containing limitless possibilities of encounters, materialisations, and chance that can neither be fully perceived nor predicted. It effects consequences in phenomena without materialising itself as an occupiable surface. Smoothness is the quality of all space to infect the unfolding of phenomena indeterminately, in spite of the organised separations and contours that produce unified experiences in space. Smooth space inheres in the roots of a tree erupting out of concrete driveways; it makes itself felt in the all-too-universal and unhappy experience of stubbing one’s toes against a piece of furniture in the intimately known structure of one’s inhabited space; it is at work in a roof caving in from the accumulated pressure of continuously percolating rainfall. Albeit imperceptible, smooth space makes itself felt in unpredictable shifts and unanticipated encounters that erupt out of the continuous flow of phenomena in the passage of time on space.Footnote 63 It registers itself as the propensity of phenomena to take shape by repurposing or even degenerating striations in space, connecting discontinuities while disrupting stabilisations.
Of particular interest to my argument here is how movement moves differently within striated and smooth space. Striated space is ‘sedentary’ because its purpose is to ‘parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares’, and is hence marked out by walls, enclosures, boundaries, whereas nomadic or smooth space only carries ‘traits’ that appear and disappear in the passage of movement.Footnote 64 Movement in smooth space contains the nomadic potential to ‘diverge from the present, to function differently’ in space, and thus cannot be made to repeat itself or be transmitted fully into organised knowledge.Footnote 65 Thus, while an urban road may be well marked with defining partitions for the functional separation and flow of traffic, bodies flowing in it can bring to the fore the smoothness of space simply by suddenly swaying sideways in it, jumping over barricades, disappearing behind bushes, re-emerging out of nowhere in the middle of a busy street, and dispersing other bodies around themselves in more, ever-opening directions that the striations cannot foresee.Footnote 66 The distinction between smooth and striated is then, as Grosz puts it, ‘a distinction between a necessarily unpredictable materiality and the imposition of our needs for regularity and predictability on this materiality’.Footnote 67 The smooth and striated constantly jostle and chafe against each other, interlocked in an interminable conversation.
Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari clarify that smooth space effects itself through ‘small tactile or manual actions of contact’ – as opposed to the visually organised striated space.Footnote 68 Consider the movement of a parkour athlete in a dense concrete jungle.Footnote 69 The athlete moves between destinations by deploying points such as buildings, fences, railings, abandoned structures, and so on as tactile encounters to launch themselves into the next movement. These points of contact act as ‘relays’ and not barriers,Footnote 70 prioritising continuous passage of movement over regulation. Points in smooth space generate highly localised physical encounters that enable movement to pass through them without assigning meaning or position to the movement. Thinking with the movement of the nomad, Deleuze and Guattari explain that it is not that the nomad moves in ignorance or defiance of points, they move through and across these points of contact (‘water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.’) – where every ‘point is reached only in order to be left behind’.Footnote 71 Nomadic space thus does not yield destinations for movement to come to rest in, but connecting links forged spontaneously in the flow of movement, for the continuous facilitation of movement.
Striated space becomes a method of regulating this movement, a method of intervening into the ‘absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space’ and decomposing it into ‘relative characteristic of a “moved body” going from one point to another in a striated space’.Footnote 72 The consequence of giving ontological primacy to such stratifying partitions is that ‘in doing so, they obscure what is most “true” of nature, and what is most “true” of peoples and subjectivities in general, which is their tendency toward multiplicity’.Footnote 73 With the ‘variability … of directions’ between the indefinite ‘sets of relations’ that compose and recompose space,Footnote 74 nomadism highlights the multiplicity that is inherent to space.
Massey identifies within this nomadic multiplicity the ‘chance of space’.Footnote 75 It is the chance of contingency that nomadic space injects into the making of phenomena, the chance of ‘singularities, unpredictable eruptions, transmutations, or evolutions’ that imbricates the movement of becoming.Footnote 76 The chance of space blooms indeterminately, in uncertain, unpredictable ways, into ongoing events that compose the world as process. Here, events are not the same as the inscriptions – or ‘intelligence’ – that are made in their wake, retrospectively, to give them historical meaning and territorial position.Footnote 77 However, this also underscores the difficulty of accessing nomadic space. It cannot be touched or seen directly. To reach into the immateriality of nomadic space one must move in the vanishing trail of a nomad while feeling for the moments of chance that propel movement in indeterminate directions. I now turn to such a movement through space in my reading of the movement of violence during the Partition. I deploy the war machine as an analytical bridge to get access to nomadic propensities in space. As I argue in the next section, in the case of the Partition, the violence can be read as an expression of the war machine that channelled nomadic potentialities and variabilities of space to attack nascent striations. Thus, in following the movement of violence it becomes possible to feel the potential of nomadism.
However, I hasten to add a brief note of caution here. This framework does not entail a romantic celebration of nomadism as an extrapolatable resource for emancipatory resistance. Nor does it identify with the ‘nomadic subject’ of Rosi Bradoitti’s design that is exhorted to remain ‘grounded … in the radical immanence of a sense of belonging to and being accountable for a community, a people, and a territory’.Footnote 78 Nomadism ungrounds, and its porosity and fluidity cannot be applied as a solution to the exclusions and perforations of partitions. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, ‘there are just as many relations of force, and just as much violence, on one side as on the other’.Footnote 79 Thus, the point here is not to establish normative ascendancy of nomadism over partitions, or even to dispute or deny the material presence and significance of partitions. Instead, it is to make space for the nomadic and indeterminate in the writing of space in IR.
The Indian Partition: The nomadic space of the war machine
‘On whose behalf were they acting…?’Footnote 80
Urvashi Bhutalia poses this question in the context of the mass suicides and honour killings of women in Punjab amid the raging atrocities of Partition violence in the newly formed India and Pakistan in 1947. This question, however, can be equally extended to every agent and act of brutality that the Partition inaugurated in the Indian subcontinent, especially in Punjab where the violence was so total and all-encompassing that blame, ownership, responsibility still remain impossible to assign. As the British Empire made its exit from the subcontinent, affording ‘competing nationalist imaginations’ of India and Pakistan to explode into each other, victims, aggressors, death, and grotesquery all merged into the seismic, rolling explosion of violence that lasted for weeks and months before and after the Partition/Independence.Footnote 81 As far as estimated numbers go, over 14 million people were ‘exchanged’ between the new nation-states, 2 million people killed, 100,000 women raped and brutalised, countless horrors witnessed, and innumerable sorrows afflicted.
The Partition was championed based on naturalised notions of community and homelands, and specifically on the notion of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asian Muslims. As such, the logic of Partition stood at the apogee of a statist politics of spatialised meaning which locates, attaches, and bounds definite subject positions in enclosed space. However, in the decimating force of unprecedented violence, the striating logic came undone, precisely in the impossibility of ‘fully comprehend(ing) its meaning’.Footnote 82 While the effects and nature of the violence were not homogeneous to all communities and spaces in the subcontinent,Footnote 83 violence itself was ‘universal to the experience of the event’.Footnote 84
An important observation that finds common ground across the terrain of partition studies is that violence spatialised key tendencies of Indian social and political realities. While early scholarship on Partition treated the violence as an exception or aberration – a ‘temporary madness’ – the later development of the field has sought to emphasise that the violence was an expression of a ‘much more general and continuous aspect of modern life’,Footnote 85 spatially expressing the competing intersection of the multiple relations, interests, and affinities that composed routine life.Footnote 86 In this vein, Shruti Kapila has recently argued that violence, or more importantly, the ‘potential for violence’ among kinsmen who lived in close intimacy, was a crucial axis along which Indian political thought developed in the early 20th century.Footnote 87 This recognition of the potential for violence in intimacy disturbs normative notions of organised order by infusing landscapes of shared becoming with the tendency to ‘potent irregularity and interruption’.Footnote 88
Channelling this potential for violence of the ‘anti-statist subject’,Footnote 89 Partition violence followed patterns of spatial change and continuity.Footnote 90 At the same time, violence effected displacements in the spatial distributions of people and communities.Footnote 91 Finally, the violence was integrally significant to the resultant shapes that space was stratified into in the newly formed nation-states. Indeed, as Purushottam points out, ‘violence cleared space, quite literally, for the growth of a new regime of state sovereignty’,Footnote 92 effecting a transition of the colonial state into a developmental national state. Considering the significance of spatial relations and concretisations to the emergence, execution, and distribution of violence in Partition, the latter can be treated as a significant device in mapping and following the nomadic elasticity of space.
To reiterate, this is not a historical analysis or an attempt to piece together the ‘principal historical issue’ of ‘why … the atrocious violence [happened] … and who was responsible for it’,Footnote 93 eschewing the typical historical model of reducing the violence to the history of its context.Footnote 94 Instead, I use the nature of the violence that erupted in response to, and in advance of, imminent stratifications in space, to demonstrate the nomadic variations that are always possible in space. Violence became the moving force that smoothened space, at the precise moment when modern stratifications, overburdened with competing, intersecting meanings, were coming into effect. As such, I see Partition violence as ‘nomadic life’s counter-attack’ to the striated foreclosure of stratified meanings in space.Footnote 95
I use the war machine here as an analytical lens to explore how Partition violence revealed the immanent nomadic tendencies in space. In the interest of analytical conciseness, I use three specific methodological aspects of the war machine that highlight tendencies of nomadic space outlined in the previous section. These include the war machine’s irreducibility to the state;Footnote 96 how it gives form to the chance of space by existing ‘only in its own metamorphoses’;Footnote 97 and, relatedly, how it does so in the movement of ‘following’ or relaying, as opposed to reproducing.Footnote 98 The next section then maps the spatial unfolding of this emergence in the exemplar becoming of Partition violence in Punjab in the massacre of refugee trains.
War machine
In his survey of violence affected areas in Punjab in March 1947 as the vice-president of the Interim Government, Jawaharlal Nehru lamented that ‘if politics are to be conducted in this way, then they cease to be politics and become some kind of jungle warfare which reduces human inhabitations to the state of a desert’.Footnote 99 This is a particularly striking analogy that projects the decompositional force of smooth space. In distancing the violence of ‘this way’ from the conduct of politics, Nehru situates a certain kind of warfare beyond the grasp of the state, whose conduct has the potential to entirely flatten space – obliterating and rasing structured human inhabitations to the unstructured potential of the desert. In exacting this difference Nehru’s statement anticipates the coming of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘war machine’ – an immaterial force of virtuality that takes shape by pulling in and stretching out in space the tendency within it to continuous and indeterminate change.
Irreducibility
The war machine is not an organ or function of the state. It emerges in the wake of a ‘social state’,Footnote 100 a loose shape-shifting gathering of multiplicity, of multiple desires, affects, and chances, bursting at the seams and raging to ward off the striations and concrete wholes. Unlike the striated functioning of the State, the war machine does not adhere to a reproductive model of ‘remaining identical to itself, across its variations’.Footnote 101 While the war machine may be appropriated from time to time by the state and channelled into its military apparatus, the latter does not own or possess the force and functioning of its violence. Indeed, when ‘it fails in this exercise, it is in trouble’,Footnote 102 for it opens itself to the war machine’s escape from its interiority as well as the war machine’s erosive violence against its partitioned securities.
The war machine emerged not despite the Partition, but precisely in response to the colonial striations that had ‘hardened’ the fluid affinities of the subcontinent into concretised identities and religious affiliations.Footnote 103 These striations had not only entrenched divisions but had also, for so long, engendered such deplorable conditions of existence, economic, social, and political, that ‘a condition of extraordinary explosiveness’ was ripe.Footnote 104 This was intensified by ‘the fragmented and distributed forms of local authority’ that always already paralleled and challenged the sovereign authority of the state on the ground in colonial India.Footnote 105 These intensifications together contributed to the emergence of a ‘social vacuum uniquely habitable to thugs and goons’.Footnote 106 Thus, despite the imminent closures, space was opened up ‘in a way that provid(ed) the nomad with a territory’.Footnote 107 And the war of the nomad always already implicates space in it, for it necessarily proceeds ‘by a manner of being in space as though it were smooth’.Footnote 108
The Partition violence remains impossible to attribute to any singular source – community, state, or individual motives.Footnote 109 The violence expressed itself as rhizomatic fruition of a ‘multiplicity of sources, uses, motives, and purposes’ which were irreducible to a centralised collection of causes and rationales.Footnote 110 The violence was thus a movement of incoherent, inconsistent multiplicities that converged onto specific points of breakdown in space before moving further, passing along ‘as a function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize’.Footnote 111 As such, a straightforward relationship between particular instances and agents and general causes and reasons ceases to exist. As Brass points out, often in cases of violent antagonisms ‘peoples display local and personal motives that have little or nothing to do with categorical explanations applied to them’.Footnote 112 These motives were highly varied, including but not limited to revenge, community honour, loot, and competition for resources. Thus, the Partition war machine was comprised of the movement of ex-military men, mushrooming paramilitary organisations, volunteer movements, and so on, each loose grouping composed of raiders ‘making use of the war’ to effectuate their own disparate or coinciding interests.Footnote 113 While factions of the state were definitely involved in the execution and continuance of violence, for instance, in the emergence of ‘heavily armed and organized war parties that were on occasion aided by policemen and soldiers’,Footnote 114 yet the violence ‘emanated from the society rather than the modern state’.Footnote 115 As Deleuze and Guattari point out, it is not uncommon to hear the cry ‘The police are with us!’ when the war machine surges.Footnote 116
Metamorphoses
Largely, partition scholars have pointed out how the militarised tendency in Punjabi society, honed for long by the British Empire’s policy of extensively recruiting men from the region for its own army, ‘turned in on itself’.Footnote 117 The empire had developed a systematic policy of recruiting military personnel from particular ethnic groups it deemed ‘martial’, and this was designated based on whether ‘members of the group had been defeated by the sepoys of the Bengal Army in the 1840s and had not joined that force in rebelling against the British in 1857’.Footnote 118 While the state thus honed fidelity to its determinations as key to the recruitment of its causes, the martial tendencies exceeded statist capture and were channelled by the war machine into the propagation of violence, which served as the one connecting link between the disparate multiplicity of interests.
This multiplicity was transformed into an interlinked continuity of violence, wherein each emergent link’s force effected its own variation into the ongoing movement of the violence. For instance, Swarna Aiyar has documented how the military nature of the society in Punjab was hugely influential in yielding the organised bands and packs of travelling violence during the riots. Punjab has always demonstrated strong tendencies towards military-style socialisation of its men and a general proclivity for organised military training which imparts ‘an extraordinary group solidarity and willingness to die for a cause’,Footnote 119 denoting an intrinsic harnessing of warring and warrior tendencies that does not find its end in the state. Aiyar argues that the presence of these trained men of war, along with access to sophisticated ammunition and methods of war, severely compounded the violence in Punjab.Footnote 120 Further, it was not just military training that enabled the exacerbation of the violence, but also importantly the combat experience gained by recruits in the Second World War.Footnote 121 Jha and Wilkinson have demonstrated that the greater the presence of units with combat experience among the paramilitary bands of war in a region, the more intense the violence of ethnic cleansing. The advantage of combat experience, they argue, is that it offers insights into ‘the actual experience of engaging in violence, and the need to improvise in rapidly changing circumstances’.Footnote 122
This sharpened experience of responding to variation in space was in turn further siphoned into the training of the many ‘mushrooming’ paramilitary units that were emerging in the region.Footnote 123 Many of these units were populated by volunteer organisations for community defence, such as the Muslim National Guard, the Ram Sena, and the Akali Fauj, among others, cultivated out of ‘tentative and always emergent [forms of] authority grounded in violence’.Footnote 124 These volunteer groupings were assemblages of ‘mushroom organizations, created to meet the exigencies of the moment and then forgotten … owing allegiance to nobody, or what is worse to a local faction or a faction’s busybody’.Footnote 125 Thus, exceeding the state on the one hand, the war machine in Punjab became a force of metamorphosis on the other. The militarised tendencies of Punjabi society that were first appropriated into the colonial military apparatus were unleashed back into space on ‘an altogether new and different plane’ through a continuous series of metamorphoses of the war machine.Footnote 126
Following
Further, the emergent channels of communication between these mushrooming assemblages set up contingent lines of flight along which ‘potential violence was networked’.Footnote 127 These lines of flight were the pathways that violence followed. This sense of ‘following’ can be distinctly seen in the ways in which the violence exerted itself, through a very specific ‘directional’ logic of relaying in space.Footnote 128 Consider the following exhibit of a particular pattern that violence reportedly followed in certain regions of Punjab:
A false alarm that a Sikh band headed by horsemen had attacked a locality would be sent to the military. The local police would impose a curfew. The National Muslim Guard would set fire to Hindu and Sikh houses. The people running for life from burning houses would be shot for breaking the curfew. Those trying to escape the town would be butchered by the troops (of the Guard).Footnote 129
The methods of the war machine thus relied on a ‘continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting constants from them’.Footnote 130 It recruited a series of spatial effects to engender its violence, using variable points of contact to advance itself further in space, without occupying any single point as a constant container of its violence. Significantly, this ‘ambulant’ model of exertion gathered violence into fleeting compositions that, ‘lacking any central command’, took form as connecting effectuations in space.Footnote 131 The composition of the gangs could be organised at very short notice, and the organisation of their constituent formations also followed a directional, and not a territorial, logic in space. That is, the units emerged in relation to dispersed points in space. Thus, the Sikh jathas (gangs), for instance, would take form in assembling in the vicinity of the village gurudwara (Sikh place of worship), where they would be apprised of their immediate mission by the leaders.Footnote 132 The size of the composition would vary with the size of the mission. For larger missions, like the massacre of a refugee train, the gangs would absorb local Sikh villagers, who would ‘disperse to their homes’ following the mission, while the jathas would find shelter in a village local to the operation.Footnote 133 The assembly, deployment, and dispersal of the gangs took form in response to the emergent directions that the violence was to follow, and the movement of these units and its compositional parts was not uniform and homogeneous, but ambulant in an open space. The composition thus remained indeterminate and variable, gathering and releasing bodies in the ebb and flow of the violence.
Community here provided the vectorial direction for the moving squads of the war machine, creating the moving targets that the violence followed. Indeed, in the instances of honour killings of women ‘a whole new order of violence came into play, by men against their own kinswomen; and by women against their daughters or sisters and their own selves’.Footnote 134 Thus, as Bhutalia has pointed out, the impossible separation between subjects and agents of violence makes it also impossible to be explained as communal.Footnote 135 The violence cannot be reduced to ‘feelings’ of community and nationhood: ‘feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject”, to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force’.Footnote 136
Dispersed assemblages gathered into varying speeds of violence which wandered in space, extending into the directions that the violence followed. A total metamorphosis of space drove a continual relay of relations into the movement of violence. Francisco has stressed that there may have been instances where retaliatory violence was spurred purely by the affective diffusion of fear, ‘by people who surrendered to a frenzy of anger’.Footnote 137 The war machine’s emergence was thus this relaying movement of violence that transformed space into an infinite and localised set of manoeuvres and missions which could not be reduced to a uniformly coded structure and cause.
Ghost trains
One of the most enduring images of the rapacious violence of Partition in Punjab is the carnage of migrant bodies aboard the trains that ran between India and Pakistan between August and September in 1947, which came to be known as ghost trains. The ghost trains became ‘the virtual hallmark of Partition violence’.Footnote 138 While incidents of train wrecking, derailment, and other acts of sabotage and killing on board had already begun weeks before the Partition, post-Independence and Partition, trains became moving weapons of mass carnage in both directions. By September, the two governments had organised Refugee Special Trains to facilitate population exchange, while ordinary services had been completely suspended owing to the increasing instances of sabotage and killings after Independence.Footnote 139 However, with the Refugee Special trains the war machine found clearly directional lines of flight to follow – ‘these trains generally carried members of one community only, who were headed in the opposite direction and provided ideal targets’.Footnote 140 The attacks on the special trains, thus, emerged in response to the direction in which the train was headed, as that determined the community whose members would number the train, and hence simultaneously the attackers whose vector that particular community was. The nomadic violence assembled and disassembled in following directional lines of flight in space. Following these lines, the war machine engendered its own metamorphosis into a self-generating and self-perpetuating movement of total violence:
Sending train loads of dead passengers across the borders became a mad competition on both sides of the border so that each exhorted its community to kill ever greater number of people to be sent across to the other community.Footnote 141
Once again, seizing and occupying territory or power was not the abstract force reproducing this violence. Instead, the ‘competition’ was over the count, how many more other bodies, how much space, can be counted in the passage of violence, and left behind decomposed.
In his novel Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh offers a vivid description of how the refugee trains moved: ‘From the roof legs dangled down the sides onto doors and windows. The doors and windows were jammed with heads and arms. There were people on buffers between the bogies.’Footnote 142 The irruption of the war machine decomposed territorially rationalised distinctions and forms in space. With the ‘intolerable overcrowding’ on the refugee trains, the organised space of the train and its compartments and coaches and other striations was rendered a smooth space where any point could be entered into contact with.Footnote 143
As a moving body that traverses through points to continue its onward trajectory, the train is always already a nomadic body. Arrival and departure are not so much the ends of its spatial encounters as relaying points that re-turn it to ongoing movement. The space of locomotion came now to be doubly infused with the dense heterogeneity of uprooted, groundless bodies. This smothering, piling, and choking mass of moving bodies – of the train, of the passengers, of their salvaged possessions, and eventually the shredded, decomposed remains of these bodies – became a rolling multiplicity composed of undifferentiable unity. The trains turned into a force of metamorphosis, and bodies coming into undistinguishable relations with it became a pure exteriority – a space completely on the outside of, and even inhospitable to, discrete forms of organisation and reproduction.
Indeed, the ghost trains cannibalised their own organised tendencies in the suicidal mania of the war machine. The trains had fixed directions, and times of arrival and departure were known.Footnote 144 These organised tendencies of the trains’ movement were what allowed for the marauding gangs to time their violent irruption into the trains’ durational becoming. This irruption transmuted all bodies in space into possible and actual relations of violence.
Trains would usually be attacked when passing through the countryside, which provided ideal cover for the mobs stopping the trains as they could lie in wait in the nearby fields of standing crops or sugarcane or maize, and vanish with equal ease once the looting and killing was completed. For the same reasons attacks were generally carried out in the nights or in the early hours of the morning.Footnote 145
The above exhibit demonstrates how the movement of violence advanced in relation to the space, converting all spaces into ‘a milieu of pure exteriority’.Footnote 146 The rampant forms the war machine took gathered unto itself the very spaces of sustenance that feeds the primarily agrarian geography of Punjab and turned them into conniving checkpoints or relays for the passage of violence. Further, these spatial emergences enabled the aggressors to remain anonymous. The aggressors appeared and ‘vanished’ as indeterminate, undefined movers of violence that worked through the dimming of visual understanding of space, producing instead smooth space of fluid, tactile contacts. The attackers were also helped by the particularly aggressive monsoonal flooding that year, which, enacting the chance of space, had destroyed railway bridges and tracks in rural areas.Footnote 147 Thus, all tendencies in space are always already available to be repurposed in the nomadic movement of becoming. Subverting the logic of organised population transfer across two territories, the trains instead turned into moving conglomerations of violence, folding into this movement a dense jumble of bodies that formed and deformed as an inseparable, multiple force of uncontained response.
Finally, it was not only en route that the trains engendered the passage of violence. The stations and platforms were particularly affected by the multidirectional movement of bodies. Serving as ‘the entry point for one set of refugees and the exit for another’, stations and platforms were appropriated into the nomadic overrunning of space in Punjab.Footnote 148 Not only did the stations turn into dense sites of filth and disease as the number of bodies driven to the platforms increased, but also the multiple directionalities of bodies either entering or exiting the newly formed territory enabled a continuous metamorphosis of space into sites for ‘wholesale carnage’.Footnote 149
The Partition violence in Punjab was thus an intensely spatial becoming that populated in space a response to the partitioned territorialities of emergent nation-states. Yet, in closing this section, it is important to point out that emergence of the war machine did not concretise into permanently nomadic spaces post-Partition.Footnote 150 There is no coherent end to the variability of nomadic space. As state- and nation-building processes gained momentum in both India and Pakistan, striations hardened into an enduring nationalist conflict which saw the reabsorption of the war machine into the statist machinery. An example of such post-Partition reabsorption can be seen in the space of Kashmir, which has been produced as an ongoing location for the enunciation of competing state identities and militarised conflict, restraining and reducing the complex local multiplicities and voices of Kashmiri peoples to the ‘binary choice of either supporting India’s or Pakistan’s claims’.Footnote 151 The chasm of nomadic space that had opened with the emergence of the war machine underwent a ‘passage and transition from one formula to another’, such that spatial excess and fluidity were reconstituted into a unifying framework for national identity.Footnote 152
Conclusion
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of nomadism and the war machine, I have argued here that spatial assessments in IR remain tied to striated understanding of space. Striated space privileges the methodological acts of bounding and (re)production, which are seen as yielding meaningful consequences in space. I have argued that this singular emphasis on meaningful production limits itself to recognising concretised outcomes in space, at the expense of the nomadic potential to variation immanent to the process of becoming in space. Nomadism renders space open to the indeterminate potential that always already exists and flows in space. I have sought to demonstrate this nomadic movement in space through the violence that moved in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Partition of 1947 through the frontier region of Punjab. Resisting the representation of this violence as a spatial outbreak of entrenched social antagonisms, I follow the movement of the violence as the emergence of the war machine – the cascading irruption of nomadic potential against the closures of statist partitions.
This paper has sought to reflect on spatial tendencies that elude meaningful narrativisation. Spatial indeterminacy infuses into phenomena and bodies an uncanny potential to become other in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. I have made a provisional attempt at mobilising nomadic concepts to read this indeterminacy in the unfolding of phenomena. An important theoretical consequence here is that indeterminacy is not merely a matter of recognition. It is not enough to identify and name locations and discourses in space as being open-ended and processual while keeping the ontological primacy of boundedness intact. Accepting the essential kernel of indeterminacy in nomadic space in turn necessitates a methodological openness to accounts that do not always add up to a coherent, or meaningful, framework of experience. This means encountering possibilities and potentials which do not make sense within established regimes of meaning-making, without rushing to ontologise them as organised configurations. A methodological sensitivity to smooth space is an openness to following the currents of phenomena rather than reproducing predetermined objectives or conditions of movement. Yet precisely because it follows immediate stimulus rather than pregiven constraints, nomadic methodology cannot be defined in advance as a set of structured solutions or steps.
Nonetheless, while it may be difficult to offer ready-made scripts for proceeding with the potentials of nomadism, it is still possible to highlight the analytical shifts that it makes possible. Nomadic space throws up possibilities and parts of experience that are undisciplined and emergent and indeed beyond the grasp of organised production. These are parts concurrent with the experience of organised phenomena yet underscore its radical openness to divergence and surprise. Channelling this analytical openness into study of phenomena enacts immediate shifts in the ‘how’ of doing. Like the parkour athlete’s movement, it demands a way of moving through space as a series of possibilities in motion that are experienced as passing encounters rather than occupied as positions. Experience is open to intensities, affects, and ways that run unseen and unrecognisable to existing knowledge, leaving us always exposed to a very wide margin of chance. This margin necessitates a shift away from reproducible mandates of moving in particular ways to guarantee certain outcomes. It also calls for a shift away from requiring all phenomena to be explainable within predominant models and methods of understanding. Inexplicability follows close on the heels of indeterminacy, and if the latter is allowed space in analyses, then erasing the former cannot be a sustainable ontological assumption or methodological ambition. Openness thus calls for attention to flow outside of pathways of research that repeated ontological manoeuvres have striated into habitual patterns.
Acknowledgements
A very early draft of this paper was presented in the ‘Motioning the International’ panel at EISA PEC, September 2022. Thanks to all the participants in the panel for their helpful comments. I would like to acknowledge the support of my former colleagues at the Centre for Writing Studies, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, where I worked on initial drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and editors at the Review of International Studies for their generous engagement with this paper.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101186.
