Neeti Nair's Changing Homelands is a valuable addition to a scholarly literature that in recent years has complicated our understanding of the partition of India. The longstanding notion that partition was the inevitable outcome of the steadily increasing communalization of politics, she suggests, accounts neither for the insistence on the possibility of both freedom and unity in Punjab in the discourse of the years leading up to 1947, nor for the enduring sense of disbelief among its participants after the fact that partition actually happened. At the same time, Nair seeks to move beyond the eschewal of “high politics” by more recent interventions that emphasize the incommensurability of fragmentary experiences with overarching narratives. She thus brings together in the same analytic frame the registers of high politics and individual experiences.
Nair's focus is on the Punjabi Hindus, a group whose demographic plight mirrored that of Indian Muslims: as Hindus, they were a minority in the Punjab but a majority in India. Her analysis of the spectrum of motivations driving allegiances among various Hindu groupings (and often between Hindus and Muslims) shatters the notion of a monolithic Punjabi Hindu community increasingly fueled by communalism rather than anti-colonial nationalism. “There was no point,” she argues, “that could distinguish the communal politics of Punjabi Hindu leaders from their anti-colonial politics” (p. 256). Rather, her argument is that partition became increasingly possible as deliberations and negotiations to share power between the communities finally collapsed. In this sense, demography and politics trump religion in explaining the course of events: partition, at least in Punjab, represented the victory of those Hindus unwilling to yield to Muslims majority status in Punjab over those seeking to continue negotiations. Further, much of the violence that accompanied partition could have been avoided had the British acted upon their understanding that a breakdown in negotiations would lead to violence. Absent such intervention by the state to maintain order, members of various communities took up arms to defend themselves, leading to escalating cycles of violence.
Nair proceeds by examining over the course of five chapters the politics of Punjabi Hindus over the four decades preceding partition, as well as a sixth chapter that examines, through oral histories, the memories of partition of Punjabi migrants to Delhi.
The first three chapters show the shifting, multiple, and sometimes contradictory positions assumed by Punjabi Hindus right up until partition. The first chapter begins by outlining a range of Punjabi Hindu grievances before examining political contests between 1907 and 1917—including agitation around the Punjab Land Alienation Act and the Ghadr movement—to show that her protagonists embraced a wide range of positions, including loyalist, nationalist, and communalist. Chapter 2 looks at debates around the shuddhi and sangathan movements to consider the implications of these for the sharpening of religious tensions, focusing especially on a riot in the Northwest Frontier Province that may have been caused by a pamphlet linked to the sangathan movement. The key figure here is Lala Lajpat Rai, who is shown to embrace a wide range of positions. The third chapter strikingly presents two well-known figures in unexpected guise. An account of Swami Shraddhanand, later characterized as a communalist activist, shows him speaking against the Rowlatt Act at the Jama Masjid in Delhi, with Hindu and Muslim support. Nair shows how the Hindu-Muslim unity of this action from the late 1910s continued to play an important role in Swami Shraddhanand's self-understanding later, as he embarked on his shuddhi activism of the 1920s. Bhagat Singh, better known for his revolutionary actions, is presented as a nonviolent noncooperator in the late 1920s, working together with members of all communities.
In the second half of the book, Nair explains the ways in which the breakdown of political negotiations led eventually to partition, all the while underscoring the struggle to find alternate solutions. The fourth chapter investigates a series of attempts in the 1930s and 1940s, right up until the summer of 1947, to arrive at an acceptable power-sharing arrangement between the various communities in Punjab. Nair suggests that right up until partition took place, the cry for Pakistan held multiple meanings and that Punjabis explored all possible avenues to find a solution that preserved an undivided India. Chapter 5, dealing with the difficult question of partition violence, concludes that the sources of violence were multifarious, and that the colonial government could have prevented at least some of it by actively maintaining order in the aftermath of the breakdown of negotiations. Finally, chapter 6 extends the analysis to the present day and shows the wide range of ways in which the events around 1947 are remembered, all while underscoring a common thread of disbelief among the interviewees that partition actually happened.
Drawing on an impressively wide range of archival sources, Changing Homelands gives us a compelling account of the contingent and far-from-inevitable onset of partition in Punjab.
