Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls

Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right.¹ Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened;² they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India;³ and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of “the burning plains of the Punjab” becoming a metaphor for partition itself.⁴