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Priya Satia: Why poetry remains a primary resource in remembering and understanding the Partition
The first instalment of an essay originally published in 2016. Yesterday · 12:30 pm Displacement is central to Punjabi identity as it is to Jewish and Armenian identity. | Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
What is the poet’s role in history? For a historian of Britain like myself, this question calls to mind the work of EP Thompson, who read the history of the English working class with one eye on the Romantic poets who sensitively captured the social and cultural transformations of the revolutionary late 18th century.
Their notions of place, people and conflict were also shaped by the imperial expansion unfolding in precisely the same moment, and they waxed orientalists even in their defences of freedom. Thompson’s favourite among the Romantics was the prophetic William Blake, partly for his consistent anti-imperialism. He disapproved of William Wor