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To be sure, Partition itself was the product of a utopic plan enacting Enlightenment notions about the rational ordering of society. It promised to produce order out of a religiously and linguistically mixed society. It promised a homeland to those out-of-place in nationalist India.
Many who moved did so out of faith in this project, out of conviction, at times against the wishes of their families (most famously, Jinnah’s only daughter did not move). Indeed, the deliberate sacrifice of home and bonds was the price that made the result – participation in the creation of a new nation-state – all the more sacred. (See oral histories in Anam Zakaria,
From the late 19th century, humanity began to move faster than it ever had before in history towards specialisation in various disciplines of knowledge. At the same time, we witnessed the divide between academic parlance and the common reader widening. Today, leave alone mathematical philosophy or theoretical physics, the knowledge offered by texts of literary criticism and applied sociology is becoming inaccessible to those untrained in these subjects.
The specificity of language and style in each discipline that evolved over time was perhaps necessitated by the need for seeking depth and rigorous investigation within each subject. However, that specialisation has also contributed to a compartmentalisation between branches of knowledge even at the rudimentary level.
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