Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India's Partition

by Devika Chawla

The Indian Independence Act of 1947 granted India freedom from British rule, signaling the formal end of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This freedom, though, came at a partition, the division of the country into India and Pakistan, and the communal riots that followed. These riots resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border. This watershed socioeconomic–geopolitical moment cast an enduring shadow on India’s relationship with neighboring Pakistan. Presenting a perspective of the middle-class refugees who were forced from their homes, jobs, and lives with the withdrawal of British rule in India, Home, Uprooted delves into the lives of forty-five Partition refugees and their descendants to show how this epochal event continues to shape their lives.

Exploring the oral histories of three generations of refugees from India’s Partition―ten Hindu and Sikh families in Delhi, Home, Uprooted melds oral histories with a fresh perspective on current literature to unravel the emergent conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in the stories of the participants. Author Devika Chawla argues that the ways in which her participants imagine, recollect, memorialize, or “abandon” home in their everyday narratives give us unique insights into how refugee identities are constituted. These stories reveal how migrations are enacted and what home―in its sense, absence, and presence―can mean for displaced populations.

Written in an accessible and experimental style that blends biography, autobiography, essay, and performative writing, Home, Uprooted folds in field narratives with Chawla’s own family history, which was also shaped by the Partition event and her self-propelled migration to North America. In contemplating and living their stories of home, she attempts to show how her own ancestral legacies of Partition displacement bear relief.

Home―how we experience it and what it says about the “selves” we come to occupy―is a crucial question of our contemporary moment. Home, Uprooted delivers a unique and poignant perspective on this timely question. This compilation of stories offers an iteration of how diasporic migrations might be enacted and what
“home” means to displaced populations.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 27, 2014

Reviews

[Bhavana Nissima · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book unhomes you—from binary divisions, from boundaries, from regular history, from home itself. Uneasy it travels with you or rather you travel with each chapter.

Homing on cross-generational oral histories of refugees of India’s Partition, the author, Dr. Devika Chawla, a second-generation refugee herself, contemplates on the various notions of home/unhome/belonging/displacement in the narratives. What emerges is not only a reading of a specific history, but a reading of memory and a reading that allows the reader to recognize their own displacements and problematics of home.

Mainstream stories of partition often revolve around displacement of what was once “home,” of acts of violence during the passage to India that continue to shroud the psyche. Along with such stories, this book blends in other narratives that are lost, left behind, displaced, erased and creates a word memorial to batwara that is as uneasy as Partition itself.

Like, was that, wahan, a “home” for every refugee? Or did some find home only after partition? Like Kiranji who comes into her being post partition, completes her Masters, eventually heads a school head, designs a radical curriculum and creates, in a sense, a home outside home. As Kiranji narrates,

“Home is the mother, the real mother is where you are born. . . . It is like losing a limb . . . like you’ve lost a life that you would love to live over again. . . . But, would I be where I am or be what I am, had I not lost this home? I don’t know the answer to that.”

What about women for whom displacement is a given? Women are first displaced from their natal home to the marital home, and then if disasters strike, from that home into another, and thereafter, the Partition displaces them further. How do we read their stories? What if a woman was displaced from her natal home in India to her marital home in Pakistan, and thereafter, due to Partition displaced back to India—how do we understand her story?

When Partition stories are told in families, how are women’s stories and women themselves positioned? Are their contributions to the safe passage to India recognized? And if they are, in what way? When Hindu women were told to consume poison and commit suicide rather than be assaulted by Muslims, what roles were their bodies assigned to by the community?

What about those who remained forever displaced—never ever finding home again? How do their families—the second and third generation members remember the past? How are those stories conflated to accommodate both present needs with selective past images? How is post-memory created?

The book meditates on these yearnings and loss, on displacement within displacement, of home and unhoming, allowing them to tell a story that doesn’t have to fit a pre-existing frame.

The book also moves beyond easy binary divisions—Muslim/Hindu, Violence/Peace, India/Pakistan and instead presents multiple narratives that intersect, build and disturb. For example, Labbi Devi was kidnapped twice by Muslim rioteers as she and her family attempted to cross into India. She has a gash in her head from when she was attacked. Then you also hear Labbi Devi was born after the death of six siblings, and breastfed by a Musalmani because her mother believed her breast milk was the reason for the siblings’ death. Or Saralaji who spoke of a friendship with a Muslim neighbour even as rioting spliced the communities apart. Neither saccharine-rich tales of harmony nor an overpowering stench of violence, the book manages to present stories of displacement without being displaced to an already existing storyline.

This book walks through the said, unsaid, the in-between the lines, the erased with an uncanny detachment and a willingness to host the reader in the narratives. Before you realize, you have walked in with the author through many living rooms, the chai and snacks, sat by the dining table, sometimes traveled with her in taxis searching for a home. You are as exhausted as the author as she makes many attempts to listen to qawwals at Nizamuddin and as surprised when she encounters the qawwals at a Sufi evening to celebrate the tenth wedding anniversary of a relative. You are with her as she steps in and out of stories, watching her reactions and allowing her subjects the space to be themselves. And in that process she dissolves and you become the listener of the oral histories.

The book is immensely accessible and readable for readers from various backgrounds. You can stick to the narratives and a portion of the analysis or if you like, engage in the deep discussions of various scholars in this area of study. Some chapters are heavy on analysis and labored. That makes reading bumpy. But on reflection, the unease is because the author refuses to sit with easy and convenient analysis. She pushes to uncover the layers within and presents them before us. You have to dig with her. As the author says,

“Stories are bits and pieces and wholes and fragments—experiences and remnants of experiences that we enter into at a pace determined by those who were already there. We may find a footing and stay in some versions, and we may depart from others. Only in such wanderings can hidden plots be unearthed.”

I was put off by the continuous usage of the word “home” in various permutations and combinations in every other para. It felt pretentious and unnecessary. But like the author, I studied my reactions to the word. The book displaces the reader from the usual dominant understanding of home. Each time you come across this word, you no longer know what it means. The sentence sits uneasy, you are not sure if you understood and yet you are unable to leave the book behind. Something changes within you. And it isn’t comfortable. I think a good book should do that—welcome readers onto a journey within themselves.

There are many sections in this book that I am eager to quote from. But let me leave you with this piece:

“What happened to the physical landscape? Where did it go? I read, re-read, and in fact over-read my field stories, finding nothing. I read my own writing about them and find that landscape is peripheral, a tinge of scenery here and there—I/we just roam in memories. My homes, our homes, Papa’s homes are as bereft of physical landscapes as these person’s lives here are immersed in them. I consider the terrain only because the people here continue to remind me that their hills are guardians that stand around them, keeping trespassers at bay. Home, for them, extends outside of home—in a different way—into the veins, the roots, the undergrowth, and even the natural gasses that hold together these mountain ranges. Home is here, present. It lives, it breathes, it is an extension of the self into the physical world.

For the subjects of Home, Uprooted, for Papa, for me, home is not here, it will always be someplace else—a border that cannot be crossed as easily as the one between Ohio and West Virginia, over a toll bridge. Home is a field of memories. Of stories told and those that I tell here. Home is an attempt to write a loss of landscapes. Consider these words one such attempt. Here.”

[Sumallya Mukhopadhyay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Home, Uprooted, Devika Chawla
“There can be no story without interlocutors.”
Chawla’s revisionist take on the Partition divides the event into three parts. First, there is the official history or the high politics of the Partition. Secondly, we have the fictional literature to reflect on the ways the vivisection informed the ideological/creative presuppositions of an artist. Thirdly, we have, what she succinctly defines as, the “everyday local history and nonfictional literature” of the event. A second-generational refugee from North India, Chawla attempts to explore the theoretical implications of being at home or finding a home as a South Asian, Indian but naturalised US citizen, settled in the USA. Hers is a personal involvement with the event—not necessarily a political one—though she might charge such a claim. After all, the personal can be the political. However, in the narratives presented in Home, Uprooted, never for once, does she interrogate the refugee rehabilitation process initiated/thwarted by the government in the years post-Partition. Being a refugee itself is a political standpoint who surrenders his/her agency before events beyond his/her control. By surrendering the agency, a refugee is not really helpless but finds possibilities to reshape, redefine and resettle oneself in a de-familiarized territory. As one reads Home, Uprooted one understands that Chawla’s focus is on the de-familiarized territory that marks the (un)home of the refugee.
In the context of the book, home is a postmodern, postcolonial and transnational space that is poetic, discursive, and imaginary yet it embodies potential to create selves, shape their cultural understanding, and all these factors collate in framing the identity of the eye-witness participants in the oral histories. By drawing on the narratives articulated before her, Chawla carefully disentangles various threads to examine the performative aspect of an interview process. The first interview of Labbi Devi is a case in point. Labbi Devi’s resilience to sustain herself during the riots—she was kidnapped by a Muslim man—is subverted by the familial retelling of a separate story by her husband, the patriarch. According to Chawla, Labbi Devi is the “subject-repository” of the memory of her family but, in the interview, she is often left silenced by others present. While Chawla deviates to wallow in guilt, talking about Spivak’s idea of “cognitive failure” of an ethnographer to do justice to the work, the oral history of Labbi Devi highlights gendered interplay in the interview process. It is contingent on the fact regarding who owns the story, and how it gets placed in the family history. At times, owning a story does not mean it remains totally yours. It gets refracted through the voices who have heard this particular story in question. These “conversations of struggle” eventually get transpired into collective conversations mediated by memories of various individuals. The second narrative of Kiranji exemplifies how collective conversations often do not depict the right picture. While Kiranji’s family believes that she “became something” after resettling, she appears as a determined woman equally active to make a difference in her own way. Such becoming/unbecoming in the efforts to find a home is a part of the refugee rehabilitation process. One travels to one’s lost home in dreams (like Arunji does) or is desperate to find one material object that connects one to the lost life (Anilji’s story). At times, memory buried within material items garner greater currency while stories recede to the background. Hence, Chawla preserves the lid of her Biji’s Taj Mahal “English Make” box. Hence, to cement his story in a master text, Mohanji has written an autobiography to enlighten the family regarding his life.
Parallel to the process of (un)homing, there exists the (un)becoming of refugee status. Being at home is another intervention for the refugee to resettle himself/herself in the face of the traumatic events. Chawla’s Home, Uprooted does not talk about the Partition in Bengal. Perhaps a look at the Partition in the East would have made Chawla receptive to subjectivities of a different kind.