Khitkhite Buri’s Reviews > Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India > Status Update

"If modern Indian historians or political scientists could similarly distance themselves from 1947 ... we might have seen moves towards the institutionalisation of the memory of Partition, in the way of Holocaust museums, Vietnam memorials and reconstructions of Hiroshima. As it happens, given the history of the subcontinent since 1947, this has not been possible."

"The civilising state may use ‘force’ – in war, in counterinsurgency operations or simply expanding the frontiers of production and profit – but it never, apparently, uses ‘violence’. It is as though ‘real’ violence, of which the ‘riot’ might be described as the quintessential form, lies outside the domain of the state, outside progress and history"