Event Details:

The territorial division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh, is referred to as "Partition" in English. Indian languages have their own terms to describe this phenomenon and quite often, victims of this history provide in their oral testimonies versions that complicate the singularity of this event even further. My talk will provide the dialectics between history and memory, state and individuals to show how this "event" is constructed and remembered in diverse ways in India. I will focus largely on my research on Sindh and how its minorities migrated to India during Partition, their processes of rehabilitation and resettlement and also compare them with Sindhi speaking Muslims who have lived along the borders of Kutch and Rajasthan in India to argue that negotiation of borders is an everyday practice for some. Finally partition reincarnates itself through border making and border crossing practices in the subcontinent. I examine this in relation to language, literature, religion and nations at large.

Rita Kothari is a professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India. She is the author of Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English (St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester, rvd ed. Cambridge University Press, New Delhi) and The Burden of Refuge (rvd.ed. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi). She has co-translated Modern Gujarati Poetry (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi) and Coral Island: The Poetry of Niranjan Bhagat (Sahitya Akademi, Gandhinagar). Her translations of note are The Stepchild: Angaliayat (Oxford University Press, New Delhi), Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by Gujarati Women (Zubaan, New Delhi) and Unbordered Memories: Partition Stories from Sindh (Penguin). She has co-edited Decentring Translation Studies: India and Beyond (John Benjamin Press, Amsterdam) and Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish (Penguin, forthcoming).