“What all will you remember, from where and till when?”, someone quipped, interrupting that lyrical slogan “everything will be remembered”, with which Pranav Kohli chose to conclude his book Memory in the Service of the Hindu Nation: The Afterlife of the Partition of India, recently published by the Cambridge University Press in 2023. This was during the anti-CAA protests, and the dialogic tension of the day precisely sums up the methodological complicacies undergirded by hostile histories that inform the work under review. The book is not only a timely intervention in the ongoing discourse on the rise of the Hindutva but also a meaningful one, in the sea of publications on Hindu nationalism that has been throttling the edges of academia in recent years.

One of the greatest anomalies, reproduced over and again in major scholarships on the formation of the Indian state as a secular nation, including oral histories, is the treatment of the project of state-building. It is often written about in isolation from the inscribed violence of the partition of 1947. G Pandey as Kohli rehearses, argues that there is a tendency within Indian historiography to treat the partition violence and other episodes of communal violence in India as someone else’s history – or even, not history at all. Kohli argues that this separation itself springs from the common-sense understanding of communalism and its violence as not nationalism. In this way, the violence of the partition has been separated from nationalism and nationalist historiography (pp.138-139). It is almost as if the 1947 partition, accompanied by the large-scale violence, conjured up a dystopian tunnel of disbelief that did not coincide with the period of the state formation. India is imagined growing into a secular nation-state overnight, without any bearing of the partition violence. Further, selected scholarship that does take the question of violence seriously, locates it outside a community – violence initiated by the “other”, whereas all response is reckoned as self-defence. This tendency of decoupling, which is also dominant in some major recent works, seems to have been finally tackled in this work by Pranav Kohli, through ethnographic fieldwork with partition survivors from west Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, in Delhi and its surroundings between 2017-18.

The author argues that “to the survivors of the partition, Hindu nationalism functions as a form of theodicy that rationalises their experience of violence, suffering and displacement”, and the recovery from this paved way for “ressentiment” (pp. 50). To then frame in a sentence: the silences in the scholarship on partition are underwritten by the memories that are telling of a ressentiment of the partition refugees, which have been tapped on by the forces of Hindutva. The author further drives this point by articulating the problem of theodicy in the context of partition. In pointing out that the inevitable death of the last generation of partition survivors has sparked a public turn to remembrance, the author argues that the vast body of literature on the partition of India comprises a long ongoing search for theodicy. This is marked by the efforts to reconcile the death and suffering of the partition of India with the nomos that is the idea of India. Thus, drawing the theodicean arc of partition through “a mosaic of ethnographical vignettes” (pp. 50), the book examines the intervention of Hindu nationalism in the memories of partition survivors. It also delineates how the fold of ethnonationalism can envelop layers of different intent and motives peculiar to diverse groups and individuals taking to violence. Though I have a lot to say, given that the book offers several incisive categories and arguments, in this short piece, however, I would only like to focus on two important facets. One, regarding the methodological acuity and second, the sharp, pre-emptive, and yet honest analysis that the author arrives at.

To then speak of methodological acuity: The question for partition histories and oral testimonies of victims that he lays out in crude terms is this – if everyone is a victim in the partition killings, then who are the perpetrators? The methodological solution for the author comes in the form of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion while challenging how categories like trauma have come to hold a moral bearing. This in other words implies scrutinising those trauma narratives of the partition survivors that feed the retributive violence of fascist enterprises, as the moral claim to victimhood often goes unchallenged. He applies the same to his respondents’ narratives, to prod out some serious but age-old debates on the philosophy of history, as well as the role of memory in this discourse. The author thus displaces the overarching victimhood of partition by recognising the narrative agency of the informants, thereby breaking with the convention of believing victims to then interrupt the uncritical use of the word trauma to describe the experience of the informants.

Even when the author argues that his exploration of the memory of partition does not hope for a positivistic extraction of a pure or authentic retelling of the event – one wonders to what end does one apply the hermeneutics of suspicion?  The hermeneutics of suspicion in the words of Ricouer pivots not only on a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness”, they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents self-evident meanings to draw out less visible and less flattering truths[i], but also the hermeneutics of suspicion presupposes the existence of a prior understanding aimed at the reconstruction of that which was lost in reading, against which the narrative is held as a suspect for an against the grain reading – here a suspect of what if there is no authentic history of what could have transpired? For instance, why not subject the memories of the women, which is nonetheless important for puncturing the narrative of purusharth – to against-the-grain reading; what standards of judgment do we use to decide which texts should be read against the grain? The author here falls to the very methodological move that he had hoped would save him from the excess readings.

The question that we must pose then is: even if any testimonies and narratives help further fascist forces in the first instance, should we put them through a hermeneutics of suspicion, then as the first filter? Should the intent of the witness, the potential usability and instrumentality of a narrative take precedence as a criterion? Methodological deficiency then is compensated by the scrutiny of intent, wherein the selection of the narratives therefore is at the mercy of intent and instrumentality as criteria, rather than method. Hermeneutics of suspicion, in this case then, presupposes a suspicion of a particular kind, which is more about the instrumental values of the narrative for the Right, and not really a generic against-the-grain reading of the narrative.

Have we thus entered a new phase in the poverty of methodology when it comes to oral histories of violence, the spectre of which then haunts the politics of our time and what challenges does this resurrect for the enterprise of history so to say?  

The other difficult issue is the definitional choice as the author chose to employ a postmodern understanding of memory in the beginning; drawing on Halbwachs and Connerton to understand memory as a social construction. If the operational definition of memory is postmodern, then no narrative can be tested, ruled out, or validated because all narratives then premised on memory are merely representative of a reality that cannot be accessed or recovered, and none, therefore, corresponds to a verifiable reality of partition. On what basis can the author interrogate the veracity of any narrative? How would the author resolve the inherent tensions between the hermeneutics of suspicion as a method and the definitional understanding of memory as postmodern, applied simultaneously in this work?  One cannot simply employ a working definition of a central category of the work like memory, and then proceed to apply the premises of postmodernism only selectively while opting out of this application when it comes to the use of methods, episteme, history, and the context he invokes. The good or bad news is that while this understanding of memory is stated, it is not followed. The author invokes Maurice Halbwachs, who was not a postmodern, and he only explicates memory as a social construction, to the extent that we derived meaning through our social relations and so do our memories, i.e. all human activity is socially determined. This is a sociological approach to memory, that can be best described as structuralist and not a postmodern approach. Treating memory as a social construction is not the same as a postmodern understanding of memory.

Further, the author depicts the essentialist frames of different kinds, notably of sacrifice as purusharth for the Punjabi refugees, the essentialist understanding of partition violence (pp. 240) and the essentialism of a timeless, victimised Hindu nation that gives sense to its ressentiment, as self-orientalising discourse (pp. 104). However, he argues for an anti-essentializing lens for the anthropologist, by making a case for moving beyond Eurocentrism to challenge the orientalist perspectives (pp. 315). Yet he ends up falling into the same trap of essentialism by arguing that the Orient is the master of its own will – in this case fascism – he is still holding onto the category of the “Orient”, if only for labels (pp. 322).

Now then, to talk about the analysis: Kohli shows that the circumstances wherein the victimhood-perpetrator positions are not identifiable nor well defined, there the questions of memorialisation and mourning become all too complex to articulate, like the partition-violence of 1947. For example, in Gandhi’s case, after his assassination, the outpouring of grief was instant because the perpetrator and victim were easily identified. To add to that further, I would argue that the violence on account of partition therein becomes necessary to be distanced from nationalism because the articulation of nationalism is pinned on the existence of a nation-state, which in turn rests on the existence and sustenance of the binary between victim-perpetrator, us and the other – is very essential for the claims of nationhood and nationalism. This could be one of the reasons that partition violence, where the victim-perpetrator positions are too nebulous, is seen as an aberration and not a form of expression of nationalism. Nationalism in that case therefore will not extend its support to this kind of mourning or expression which is void of clearly defined victim-perpetrator equation – partition violence and dissociating it from celebratory nationalism for independence being a prime example of this. This is why, more than looking at this as Congress’s political opportunism and the project of secularism towards which Gandhi’s assassination also was instrumentalised, it should rather be argued that memorialising Gandhi was feasible to the project of the nation-state, because the perpetrator-victim binary could be identified and sustained in that case as against memorialising the violence of partition, and therefore has been neglected.

Further, taking up Kohli’s analysis of the idea of hard work as a redemptive sacrifice as purusharth; that the state owns the refugee’s compensation not because they believe in the welfare state but because they see themselves as inhabiting a meaningful cosmos where suffering warrants reparations. That the state has failed in this is taken as evidence that the state has been captured by minorities and self-serving liberal elites. The stories of purusharth breed resentment and thereby feed into what Appadurai calls a ‘democracy fatigue’. Kohli’s analysis here well explains the growing support for BJP and Modi’s project of Hindu nationalism by drawing our attention to the questions around ressentiment, theodicy and Purusharth, which is partly answered by Modi’s politics. But what explains the electoral behaviour of those outside the Hindu fold? Further, is there a limit to the working of purusharthi-politics in terms of political mobilisation? How one may understand socio-political set-ups wherein people inhabit multiple, often contradictory moral universes with ease (for instance – love for Muslim neighbours yet passion for Hindu nationalism), as evident from his respondents’ interviews, are questions of interest.

However, the work is a welcome breeze of freshness in the academic lands that had been turning arid for some time now, in the attempt to make sense of the recent political developments in India, and elsewhere, often deploying populism, elections, culture, or performance as blocks of analysis. This work is far more layered, and commendable in its effort to sustain not only a methodological cognizance but also is animated by numerous ethical positionings and dilemmas of the field, though with sensitive posturing towards a history that often has been used as a trigger not only for discordant academic debates but more so for political violence.

[i] Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation by Paul Ricoeur, Translated by Denis Savage, 1977, Yale University Press.

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Sana Shah is a PhD student of History at the University of Oxford.