List of Abstracts
List of Abstracts
One of the many cliches in the existing 1947 Partition literature is "partition of mind." It refers to the specific aspect of Partition that 1947 divided us not only in the physical/material realm but in our cartographies of mind. In the case of partition-populace, it seems that their memoryscapes, worlds of imaginations, thoughts and theories, languages and articulations, ethics and judgments-- all bifurcated along the faultline of 1947. And this often awkwardly transforms the known to the unknown and the legible to the illegible. People living on two sides of the border may speak the same language and work in the same field of creative arts or academic discipline-- the imprint of Partition often configures their content, style, and argument differently. This divergence strikes when a scholarly 'other' or their work meets the strangers. At a conceptual level, one can be aware that a concerted chorus across the partitioned border is impossible to attain unless one aims to establish a hegemonic narrative. Yet, when the audience encounters a strange/unfamiliar text and fails to match it with their familiar thoughts and languages-- they find it awkward. This awkwardness is inevitable historically and culturally. Only after acknowledging these specificities, one may proceed for a transcendental cognitive uniformity. Therefore, a loud and clear claim and utterance of the divergences should be the prime task of the Partition researcher to transcend the stranger's awkwardness and reach a common larger truth.
Despite the multiple migrations that took place following partition, the experiences of non-Bengali Muslim minorities remain understudied. This study aims to fill that gap. Through ethnographic qualitative methods, migrant’s decision to stay back in Bangladesh, their perception of themselves and their use of language, food and dress are specifically studied to understand migrant experiences. Findings highlight the majority-Muslim population of Bangladesh is a primary deciding factor in migration and staying back. Findings also show that a migrant’s self-perception varies with their varied experiences, often underlined by their class positions at the time of migration and the changes in it, their gender and their unique ethnic identities pre-migration. Still, certain aspects remain constant, such as their identification as naturalised Bangladeshis as their nationality, and the importance of food and language in identity retention, as well as the loss of differences in clothing for most migrants who assimilated to Bangladesh’s common clothing. These findings highlight the varied experiences of migrants and the need further to study their experiences post-migration more specifically.
Historically, Bengal existed as a colonial administrative entity encompassing present-day Bangladesh, the Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and Tripura. It was partitioned twice: 1905 and 1947. After the Partition of 1905, the Muslim intellectuals and leaders realised that the interests of Indian Muslims were not safe in the hands of the Indian National Congress (INC). Therefore, they formed the All India Muslim League (AIML) in 1906. From then till 1947, these two political parties generally represented their own religious communities. Therefore, the Partition of 1947 was believed to be unavoidable, and its root was laid down in the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Historians and social science experts articulated trauma, migration, and diaspora related to the Partition of 1947 through different methodological and theoretical perspectives. However, some relevant questions about Bengal’s second Partition and the Bengali diasporic community must be addressed. For example, what was the migration pattern of the Bengalis during the colonial period? What were the reactions of the Bengali expats to the Partition of 1947? How did the Bengali Hindu and Muslim diasporic communities interact away from home? Bengali migrated worldwide, particularly British Malaya, during the colonial period. The Partition of Bengal of 1905 affected some Bengali expats, and it became visible after the second Partition in 1947. Hindu and Muslim communities formed different civil societies in Singapore and Malaysia and were involved in social activities simultaneously. Such social interactions might be seen as ‘constructive disengagement’ or ‘civil indifference.’ Thus, the Partition of 1947 affected the Bengali expats significantly, which was reflected in their activities. However, scholars have overlooked this sphere of Partition. This paper, therefore, will focus on two interrelated issues. First, it will deal with the different migration patterns of the Bengalis in the Malay Peninsula and the making of a diasporic space. Secondly, it will illustrate the social interactions between Bengali Hindu and Muslim expats after the Partition. The study takes up a predominantly qualitative approach supported by quantitative Analysis.
A range of archival and non-archival sources has been consulted. The archival sources are population census, government records, administrative reports, and newspapers. This study uses newspapers published since the early 19th century in British Malaya. The oral testimony of the Bengali diasporic community is also included as a primary source. These oral testimonies are recorded in the National Archives of Singapore. In terms of non-archival sources, this paper uses a good selection of books, articles, and chapters published since the early nineteenth century, which have been consulted. Moreover, some unpublished monographs, dissertations, and electronic materials, including online journals and websites, have been navigated. Thus, the study hopes to address the lacuna in the existing historiography of the Bengali diasporic community in the Malay world, which will contribute to the recent flourishing of partition studies.
The Partition of 1947, caught between Pakistan’s triumphant sentiment of “the birth of a new nation” (Zakaria, 2019) and India’s grief over “the breakup of the motherland” (Zakaria, 2019), suffers from notable amnesia in the collective memory of Bangladesh for several reasons. Marked by the longue durée effects of the Bengal Partition, this watershed moment in the subcontinent’s history is rarely discussed in everyday life or academic discourse in Bangladesh. However, it finds a narrow yet significant gateway in fiction and films on Partition, which function as cultural archives preserving popular memory in the region. At East West University, Partition Literature was added to the revised MA in English curriculum, offered by the Department of English, in 2023. I had the privilege of teaching this course in Fall 2024. The course serves as a means of revisiting the Partition of 1947 through the study of Partition history, novels, short stories, poems, films, and documentaries. Texts covered in the course include Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man and its film adaptation, Deepa Mehta’s 1947 Earth, Azmat Ashraf’s Refugee, Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Seemantorekha, Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House, Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories “Khol Do” and “Toba Tek Singh,” Hasan Azizul Huq’s “The Exile” from The Escape and Other Stories, selected chapters from Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, and W.H. Auden’s poem “Partition.” While designing the syllabus, I sought to balance historical, fictional, and poetic narratives with visual media, incorporating perspectives from the three decolonized nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In response to concerns raised in this workshop’s CFP about the tendency to interpret Partition history primarily from India’s perspective, I aim to examine the current state of awareness regarding Partition history in Bangladesh through the study of visual media texts. Films and documentaries on the Bengal Partition—from Ritwik Ghatak to Kaushik Ganguli—offer a visceral and engaging means of understanding its complexities. These visual texts, which function as informal Partition archives, can serve as powerful pedagogical tools, providing students with a deeper, more emotional grasp of Partition’s impact. My discussion will focus on how history, memory, and trauma are depicted in these visual narratives, analyzing the role of “personal memory” (John Locke), “secondhand memory” (W. G. Sebald), and “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch) in shaping public consciousness. Exploring these representations can enhance understanding of key Partition-related issues in Bangladesh, including refugees, migration, borders, and the plight of stranded Pakistanis, ultimately helping to alleviate the prevailing amnesia surrounding Partition.
The website titled, 1947 Partition Archive terms itself as a “global digital museum” that has recorded over ten thousand oral histories including digital copies of antiquated photographs, documents and images of personal objects of historical value, gathered from personal collections. In this light, the ‘digital turn’ with regard to the turbulent Partition of 1947 has come to be a catalyst for the development of new research and has transformed the way oral histories are recorded and (re)produced. A primary reference point for recent analyses of archival technologies is the work of Jacques Derrida, in particular Archive Fever that calls for a rethinking of the arkheion vis-à-vis a paradigm shift brought about by digital communications and storage media. Derrida revisits at length the writings of Sigmund Freud in order to analyse, the connection between archives and the structures of human memory. The ‘archive’ is changing in its foundation, as is the interlink it forges between public and private space. The paper shall attempt to study, in this context, the modern digital archive of 1947 that is dedicated to documenting ‘everyone’s history’. In Derrida’s description of the Greek era, public/state records were situated in privileged private realms that were governed by a select few whereas today, the contrary is becoming a reality. The human mind and memory are ‘affected’ by the technical mechanisms for ‘archivization’. The digital project under study can be seen as an attempt at ‘de-contextualization’ and ‘de- politicization’ of oral testimonies in which the recipients of the narratives consume and share memory in a more ‘social’ manner. The paper shall also locate this documentation of Partition within a wider historiography of oral history and Partition Studies.
On the 5 th of September of 1947 Maulvi Shamsuddin Ahmed, the recently nominated superintendent of archeology in East Pakistan, wrote to Nirad Bandhu Sanyal, curator of the Varendra Research museum in Rajshahi, to announce that in the office of the district Collector of Dinajpur now lay East Pakistan’s first archeological discovery – a “couple of images” – found in the “Nashipur Arakanese camp”, a British built-shelter vacated by its Rakhine refugee population, then busy quitting the newly independent East Pakistan to return to a similarly
hopeful postcolonial Burma. The two Nashipur images, identified in the collector’s correspondence as Kali and Durga, were in fact revealed by Shamsuddin’s deputy, Babu Dvijendra Kumar Chakravarty, to be sculptures of great import: they were Pala-era Buddhist goddesses, Chamunda and Tara. Courtesy of the Archeological Survey of Pakistan, they would become the first acquisitions of the museum’s postcolonial collection of ‘relics’.
Yet despite such finds, the value of the materials assembled in the Varendra Research Museum was – for many in the newly independent Pakistan – anything but a settled question. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta has shown, Pala sculpture and the rich collections of the Varendra Museum been lionized in the 1920s and 1930s by a nationalist Bhadralok art history as a distinctively ‘Indian’ art form, and – the Mahayana Buddhist context of their production notwithstanding – they had been made to figure as a key precursor to what was hoped would be a modern, national, and overtly Hindu school of art. On the Pakistani side of the Padma, the relevance of such Indian pasts to the Pakistani future was, unsurprisingly, unclear to many and suspect to some. As much of the museum’s colonial-era leadership opted for India and left Rajshahi the museum entered into crisis: by 1949 key elements in its collections had been lost to loot, with an unsympathetic police force refusing to investigate the disappearance of a priceless copper-plate collection. For the district magistrate of Rajshahi, Majid Khan, and for some amongst the town’s local political leadership the museum would in fact best serve Pakistan by ceasing to exist altogether: Rajshahi needed a medical college, not an assemblage of gods in glossy, black basalt. With this in mind, in 1950, political activists seized part of the building.
In ‘What Pakistan Remembered of the Palas’ I will try to understand how, despite such early setbacks, care for the ‘relics’ of the Palas not only endured but came to find a central place in the antiquarian and archeological imaginations of Bengali Muslims. I will focus on the ways in which Bengal’s traditions of Pala sculpture came to be seen as a distinctive eastern counterpoint to West Pakistan’s affective and imaginative entanglement with the art of Gandhara, and, increasingly celebrated as the art of a “Golden Age” of which Bengali Muslims were now heirs and trustees, they came to stand in for East Pakistan’s past as a whole, leaving Rajshahi to represent nothing less than Pakistan’s history on the international art-historical exhibition circuit of the 1960s.
The proposed study aims to delve into the intricate dynamics of the everyday experiences and narratives of women residing in the precarious borders and borderlands of the subcontinent. Discourse relating to ramifications of partition narratives in the region of South Asia, have engendered assertions pertaining to affiliation and the concerted endeavours to surmount the state of being perceived as 'alien'. Delineating the intricate interconnections between agency and visibility in border regions that evokes a complex blend of vulnerability and abundance in such highly sensitive zones, the omnipresence of state machinery exudes the power dynamics by engaging into multifarious violence particularly towards women. Adeptly navigating and challenging established norms dictated by patriarchal structures women here actively participate in illegal activities. Situating women within the economic framework in these borderlands, these actions/activities serve as alternative narratives that contribute to our comprehension of women's security and visibility/autonomy in these highly disputed areas. Women residing in conflict zone (here zero line villages) have traditionally treated as ‘collateral damage’ or hardly seen as disruption of law/violation for serious crimes like rape, abduction, child marriages, trafficking etc. are until the amendment of International Human Rights Law addresses the sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a war crime and crime against humanity. Suppressing gender violence, mostly underreported as committed by state machinery eventually creates a culture of violence and injustice prevailing in peripheral sites. Propagating by SGBV, this frontier culture makes the violence a routine affair, frequently witnessed, and mutually normalized in the milieu of borderland villages among local inhabitants and thus threaded into ‘the fabric of everyday life’. Aiming to investigate the narrative and politicisation of the border fence in a specific village of West Bengal while selecting a specific group of respondents: women aged between 20 and 50, the Indian citizenship of certain individuals has raised concerns, whether it be due to their birth or their marriage. Using an intersectional lens to shed light on how women's experiences of sexual and gender-based violence can be undermined by their marginalised location in zero line villages and positing the place as a complex and disputed aspect of borderland which is under constant surveillance, this study aims to investigate the impact of territorial security on women who have lived through the Partition, shedding light on the gendered effects of border dynamics.
The great partition of 1947 that ultimately led to the emergence of Bangladesh has received much less attention in Bangladeshi literature compared to Indian and Pakistani fiction. This is surprising when we consider press reports recording the ebullience following the dissolution of the British Empire. For example, the Daily Azad editorial of August 14, 1947, informs readers: "The Indian subcontinent is luminous with the sunshine of freedom. The ignominy of long two centuries of subjugation is now extinct; her sky and air are now illuminated with the new light of independence” (Ahmed). In contrast, a lack of exuberance in literary representations of the partition in Bangladeshi fiction therefore prompts the need to interrogate such reticence or apathy. Drawing on insights from affect theory, we can read Bangladeshi-authored narratives for a more nuanced inscription of emotions and move beyond current preoccupations with trauma and nostalgia in partition studies. In other words, affect can offer a new dimension to critical frameworks used in examining fiction centring on partition. An analysis of emotional register is interlinked with embodied experiences for as Margrit Pernau remarks sensory experiences are mediated by feelings, and these in turn colour the way individuals interpret events (p.113). Thus, a focus on affect will encompass the examination of corporeality too, and yield a comprehensive appreciation of the lived experiences of partition.
One explanation offered for the refusal to valorize the historic moment of 1947 is the subsequent disillusionment that people in East Pakistan felt vis-à-vis the new nation. However, approaching literary texts from affect theory makes visible other factors. Judith Butler’s concept of precarity is useful in this case to appreciate the vulnerability of marginalized lives and the different responses to partition among people residing in the peripheries of Bengal and later East Pakistan. Narratives presented from a female perspective on the partition and its aftermath in select Bangladeshi contemporary novels -Agun Pakhi (2006) by Hasan Azizul Huq, Sonali Dumor (2012) by Selina Hossain Kaler Mandira (1998)by Makbula Manzur and Ranga Prabhat (1957) by Abul Fazl—provide entry points into understanding the lived experiences and subjectivity of such marginalised and precarious characters. The micro-narratives of these fictional women who were neither empowered nor revolutionary figures, form an important document of the everyday material reality of the gendered and domestic world. Such a reading will offer an alternate to the macro-history of partition and also enrich feminist studies by uncovering the hidden sites of agency and resistance among women who remained confined to their homes and stayed away from the public sphere.
In this way, this paper will reorient partition studies in two major ways. Firstly, by throwing light on Bangladeshi literature, the gap in critical studies will be addressed, and secondly, by shifting attention away from migration and dislocation to a different analytical framework based on affect theory and micro-narratives. As a result, the examination of partition studies will be of benefit to both literary and socio-cultural research.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978), Lacan analyzes the real as trauma using an anecdote of a burning child. The ailing father of a dying child fell asleep by his child’s bed and had a dream of his child burning and crying for help, “Father, can’t you see I am burning?” The father woke up to find his child dead, and the dead body damaged in a sudden fire caused by a burning candle. Lacan uses this example to define trauma as a dual event that occurs both externally and internally and emphasize on the repetitive impact of a psychical event. The physical incident may have happened once, but the subconscious event is repetitive and has the capacity to control action and emotion, transcend the exteriority, and absorb into the subject’s history and identity. Sociologists also define trauma as a fearful reaction to some shattering events that impact individual or collective well-being and provoke repression of recurrent memories. In Trauma: Social Theory (2012), Jeffrey Alexander calls trauma a sociological process that defines a painful injury, establishes the victim, attributes responsibility, and distributes the ideal and material consequences, and because trauma experience is evoked through memory, the process of re-membering, reconstructing, and re-presenting gets intertwined with the repetitive psychical experiences of the traumatized subject. Like trauma, memory is also an indeterminate process, or rather a way of processing and reworking of remembrance. Memory is both representation and repression of trauma; and at the same time, memory is also a resistance to trauma. The traumatized subject continuously reconfigures the borders and boundaries of individual and collective identity. If the traumatized subject is a woman or a gendered minority, the psychophysiological struggle becomes violently political in nature. If such political violence causes displacement and dislocation, then the recounting of loss and absence is what Dominick LaCapra would call a historic trauma (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2001); and if such historic trauma dismantles one’s individual identity and collective history, then the memory it invokes and revokes is what Stef Craps would call a narrative impossibility (Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, 2012). Using all these various facets of Memory and Trauma theory, this paper will focus on the framework of cultural memory and collective trauma of displaced women during the Partition of 1947 and examine how the events of physical and psychological violence and displacement made their bodies a burning site.
While the primary research will stand on the premises of sociological and postcolonial trauma theories, the literary evidence for this paper will come from Attia Hossain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999).
This presentation will examine the provenance, curation, and accessibility of South Asian colonial records held in British institutions, primarily the British Library’s India Office Records and The National Archives UK. The talk will cover:
Types and origins of South Asian colonial records in UK archives
Selection processes for archival preservation
Contemporary user experience in accessing these materials, based on survey data
Analysis of the UK Government's ‘Official History Programme's treatment of Partition through ‘India: The Transfer of Power, 1942-47’ HMSO
Impact of archival selection on historical narratives and creative interpretations of Partition.
This research provides a critical examination of how institutional practices shape the preservation and interpretation of colonial history.
The partition of British India resulted in diverse historiographies in the four successor states: Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar. Overcoming this historiographical divide is essential for historians of South Asia. We can address this historiographic divide in a number of ways, one of which entails a reexamination of archival data in the form of sound. The role of sound, including songs, slogans, speeches, and technological advancements like radio (and gramophone) in shaping cultures, identities, and societies in and around 1947 is profound and multifaceted. My research investigates how multisensory views and approaches might inform historiographies of partition. Since the 'visual turn,' the field of history has seen major transformations away from its previous dependence on texts as sole archives. There is currently a surge of interest in sound as a technique, as indicated by several noteworthy monographs in South Asian Studies published in the previous five years. Using such works as inspiration and provocation, an awareness of how sensory inputs, such as sound, shape and facilitate how we think about 1947 significantly enriches our historical understanding of the partition. My paper invites a reflection on how multisensory approaches to historical events such as the 1947 partition are enhanced by sensitivity to auditory experiences and contexts. In doing so, the idea is to broaden the knowledge of partition by examining sound archives while also reflecting on the significance of embracing the sensory turn in how we study history. What can radio broadcasts from 1947, for instance, tell us and make us hear how millions of people experienced the partition? In what ways might the integration of these audio archives with other partition-related textual and visual archives enrich partition historiographies? More significantly, how can these archives help promote conversations across peasant-day borders and discontents among the neighbouring states? I investigate the role that radio broadcasts and wireless transmissions played in East Pakistan in the fictitious delineation and reimagining of borders soon after the partition. Even though the wireless’s reach across the airspace of Pakistan’s linguistically and culturally diverse ‘wings’ was one of the strongest available infrastructures for envisioning an ‘imagined community’, leaky radio transmissions between the airspace of Pakistan and India were a perennial headache for the new states as it pointed at the fuzzy contours of the spatial reality of such borders.
Although the victory of the Congress in the 1937 provincial elections in Bihar gave rise to the general view that the people had put their faith in secular ideas, the rise of communal consciousness in the 1940s made the region one of the epicentres for the demand for Pakistan. Following the Noakhali and Kolkata riots in 1946, Bihar too witnessed mass killings, abductions, and rapes of Muslims. Large scale Muslim migration took place to East Pakistan and vice versa, making it difficult to overlook Bihar as part of the greater Partition saga.
Yet, socio-cultural experiences and articulations of the Partition from Bihar are still under-examined. Accordingly, in this paper I will closely read Juloos (1966), a novel by Phanishwar Nath Renu, to analyse the literary representation of the aftermath of the Partition in Bihar. The novel is based on changes in the social equations of Goriyar, when a group of Hindu refugees arrive from East Pakistan to find home in the village. The text narrates their struggle to establish themselves as part of the Hindu community they feel they belong to. Driven by misconceptions and superstitions, the villagers derisively call their hamlet Pakistani tola and refuse to accept them due to their roots in what is now Pakistan. I will juxtapose the use of colloquialism in the text against its setting—compounded by a complex matrix of caste and linguistic identities—to show how Juloos offers linguistic and geographical distinctiveness in its representation of the Partition and the experiences and encounters of the people from the neighbouring states of Bengal and Punjab.
The paper re-reads Hasan Azizul Haq’s Agunpakhi (2006) against two personal narratives of migrant women retrieved through interviews in 2017 to discover complex connections between oral narratives and literary representation. It is theoretically presumed that the Muslim Bengali community envisioned a comparatively peaceful living in East Bengal/ Pakistan, having secured positions left vacant by Hindus who migrated to India, driven by the insecurities of “Partition-Independence” in 1947. On the ground, however, while Muslim men recount their material losses and gains, women mostly dwell upon their relationships, both eco-social and personal in pre- and post-partition milieus. The question that arises is whether the apparent satisfaction of the men is a gendered discourse or have the women failed to conceive of Partition as the macrocosmic event with long-standing ramifications that it actually is. The question is further problematised by the fact that memory is always understood as having a gendered trajectory. Following this line of thought, the paper presupposes the hitherto undocumented private memory of the Partition as a tool for contestation and triangulation of the public/collective unconscious that finds representation in literature, Haq’s novel being an example in point. Drawing upon Johannes Fabian’s collective and private binary of memory, the paper also claims that both documented and undocumented personal/collective/public memories have made the ‘nation’ a contested gendered concept, its romanticised versions in literature notwithstanding.
The 1947 Partition of India dramatically altered the demography and geography of the Indian Subcontinent. Its immediate and long-term effects have created three countries in the region: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The central emphasis of this paper will address how Partition is depicted in national museums of the Indian subcontinent. This proposed paper is an outcome of extensive fieldwork conducted in the National Museums of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as the National History Museum in Lahore, Pakistan. States are profoundly involved in shaping the national memory, and as a mnemonic institute, national museums are a significant part of this construction project. Since national museums are publicly funded and controlled by the state, a comprehensive study of national museums in South Asia would unfold the diverse narratives offered by different states in their musealization of the Partition. However, there is a discernible institutional reluctance to remember the memories of Partition apparent in the displays of national museums. In some cases, the memories of Partition are being sidelined. Another aim of this research is to investigate how and why the Partition memories are muted in the musealization projects. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and comparative picture of the musealization of 1947 Partition memories in South Asian national museums by examining their representation and the absence of this memory in museum displays.
On October 15, 1952, top government bureaucrats and police officers from the East and West Bengal governments convened on both sides of the Benapole/Petrapole border—the busiest land border checkpoint between the two Bengals—to witness the introduction of the passport and visa system between India and Pakistan. It turned out to be hardly a momentous occasion: on the first day of travel under the new arrangement, all trains running between East and West – the Khulna Passenger, the Dacca Mail, the Barisal Express, and the Chittagong Mail—were found to be running nearly empty. In fact, in the lead-up to the introduction of the new passport system, millions of people from both Bengals had been frantically crossing the border to settle before the new passport travel regulations were to take effect. Repeated assurances from central and local governments that the passport and visa system would not create a “Chinese wall” between the two regions had failed to reassure citizens of the new nations of India and Pakistan, and Bengal was gripped by an anxious “passport scare.” What would passports mean?
In this paper, I will investigate the complex history of the emergence and implementation of the passport and visa system between the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan in order to understand how the new documentary regime reshaped citizenship, national belonging, and state control over movement and resources in the aftermath of Partition. As is well known, the new system transformed what was once a porous ‘soft border’ into a ‘hard border’ and represented another step in the unraveling of Bengal brought about by Partition—as connections between people, economies, and geographical orientations unraveled and newly distinct spaces were created. Yet the territorialization produced a new politics: drawing on unpublished and published archival sources, newspaper materials, personal memoirs, and autobiographies and focusing on the documentary regime and technologies of control on the Eastern border, I will seek to expand the historiography of Partition to retrieve a possible point of origin for the biopolitical concerns of contemporary South Asian states and of how new technologies of regulation and control came to be central to the experience of citizens.