Remembrance, Forgetting and Utterance: Rethinking the Politics of Memory in South Asia

This volume explores new avenues in the field of memory studies. Going beyond Western frames of reference, it shows how religion, region, caste, and class and their intersectionality and the fraught legacy of colonialism shape acts of both collective remembrance and forgetting in South Asia. The chapters in the volume call for a substantive rethinking of the conceptual and methodological frameworks in the field by posing critical questions such as, how do these layers play into and inform the processes of crafting and curating national histories and memories in South Asia? What are the silences that exist within it and how are they contested? What are the alternative modes of remembering, marking and accounting for “difficult pasts” beyond the confines of state-regulated memorial projects? And what “events” constitute dominant and rightful entry points for engaging with these themes and which remain ignored? In doing so they steer discussions on the politics of memory in the region in directions that offer opportunities for not only re-visiting the Partition of 1947 from previously unexplored perspectives but also for going beyond it as the central analytical lens for approaching questions of remembrance, forgetting and utterance in South Asia. A radical new intervention, the volume will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of history, sociology and social anthropology, politics, and South Asian studies.

Table of Contents:
Introduction PART I - Memory as Agency Chapter 1 Reclaiming Identity: Memory as Mechanism of Protest in Two Bengali Dalit Narratives Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis Chapter 2 Remembering and Responsibility: A Study of Dalit Life Narratives Greeshma Mohan PART II - Contested Articulations and Curations of Collective Pasts Chapter 3 Missionary Geography and the Imaginations of Sacred Space in Post-colonial North-East India Hamari Jamatia Chapter 4 Evoking Public Memory and Re-writing Histories: Memorials Within the Anti-Caste Struggles Shabana Ali PART III - Ghosts from/of the Past: Spaces of Memory and Forgetting Chapter 5 Spectrality of the Past: Haunted Memories, Transforming Urban Space and Bengali Cinematic Imagination Šarūnas Paunksnis Chapter 6 Romancing Ruins: Architectural Memory in Gulabo Sitabo Zehra Kazmi PART IV - Negotiating History and Memory Chapter 7 Memory and Counter-Memory: Re-membering the Malabar Rebellion Manoj Parameswaran and Aiswarya Sanath Chapter 8 History Writing and the Pakistani Ulama: Competing for Legitimacy Mohammad Waqas Sajjad PART V - Remembering Displacement Chapter 9 Cultural Memory of Climate Crisis and Human Displacement in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island Trina Bose and Punyashree Panda Chaoter 10 Are You What You Eat? Food as Memory Among Punjabi Partition Survivors Mohini Mehta PART VI - Historical Injustice and Collective Trauma Chapter 11 Reading Remembrance and Reconciliation in Post-War Nepal through Tara Rai’s Chapamar Yuwati ko Diary Kritika Chettri Chapter 12 Curating National Pasts and Historical Trauma: Mourning and Loss in the Cultural Memory of the 1971 Bangladesh War Isha Dubey

About the Author :
Isha Dubey is an assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad’s Human Sciences Research Centre (HSRC). She graduated with a PhD in history from the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. Prior to joining IIIT, Isha has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University, Sweden, and the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. She is a co-investigator in a Danish Research Council funded research project Constructing the Ocean: Indian Ocean Infrasructures and Thick Transregionalsim. The temporal and regional focus of Isha’s research is modern and contemporary South Asia, and her work is guided by an overarching interest in histories of migration and displacement especially in the context of the Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh War, memory studies and urban history.