© Columbia University Press
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories
October, 2007
Cloth, 304 pages, 25 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-13846-8
$50.00
/ £29.50
"Zamindar puts together a history that helps clarify the story of partition and makes clear that there were no easy solutions." — Lucian W. Pye, Foreign Affairs
"A significant contribution . . . Highly recommended." — Choice
"This is a significant and path-breaking book and is likely to become the standard study of the subject. It will be cited authoritatively or be argued with for some time to come." — Aamir Mufti, author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture
"A remarkable exercise of ethno-history from below. In addition to official sources, Zamindar has collected testimonies in archives and interviewed survivors of Partition to offer an original and significant chronicle of the nation-making process in both India and Pakistan." — Christophe Jaffrelot , author of The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian politics: 1925-1990s
"A product of outstanding historical-ethnographic research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar's book tells like no one has done before the maddeningly tangled story of how, in the years after the partition of 1947, India and Pakistan actually came to separate their territories, properties, and peoples into two sovereign states. Zamindar's ability to weave into a single narrative the national and the local, the administrative and the personal, the everyday and the epochal, is truly remarkable. This is a pathbreaking contribution to modern South Asian studies." — Partha Chatterjee, author of The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World
"A deeply moving account of the contingent category of the no-questions-asked natural citizen within the Indian and Pakistani nation-states, at birth and in their long, postnatal condition. The hurriedly-fixed national boundaries here both necessitate and entice, contain and penalize crossings. Zamindar richly documents how for some minority groups travel, kinship ties, and a national longing have to be continually bared to lay claim to citizenship within a multireligious dispensation. An unsettling work, which breaks through the chalk circles that circumscribe the retellings of 'our' separate national pasts." — Shahid Amin, author of Writing Alternative Histories: A View from India