SUCHITRA VIJAYAN: [The Partition of India] is one of the biggest population transfers that happened. Sometimes people say close to 10 million people actually moved across. They say over 1 million people died in the process. So what you really see is that the birth of a nation is also a deeply traumatic and bloody history. But one should also keep in mind that the birth of India is not ahistorical. One has to place this in a much larger context of the colony and the empire and colonial cartographies that continue to wreak havoc in our lives today, whether it’s Iraq, whether it’s South Sudan, Israel and Palestine. All of this dates back to a much larger sense of what empire did to this world and what carries on from there.
[…] a lot of these populations that now live in these places lived through a cartography that was left behind by the departing colonial forces. Modern international law, as we know today, was in some ways created to protect the colonial enterprise. That is still being employed today to deal with these negotiated settlements that were created. We have never given these groups of people their own opportunity to come up with their own imagined community, their own imagined political community. Those are all important things that we have to deal with. I think those are all questions that relate, whether it’s India, whether it’s Iraq, whether it’s South Sudan. I think this idea of giving people the right to imagine their own political community is important.
[…] What has always appalled me is that this language continues to play out today. We still have the same dialogue of “how do we deal with it,” without giving the population, whether it’s the Kurds, whether it’s the Sunnis or the Shia or other minorities of Iraq, the right to imagine their own political community. It’s always taking the people who matter the most from the equation. I think those are things that we really need to understand, and we need to go back to the very beginning to understand where these conversations begin and how we can actually engage with them in a much broader sense. More here.