PARTITION'S Post-Amnesias is an interesting book, not the least because it is also intriguing. The author, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, is a professor of English Literature at King's College, London, and, as is usual with many academics, quite a prolific writer of scholarly works. She is also a representative of an illustrious family, originally from Faridpur, which epitomizes the terms diaspora, cross-culture, and a few other globalization phenomena. All of those attributes are to be found in Partition's Post-Amnesias, incorporating the partition of British India in 1947, the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, and diverse aspects relating to modern South Asia. The author weaves her narrative around a personal journey of discovery, aided by that almighty catalyst of globalization, the Internet and one of its accessories, the social media.

The book, as the author makes clear, "is not about Partition per se. It is about what a scholar from Karachi's divided families terms "Partition effects, or the ways in which Partition is socially remembered and retrospectively assessed', and from the vantage point of the 'peculiar relationship'... that my generation has to places no longer accessible to us thanks to the epochal events of 1947 and 1971." From the viewpoint of political history, she is drawn to the relatively recent revisionist historiography that concentrates on the high politics of Punjab and Bengal, the two Muslim majority provinces that were partitioned in 1947. Beyond the popular narratives based on the Two-Nation Theory for the partitioning of British India, Kabir alludes to the newer scholarship of how Mohammad Ali Jinnah was less imbued with the idea of a theocratic state than in driving a hard political bargain, while the members of the Congress in Bengal (and in other parts of India) seem to have been driven by visions of a Hindu majority regional demographic rather than by secularist ideals.

"The consequent fracturing of families," Kabir believes, “through the permanent reconfiguration of the personal, the political, and the collective dimensions of loyalty and belonging was amongst the most painful aspects of Partition." She terms this as "radical alienation", and concentrates in most of the book on explaining it from various dimensions. She takes the effects of Partition to a higher plane than physical trauma: "For both those who experienced violence and those who escaped it, Partition was experienced as 'the wound of the mind: the breach in the mind's experience of time, self and the world'."

The author emphasizes on the personal aspects behind the writing of the book: "Partition's Post-Amnesias embodies my own participation in the memory work surrounding Partition.... In grappling with Partition as a process...I have dispensed with the dichotomy between 'personal writing' and 'scholarly writing....'” The emphasis on humanity is in evidence throughout the book: "Violence, rape, and the destruction of entire ways of life are the horrifying, traumatic truths that bind Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh together despite their now-separate trajectories as sovereign nation-states." And poses the thoughtful question: "What can families divided across the three nations reveal about the traumatic linkages between these events that national master-narratives obscure?" She proceeds in trying to answer it, through recounting stories heard from her own much-extended family in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and, no doubt, a number of other countries, in more than a few instances courtesy of the Facebook and other social media,

the writings of a Bangladeshi (Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age), a Pakistani (Kamila Shamsie's Kartography), and an Indian (Siddhartha Deb's The Point of Return), and conversations with a variety of people.

She is critical of excessive narratology, believing it may cause more harm than good, to humanity: "Excessive narrativization of 1947 and 1971...mires reconciliation and understanding between collective identities both within and across nations, contributing to the continuing persecution of religious minorities, the growth of religious fundamentalism, and escalating geopolitical problems in peripheral frontier zones. Yet scholarship on South Asia regularly grants narrative the role of prime mover as well as the prime vehicle of identity formation." One can visualize red flags being hoisted against her line of thinking, but, nonetheless, her point is very well taken. Drawing upon Marianne Hirsch's formulation of 'postmemory', Kabir comes up with the term 'post-amnesia', which she explains as “a symptomatic return to explorations of places lost to the immediate post-1947 and post-1971 generations through a combination of psychological and political imperatives." Hence, Partition's Post Amnesias, which offers "a comparative examination of memory politics in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in order to reveal imaginative alternatives to modes of self-fashioning that devolve around the persecution of minorities, religious fundamentalism, and ongoing conflicts in peripheral frontier zones."

The author is sanguine enough to acknowledge that, "(p)eople searching for historical facts around Partition and 1971 as well as commentary on what is 'true' and what is 'false' may well find this book wanting", but, in the international system anchored primarily on political realism and its attendant attributes, her espousal of greater use of the arts in peace initiatives and conflict resolution is a little too utopian. Going back to postamnesia assessment and/or reassessment, her perspective on the Indian Muslims is compelling: that collectively, they are “a cipher for all vulnerable subject positions created through Partition and still beset by tangible insecurities."

Kabir uses several themes in support of her construction. In the chapter on "Terracotta Memories", she observes, citing the famed

archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, in the process touching upon anomalous divisions wrought from a unified whole: "Pakistan is found to include almost all the whole of the known extent of the earliest civilization of India, that of the Indus Valley.... On the other hand...almost all the Mohammedan monuments of the first importance remain in India." Historical linkages are important to her, as they should be for people in general. Therefore, she extols the post-partition efforts of Zainul Abedin in East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and A.H. Dani in East Bengal/East Pakistan/West Pakistan/Pakistan, who, through institution-building, endeavoured to reconstruct lost 'line linkages'. In the chapter on "Archeography", she dwells on Pakistan after the creation of Bangladesh. She reiterates novelist Aslam Khan's ironic comment on Pakistan's efforts at self-definition being one of its newness as a nation and ancientness as a civilization. And then poses the following questions and attempts to answer them: "Could the myth of geo-body be constructed anew based on what was left when 'West Pakistan' took on the new identity of 'Pakistan'? What cultural resources could be most efficiently drawn upon for this task? "Ona more sobering note, especially in the context of events taking place over the last twelve years or so, Kabir observes: "The amnesias of 1947 and 1971 led...not only to reactionary Islamicization (sic); the 'horror of newness' distilled by a myth of origins centred on Islam also instigated the archaeogeographic search for alternative mythic pasts."

In "The Enchanted Delta", Kabir makes this point about Bangladesh: "The enchanted Bengal delta, a repository of folksong, myth, and beguiling natural features long contested by the Bengali bourgeois sensibility to a disenchanted, alienated urban modernity, is the exemplary space of Partition's post-amnesia. For the Bengali bourgeois sensibility is also an irretrievably and complexly partitioned one." In this chapter, she dwells at some length on an illustrious member of Faridpur's Kabir Bhaban, her great-uncle Humayun Zahiruddin Amir-e-Kabir (Humayun Kabir to almost all who knew, or know of, him), former education minister of India, whom she describes, quite appropriately, as a maverick, modern, Bengali, and Muslim. In the final chapter, "Darjeeling Chai", Kabir sums up her quest in Partition's Post-Amnesia: “Not memory then, and not even post memory; but post-amnesia, or the attempt to remember after amnesia. Post-amnesia allows us to formulate a response to Ashis Nandy's perspicacious question: 'Why did the older generation not speak out?'" And, "As a subject of Partition's post-amnesias, I have written this book to retrieve a country where that lost language of desire can regain meaningfulness."

There are some major errors of fact in the book. Jinnah was the first Governor-General of Pakistan, and not the country's first prime minister, as Kabir states. Ali was not Prophet Muhammad's (pbuh) grandson, but his son-in-law. And this sentence is confusing: "The young doctor was my mother; the son of Jehangir Kabir, my father." It would appear from the configuration of this sentence that Jehangir Kabir was the author's father, when he was actually her grandfather. And, then, some people might find the writing style, especially of the first two chapters, a little too grand for their taste. Nonetheless, Partition's Post-Amnesias is a fascinating piece of work that explores an interesting and intriguing perspective on South Asia.

SHAHID ALAM IS AN ACTOR, ACADEMIC AND FORMER DIPLOMAT