This engagingly written book places Punjabi Hindus at the center of Partition scholarship. Nair's often devastating examination of the complex considerations and unfathomable burdens that weighed on the minds of millions as they 'chose' to migrate reveals fresh thinking about religion and politics in South Asia. -- Mridu Rai, author of Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir Nair's powerful book claims that for Punjab's Hindus there was nothing inevitable about the coming of partition. She offers new and challenging interpretations of major events and personalities, which will transform our understandings of Punjab's relationship to the Indian nationalist movement. Her discussion of Punjab's partition and the subsequent memory of partition among Delhi Hindus is a tour de force. -- David Gilmartin, author of Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan
Neeti Nair is the author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India and coeditor of Ghosts from the Past? Assessing Recent Developments in Religious Freedom in South Asia. Professor of History at the University of Virginia, she has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
This engagingly written book places Punjabi Hindus at the center of
Partition scholarship. Nair’s often devastating examination of the
complex considerations and unfathomable burdens that weighed on the
minds of millions as they ‘chose’ to migrate reveals fresh thinking
about religion and politics in South Asia.
*Mridu Rai, author of Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam,
Rights, and the History of Kashmir*
Nair’s powerful book claims that for Punjab’s Hindus there was
nothing inevitable about the coming of partition. She offers new
and challenging interpretations of major events and personalities,
which will transform our understandings of Punjab’s relationship to
the Indian nationalist movement. Her discussion of Punjab’s
partition and the subsequent memory of partition among Delhi Hindus
is a tour de force.
*David Gilmartin, author of Empire and Islam: Punjab and the
Making of Pakistan*
The well-researched study, providing a wealth of information drawn
from a wide variety of sources, serves more than a purely academic
purpose. It gives the lay reader a clearer understanding of the
subcontinent’s history in its crucial phase, the part of history
that continues to be distorted by diverse groups of holy
crusaders.
*The Hindu*
Historian Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands, a fine addition to the
new generation of Partition scholarship, adeptly navigates
sensitive historical terrain to shed new light on the complicated
story of Punjab’s Hindus, and the relation of Punjab to the larger
Indian national movement… Nair traces the evolution of the term
‘communalism’ in anti-colonial nationalist politics from the first
decade of the twentieth century, thereby complicating the easy
synonymy the term has come to occupy with exclusionary bigotry
today. This is crucial work if we are to dissipate the polarized
debates that we have inherited and often perpetuate. In excavating
the role played by the politics of Punjab’s influential Hindu
minority, even as she attempts to impart multiple dimensions to the
key players and situations involved, Nair puts forward an original,
bold and responsible interpretation which adds considerably to the
existing literature that focuses overwhelmingly on Muslim politics
and the role of the British in ‘explaining’ Partition and the
inception of communal politics in India.
*Contemporary South Asia*
An extremely able work.
*Frontline*
Gives you new food for thought.
*Daily Star*
Neeti Nair confidently handles the tangled responses of Punjabi
Hindu politicians to the issue of minority rights and safeguards in
the late colonial era, thereby shedding fresh light on Punjab’s
relationship to the Indian nationalist movement… Nair consults a
variety of source materials and offers original interpretations for
her readers.
*American Historical Review*
The book makes a serious claim that the partition of Punjab should
not be seen merely in relation to the ‘known’ politics of the
Muslim League; rather, to understand the events of 1947, one needs
to look at the complex politics of colonial Punjab, particularly
the ideas, beliefs and moves of those Punjabi leaders, who claimed
to represent the interests of ‘Hindus.’ …The modes by which
‘politics,’ an organized and collective activity, is performed in a
colonial context is another important and perhaps the most
fascinating theme of the book. One finds an engaging discussion on
three well-known political figures—Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami
Shraddhanand and Bhagat Singh. Nair does not take the conventional
route to approach these figures; rather, she tries to place them in
their own context to unpack those political aspects, which are not
associated with the established images of these leaders… Nair makes
a powerful claim that the given histories of Partition need to be
questioned to understand the processual nature of such events. In
this sense, Nair makes a serious contribution to Partition
Studies—an emerging field of intellectual engagement with histories
and memories of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent.
*The Book Review*
[Changing Homelands] challenges the conventional understanding on
the political causes leading to division of a nation into two…
[Nair’s] account is to a large extent groundbreaking and adds a new
perspective to the existing discourse on India’s partition. There
is an underlying inquisitiveness embedded throughout this
exhaustive account for which the author deserves critical
appreciation… The author’s arguments are imposing and sure to draw
attention. Her language is clear and engaging and her bibliography
offers a rich assortment including several primary documents which
authenticate the narrative and add further value to the overall
broader arguments.
*Canadian Journal of History*
Neeti Nair has written a comprehensive and complex history of the
Punjabi Hindus in the first half of the twentieth century. Changing
Homelands begins by tracing the rise of communalism in the 1920s
and ends with partition in the 1940s. The author has offered new
insights about the role of prominent personalities, like Swami
Shraddhanand, Lajpat Rai, and Bhagat Singh… Changing Homelands is…a
valuable account of the partition of the Punjab. More important,
Nair’s book is probably the most substantial and nuanced history of
urban Punjabi Hindus that has been written so far. She will be
widely read.
*H-Net Reviews*
Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition
of India raises the pivotal question of Punjabi Hindus who, being
‘suddenly’ rendered a minority in their land, had to migrate to
what became/remained India. The case of the Punjabi Hindus is
atypical—they were minority Hindus in Muslim-majority Punjab, who
had to migrate to become part of a majoritarian Hindu community in
India. In India today, where Muslims constitute the major minority,
it is hard to imagine Hindus as a minority. The book can help us
imagine, across time, the fate of such a large minoritarian Punjabi
Hinduism. This is historically significant as the present state of
minority Hinduism in Pakistan (chiefly in Sindh) is too miniscule
to provide a useful comparative point of analysis. Nair’s book
helps sensitize us to the enormous contingency of majority and
minority formation—and perhaps no question is more significant for
South Asian polities today…Nair’s book demonstrates the compound
causal assemblages and nexuses that led to Partition rather than
the teleology of ‘communalism’—and the chief value of this type of
analysis might lie in the fact that the identified political
elements can then be meaningfully re-assembled in a way that can
moderate conflict, guilt and misunderstanding in the present.
*India International Centre Quarterly*
It is in this emphasis on the heterogeneous history of nationalism
and Partition, and in its contestation of the exclusivity of
categories like communal, anti-colonial or nationalist that this
book can claim its distinctive place in South Asian historiography…
In recent years a number of historians have argued about the nation
living in heterogeneous time. This book buttresses that argument
with significant empirical evidence, culled from conventional
archives as well as retrieved through oral history methods. In that
sense, it is an important addition to the genre of Partition
literature.
*Indian Historical Review*
Drawing on an impressively wide range of archival sources, Changing
Homelands gives us a compelling account of the contingent and
far-from-inevitable onset of partition in Punjab.
*Journal of Asian Studies*
This book is an important addition to the field of ‘Partition
Studies’ that has sought to complicate the earlier
historiographical silences around the 1947 Partition of India and
its narrativization as an aberrational moment of insanity in an
otherwise non-violent history of Indian national independence.
Nair’s revisionist attention to the warp and weft of religious
anticolonial politics in early twentieth century Punjab illuminates
the disjunctures and differences between the power negotiations
among religiously defined Punjabi communities that retrospectively
got named ‘communalist’ and contemporary Hindutva… Through careful
and textured archival analysis of the political discourse around
key events leading up to the Partition, Changing Homelands offers
us a fresh and valuable perspective on the Punjabi experience of
Partition and its continued affective resonance for so many
refugees and their descendants in contemporary Delhi. It is as much
a book about modern power relations in South Asia as it is a book
about the failures and lost opportunities that constitute the
history of Partition. This book is useful not only for those
interested in the Partition, but also for those interested in the
history of empire as well as South Asia.
*Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient*
Provides a valuable corrective to the historiography of politics in
late colonial Punjab that has more often than not been
over-determined by the impulse to explain partition… Nair marshals
a wide range of sources to demonstrate that while some Punjabi
Hindus undoubtedly supported partition, the historical evidence
does not demonstrate that this particular way of imagining a
homeland and belonging to it had gained overwhelming support, or
even the upper hand, among all or most Punjabi Hindus in the
decades preceding partition… Neeti Nair’s main contribution lies in
providing a revisionist perspective to the Punjabi Hindus’
complicity in partitioning the province; but Changing Homelands is
much more than a regional study of the ‘high politics’ of partition
in the Punjab. With consummate skill, the narrative interweaves
archival research with oral history, and fleshes out the
connections between the high politics of partition and the
situation on the ground. Her work is emblematic of a new wave of
partition studies, in which an untenable separation of elite and
subaltern politics has given way to rich mappings of their
interconnections.
*Journal of Genocide Research*
An important addition to the emerging research on this region’s
politically traumatic event, Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands
highlights how Partition memory, stored in oral histories, has been
largely constructed by the region’s subsequent politics and by
people’s willful act of forgetting some portions of history… The
story of Partition is only now beginning to be unpacked, as South
Asians try to break free from the formulaic versions fed to them in
the initial nation-building decades. In this context, Nair’s
juxtaposing and interrogating of different strands of memory-making
tools will be immensely useful, especially because oral history is
just now taking off in India. While many academic historians
dismiss oral history as inauthentic even today, this book helps the
reader go beyond the simple act of rejection or acceptance. It
advocates a more nuanced study of how memory works and how history
is fluid and unfixed.
*Oral History Review*
Nair offers fresh interpretations of Punjab’s relationship with the
national movement.
*Refugee Watch Online*
It is an excellent work of meticulous research. Its argument is
sharp and well executed. In many ways, what Joya Chatterji
accomplished in her book, Bengal Divided (1994), Nair does for
Punjab. Nair’s is a fine illustration of Rancière’s dissensus: it
derails the received wisdom on Partition. Nair cogently builds her
argument by dwelling on Punjabi Hindu politics. She discusses
diverse ideological currents among Punjabi Hindus (and Sikhs) and
attends to their entanglements, inconsistencies and evolution.
*South Asia*
[An] extremely impressive study of the Partition of India… Nair’s
accomplishment in Changing Homelands is, above all else, her
meticulously close attention to detail as she patiently unravels a
number of vital strands in this larger tangle. She delivers a
necessarily dense and complex, but very readable, narrative of what
transpired in the Punjab (her focus), primarily over roughly a half
century.
*South Asian Review*
As a history of activities of Hindus in the Punjab, this book is a
useful addition to understanding the history of the Punjab.
*Choice*
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