Report by Lavaya Senthil

Urvashi Butalia began by discussing what she had learnt about Partition as a member of the first post-Partition generation. In school, students were given a neat picture – the British and Pakistanis wanted Partition, Indians did not; Nehru was good, Jinnah was not; India was better for choosing secularism. Students, including Butalia, accepted this as truth. Meanwhile, family member’s real experiences of the Partition were seen as mere family tales and not taken seriously.

Butalia then began to recount her unlearnings, scattered throughout her life as she engaged with oral history, of this view of Partition.

Her first unlearning occurred when she lived through the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi, and watched the city transform overnight. As a member of a group providing aid to Sikhs who had lost their homes, she was asked to write down their stories so they could later be used as legal evidence. People frequently likened their recent experiences in the pogrom to their memories of Partition. This made her wonder how terrible the Partition itself must have been, if the memory of it was so bad. She realised what a disservice it was to dismiss the Partition stories of her parents’ generation.

This drove her to visit her estranged uncle in Lahore who had remained there after Partition. Through conversations with him, she experienced her second unlearning: narratives are not objective; they change according to point of view. Butalia’s mother’s assumptions about her brother’s actions and intentions—what Butalia grew up hearing—turned out to be totally different from his own perspective. Butalia also unlearnt the huge significance we ascribe to religious conversion when her uncle told her that he converted to Islam simply because he didn’t care about religion either way.

This engagement with Partition stories transformed her view of Delhi too. She started noticing refugee colonies, past or present, throughout the city – Jangpura, Purana Qila, Kingsway Camp. She now decided to research Partition, only for herself and do this by collecting individual stories.

Here occurred her unlearning of feminists’ belief that it’s their job to go to oppressed, silenced women and make them talk openly. As she went from house to house in her neighbourhood asking for people’s memories, Butalia learnt that it was difficult for women to speak freely because they, unlike men, were constantly surrounded by other people (children or relatives). Rather than focusing on making women speak, Butalia now began thinking about silences, unspeakability and the difficulty of finding vocabulary to discuss experiences like sexual violence and abductions, which happened on a mass scale during Partition.

Butalia also unlearned the idea that communal violence always came from the ‘other side.’ Oftentimes, families killed their own women. They also erased them from their narratives— Butalia recounted how a family which she knew had experienced the abduction of two women, kept silent about them as if they never existed.

Butalia’s next unlearning occurred while talking to a woman from a village located on the border. While the new national boundaries were still being finalised, people often fled their homes due to communal fears. Whenever this happened, the woman and her sisters would go to these abandoned houses and take everything left behind. Butalia asked her how they weren’t attacked during these times of intense communal strife. The woman replied that it was because they ‘weren’t Hindus or Muslims’, they were ‘Harijans.’ Butalia then realised that, so far, she had completely ignored the role of caste in the Partition.

At the time of Partition, some Dalits in Punjab were demanding an independent state called Achhutistan. When Butalia said the name of this state during a class, she laughed. After a student questioned her on this, another unlearning occurred. Butalia realised that interlocutors —which is what historians are—must respect the stories of the people they talk to.

The question of research ethics is similar to this. A woman Butalia spoke to asked her not to publish her experience of sexual violence. Butalia was now faced with a dilemma—in the pursuit of truth, can we put out something which makes someone’s life vulnerable? She eventually decided to respect the woman’s silence. Moreover, her main concern was not accuracy of information; her central claim was that there are narratives other than factual ones —emotional, affective narratives that can be accessed through oral history.