Abstract
Partition of 1947 is a complex historical phenomenon due to the event's impact on specific identity formations and the forces of intercommunal performative violence that followed. Millions died, and millions more lost their homeland, for which they would have lived. This study would like to delve deeply into the memories of Abul Mansur Ahmed, an influential litterateur who is well-versed in the subcontinent’s politics, with the intention of elucidating the coinciding characteristics of the forces that inspired the debris that came with the partition. Using Ahmed's memoirs Atmakatha (Autobiography)and Amar Dekha Rajnitir Panchas Bachar (Fifty Years of Politics As I Saw It) as a gateway, this paper tries to examine the dynamics of identity and violence portrayed in Ahmed’s participation in this seminal event. A careful analysis of the texts urges us to reconsider, range, and ramify the multiplicity of identity in practice, and the forces which, both actively and passively, make the shift to rigid sets of identities. Consequently, in time, this paper tries to reveal how these selected sets of identity can become the seed of the same vicious cycle of identity formation. Primarily, this paper will focus on how violence becomes a catalyst in one’s method of identity construction. Ahmed's account of the 1947 partition, and theoretical frameworks derived from Sen, Maalouf, Littman, Paluck, and Gordon, including other interdisciplinary works, would comprise in revealing the positioning, politics and pressure of the construction. Using the biographical accounts, this paper would also like to understand the keys behind the construction of the choice-making entity, i.e., the author of the memoirs, and how the complementary concurrent construction of identity and violence falls into an inescapable pattern. In this way, this paper would try to identify and address the markers and containers of identity, the violence they spur, their effect on the individual, and finally, how they influence the individual to see violence as less aversive.
