Thesiss

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent – into India and Pakistan in 1947 – was one of the crucial moments marking the break between the colonial and postcolonial era. My project is invested in exploring the Partition not merely in terms of the events of August 1947, but as an …

In this dissertation, I focus on literary representations of the partition of British India in 1947 during which approximately one million people were massacred, eight to ten million people were displaced, and women of minority communities were systematically raped, mutilated an…

Like other regions of the Indian subcontinent, colonial Bengal saw considerably organized Dalit political movements against its historically dominant upper caste Hindus. With the Partition of Bengal and the winning of India's and Pakistan's freedom from British rule in 1947 howe…

The dissertation examines U.S. policy towards partition in the 1990s. Partition is defined as the division of a sovereign state into one or more sovereign states, representing the successful culmination of one or more secessionist or irredentist movements. The author utilizes th…

This dissertation examines the work of the Radcliffe Boundary Commission, which drew the Indo-Pakistani boundary during the 1947 partition of South Asia. Focusing on the division of Punjab, it explores the impact of the new border. This boundary-making effort was significant for…

This study examines the trauma of the partition in Indian fictions, mainly of the last two decades. Until recently this trauma was thought to derive almost exclusively from the enormous violence provoked by the partition of 1947. This study argues that the political division is …

This dissertation considers alternative accounts of the Partition in the performative public sphere that complicate our received official histories of Indian independence from British rule. The 1947 Partition of British India into India and Pakistan affords a crucial historic mo…

This dissertation argues for a reconceptualization of the 1947 Partition of India as the occurrence of a historical trauma. In contrast to the story of the Partition as an epiphenomenal event of independence, I suggest that the division of British India into the new nations of I…

This dissertation argues for the importance of reading literature about the 1947 partition of colonial India in order to begin a truly interdisciplinary reflection on postcolonial and South Asian studies. I shall argue that South Asian literature about the partition of colonial …

Britain's presence in Palestine coincided with a promise to Zionists to support the establishment of a Jewish national home. For two decades, Britain continued to support Zionist aims in Palestine including immigration and colonization, even in the aftermath of the first phase o…

My dissertation argues that contemporary novelists writing about partition and the post-partition state in India, Pakistan, and Northern Ireland create alternative social histories that reframe our understanding of these newly created spaces and the ways in which the intrusion o…

In 1947, the British colony of India was declared independent and emerged as two separate states, Pakistan and India. To examine this event, I ask what material cause(s) made possible the institutional separation between these two new states. To approach this question, I will re…

This paper examines Dividing Line (2001), a woodcut print by the contemporary Indian artist Zarina Hashmi, in relation to a history of Partition, the division of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947 that gave rise in part to the Islamic state of Pakistan. An abstracted renderi…

Why do some post-partitioned states have more successful outcomes than others? This thesis examines post-partition settings following ethnic civil wars. In previous research, scholars have investigated whether demographic partitions lead to a termination of violence and whether …

In the summer of 1947 the British government granted India its independence and partitioned the colony into two nations: the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India. The partition displaced over 10 million people and an estimated one million people died in this transfer of p…

This dissertation looks at the ways in which the landscape and the built environment have been called upon and transformed into conduits of national belonging, focusing on the near-simultaneous emergences of Israel, India, and Pakistan. It considers the role of space in consolid…

The diplomatic and political deadlock in what has come to be known as the Palestine/Israel conflict, has led to the re-emergence of an anti-partition discourse that draws its arguments from the reality on the ground and/or from anti-Zionism. Why such a re-emergence? Actually, an…

In this dissertation, I focus on examining how South Asian women’s writing in different forms—literary, cinematic, and critical—emerging from South Asia or its diaspora, helps us see the politics of the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and subse…

This dissertation is a study of the critical role played by the Muslims of the United Provinces (UP) in the movement for the formation of Pakistan during the last decade of colonial rule in India. In this regard, it seeks to understand as to what Pakistan may have meant to the M…