Fordham University Press Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India's Partition

The Indian Independence Act of 1947 granted India freedom from British rule, signaling the formal end of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This freedom, though, came at a price: partition, the division of the country into India and Pakistan, and the communal riots that followed. These riots resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border. This watershed socioeconomic–geopolitical moment cast an enduring shadow on India’s relationship with neighboring Pakistan. Presenting a perspective of the middle-class refugees who were forced from their homes, jobs, and lives with the withdrawal of British rule in India, Home, Uprooted delves into the lives of forty-five Partition refugees and their descendants to show how this epochal event continues to shape their lives. Exploring the oral histories of three generations of refugees from India’s Partition―ten Hindu and Sikh families in Delhi, Home, Uprooted melds oral histories with a fresh perspective on current literature to unravel the emergent conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in the stories of the participants. Author Devika Chawla argues that the ways in which her participants imagine, recollect, memorialize, or “abandon” home in their everyday narratives give us unique insights into how refugee identities are constituted. These stories reveal how migrations are enacted and what home―in its sense, absence, and presence―can mean for displaced populations. Written in an accessible and experimental style that blends biography, autobiography, essay, and performative writing, Home, Uprooted folds in field narratives with Chawla’s own family history, which was also shaped by the Partition event and her self-propelled migration to North America. In contemplating and living their stories of home, she attempts to show how her own ancestral legacies of Partition displacement bear relief. Home―how we experience it and what it says about the “selves” we come to occupy―is a crucial question of our contemporary moment. Home, Uprooted delivers a unique and poignant perspective on this timely question. This compilation of stories offers an iteration of how diasporic migrations might be enacted and what “home” means to displaced populations. Review Chawla employs a lyrical writing style that is able to collapse the boundaries between ethnography and autobiography, and between academic history and personal reflection.-- "--Oral History" Chawla's family story is woven throughout the book, and many of its most moving moments are deeply personal. ---Corine Colbert, Ohio University, --Perspectives Home, Uprooted is a beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated and disarmingly fluid analysis of the idea of home through oral histories with three generations of Partition refugees from Delhi, India. Devika Chawla explores what home means to those who have been displaced; how the notion of home has a life of it's own, and why it is important to tell this story of an Un/homely Partition. Whether the Partition maintains a spectral presence or an embodied materiality in each rendition of home, in every story that she tells us, Chawla moves effortlessly through the shifting contours of loss, belonging and memory. Beyond history, beyond ethnography, this book is among the first of its kind in both - its passionate destabilizing of any fixed notion of home and its narrative form, which carefully combines personal history and autobiography with stories shared by other participants in the project. The book offers a much needed critical reflection on method, and a trenchant critique of Self/Other binaries by centering stories told and heard via multiple encounters between self, ethnographer, storyteller and interlocutor. Engaging and accessible in terms of writing style, Home, Uprooted will appeal to a large audience beyond the academy, and is a MUST read for anyo