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HIST369: India - Partition and the Post-Colonial Nation

Special Subject (60 credits)

Partitions became a habit of late-British Imperialism. Palestine, Cyprus, India and Ireland all underwent territorial partition as an Imperial ‘solution’ to ethnic conflict. In this course we consider the partition of British and princely India into the two independent, sovereign states of India and Pakistan in 1947. This division, engineered to avoid communal conflict, resulted in the largest migration in recorded history and the deaths of at least one million people. We will examine a range of documents which relate to the origins of the idea of partition, within and outside of India, and consider how the idea became a geo-political reality. How do we begin to understand the violence which took place – within settlements, communities and families – as historians? How does this history require us to re-think our understanding of different forms of evidence: bureaucratic, political, literary, visual and oral? The course proposes that the partition of India and Pakistan was not a finite, political process. Instead, it can be understood as a process which took place over decades and is arguably still going on.

For further information on HIST369 visit the Lancaster University Online Courses Handbook.

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