ABSTRACT
Now is the moment when the historical clock ticks past the famous midnight hour of 14-15 August 1947. This chapter aims at breaching the spatial and temporal divide which that moment has come to represent in the domain of scholarship. Despite a much longer shared history, marked by as many commonalities as differences, post-colonial India and Pakistan have for the most part been treated as two starkly antithetical entities. Only a few comparative analysts have risked trespassing across the arbitrary frontiers demarcated at the time of partition, preferring to operate within the contours of independent statehood, even when these fly in the face of overlapping developments rooted in the distant as well as the recent colonial past. Such scholarly deference to the boundaries of post-colonial nation-states in the subcontinent is matched by the attitude of Indian and Pakistani border patrols, who despite firing shots at one another, seem perfectly resigned to the two-way flow of illicit trade in luxury wares, arms and drugs. If a twelve hundred mile-long frontier has served to thwart policing efforts, a five millennia-old past persists in unsettling the rigid compartmentalization of historical memory and narration enforced during five and a half decades of state-orchestrated national imaginings. Neither end nor beginning, 1947 has to be seen as intrinsic to the ongoing processes of decolonization while addressing the theme of continuity and change between the colonial and the post-colonial eras.
