ABSTRACT
In the crowd of the historians of Indian partition, Gyanendra Pandey has dropped a bombshell by claiming a definitive statement on the partition of the subcontinent – almost a final account on the relation between violence and community, irrevocably associating violence with formation of a political community – by questioning the accounts of independence and partition that present partition as legitimate, but represent violence as ‘an illegitimate outbreak’ that ‘goes against the fundamentals of Indian (or Pakistani) tradition and history’,1 and by implication declaring that violence was almost the ‘normal’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘natural’ thing to accompany the establishment of the two independent states of Indian and Pakistan, in his words, ‘the procedures of nationhood, history, and particular form of sociality’. Violence marked the moves that were ‘made to nationalize populations, culture and history in the context of this (legitimate) claim to nation-statehood and the establishment of the nation-state’.2
