ABSTRACT
The key intention of this chapter is to critically examine the role of excessive geopolitics in the partition of ‘British India’, an imperial spatial formation, mapped, sustained and legitimized through a reductionist geopolitical reasoning, and forced upon highly diverse and complex social-cultural landscapes and their inhabitants, historically resistant to centralizing tendencies. The paper argues that the ‘moment’ of territorial partition finally arrived on the subcontinent when non-geopolitical reasoning and various forms of resistance either succumbed to or were subsumed within the overall geopolitical reasoning and representations deployed by hegemonic group(s). For the purposes of this chapter, geopolitics is defined as politics (ab)using spatial-territorial reasoning, arguments and representations for power-political purposes. Geopolitics is invariably intertwined with certain hegemonic forms of masculinity, whereas practices of statecraft are also practices of man-crafting. Territory and its representations are at the heart of geopolitics. Often resorted to by the powers engaged in pursuit of primacy, understood largely in territorial terms, excessive geopolitics feeds into, and in return, is sustained by the discourse and practices of reflexive otherness.1 Even though excessive geopolitics does not mean the total absence of resistance to geopolitical discourse or geopolitical representations, it does imply, however, that various alternative reasonings and representations – related to federalism, cultural autonomy, struggles against feudal oppression, local/ regional identities, gender domination/discrimination, etc. – get subsumed temporarily under excessive geopolitics but reassert their ambitions and agendas afterwards.
