ABSTRACT
Yet outside history books, the memories of the coming of independence remain deeply etched in peoples’ minds. It is ironic that these memories are mostly not about the events which are celebrated in textbook histories but about individuals and family circumstances, their hopes and fears, and about the anxieties which many people, especially from the ‘minority’ communities, felt about the future. Further, they are characterized by enormous diversity and while attempting to reconstruct the happenings of 14-15 August 1947, one is struck by the epic quality of the events and the sheer futility of narrating them within a single frame as has been done in history textbooks which locate these events within the narrowly-framed univocal narrative of the ‘Nation-State’.
