ABSTRACT
A history of partition is a history of how independence came, featured in our minds, and still arrives; and a history of independence is a history of the impossibility of retaining the innocence of the dream of independence. The post-colonial nation form was to be the ultimate form of political institution. For the realization of this form, fundamentally through a constitutional process, it required the production of non-state people from time to time. Partition was to make the nation complete so that the subject could now become the citizen and the nation could now fly into the full panoply of state. Invariably such memories are fragmentary, memory becomes the passion of mind, and victim-hood becomes the soul of the nation. At a more fundamental level, dialogic politics faces the question of a modern representative politics in post-colonial conditions of South Asia born out of partition.
