The 1947 Partition of India stands as a defining event that shaped the political geography of South Asia and intensified the rise of religious nationalism. Its legacies include mass displacement, communal violence and the long-term politicization of religious and ethnic identities, which continue to fuel regional conflict and undermine minority rights in the nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Traditional historiography has largely centred on high politics, including state formation, national leadership and constitutional negotiations, thereby marginalizing the immense human suffering, trauma and social rupture experienced by ordinary people. Since the 1990s, however, feminist oral histories and subaltern studies have reshaped Partition scholarship by foregrounding the voices of women, displaced communities and other marginalized groups excluded from official archives. Recent Partition scholarship advocates for moving beyond the prevalent focus on violence, loss, displacement and abjection, to recognize and document narratives focused on courage, resourcefulness, fortitude and resilience, love, companionship, sharing and hope. This special issue responds to that scholarly shift by highlighting underexplored narratives that illuminate hope, agency and progressive trajectories among communities such as Sindhi, Sikh, Bengali and Bihari migrants. It aims to present the less traversed, other half of the subcontinent's Partition history by exploring themes of love, resilience and cross-border syncretism. Integrating literary, visual, oral and digital methodologies, the contributors examine the intergenerational transmission of Partition memories. The special issue explores how families reconstruct shattered lives and how alternative archives, ranging from tattoos and short stories to digital platforms and films, dismantle monolithic, state-driven histories. These essays reveal the complex afterlives of Partition and demonstrate that its memory remains central not only to political identity but also to everyday acts of compassion and community-building. By foregrounding the "other half" of Partition history, this issue seeks to resist hegemonic narratives and contribute to a more just, plural and human-centred understanding of South Asia's past and present.
The unequal power hierarchy implicit in the Indian state and local response to the refugee crisis post-Partition is reflected in the creation of docile subjectivity of the refugee that is enshrined in the terminology "sharanarthi". The Nehruvian ideology of self-rehabilitation, coupled with the Punjabi ethnocultural stereotype of stoicism, enterprise, etc., and religious practices enjoined in Sikh scriptures, however, privileged Punjabi refugees' self-construction as purusharthi instead of as hapless victims at the mercy of the state. In this context, the essay undertakes a reading of Yashpal's Jhootha Sach to argue that in charting the transformation from refugee to local, the narrative deploys the trope of purushartha common in survivor accounts but subverts its normative patriarchal connotation to furnish an ideology of gendered purushartha. Using demotic concepts of gali-moholla and biradari, metaphoric and tangible community spaces are identified as affective terrain that assists in rebuilding and assimilation. The utopianism of both the purusharthi's journey of recovery as well as the community spaces from within which recovery needs to be understood is problematized through textual analysis and the novel's social realist form to show the perpetuation of the pre-Partition masculine code of honour that continued to structure state and survivor conversations on recovery, its meaning and limits. The essay, thus, contributes to literary studies of Partition by highlighting the other face of Partition trauma - recovery.
This essay employs the animated series X-Men '97 (Marvel Studios, 2024) as an aesthetic and theoretical analogue proxy to examine the dialectic of virtue and vice within far-right rhetoric and neoliberal governance. Situating the revival within the franchise's complex production history, from Lee and Kirby's 1963 debut through Chris Claremont's transformation of the mutant metaphor to the series' current status as Disney-owned intellectual property, the analysis grapples with the paradox of a corporate commodity that interrogates the structures of its own production. The essay's principal theoretical contribution lies in reading Thorstein Veblen's critique of predatory culture through Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimistic critique of liberalism, with Stjepan Me & scaron;trovi & cacute; as the mediating figure who insists that Veblen's sociology is unintelligible without Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion (Mitleid). This pairing, unexplored in postcolonial scholarship, refuses the separation between political economy and moral philosophy. Through close textual and visual analysis of over fifteen distinct scenes, the study traces the series' arc from the mob violence of the "Friends of Humanity" and Henry Gyrich's synoptic branding of hate, through the Schopenhauerian tragedy of Rogue's untouchable body and the destruction of Genosha as utopia's terminal undoing, to Bastion's post-human transvaluation of empathy into contagion. The analysis demonstrates the series' treatment of the new-right rationale wherein tolerance leads to extinction, security serves as the ritualization of barbarism, and progress appears as the refinement of predation. Engaging critically with scholarship on the mutant metaphor's conservatizing impulses and the limits of corporate subversion, the essay argues that while X-Men '97 cannot escape the constraints of global capitalism, it depicts moments that exceed the commodity form, holding open the wound of modernity's broken promises and insisting that the capacity to recognize oneself in the suffering of the Other remains the irreducible ground of any emancipatory future.
I read two texts - the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT, 1960) and Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, "Yazid" (1951) - within the context of postcolonial Indian politics. I treat water as a hydrosocial production, i.e. as the product of social, spatial, and ecological relations. I ask what textual ideas of water tell us about the social relations that constitute them and, conversely, how the ideas contribute to reshaping social relations. I argue that attending to literary and discursive constructions of water reveals the new imagination of water that emerges in the subcontinent post-Partition. This new imagination - what I term "national water" - reflects the violence, imagined and realized, of Partition. The conceptualization of the divided hydroscape of the Indus Basin reinforces the narrative of a natural hostility between India and Pakistan and the inevitability of separation. The contemporaneous promises and violences contained in the IWT and "Yazid" remind us, I suggest, of the close relationship that exists between the processes of nation building and the material and imaginative transformation of environments in postcolonial India.
