From Partition to the Present: Borders, Memory and the Politics of Conflict in Indian Political Thought

The Partition of British India in 1947 is often treated either as the violent birth of two nation-states or as the starting point of a bilateral security rivalry. This article argues that such approaches remain incomplete so long as they separate the domestic history of nationalism from the international history of borders and conflict. Partition should instead be understood as a constitutive afterlife in Indian political thought: a field of memory through which citizenship, minority status, territory and sovereignty continue to be imagined and enacted. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, it shows that Partition was inscribed into the foundational language of the Indian state itself, especially through constitutional debates over citizenship, equality and secular belonging. Second, it reinterprets borders not as fixed lines inherited from 1947 but as memory practices reproduced through refugee rehabilitation, urban transformation, border ritual and the unsettled politics of Kashmir. Third, it turns to connected and plural memory as an alternative framework for thinking about Partition beyond statist closure and nationalist enclosure. Bringing Indian political thought into conversation with memory studies and critical border scholarship, the article contends that the national and the international are not separate levels of analysis in the South Asian case. They are co-constituted through remembered violence, institutionalized narratives and performative borders.