'The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia' book review

New Delhi, May 29 (PTI) Many families of India and Pakistan became divided not because some members chose to live in one country or move to another but because of the way the border between the two neighbours was constructed, a professor of an American university claims.

"These families became divided because of the way the Indo-Pak border came to be constructed as an outcome of a long, drawn-out process of Partition," writes Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar in "The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia".

"People who were forced to leave and lost their homes, and people who never left their homes, were both unsettled as new nation-states and their margins came to be formed.

"Economic, bureaucratic and judicial institutions and inscriptions of both states asserted themselves into a ravaged landscape of people displaced from old ties, and permits, evacuee property legislation, and passports were techniques that sought to secure uncertain and contested relationships among refugees, religious minorities and citizenship," Zamindar, who teaches history at Brown University, writes.

The books says "the Partition of 1947 in many senses is not over; it is not behind us.

"Since the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 2001, signaling the rise of the Hindu right in India, and the communal violence that followed when chants of "Jao Pakistan, ya Kabrastan (go to Pakistan or your graves)" rang alongside attacks on Muslim communities across north India, the invocation of Partition and Pakistan reacquired a sinister meaning for Muslim minorities in India.