Contributed articles.

Contributed articles chiefly with reference to India.

The Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College (MAO), that became the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 1920 drew the Muslim elite into its orbit and was a key site of a distinctively Muslim nationalism. Located in New Dehli, the historic centre of Muslim rule, it was home to many leading intellectuals and reformers in the years leading up to Indian independence. During partition it was a hub of pro-Pakistan activism. The graduates who came of age during the anti-colonial struggle in India settled throughout the subcontinent after the Partition. They carried with them the particular experiences, values and histories that had defined their lives as Aligarh students in a self-consciously Muslim environment, surrounded by a non-Muslim majority. This new archive of oral history narratives from seventy former AMU students reveals histories of partition as yet unheard. In contrast to existing studies, these stories lead across the boundaries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Partition in AMU is not defined by international borders and migrations but by alienation from the safety of familiar places. The book reframes Partition to draw attention to the ways individuals experienced ongoing changes associated with “partitioning”-the process through which familiar spaces and places became strange and sometimes threatening-and they highlight specific, never-before-studied sites of disturbance distant from the borders.

Jisha Menon's book explores the mimetic relationships between history and political performance and between India and Pakistan.

This book investigates the ambivalent responses to the opposing compulsions of memory and forgetting in cultural production in South Asia. Mallot reveals how writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh indict nationalism's sins by accessing and encoding the past.

This work seeks to examine the event and concurrent transition that the inauguration of India and Pakistan as ‘postcolonial’ states in August 1947 constituted and effectuated. Analysing India and Pakistan together in a parallel and mutually dependant reading, and utilizing primary data and archival materials, Svensson offers new insights into the current literature, seeking to conceptualise independence through partition and decolonisation in terms of novelty and as a ‘restarting of time’. Through his analysis, Svensson demonstrates the constitutive and inexorable entwinement of contingency and restoration, of openness and closure, in the establishment of the postcolonial state. It is maintained that those involved in instituting the new state in a moment devoid of fixity and foundation ‘anchor’ it in preceding beginnings. The work concludes with the proposition that the novelty should not only be regarded as contained in the moment of transition. It should also be seen as contained in the pledge, in the promise and the gesturing towards a future community. Distinct from most other studies on the partition and independence the book assumes the constitutive moment as the focal point, offering a new approach to the study of partition in British India, decolonisation and the institutional of the postcolonial state. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, South Asian studies and political and postcolonial theory.

This volume of ten collected articles stands out, at one level, as a contribution to Marginality studies. Its overarching concern is to identity the main contours of the representation of Muslim woman in post-Independence Indian Writings in English (1950-2000). So doing, it examines also whether this representation replicates or modifies the image of Muslim woman as ingrained in Western literary tradition. Among the writers discussed are Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Shashi Tharoor, Manohar Malgonakr, Attia Hossain, Balwant Gargi, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Amitav Kumar, Ruskin Bond, Qurratulain Hyder and a host of story writers of Indian regional languages. Besides, the Volume is an extensive Bibliography covering the discourse on Representation and Gender issues, with pointed reference to Muslim woman. New Book