The Long Life of Rumor

Abstract

Genocidal violence leaves but broken historical trace. Not surprisingly, therefore, surviving records of subcontinent's (1) Partition are marked by their fragmentariness. They move, in fits and starts, through jerks and breaks and silences--incoherent, stuttering, even incomprehensible--between poles of testimony and rumor. Testimony, Langer notes, is a form of remembering. Rumor, by contrast, is form of doing--of making happen--by telling. (2) record of Partition clearly bears mark of both. importance of first-person testimony (for judge, as for historian) requires no underlining. was there; saw; can name; recognize; and (more than occasionally for journalist, as well as for historian, though less commonly, we are told, for judge) learned from most reliable witnesses. Testimony's method is that of particularizing and individualizing, specifying sites and bodies that carry marks of particular events, making real in everyday, physical, nameable terms. Its difficulty in limit case is that it needs to articulate an unparalleled, unthinkable history struggling to find voice. How does witness share the particularity, unshareability, and incommunicability of pain in torture? (3) How can we speak for dead, who are no longer present? How can we t estify on behalf of dead, if we are not dead? How can anyone who is not Muselmann know what it is to be Muselmann, as historians of Holocaust have repeatedly said? (4) importance of rumor in record of violence is also established, though perhaps more in matter of its making than in that of its evaluation or reconstruction. Rumor moves in direction almost contrary to that of testimony: generalizing, exalting to extraordinary (even miraculous) status, and employing sweeping terms of deluge and just desserts (actual or impending). In rumor, language is transformed from mode of (possible) communication to particular kind of imperative condition, communicable, infectious, possible (and almost necessary) to pass on. impact of this anonymous, mercurial, fleeting figure is well attested in accounts of history of violent uprisings--from Lefebvre's and Rude's writings on French Revolution to Guha's analysis of peasant insurrections in colonial India and Veena Das's account of 1984 massacre of Sikhs. (5) That rumor is no stranger also to written records and oral accounts of 1947 is hardly surprising. How seriously has all this affected our assessment of that moment? It is purpose of this article to examine extent to which historical discourse on Partition, from 1947 to today, takes form of testimony or that of rumor--or hovers between two. For this purpose, I focus on twin questions of violence against and number of casualties, both of which loom large in annals of event. The figure of abducted woman became symbolic of crossing borders, of violating social, cultural and political boundaries, Menon and Bhasin write. By time that rape, looting, and migrations were finished, eight to ten million people had crossed over from Punjab and Bengal ... and about 500,000-1,000,000 had perished. (6) Estimates of dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around million people died is now widely accepted, writes Butalia. She goes on to note statistical evidence of widespread sexual savagery: 75,000 are thought to have been ab ducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). (7) Observers described violence that erupted so fiercely between Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims in 1946 and 1947 as a war on each other's women and as war waged especially on and children. …

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