ONE DAY  NATIONAL  SEMINAR  ON  “DEPICTION  OF PARTITION  IN  URDU        

 LITERATURE”

Organised by the

Department of Sociology, MANUU, in Collaboration with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), (Janpada Division), Ministry of Culture, Government of India, on 11th  August 2022, 10:00 A.M. Venue at Saiyid Hamid Library Auditorium, MANUU.

 CONCEPT  NOTE

As we all know that India was partitioned into two independent nation states – India and Pakistan - in August 1947. In this connection the country had witnessed an unforeseen mass violence devastating millions of lives across the Indian sub-continent. The communities those had coexisted in the land since the history known to us had started resorting to violence against each others in a terrifying outbreak of communal and sectarian violence in the wake of  the  partition. Nisid  Hajari1, in  his  celeberated work  “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes that, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse……”

Given this, although there is a vast literature spawned raising debates over how the deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture of the great nation was unravelled so easily, it is a matter of grave concern to remember those dark periods as they offer us to be vigilant to thwart any such thing from happening in the future. In this connection it is reminded that August 14th  every year is observed as ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’ as designated by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. In view of this it falls on the responsibility of the academia and the civil society to join hands, bringing to the core the struggles and sacrififices of our people of those days and remembering the them. In this background the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), Ministry of Culture, Government of India, has a bold initiative  seeking  collaboration  to  forge  an  alliance  of  academic  institutions/central universities organising seminars/exhibitions across given themes, providing a platform for academic discourses remembering the struggles and sacrifices of our yesterdays’ heroes.

It is against this backdrop, and while the country celebrates its 75 years of independence under the program of “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav”, that the Department of Sociology – MANUU,  in  collaboration  with  the  Indira  Gandhi  National  Centre  for  Arts  (IGNCA), Ministry  of  Culture,  Government  of  India,  organises  a  one  day  national  seminar  on “Depiction of Partition in Urdu Literature” covering one of the themes enlisted in the concept note shared by the IGNCA.

‘The Great Divide – The Violent legacy of Indian Partition published in

‘New Yorker’ on June 29, 2015 issue)