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Partition was the bloody curtain call of the struggle for independence. Simultaneously, it became the starting point of more contemporary movements to shape modern nationhood in India and Pakistan. Far from being relegated to history, the memories, mythologies and histories of the movement for Pakistan-that, in essence, was what Partition was all about-have shaped the mentalities of peoples as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. As was tragically reaffirmed in Gujarat last week, the modern origins of the "us" and the "other" divide can be located in the happenings between 1940 and 1947.

REMEMBERING PARTITION: VIOLENCE, NATIONALISM AND HISTORY IN INDIA By Gyanendra Pandey Cambridge Price: Rs 595 Pages: 218

What is the role of the historian in this explosive interplay of the past and the present? Does it begin and end with recreating the past "as it really happened" and, by way of bonus, locating it in a larger context? Gyanendra Pandey, one of the most stimulating historians from the Subaltern Studies stable, is impatient with such an approach. The preoccupation with "statist" history, he feels, has glossed over the experiences of ordinary people in the Partition drama, condemning them to the status of lifeless statistics. It has also reduced "local" events to casual footnotes, as if the details of the heat and dust of conflict are incapable of contributing to the big picture.

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EXTRACT What would it mean to think of England, for example, not as an 'ancient nation' that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and built a worldwide ascendancy on the basis of a much advertised common sense and stiff upper lip, but as a historical community of old and new migrants, men and women, white and black, contributing different elements to the common culture, and struggling in diverse ways to expand the arena of social and political rights? What would it mean to imagine India as a society in which the Muslim does not figure as a 'minority', but as Bengali or Malayali, labourer or professional, literate or non-literate, young or old, man or woman? The politics, and history, of the coming decades could provide an answer.

Methodologically, Pandey's endeavour to rescue the little men and women from what E.P. Thompson once called the "condescension of posterity" is laudable. Oral histories, obscure diaries and novels can enrich history writing enormously and complement the months of painstaking perusal of official documents generated by the custodians of the state.

The problem with Pandey's work is that both projects remain incomplete. In completely overlooking the multi-volume Transfer of Power documents culled from British sources, Pandey proceeds on the incredible assumption that what was being deliberated on in London, Delhi or the provincial capitals had only a tangential bearing on people on the ground. Such an omission, while good subalternist posturing, makes for bad history.

Secondly, in absorbing the oral histories and testimonies of those who lived through Partition, he relies excessively on the research of others, notably Urvashi Butalia and Shail Mayaram. Yet, in highlighting the emotive issue of abducted women on both sides of the communal divide, Pandey glosses over the fact that Partition was also a battle for religious honour. Those who were Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan could have stayed on and kept their property had they converted. That they didn't exercise that option is revealing. Pandey's suggestion that "the general discourse on Partition still functions as something like a gigantic rumour" is, under the circumstances, demeaning to those who equated faith with honour.

Finally, in dissecting the novels about Partition, Pandey can barely conceal his preference for the wistful nostalgia of the Urdu-speaking elite who left for Pakistan in 1947, not out of choice, but for their own personal safety. He tries to internalise the angst behind the lament of Ebadat Barelvi that "Delhi was a Muslim city" but doesn't extend the same measure of generosity to those Sikhs who commemorate the mass suicide of women in Thoa Khalsa. Likewise, his sneering asides on Sir Francis Tuker's "memory" is unbecoming. What makes Barelvi more authentic than either an SGPC functionary or Tuker? The historian's own cultural and political preferences?

Pandey, it would seem, was faced with the choice of either playing the historian or donning the mantle of a political activist. The historian rightly assumes that nationhood is constructed from popular memory but the activist is anxious that it be refashioned along more fragmented lines. Yet, what persists as memory isn't simply an outcome of elite manipulation; it is also born of lived experience. In arguing that the idealised "community" is blinkered and should be different, Pandey unwittingly falls back on the hoary Marxist notion of "false consciousness". His book, in fact, confirms the prescience of what G.R. Elton once wrote: that historians should stick to what they are good at-history.