The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition

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These chapters provide deeply researched narratives of the links between partition in India and Palestine in 1947. It focuses on the shared dynamics that shaped both regions, such as violence, the role of religion in politics, majoritarian politics, and the persistence of imperial modes of power.

This book is the first study of political and legal thinking about the partitions of India and Palestine in 1947. The chapters in the volume, authored by leading scholars of partition, draw attention to the pathways of peoples, geographic spaces, colonial policies, laws, and institutions that connect them from the vantage point of those most engaged by the process: political actors, party activists, jurists, diplomats, philosophers, and international representatives from the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. Additionally, the volume investigates some of the underlying causes of partition in both places such as the hardening of religious fault-lines, majoritarian politics, and the failure to construct viable forms of government in deeply divided societies.

Reviews

'This fascinating essay collection offers systematic analysis of partition in India and Palestine as processes connected through supranational politics, international law, and transnational networks. Thought provoking, often harrowing and always original, the essays collected here make essential reading for anyone interested in where partitions fit within global decolonisation.' Martin Thomas, University of Exeter

'An expert team of authors assembled by Victor Kattan and Amit Rajan have produced an original book on the momentous years of 1947 and 1948 in the Indian subcontinent and Palestine. By showing how partition failed to resolve the nationality problems it was designed to solve, the multi-scalar analyses in The breakup of India and Palestine demonstrate how the seeds were sown for the illiberal majoritarian democracies there today. A brilliant achievement.' A. Dirk Moses, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Colin Powell School for Civic and International Leadership at the City College of New York, CUNY

'This book is expertly planned, presented and written. Each chapter links into the next, enabling a seamless comparative account of colonial and postcolonial governance agendas through the prism of partition politics. The detailed investigation into the latter gives a balanced account and adds an analytical rigour to the academic literature on the topic, which is skewed towards colonial politics and limits the agency of the postcolonial societies.'
International Affairs 100: 2, 2024

Author Bio

Victor Kattanis a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Law at the University of Nottingham.

Amit Ranjan is a Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.