From High Politics to Hyper-Locality: Spatiality and the Historiographical Fault Lines of the 1947 Partition

Abstract

The historiography of the 1947 Partition of India has evolved through distinct epistemological shifts, each reconfiguring how South Asia's foundational rupture is conceptualized, archived, and remembered. Traditional historiography operated primarily through macro-teleological paradigms either cantering colonial haute politique or enforcing divergent Indian and Pakistani national narratives. Over the past three decades, however, scholarship has shifted toward subaltern memory, spatial micro-histories, and disaggregated analyses of communal violence. This paper argues that the central fault line running through Partition historiography is the tension between macro-scalar teleologies and micro-spatial realities, and that resolving this tension requires a fundamental shift toward new practices of archive-making one that moves beyond official colonial repositories to unearth the hidden avenues of localized agency, working-class dynamics, and everyday bureaucratic power that actually executed the division on the ground. By critically evaluating the historiographical trajectory across five major waves colonial memoirs, nationalist teleologies, subaltern and gendered turns, revisionist spatial micro-histories, and localized typologies of violence this study demonstrates that 1947 cannot be understood as a singular, uniform national event. Instead, it was an assemblage of localized, hyper-situational transformations where municipal power dynamics, occupational structures, and administrative complicities interacted to execute the rupture. Ultimately, this paper proposes a unified spatial-situational framework anchored in critical archive-making to open new avenues for historicizing the postcolonial state and its enduring borders.

Keywords: Partition Historiography, Archive-Making, Local History, Community Violence, Subaltern Studies, Retributive Genocide, Decolonization