A Clinical Gaze on the Partition Violence

- Ramanjit Singh

Brown University's India Initiative hosted Ashis Nandy to talk about the nature and the reasons for the genocide that took place during Partition in 1947. Ashis Nandy is a distinguished Indian clinical psychologist, social theorist, and critic.

He discusses the perversity of why people who had lived peacefully for centuries participated in the violence. Relationships between communities were strong and intertwined that they could not define themselves without the other community. Where one's self-definition was incomplete without the other.

The idea of Partition as a source of violence was not there for a simple reason that this kind of partitioning was never done in history. Using Partition as a solution to solving human problems only came from a world view of the rulers who thought that they had a better solution to the problems of the people they governed. It was grounded in amorality, completely detached from those who would end up facing the brunt of the sheer illogical nature of this solution.