The Return from India, or: The Analogical Imagination and Its Limits
Arie M. Dubnov
This article aims to provide the outline of an alternative historiography, reading the parallel histories of partition and state-making in the Indian subcontinent and Mandatory Palestine/Israel in tandem, while examining the limits of the analogy between the two historical experiences.
The first part of the article, historiographical in nature, is devoted to a review of scholarship that began drawing connections between these two areas. The review enables us to distinguish between two different research strategies that emerge from this body of literature and to begin developing, despite obvious differences, what I refer to as "analogical reading." This reading provides a solid starting point for developing a nonlinear, transnational history of the decolonization processes in these two post-imperial spaces.
The article's second part demonstrates how the historical reconstruction of an analogical prism among the historical actors may help us to understand better the roots of partition politics in India/Pakistan and in Israel/Palestine. Far more significantly, it may help us to restore a forgotten, rich political discourse that emerged in pre-partition Palestine and India alike, enabling national leaders to envisage the future of the regions in imperial-federalist terms and using imperial conceptions of citizenship. The article then turns to a discussion of the relationship between sovereignty and partition and shows that the analogical perspective did not disappear following independence but rather was transferred to a higher level, in the guise of the bureaucracy and legislation developed by the new states.
Despite obvious differences, then, I argue that the theory of partition in both cases was conceived in a colonial context, but that it shaped the character of the postcolonial state apparatus that was conceived as being intimately connected to the idea of separation. To this day, we find it difficult to cut the imaginary Gordian knot connecting the very act of creating a sovereign state from the theory and practice of the partition. Ultimately, these narratives continue to color both Indian and Israeli politics, which today appear more similar to one aneach other than ever before.