Transcending antagonism in South Asia: advancing agonistic peace through the Partition Museum

ABSTRACT

India and Pakistan are entrenched in an antagonistic relation that is constantly on the verge of, once more, developing into an armed conflict. There are, presently, no signs of conciliatory initiatives on the level of state-to-state interactions, which, contrariwise, tend to uphold incompatible conceptions of regional order, nationhood and the Partition as a constitutive moment. The latter further adds to the main obstacles to dialogue and cooperation, which include emphatic disagreements on territorial claims. It, moreover, reifies ideas of national belonging along communal lines. The article analyses the Partition Museum in Amritsar as a rare opportunity to, in an agonistic manner, challenge and undo the antagonism that was enacted in 1947 and that has deepened ever since. While it succeeds in actuating a shift away from rigid friend-enemy imageries and dichotomous views of wrongdoing, it fails to decisively critique and unsettle the originary binary that underpins and propels the conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Agonism
• peace
• museum
• India
• Pakistan
• the partition

The clock at Anarkali Chowk [in Lahore] had gotten stuck at five past seven. Time had stopped. Its feet were stuck. […]. Maybe history had made a mistake. Maybe time could not keep pace with it.¹

Introduction

Ever since the demise of British India in 1947, India and Pakistan have been locked into a conflictual relationship that has led the two states to repeatedly engage in military mobilisation and full-scale war. Even in times of de-escalation and a joint commitment to forms of diplomatic exchange that seek to effectuate less hostile interaction, inter-state relations have persistently been marked by deep-seated antagonism and mutual mistrust. There are, at present, no manifest solutions to the tense and precarious relationship, and a widely espoused view is that enmity and irreconcilable alterity are intrinsic to it.²

The notion of innate estrangement and discord is grounded in two core assumptions. First, both states came into being through ‘the Partition’, which installed and naturalised an imagery of independent India and Pakistan as representing dissonant national imaginaries and incongruent territorial claims.³ Second, a continuous politicising of the past has, from the outset, sustained and reinforced the respective majoritarian nationalisms – and their negative representations of religious minorities – that have come to dominate in India and Pakistan.⁴ For instance, a recurring pattern is that ‘[e]very time a clash based on religious identity happens in India, memories of 1947 are invoked, even when Pakistan has no role to play in the event’.⁵ The long-held concern that the religion-based communalism that the Partition consisted of and manifested would one day overwrite and eradicate ‘a shared heritage of communal coexistence from collective memories’⁶ has largely been realised, both within and between the two states.

Representations of the Partition and its lasting impact on the prospects for more peaceable relations have, consequently, become tied to what Shinko refers to as ‘the imposition of hegemonic disciplinary orders’.⁷ The divergent majoritarian nationalisms, especially through their harbouring of incompatible perceptions of the past, structure and affect inter-state relations as well as majority–minority relations within each state. While the ‘enduring rivalry’ on the inter-state level is epitomised by ‘stasis’,⁸ religious minorities in both India and Pakistan find themselves caught up in the broader geopolitics of the conflict. Nation building efforts since 1947 – whether secular or religious in character – have, hence, augmented the impression that the two nation state projects equal extreme opposites and that they proceed, indefinitely, along divergent yet mutually opposed trajectories.

However, according to an emerging literature on agonistic peace,⁹ there should, even in conflict settings as solidified and stagnant as that between India and Pakistan,¹⁰ be scope for adversarial identities to be reconciled in a peaceful manner through agonistic forms of interaction and dialogue. The posited ideal is that ‘former enemies’ will come to regard one another ‘as “sharing a common symbolic space”’.¹¹ Given its core propositions that peace should be conceived of ‘as inherently relational’ and that ‘malfunctioning relations’ are, thus, possible to remake into ‘agonistic encounters between adversaries’,¹² there is a consequent expectation that hegemonic narratives of friend-enemy distinctions and a conflict’s history might – and, most of the time, will – be subjected to critique, decentring and transformation. In scholarship on agonistic peace, dissensus is both deemed ‘inevitable’ and to represent ‘a progressive source of social life’.¹³ The twofold aim of agonistic peace is, accordingly, to turn ‘enemy relations into respect among adversaries’ at the same time as ‘non-violent conflict, plurality, and dissensus [remain] at the core of that relationship’.¹⁴ This means that, ‘[f]or hegemony to be […] subjected to dissent and contestation, spaces for interaction must be provided and safeguarded’.¹⁵ It is the latter point, i.e. about ‘agonistic public spaces’,¹⁶ that the present article specifically delves into.

The widespread depiction and parallel acceptance of enmity as the core quality of India–Pakistan relations, nevertheless, confirm Maddison’s claim that ‘war and violence [...] produce different histories; different understandings of the past that can become the most contested aspect of any reconciliation process’.¹⁷ Incommensurable perceptions of the founding violence, the legacy of anti-imperialism and the need for self-determination were in circulation already in 1947 and have strongly influenced narrations of the Partition ever since, which has made it impossible ‘to secure a common frame of reference to make sense of past events’.¹⁸ In India and Pakistan, the violence associated with the Partition continues to undergird ‘the splits between political communities, embedding their separation in the very structures of their memories’.¹⁹ There is, thus, hardly any space – in or between the two states – for ‘historically delegitimized […] conflict narratives’²⁰ to be voiced, disseminated and critically reflected upon.

In light of the above, the present article maintains that it is necessary to explore the potential that an agonistic peace approach holds for unsettling the ossified character of current friend-enemy projections. Rather than to wait for diplomatic openings that will result in cooperation on such things as trade, security and climate issues to emerge, we need to engage agonistic peace in the spaces, at the very sites, in which it already has a presence. This position coheres with the view that ‘it is […] urgent to explore the locality of peace […] in order to understand the dynamics of constructing a sustainable and grounded peace’ – a peace that, nevertheless, ‘cannot be produced, constructed or built without agonism’.²¹ In the case of the India-Pakistan conflict, it is important to keep in mind that any movement towards agonistic peace initiatives across state divides inevitably depends on a coeval process of reconsidering, challenging and transforming hegemonic disciplinary orders within each individual state.

As a consequence, the conflict as such, and in particular its totalising and predetermined ascription of ‘groupness’, has to be subjected to critique. The latter, as indicated above, requires a return to the very origins of postcolonial nation building and state making in the region. In other words, if we – akin to most Indians and Pakistanis – conceive of the Partition as a founding moment, is there a way of relating to its memorialising and present significance ‘as a progressive force, driving societal change’,²² rather than as an impasse? Does a critical history of the event allow for the current ‘antagonistic framework’ to be replaced by ‘one where […] groups view each other as worthy adversaries’?²³ An especially promising site for probing and questioning the Partition as a perpetual source of conflict is the recently opened Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. The museum was established in 2017, through a private initiative led by The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT), and a sister museum will open in Delhi in 2022.

The museum in Amritsar explicitly aims to provide visitors with a ‘people’s history’ of the event, which it principally tries to achieve by centring the exhibition around oral histories of ‘Partition survivors’ and so-called ‘witness objects’ that have been donated by private individuals. Both types of material are deployed as artefacts that afford the exhibition with authenticity in the sense of allowing visitors to gain experiential and emotional access to the event, either by identifying with the first-person or eyewitness account of the narrator or by contemplating and affectively responding to the witness objects and their uncanny fusion of mundanity and its rupturing. The exhibition, thus, seeks to constructively galvanise ‘emotional and affective’ responses, rather than to erase or downplay these.²⁴ While the oral histories that are screened on monitors throughout the exhibition mainly consist of interviews with ordinary citizens who themselves experienced the Partition, the ‘witness objects are presented as testaments not only to their significance for the past owners, but also to acts of boundary drawing, upheaval and mobility per se’.²⁵

Another noteworthy facet is that the museum was purposefully established to address the long-standing silence in the public domain as well as in state discourse on the Partition as a dark and traumatic heritage of decolonisation. Against the prevailing tendency, in both India and Pakistan, to construe the end of British rule as the culmination of a successful struggle for freedom, independence and self-determination, the museum accentuates the more horrid sides of the transition. As such, the museum represents an ambition ‘to bring prevalent but less-heard narratives of structural violence into communal discourse’²⁶ and it, thereby, aspires to constitute – what Strömbom designates – a ‘[platform] on which agonistic contestation can take place’.²⁷ The museum, accordingly, contains attempts to, on the one hand, facilitate ‘[a]n epistemic openness to listening to the adversary’s narratives’²⁸ and to, on the other hand, compel visitors to reassess the transition from imperialism to postcolonial nationhood in ways that go beyond a lopsided celebration of independence. It remains to be scrutinised, however, if the museum destabilises as well as transcends hegemonic conceptions of nationhood and to what extent it, in this process, familiarises visitors ‘with agonistic memory and unsettling counter-narratives’.²⁹ Does it, that is, encourage ‘aporetic experience, in that it creates room for dwelling and doubt’?³⁰ In the specific case of the India-Pakistan conflict, such a refutation of givenness implies a critique of antonymous depictions of India and Pakistan and of the assumption that the nation, in the wake of decolonisation and territorial partitioning, offered the only viable expression of political community.

The Partition Museum and its attempted facilitation of agonism

It is significant that the lack of state efforts to address what the Partition meant, and continues to mean, for discordant conceptions of community and troubled state relations in the region has foremost – outside academic circles – been challenged by private initiatives, with the Partition Museum as the most prominent example.³¹ The museum seeks to amass and disseminate, as mentioned above, a people’s history of the event, by drawing on the use of oral history interviewing and the display of witness objects. Its stated purpose is to offer an exhibition that covers elite as well as everyday experiences of the Partition in a manner that transcends nation state borders and recognises regional and local dimensions of collective identity and belonging. It is, in other words, devoted to the promotion of ‘voices and narratives that were previously silenced within museum space[s]’³² and its existence substantiates the claim that ‘museums, largely perceived to be independent voices outside of direct [state] control, have increasingly acquired a position of responsibility and prominence’.³³

A significant detail is that its location in Amritsar, which is situated close to the India-Pakistan border, in a tangible and immediate sense connects the museum with the event. In 1947, Amritsar was one of the main scenes of Partition violence, migration and refugee rehabilitation.³⁴ The museum is, by visitors and museum staff alike, hence seen to embody what Violi has described as ‘a real spatial contiguity with the trauma itself’,³⁵ which affords otherwise merely ‘abstract ideas’ of belonging and estrangement with material qualities.³⁶ Rather than being equivalent to a marginal space or phenomenon, the Partition Museum is a testament to how ‘curatorial processes can be seen as part and parcel of processes of peace formation’³⁷ and to how museums allow ‘visitors […] to intimately encounter the objects, institutions, selves, and others of international relations’.³⁸

By placing the Partition as a haunting and dissonant heritage at the centre of the core exhibition, the museum puts emphasis on agonistic forms of identity transformation, i.e. on those that do not, in a manifest sense, simply affirm or reproduce securitised group distinctions based on nationhood or religion. In line with this, the museum accommodates the three ‘narrative functions’ that Hansen associates with agonistic peace: it encourages narratives that challenge hegemonic delineations of ‘the “ingroup”’ as well as ‘the “outgroup”’ and it confronts visitors with narratives that break with ‘the “us-them” divide of hegemonic discourse’.³⁹

It is clear that the museum, on the one hand, corresponds to a localised need to rectify a lack of public knowledge about the Partition and its long-term consequences, while it, on the other hand, is reflective of global trends when it comes to the memorialising of dissonant heritage in museum settings. With its intended intergenerational and transnational reach, the Partition Museum fits into a broader pattern, in which museums increasingly address difficult collective memories, in particular their polyvalent and plural interpretations and connections to ongoing debates about a society’s normative foundations. However, while comparable museums are found in other parts of the world, the Partition Museum deviates from how most other Indian museums approach contested and potentially controversial issues by actively attending to that which is deemed disturbing and unsettling.⁴⁰

It refuses, that is, to provide a depiction of the past that is geared towards ‘achieving an impossible consensus’ and instead offers a curation of the event ‘that accepts the existence of contesting perspectives and argues that only by providing a space for them to come together can any real progress […] be made in managing […] difficult pasts’.⁴¹ The museum’s objectives are, thus, aligned with a more general ‘shift’ among memorial museums, i.e. ‘away from the dominant culture’s view of history to one shaped by popular culture, oral history, labour history and the everyday’.⁴² At the same time, the Partition Museum represents an even more ambitious undertaking, since it – in addition to the introduction of novel techniques and subaltern perspectives – tries to awaken the wider public to the possibility of regarding the Partition as an undetermined and still open-ended matter.

The latter is a demanding endeavour given the prevalent rendering of India and Pakistan as inverted and incommensurable nation state projects and because of the widespread acceptance that the Muslim League was foremost responsible for the Partition in the first place. For the Partition Museum to complicate and counter these beliefs, it does not suffice, for instance, to merely blur the distinction between victims and perpetrators or to alert visitors to the many possible futures that co-existed in the years leading up to August 1947. To pose a real challenge to what the Partition actualised and instituted, the exhibition must point to the ultimate groundlessness and possible contingency of the standard imagery of India and Pakistan as caught up in ‘perpetual, stagnant conflict’.⁴³ In order to further elaborate on this, let us turn to the actual content of the museum.⁴⁴

The museum depicts the Partition and its aftermath in a chronological fashion. The overall experience of visiting the museum, consequently, amounts to having undertaken a journey through history in a temporally linear sense. The first part of the museum is devoted to describing the backdrop to the event, with an emphasis on British imperial rule and the ways in which it both faced challenges from anti-imperial nationalists and generated divergent and conflicting visions of what would come after its termination. The second part attends to the migration experience by drawing extensively on oral history interviews and by exhibiting witness objects donated by and collected from, as mentioned above, private individuals. In this part of the museum, there is an accentuation of how elite decisions and behaviour impacted on the everyday lives of ordinary people. As a visitor, one is meant to identify and empathise with the interviewees, and a sensation of closeness and immediacy is supposed to be generated by the simultaneous display of the interviews on TV screens and the, more intimate, option to listen to them by using headphones. In the third and final part, visitors encounter stories of individuals who were significantly affected by the Partition yet were able to turn tragic fates of migration, loss and suffering into personal success in independent India.

The Partition Museum’s layout and content are, hence, entirely congruent with Franklin’s description of the modern art museum, according to which the items on display are ‘collected, curated and exhibited in order to narrate a linear and representative history tracing a developmental path of gradual improvement to the present day, in ways that [validate] the present and incumbent power’.⁴⁵ At the same time, the museum consistently tries ‘to embrace disruption and to encourage visitors to adopt a new set of lenses that might seed different perspectives’, in part by turning visitors into ‘embodied and active agent[s]’.⁴⁶ Visitors are immersed in the sound of oral history interviews, and they encounter and try to make sense of installations and paintings that are meant to capture the suffering and violence of the migration experience.

However, while the museum offers an ambitious retelling of the Partition – one that, above all, makes it untenable to conceive of violence, pain and trauma as associated with specific religious communities – it does not contain explicit efforts to relate such a reconsideration of the past to the present. More specifically, it does not employ the Partition as a vehicle for questioning the ever-deepening ‘communalisation’ of Indian society and politics or the nation form as such. While it, in an agonistic fashion, advocates ‘the articulation of common pasts’, it evades the crucial task of conjuring ‘aspirations for a “common destiny”’⁴⁷ by ‘[re-politicising] the relation of present society to the past’.⁴⁸

A second limitation is that it is almost entirely focussed on narrating the Partition as it unfolded in the British Indian provinces of the Punjab and Sindh, which means that the parallel and equally momentous division of Bengal as well as the integration of the Princely States are not properly considered. Hyderabad’s forceful incorporation into India and Kashmir’s disputed status are, for example, not extensively commented on at the museum. One important consequence of the museum’s silence on that which lies beyond the Punjab and Sindh is that questions regarding India’s assumed unity and singularity do not figure prominently at the museum. A third inadequacy is that the museum, despite being committed to a transnational account of the event, primarily presents oral history interviews recorded in India and that only a few of the witness objects have been collected in Pakistan.

These shortcomings all indicate that the retellings and narrations that are on display at the museum need to be grasped as situated ‘within […] memorialization projects’.⁴⁹ Dandekar has perceptibly noted that ‘[o]ft-recounted memories become defining “scripts” that concur with the narrator’s evolving sense of self within socially accepted frameworks’, and that ‘Partition memorialization is […] a personal endeavor mixed with political practices rooted in the present’.⁵⁰ As a consequence, it would be incorrect to portray a ‘people’s history’ of the event, such as the one on offer at the Partition Museum, as ‘necessarily [constituting] the “other” of official records or […] as evidence for the subversion of […] nationalist history’.⁵¹ Indeed, as the aforementioned limitations indicate, the exhibition is consistent with Indian nationalist historiography since 1947.

Despite these evident deficiencies, the Partition Museum, nonetheless, doubtlessly corresponds to an ‘agonistic space’, one that aspires to ‘incorporate dissonant voices and “hot”, emotionally charged memory’ and to enable ‘bottom-up participation’.⁵² The museum is centred on the rare public recounting and display of how violence, uprooting and state failure were experienced by non-elites. By inviting visitors to critically reflect on their own sense of belonging and the foundations on which India and Pakistan rest, the museum offers ample ‘opportunities to safely engage in [agonistic] dialogue’.⁵³ Both during the visit and after. The museum, in other words, facilitates ‘the development, articulation and contestation of different political alternatives that can exist in parallel’.⁵⁴ However, as Lisle correctly maintains, even at more interactive museums, ‘the supposedly emancipatory vocabulary of active learning is saturated with visions of progress’ as well as tendencies to cultivate ‘consensus politics’ much more than ‘critical or subversive positions’.⁵⁵ This is often aligned with a tendency to reduce museums such as the Partition Museum into sites ‘where visitors commemorate and educate themselves about past atrocity in a tourist-friendly setting’.⁵⁶ As a visitor, it is possible to safely, and transiently, recognise shared suffering across communal divides while remaining committed to futures that are bound up with one of two distinct nation state projects.

An example of the latter is how the Partition Museum conveys a celebratory and heroic account of those ‘survivors’ who demonstrated an ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit and ‘made it’ in independent India. The museum, thus, transposes the heroism associated with India’s independence from the ‘freedom fighters’ of the anti-imperial movement to successful and prosperous survivors qua citizens (businessmen, sportsmen/-women, writers, artists, etc.). The final part of the exhibition is tellingly named the ‘Gallery of Hope’. Whereas it has been noted that ‘[h]istorical museums of war often instate heroic fighters at the forefront, depicting them as those who embody comradeship and sacrifice, baring a kind of sacred aura’,⁵⁷ the Partition Museum affords a comparable ascription of heroism to those who survived and managed to build successful lives in postcolonial India. As such, it signals to the visitor that India, as a nation state, caters and sees to the needs of its citizens and that the best way to relate to the past is to – through forward-looking exertions – forget and lay to rest.

Rather than leaving visitors with a truly aporetic experience, the exhibition abruptly ends with these ‘celebratory tales’ of entrepreneurship and individual resolve.⁵⁸ ‘[T]he past’, to draw on Violi, ‘is […] remembered and reconstructed from the point of view of the future, of the new post-conflict society to be built’.⁵⁹ Here Dauphinee’s questions about ‘the multivalent and competing narratives that comprise the worlds we encounter’ come to mind, i.e. ‘In the cacophony of voices, whose do we decide to hear? Whose do we privilege? How do we decide?’⁶⁰ One of many risks, also in the case of the Partition Museum, is that ‘[l]ogging the stories of oppression and violence […] is not enough in itself, for these stories are erected on the lives and deaths of those we will never hear, and they often simply reproduce the violence that destroyed them’.⁶¹

Given the above, to what extent does the museum, nevertheless, contain ‘agonistic remembering’ as defined by Cento Bull and Hansen?⁶² First, it ‘avoid[s] pitting “good” against “evil”’ in fixed and strictly binary terms.⁶³ It, in other words, does not place the blame for territorial division and the ensuing violence on a particular community, and it does not identify some as perpetrators only and others as their helpless and agency-deprived victims. Second, the museum is consistently committed to prompting emotive responses and to encouraging empathy with those who were most immediately affected by the event. Third, a considerable part of the museum consists of a detailed ‘reconstruct[ion of] the historical context, socio-political struggles and individual/collective narratives which led to mass crimes being committed’.⁶⁴ However, in the sections that present material related to the migration experience, the focus is almost exclusively on narrating stories of victimhood, rather than on the presentation of ‘testimonies of both perpetrators and victims’.⁶⁵ Thus, while the Partition Museum avoids ‘jettisoning ambivalence and installing morally clear narrative trajectories’,⁶⁶ it abstains from naming instigators and perpetrators of violence as well as from sharing oral history material that blurs the line between having committed and having been subjected to violence.

Memorialising the Partition and the main impediments to agonistic peace

A major hindrance to the articulation of polyvalent notions of what the Partition and the larger conflict between India and Pakistan denote resides in both states’ obsessive preoccupation with territorial integrity and national cohesion ever since 1947. Although every state routinely commits to the maintenance and securing of these elements, the Partition established a particularly acute need to mobilise and assert a sense of singularity and completion. Neither India nor Pakistan existed as nation states prior to decolonisation, and the British initially only intended to transfer dominionhood, not full-fledged independence. Both states, in addition, immediately faced challenges of an existential kind: they had to find ways of protecting their respective citizenries from the Partition violence, attend to the crisis developing in Kashmir and, as gently as possible, persuade and coerce the more than 500 ‘semi-sovereign’ Princely States to sign instruments of accession. The Princely States had, by the British, been promised the right to decide themselves whether to join India, Pakistan or become fully independent, in the sense of exercising internal as well as external sovereignty.

These origins of India’s and Pakistan’s constant search for Oneness, distinctiveness and naming of the abject and ‘extimate’⁶⁷ are at the heart of the India-Pakistan conflict. It is, however, important to keep in mind that ‘the question of enmity’ at the time of the Partition, unlike today, ‘was defined by intimacy and familiarity rather than the externality of the category of the foreigner’.⁶⁸ These exact matters are what the Partition Museum evokes and engenders among its visitors. This might, for instance, be illustrated with how a map of ‘political divisions of the Indian Empire’ from 1931 covers an entire wall in the corridor through which visitors enter the main exhibition. The caption above the map reads ‘where do you come from?’, which compels visitors to confront and come to terms with the fact that one cannot answer the question with ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’. In 1931, the choice was between British India or individual princely states. The museum, from the outset, elicits visitors to think beyond and, possibly, negate taken-for-granted conceptions of statehood.

A key obstacle to the recognition of multiple and not always compatible experiences and narrations of the Partition is the silence that has engulfed those acts of violence that did not fully cohere with the hegemonic notions of nationhood that were sanctioned and made corporeal through the event. That is, violence that was either enacted ‘inwards’ – targeting one’s own purported community – or which failed to cohere with the emerging nation state framing of political order and authority. Oral histories by women, children and Dalits (‘Untouchables’) that bore witness to harm, betrayal and displacement have, since 1947, been muted and disregarded in the public domain as well as in state accounts of the Partition.⁶⁹ The Partition Museum, conversely, accentuates such subaltern narrations and narratives, and it, thereby, stimulates public awareness of an agonist kind when it comes to making sense of the Partition and its impact on state-level conflict and societal antagonism. The museum provides space for dissensus, viz. between different oral histories as well as within individual accounts, between the elite-centric description of events that is on display in the first part of the museum and the ‘people’s history’ of displacement, bewilderment and distress that is brought to the fore in its second and third part. Visitors, consequently, encounter plural and not always accordant and harmonised versions of the past.

As noted above, the museum remains centred on India. With state borders that cannot be traversed by ordinary citizens, an ensuing absence of ‘people-to-people’ contact and a lack of reconciliation on the level of high politics, the museum tries to adumbrate new perceptions of the ‘neighbour’ – from enemy to adversary – by focussing on Indian, not Pakistani, visitors.⁷⁰ While this sets clear limits to agonist initiatives, the museum still ambitiously advances an agonist approach in a dual sense: first, by opposing the unified image of the national Self that every generation of Indians has been inculcated with since 1947 and, second, by acknowledging the many commonalities that exist across national and communal divides. At the museum, visitors are encouraged to dissociate the past (and the present) from a strict nation state framing that unfolds along communal lines. This is brought into sharp relief if we compare it to the Parliament Museum in Delhi – which has been described as ‘proudly, unashamedly patriotic, even nationalistic, clear about its goal of aiding the nation-building project’.⁷¹ In contrast, the Partition Museum does not advance or reinforce a view that the ‘Partition, while […] traumatic, did not materially change the identity of the Indian nation-state, or the trajectory of its history’, and it does not perpetuate a ‘nostalgic hope that the country might yet be re-united’.⁷² Similar points can be made about how the museum differs from the Punjab State War Heroes’ Memorial and Museum and the recently revamped Jallianwala Bagh Memorial, both located in or just outside Amritsar.

By rejecting the alleged innateness and perpetual character of the conflict between India and Pakistan and by highlighting the transnational traits of Punjabi culture and traditions, the museum, in addition, erodes and nullifies the validity of the so-called ‘two-nation theory’ – an idea that, in the 1940s, was mainly advocated by the Muslim League, yet which today is, in an inverted fashion, primarily endorsed by the Hindu Right in India. Whereas the two-nation theory was originally associated with calls for South Asia’s Muslims to have the right of self-determination and self-government, it is, at the moment, foremost tied to the positing of India as the embodiment of an ‘eternal’ Hindu civilisation.

The museum’s stance is notable since notions of an inter-state conflict between a ‘Muslim’ Pakistan and a ‘Hindu’ (or, at times, ‘secular’) India are intimately entwined with the Hindu Right’s essentialising portrayal of Hindus and Muslims as members of distinct and separate communities. In India, it has, for example, become commonplace to conceive of Indian Muslims as harbouring loyalty to Pakistan. Indian Muslims are, moreover, routinely targeted with communal violence and they suffer from socio-economic and political marginalisation. This idea of Muslims as lesser Indians and as abject others first gained its supposed validity through the Partition. Even though Indian state discourse has always blamed the British and the Muslim League for the ‘vivisection’ and the bloodshed in 1947, the current shift in India – from a secular and inclusive kind of nation building to one imbued with Hindu Right conceptions of citizenship, territory and history – further cements such a view. To fully appreciate what the Partition Museum tries to achieve, its eschewal of the standard framing of Indian Muslims as the main culprits, hence, must be accounted for. By refusing to, with certainty, identify victims and perpetrators, monstrous villains and untainted heroes, the museum embraces an agonistic approach to remembrance and conceptions of the past that becomes a critical commentary on matters internal to India as much as on the India-Pakistan conflict. One that holds the promise of undermining perceptions of communal divides as intransigent, natural and permanent.

Acts that memorialise the Partition have, since 1947, tended to corroborate the view that ‘[s]ocieties with histories of mass violence and deep inter-group divisions, steeped in memories and experiences of violence that vary among conflict actors, can perpetuate mistrust and sometimes-dangerous perceptions of the “other”’.⁷³ The Partition Museum, on the contrary, represents a two-fold agonist challenge to the cogency of these divisions: it seeks, on the one hand, to ‘accommodate plural views and [to] incorporate the relational aspects of past violence’⁷⁴ without insisting on the need for consensus and, on the other hand, ‘to ensure that the conditions and processes which may lead to mass crimes are not repeated in the present’.⁷⁵ The museum is, in other words, dedicated to ‘[curating] the conflicts of the past, with implications for the present’ and to allow for ‘collective healing and spiritual growth after traumatic times’.⁷⁶ It does this by ‘[w]idening the scope of experiences deemed permissible as war-’ or, to be precise, conflict-memory.⁷⁷

Agonistic peace: reifying or transcending divides?

Two limitations of agonistic peace, which the reasoning on the Partition Museum draws attention to, are its failure to fully commit to a conception of ‘identity categories’ as always and fundamentally ‘malleable’ and its resultant downplaying of a need – in many conflict settings – to promote an ‘expanding […] collective self ’.⁷⁸ In other words, is it really accurate to assume that ‘contradictory identities’ might ‘be reconciled’⁷⁹ in a peaceful manner, through agonistic forms of interaction and dialogue, if these simultaneously represent an affirmation of difference and distinctiveness? Is it, moreover, sufficient to aspire to turn ‘destructive political relations and positions […] into more constructive ones’, while maintaining that they will, most likely, ‘never dissipate’?⁸⁰ In the case of the Partition and its lasting impact, this would mean that individuals are categorised along communal divides – and that, by extension, essentialised and monolithic views of groupness are left intact and even upheld. However, such an approach would surely only make the conflict between India and Pakistan seem more unsolvable and it would fail to genuinely acknowledge that ‘community’ is always ‘a contingent achievement of political action’.⁸¹

The Partition Museum, in addition, intimates another possible shortcoming of agonistic peace by demonstrating the grave dangers of accepting the proposition that efforts to ‘depoliticiz[e] tensions and […] neutraliz[e] the very energies that buoy political action’ ought to be dismissed.⁸² Given the destructive and deadly history of communal violence in postcolonial India, which is actuated precisely by the release of an excess of such ‘energies’, it would be naïve beyond the imaginable to construe agonistic peace as necessarily bound to expressions of ‘political contestation’ that aspires to ‘[reignite] passion and emotion’.⁸³ If the conflict as such and its derivative subject positions are not radically negotiable and alterable, to call for the passions and emotions of the Partition to be reignited will merely amount to yet another extension of the cycle of war-like interactions between India and Pakistan and the constant demotion of Muslims to the position of liminal citizens in present-day India.

The challenge here is to, on the one hand, balance the demand to avoid elite-driven and partisan initiatives while trying to overcome the divisions that characterise post-conflict societies and to, on the other hand, remain committed to agonism ‘primarily in terms of an ethos that affirms the contingency and openness of political life’.⁸⁴ If we take the latter seriously, any kind of groupness – whether shaped by friend-enemy distinctions or the naming of adversaries – is, and should be, susceptive to re-evaluation. That is, the ‘difficult, fragile and contingent’ character of all sorts of commonality⁸⁵ has to be open to contestation, revision and to being abandoned. Especially in contexts, such as the present one, that are shaped by a constitutive moment that installed and afforded a sense of permanence to essentialised views of communal belonging.

These reservations are strengthened if we consider that a key trait of agonism is that ‘opponents, while they might completely disagree on most substantive issues, at least recognise each other’s legitimacy within the’ existing ‘system and share a commitment to that system’s basic values’.⁸⁶ In the specific case of India, it seems apt to question the extent to which a mutual commitment to the normative and ideational underpinnings of the political system has attenuated unjust societal and political hierarchies based on, for instance, class, caste and Islamophobic perceptions of Muslims. In most accounts, agonistic peace is, contrariwise, overly limited and limiting in its view of what agonism denotes. Rather than giving rise to resignation in the face of deep and ingrained divisions, agonism ought to point us in the direction of trying to ‘[act] politically in conditions of impossibility’.⁸⁷ It is not satisfactory, if we consider the specific example of the Partition Museum, to settle with that which Honig refers to as ‘[t]he mortalist humanist idea that we should […] find in grievability a new social ontology of equality’.⁸⁸ If visitors leave the Partition Museum with the impression that closure is achieved by expressing ‘forgiveness for or acceptance of those who confess their crimes and recount what happened to their victims’,⁸⁹ it has failed to catalyse self-transformation proper. It would then merely end up replacing disharmonious nationalist imaginings with an order defined by ‘[s]hared suffering, publicly acknowledged’,⁹⁰ whereas there is an equal need to resolve and come to terms with the many wrongs that the Partition was made of and set in motion.

In order for the latter to be achieved, debates about foundations have to be revived. Such a reopening or renewal requires that collective identities are not seen as inexorably conditioned by a particular conflict. With Honig, it might be argued that ‘even foundationally secured foundations are always imperfect, fissured, or incomplete and that these imperfections are the spaces of politics, the spaces from which to resist and engage the would-be perfect closures of god, self-evidence, law, identity, or community’.⁹¹ In contrast to her suggestion, agonistic peace as an endeavour does not foremost seek to erode and transcend ‘would-be perfect closures’.⁹² It, thus, neglects to pivot on and stress ‘the transformative power of politics’, and it tends to ‘affirm existing identities in a communitarian politics of reintegration’ instead of enabling ‘practices of generation and proliferation’ that take us beyond ‘the falsity and productiveness of the original binary’ between members and non-members.⁹³ This is also the point where the Partition Museum meets its limits. Similar to other attempts to memorialise the Partition, it appears incapable of doing away with the original (or originary) binary that India–Pakistan relations as well as the states themselves rest on.

The case of the Partition and its remaining legacies corroborate a view that agonistic peacebuilding ought to incorporate and advance two premises that are found in Honig’s broader work on agonism: first, that ‘[t]he people […] are always inhabited by the multitude’⁹⁴ and, second, that ‘[b]eginnings are never over’.⁹⁵ Instead of regarding existing adversarial subject positions as, in some sense, final or given and as providing necessary ontological security, agonistic peace needs to remain attentive to some of agonism’s most important questions about subject formation on the collective level, viz. ‘Are we a people? Or just a blind multitude? Or undecidably both? Is the lawgiver ours? Or someone else’s? Or no one’s?’⁹⁶

After all, as Lindahl argues in relation to ‘constituent acts’,⁹⁷ ‘who counts as “a relevant party” presupposes a foundational act that seizes the initiative to determine who is a party and what interests join a manifold of individuals into a collective’. To insist on agonistic peace as equalling ‘a peace that builds on institutions that are respected and accepted by all parties’⁹⁸ would, in the present case, correspond to a mere approval of the present order. Contrary to this, the Partition Museum is well-placed to facilitate an agonistic peace approach that resists ‘the desire to sublimate, rather than confront, a violent history’⁹⁹ and that breaks with the tendency to tacitly accept and constantly ‘reactualize, albeit ever provisionally, the prior, underlying agreement among the members of a polity’.¹⁰⁰ That is, to not take for granted the existence of a ‘fundamental agreement’ and ‘consensus’ to begin with.¹⁰¹

In addition to the important tasks of educating the public about what it meant to experience the Partition as a lay person, to correct an official historiography that demotes the violent upheaval that accompanied decolonisation and to raise awareness regarding the cultural traits and histories that are shared across state borders, the Partition Museum, as a consequence, has a particular responsibility vis-à-vis the region’s ‘minorities’. In India, this primarily means that the museum has to bring attention to how difficult it has become for Muslims to find recognition as equal citizens, rather than as ‘enemies’ or ‘adversaries’, and to the inadequacy of assenting to a situation according to which, ‘at best, groups in divided societies can aspire to an agonistic engagement, in which conflict across and about their deep, identity-based differences continues to define the relationship’.¹⁰²

There are two problems with this. First, it amounts to placing an entirely tenuous and unfounded demand on Indian Muslims to reach ‘mutual understanding’¹⁰³ on such things as the Babri Masjid as a past violation of Hindu civilisation and religiosity, the Partition as chiefly caused by South Asian Muslims, and the portrayal of Muslims as proto-citizens of neighbouring states. Second, it subscribes to a view of the conflict as inescapable¹⁰⁴ and that we might only hope to reframe it as a ‘struggle […] over ideas’.¹⁰⁵ However, for Indian Muslims it is neither a sustainable option to try to ‘“live together productively, even harmoniously with conflict”’¹⁰⁶ nor to remain satisfied with ‘ensur[ing] mutual recognition of the Other and its own history’.¹⁰⁷

Such a take on conflict runs the risk of being ‘overwhelmingly ontologically dyadic’, which, for instance, most likely entails accentuating ‘the intergroup relationship between victims and perpetrators but not the cleavages, alliances and tensions within such groups’.¹⁰⁸ It also fails to account for essential aspects of identity formation. As Flower-MacCannell notes,

[t]he paradox of a society based on the self-image of a unified ego, not a divided subject[,] is that this requires the ego to be an isolatable unit, discrete and countable, while this ‘undivided’ ego only exists as a unit by virtue of its inclusion in the whole, the bounded totality of a social order whose oneness and singularity mirrors and sustains it.¹⁰⁹

Supposed adversaries are, that is, only adversaries within such a bounded, yet never conclusive, totality.

Conclusion

Even though it ‘[provides] opportunities for divided groups to explore attitudes about the experiences of episodes of past violence that continue to polarise them’,¹¹⁰ the Partition Museum stands as a testament to the need of not being content with an agonistic peace that merely posits that ‘there will always be multiple truths, multiple histories, that must somehow coexist’.¹¹¹ In the case of the Partition, such a restricted objective threatens to leave us with an unwarranted parity between accounts that put the blame on one religious community or a specific political actor – which, in turn, are deployed to sustain antagonistic and discriminatory acts of nation building – and those that shift attention away from communal belonging or ‘ethnonationalist’ divides as the core constituents and catalysts of the event.

It is, to conclude, easy to approve of the manner in which the Partition Museum strives to make it possible for visitors ‘to recognize that the Other has a story, [by] re-humanizing the demonized enemy’ and of how it, thereby, undermines and disqualifies ‘simplistic, polarizing good-versus-evil narratives’.¹¹² At the same time, the museum – if conceived of as an effort to bring about agonistic peace – is overly limited when it comes to subjecting the ‘political […] and social structures’¹¹³ that made the Partition possible in the first place and that underpin its legacies to critique. As the above analysis of the Partition Museum demonstrates, even a curation of the event that brings a ‘people’s history’ into view, ends up reproducing and upholding the foundational imaginary of India as a secular and inclusive nation state.¹¹⁴ In other words, it validates, rather than questions, the myth of India as a site for agonism par excellence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), project no. 2016-02256.

Notes on contributors

Ted Svensson

Ted Svensson is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. His publications include Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition (Routledge 2013) and articles in Review of International Studies, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Governance.

Notes

¹ Fikr Taunsvi, The Sixth River: A Journal from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2019), 67.

² Paul’s inventory of the main impediments to ‘a permanent resolution’ remains valid, viz. ‘unsettled territorial issues, political incompatibility, irreconcilable positions on national identity, and the dearth of significant economic and trade relations’. T.V. Paul, ‘Why Has the India-Pakistan Rivalry Been so Enduring? Power Asymmetry and an Intractable Conflict’, Security Studies 15, no. 4 (2006): 601.

³ Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ted Svensson, Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition (London: Routledge, 2013); Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000).

⁴ Katharine Adeney, ‘A Move to Majoritarian Nationalism? Challenges of Representation in South Asia’, Representation: Journal of Representative Democracy 51, no. 1 (2015): 7–21; Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson, ‘Misrecognition and the Indian State: The Desire for Sovereign Agency’, Review of International Studies 44, no. 5 (2018): 902–921; Ted Svensson, ‘South Asian Nationalisms: Concluding Reflections’, Asian Ethnology 80, no. 1 (2021): 217–238.

⁵ Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Dissimilar Twins: Residue of 1947 in the Twenty-First Century’, Social Semiotics 19, no. 4 (2009): 449. See also Ted Svensson, ‘Frontiers of Blame: India’s ”War on Terror”’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 2, no. 1 (2009): 27–44.

⁶ Ashutosh Varshney, ‘India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism’, Asian Survey 31, no. 11 (1991): 998.

⁷ Rosemary E. Shinko, ‘Agonistic Peace: A Postmodern Reading’, Millennium 36, no. 3 (2008): 475.

⁸ Paul, ‘Why Has the India-Pakistan Rivalry Been so Enduring?’, 602.

⁹ While most of this literature is referred to in the present study, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a recent special issue on the theme. See Third World Quarterly 43, no. 6 (2022).

¹⁰ Where, as the epigraph conveys, even time has ‘got stuck’.

¹¹ Lisa Strömbom et al., ‘Agonistic Peace Agreements? Analytical Tools and Dilemmas’, Review of International Studies 48, no. 4 (2022): 691.

¹² Lisa Strömbom and Isabel Bramsen, ‘Agonistic Peace: Advancing Knowledge on Institutional Dynamics and Relational Transformation’, Third World Quarterly 43, no. 6 (2022): 1237–1238.

¹³ Strömbom et al., ‘Agonistic Peace Agreements?’, 690.

¹⁴ Ibid. As of yet, agonistic peace has not been presented and construed as a strict and replicable model for peacebuilding. However, Strömbom et al. have recently – in a promising first step – suggested how peace can be achieved through the presence and activation of three ‘tangible elements’, viz. ‘contestational dialogue, pluralism, and incorporation of dissent’. Ibid., 693.

¹⁵ Ibid., 694.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Sarah Maddison, ‘Can We Reconcile? Understanding the Multi-Level Challenges of Conflict Transformation’, International Political Science Review 38, no. 2 (2017): 163.

¹⁸ See Audrey Reeves and Charlotte Heath-Kelly, ‘Curating Conflict: Political Violence in Museums, Memorials, and Exhibitions’, Critical Military Studies 6, nos. 3–4 (2020): 244.

¹⁹ For more on the latter, see ibid.

²⁰ See Ayşe Betül Çelik, ‘Agonistic Peace and Confronting the Past: An Analysis of a Failed Peace Process and the Role of Narratives’, Cooperation and Conflict 56, no. 1 (2021): 27.

²¹ Annika Björkdahl and Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, ‘A Tale of Three Bridges: Agency and Agonism in Peace Building’, Third World Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2016): 321–2, 331.

²² See Lisa Strömbom, ‘Exploring Analytical Avenues for Agonistic Peace’, Journal of International Relations and Development 23, no. 4 (2020): 949.

²³ See John Nagle, ‘From the Politics of Antagonistic Recognition to Agonistic Peace Building: An Exploration of Symbols and Rituals in Divided Societies’, Peace & Change 39, no. 4 (2014): 485.

²⁴ See Nagle, ‘From the Politics’, 486.

²⁵ Ted Svensson, ‘Curating the Partition: Dissonant Heritage and Indian Nation Building’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 27, no. 2 (2021): 224.

²⁶ For the cited formulation, see Nilanjana Premaratna, ‘Theatre for Peacebuilding: Transforming Narratives of Structural Violence’, Peacebuilding 8, no. 1 (2020): 16–7.

²⁷ Strömbom, ‘Exploring Analytical Avenues’, 955.

²⁸ See Betül Çelik, ‘Agonistic Peace’, 31.

²⁹ See Anna Cento Bull et al., ‘War Museums as Agonistic Spaces: Possibilities, Opportunities and Constraints’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 6 (2019): 612.

³⁰ See Gail Ritchie, ‘Aporia: A Room for Dwelling and Doubt’, Critical Military Studies 6, nos. 3–4 (2020): 423.

³¹ As late as in 2009, Mukherjee contended that ‘it is difficult to imagine ever having a Partition Museum anywhere in India or Pakistan, not because the wounds are yet to heal but for reasons that go deep into the roots of our cultures, which traditionally posit less value to material artefacts than to an aural archive consisting of stories, songs, legends and folklore’. Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Dissimilar Twins’, 447. These assumptions were clearly wrong.

³² See Debbie Lisle, ‘Sublime Lessons: Education and Ambivalence in War Exhibitions’, Millennium: Journal of International Relations 34, no. 3 (2006): 850.

³³ Chris Reynolds and William Blair, ‘Museums and “Difficult Pasts”: Northern Ireland’s 1968’, Museum International 70, nos. 3–4 (2018): 15. While a recent initiative by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to designate 14 August as ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’ has generated a lot of negative and sceptical reactions, especially relating to the fact that Pakistan celebrates its Independence Day on the same date, media representations of the Partition Museum have, since its opening, consistently been highly positive and appreciative.

³⁴ Ian Talbot, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: The Aftermath of Partition for Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957’, Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 151–185.

³⁵ Patrizia Violi, ‘Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum’, Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 39.

³⁶ See Filip Ejdus, ‘Abjection, Materiality and Ontological Security: A Study of the Unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina’, Cooperation and Conflict 56, no. 3 (2021): 267.

³⁷ Stefanie Kappler and Antoinette McKane, ‘“Post-Conflict Curating”: The Arts and Politics of Belfast’s Peace Walls’, de arte 54, no. 2 (2019): 5.

³⁸ Joanna Tidy and Joe Turner, ‘The Intimate International Relations of Museums: A Method’, Millennium: Journal of International Relations 48, no. 2 (2020): 120.

³⁹ Hans Lauge Hansen, ‘On Agonistic Narratives of Migration’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 4 (2020): 559.

⁴⁰ Cf. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Rama Lakshmi, ‘Curating a Bhopal’s People’s Movement: An Opportunity for Indian Museums’, The Museum Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 35–50.

⁴¹ For these formulations, see Reynolds and Blair, ‘Museums and “Difficult Pasts”’, 14, 21.

⁴² Adrian Franklin, Anti-Museum (London: Routledge, 2020), 4; see also Violi, ‘Trauma Site Museums’, 37.

⁴³ Tanja Aalberts et al., ‘Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things’, Critical Studies on Security 8, no. 3 (2020): 256.

⁴⁴ While a detailed account of the museum is conveyed in this article, for an even more comprehensive description of its layout and content, see Svensson, ‘Curating the Partition’.

⁴⁵ Franklin, Anti-Museum, 5–6.

⁴⁶ See Jenny Kidd, ‘With New Eyes I See: Embodiment, Empathy and Silence in Digital Heritage Interpretation’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 55.

⁴⁷ Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, ‘Heritage as Future-Making: Aspiration and Common Destiny in Sierra Leone’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21, no. 6 (2015): 610.

⁴⁸ Cento Bull et al., ‘War Museums’, 614.

⁴⁹ Deepra Dandekar, ‘Zeba Rizvi’s Memory-Emotions of Partition: Silence and Secularism-Pyar’, Contemporary South Asia 27, no. 3 (2019): 393.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 393–394. Dandekar is rightly worried that ‘objectified and musealized individual oral narratives are in danger of being coopted and deployed within Indian and Pakistani nationalist agendas’. Ibid., 394–395.

⁵¹ Ibid., 403.

⁵² Cento Bull et al., ‘War Museums’, 612.

⁵³ See Sarah Maddison and Rachael Diprose, ‘Conflict Dynamics and Agonistic Dialogue on Historical Violence: A Case from Indonesia’, Third World Quarterly 39, no. 8 (2018): 1627.

⁵⁴ See Karin Aggestam, Fabio Christiano, and Lisa Strömbom, ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding? Exploring the Antagonism-Agonism Nexus in the Middle East Peace Process’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 9 (2015): 1739.

⁵⁵ Lisle, ‘Sublime Lessons’, 851.

⁵⁶ Audrey Reeves, ‘Mobilising Bodies, Narrating Security: Tourist Choreographies at Jerusalem’s Holocaust History Museum’, Mobilities 13, no. 2 (2017): 217.

⁵⁷ Efrat Ben-Ze’ev and Edna Lomsky-Feder, ‘Remaking Generational Memory: Practices of De-Canonisation at Historical Museums’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 26, no. 11 (2020): 1079.

⁵⁸ For more on the latter, see Lisle, ‘Sublime Lessons’, 861.

⁵⁹ Violi, ‘Trauma Site Museums’, 37.

⁶⁰ Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘Narrative Voice and the Limits of Peacebuilding: Rethinking the Politics of Partiality’, Peacebuilding 3, no. 3 (2015): 265.

⁶¹ Ibid., 268.

⁶² Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, ‘On Agonistic Memory’, Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (2016): 399.

⁶³ See ibid.

⁶⁴ See ibid.

⁶⁵ Cf. ibid.

⁶⁶ See Lisle, ‘Sublime Lessons’, 861.

⁶⁷ See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 110.

⁶⁸ Shruti Kapila, ‘Ambedkar’s Agonism: Sovereign Violence and Pakistan as Peace’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39, no. 1 (2019): 185.

⁶⁹ Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998); Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).

⁷⁰ Whereas the Partition Museum would ideally welcome more visitors from Pakistan, the current border regime that is in place between the two states neither allows for nor facilitates cross-border journeys and everyday engagements between ordinary citizens. From the perspective of agonistic peace, this, however, merely reinforces the need to provide ample room for and recognition of witness objects, oral histories, etc. that originate from the Pakistani side of the border and it, moreover, strongly implies that the museum – as long as actual travelling is obstructed – ought to have as much online and digital presence as possible.

⁷¹ Anindya Raychaudhuri, ‘Demanding the Impossible: Exploring the Possibilities of a National Partition Museum in India’, Social Semiotics 22, no. 2 (2012): 178.

⁷² Cf. ibid., 179.

⁷³ See Maddison and Diprose, ‘Conflict Dynamics’, 1623.

⁷⁴ See ibid.

⁷⁵ See Cento Bull and Hansen, ‘On Agonistic Memory’, 395.

⁷⁶ For the cited formulations, see Reeves and Heath-Kelly, ‘Curating Conflict’, 245.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 246.

⁷⁸ See Erica Lehrer, ‘Can There Be a Conciliatory Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, nos. 4–5 (2010): 282.

⁷⁹ See ibid.

⁸⁰ Cf. Aggestam, Christiano and Strömbom, ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding’, 1738 (emphasis added).

⁸¹ Andrew Schaap, ‘Agonism in Divided Societies’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 32, no. 2 (2006): abstract.

⁸² Cf. Alexander Keller Kirsch, ‘Introduction: The Agon of Reconciliation’, in Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution and Repair, ed. Alexander Keller Kirsch (London: Routledge, 2012), 4.

⁸³ Cf. Marie Paxton, Agonistic Democracy: Rethinking Political Institutions in Pluralist Times (New York: Routledge, 2020).

⁸⁴ See Schaap, ’Agonism’, 258.

⁸⁵ See ibid.

⁸⁶ Benjamin Moffitt, Populism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 97 (emphasis added).

⁸⁷ Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 26; see also ibid., 79.

⁸⁹ See ibid., 26.

⁹⁰ See ibid.

⁹¹ Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9.

⁹² Rumelili and Strömbom have, for example, argued that ‘agonistic recognition […] may allow for the preservation of ontological security’, thereby accepting as desirable what they, with Giddens, refer to as ‘“a formed framework” for existence’ – one that ‘allows actors to bracket certain existential questions about themselves, others and the object world’. Bahar Rumelili and Lisa Strömbom, ‘Agonistic Recognition as a Remedy for Identity Backlash: Insights from Israel and Turkey’, Third World Quarterly 43, no. 6 (2022): 1362, 1364 (emphasis added).

⁹³ See Honig, Political Theory, 75, 186; and Bonnie Honig, ‘An Agonist’s Reply’, Rechtsfilosofie en Rechtsteorie 37, no. 2 (2008): 188–9.

⁹⁴ Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3; see also Sofia Näsström, ‘What Globalization Overshadows’, Political Theory 31, no. 6 (2003): 820.

⁹⁵ Honig, ‘An Agonist’s Reply’, 192.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 187.

⁹⁷ Lindahl, Hans, ‘The Opening: Alegality and Political Agonism’, in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 63.

⁹⁸ Aggestam, Christiano and Strömbom, ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding’, 1740 (emphasis added).

⁹⁹ See Sarah Maddison, ‘Relational Transformation and Agonistic Dialogue in Divided Societies’, Political Studies 63, no. 5 (2015): 1015.

¹⁰⁰ See Lindahl, ‘The Opening’, 65.

¹⁰¹ See Keith Breen, ‘Agonism, Antagonism and the Necessity of Care’, in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 138.

¹⁰² See Maddison, ‘Relational Transformation’, 1015 (emphasis added).

¹⁰³ Cf. ibid., 1016.

¹⁰⁴ Cf. ibid, 1021; see also Aggestam, Christiano and Strömbom, ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding’, 1739.

¹⁰⁵ See Shinko, ‘Agonistic Peace’, 480.

¹⁰⁶ Cf. Maddison, ‘Relational Transformation’, 1023.

¹⁰⁷ Cf. Betül Çelik, ‘Agonistic Peace’, 29.

¹⁰⁸ See Tom Bentley, ‘When is a Justice Campaign Over? Transitional Justice, “Overing” and Bloody Sunday’, Cooperation and Conflict 56, no. 4 (2021): 396.

¹⁰⁹ Juliet Flower-MacCannell, ‘Lacan’s Imaginary: A Practical Guide’, in Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, ed. Samo Tomšič and Andreja Zevnik (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 78–9.

¹¹⁰ See Maddison and Diprose, ‘Conflict Dynamics’, 1623.

¹¹¹ See Maddison, ‘Can We Reconcile?’, 163.

¹¹² See Betül Çelik, ‘Agonistic Peace’, 31.

¹¹³ See Shinko, ‘Agonistic Peace’, 491.

¹¹⁴ See Raychaudhuri, ‘Demanding the Impossible’, 183.