“A Special Enchantment in Lines”: The Maps of Memory

Abstract

MAPS HAVE LONG BEEN INVOKED AS ALLEGEDLY OBJECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF SHARED MEMORY, and both imperial and postcolonial authorities have endeavored to invent or affirm a community’s past through carefully constructed spatial stories. For South Asians subject to the British crown, maps told a story of “legitimate” conquest and rule; for nationalist movements before and after 1947, maps were used to prove the permanence of Hindu or Muslim populations, stretching back to an eternal geographic past while gesturing toward a rhetorically limitless, yet territorially bounded future. South Asian writers, however, have frequently suggested that imperial and post-independence maps deny or diminish important truths about the past. Because maps generally tell single stories, alternative accounts are either ignored or erased; to draw a map anew— as in the case of the quickly determined, hastily arranged Partition of 1947—threatens to visually wipe away other “pasts.” Remapping the subcontinent cut along and across various nationalist agendas, but once new boundaries were set in place, the resulting geopolitical product helped set and sustain post-Partition communal claims. Maps made memories: what was once “who we are” or “where we are” became swiftly reconfigured into radically different notions of “us,” “them,” “here,” and “there.”