South Asian Studies

The Partition of British India in 1947 into the new nations of India and Pakistan, and the transformation of East Pakistan into a third nation, Bangladesh, in 1971, were events marked by violence, displacement, and multiple alienations.

In her brilliant new book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir discusses their impact, three generations later, on contemporary cultural producers from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Literary texts, archaeological digs, photographs, maps and other memorabilia are woven together to present a groundbreaking consideration of Partition.

How violence and terrorism impact on societies has largely been ignored in mainstream security studies. However, in the post-cold war order, endemic violence has become part of life of people across the world, more so in South  Asia. Within the current debates in security studies and efforts to make security conceptions more people-centred, the issue of violence finds some primacy.

This is the First book-length account of the West by a South Asian.  Mirza Sheikh l’tesamuddin,  a Bengali munshi  who had Served the East India Company before becoming a  Mughal Courtier,  was Sent by Badshah Shah Alam II on a Diplomatic Mission to the British Court. He set sail in January 1766, and though nothing came of the mission, his journey of nearly  three years  resulted in an Extraordinary memoir  in Persian, Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet or ‘Wonderful Tales about Europe’ .

This volume is a compendium of the papers presented at the Conference convened jointly by Wilton Park and the South Asia Centre for Policy Studies (SACEPS) which was held at Wilton Park, Sussex, UK, during 11-12 October 2004. The Wilton Park Conference was a follow up of the twelfth SAARC Summit held in Islamabad in January 2004, and originates from a collective endeavour to provide inputs to the thirteenth SAARC Summit scheduled to be held in Dhaka during 9-11 January 2005.