On the Practice, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Israel–India Comparative Project

In 1947/48, two territories that had been under British administration – India and Palestine – underwent partition. In South Asia the partition resulted in the formation of two independent states, India and Pakistan, and was accompanied by massive bloodshed and the uprooting of an estimated 18 million refugees. In the Middle East it led to one independent state, Israel, and the statelessness of another people, the Palestinians. This article – based on my experiences teaching the English-language literature of the South Asian Partition to Palestinian and Jewish students at the University of Haifa – tries to articulate the problems and payoffs of a comparative study of the two partitions, offering my insights as the prelude to a larger methodological discussion of the India-Israel comparative project. I suggest a critical textual methodology that reads the literature of the South Asian Partition as mediated through our own local context and culture. An analysis of the English language, here both a foreign language and a necessary context, articulates a comparative position that reads the complex ideology of the text through a similarly complex ideology of the location of its reading.