Postcolonial Masculinity: 1947, Partition Violence and Nationalism in the Indian Public Sphere (Critical Essay‪)‬

If the humanities have a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear ... to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform (Butler, 151). [1] Much of the current scholarship on the vexed relationship between nationalism and gender, especially feminist cultural criticism and the postcolonial critique of nationalist discourses, has illuminated how women are constructed as signs and symbols of the nation or ethnic/cultural community in nationalism. As such, women's bodies often begin to bear the symbolic burden, as evidenced by colonial historians like Partha Chatterjee and literary critics like Sangeeta Ray, amongst others, of signifying culture and tradition, community and nation (Chatterjee, 233; Ray, 25). However, in the process of examining the gendering of nationalism, these critiques translate the relation between "gender" and nation, as one between "woman" and nation. This leads us to questions we are now prepared and need to address, about men and masculinity in the production of gender: What happens to men's roles, male bodies, and conceptions of masculinity in the discursive articulation of nationalism in the public sphere? How are male bodies represented, deployed and refashioned in the creation and contestation of nationalism?