Narratives of cultural violence in 1947 partition: ‘Environmental Upheaval’ and ethnic-linguistic shift

Abstract

Most literature on the 1947 Partition traces its history through a homogenous and monolithic trope of violence limited to the big cities of Lucknow, Delhi, Kolkata and the states of Punjab and Bengal. Despite various calls, Partition’s impact on subregional languages and ethnic identities remains an under-researched area. This essay looks into a case of ethnic-linguistic shift in a Partition-affected sub-regional community from the princely state of Bahawalpur residing near the Hindumalkot International Border between India and Pakistan. This migrant community underwent a sudden language shift after Partition from a polyglot language space consisting of Bahawalpuri/Jatki/Riyasti, Landa and Urdu to a predominantly Hindi-Hindu space within the lifetime of Partition survivors. Through an engagement with their oral testimonies and Census data from 1951 to 1971, this paper investigates Partition’s impact on microregional languages and the polyglot ethnic composition of Punjab. It critically examines Partition’s cultural violence by drawing from Peggy Mohan’s application of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of ‘Punctuated Equilibria’ on language to argue that language shift in this community was not gradual but sudden, due to the ‘environmental upheaval’ of the displacement and rehabilitation period, leading to language disappearance within one generation. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.