Displaced enemies, displaced memories: a comparison of politicised memories of the Holocaust and Partition of British India

Abstract

The paper focuses in the first instance on the refusal of the Muslim Council of Britain to attend the newly introduced Holocaust Day in the UK on the grounds that it should be renamed Genocide Day. In the second half of the paper I show that Quaid-i-Azam ceremonials in Manchester held by diasporic Pakistanis to commemorate the birth death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of the nation, highlight a key dimension of political mythologising: it is a feature which stems from a notion of time as cyclical. A prior mythic unity will be recaptured in a visionary, utopian future. Prior external and internal enemies (in their current manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrity of the nation once more. Ideologies based on political myths thus draw on both the future hopes and the future fears of people. Even when the enemy is different, fear of a new Holocaust repeating a prior one within a "cycle of death and suffering" is an important feature of a nation's political mythology. For Pakistanis, the Hindus and British oppressors have been displaced by Jews and Christian in a never-ending cycle of suffering and death. Thus too, in Israel the Arabs have displaced the Germans, themselves manifestations of earlier enemies, Romans, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Egyptians in the apocalyptic political mythology of Israeli society. For those who experience racism and exclusion in their daily lives, fears of expulsion and genocide loom much larger than for those who move easily through more tolerant, cosmopolitan circles. The more bound they are by their narrow group's particular symbols and images and its specific history, the more apocalyptic a group's vision of this future is likely to be.