question_answer

Analyse the distinctive aspects of the oral testimonies to understand the history of the partition of British India.

Or

Examine various events that led to the partition of British India.

Answer:

1. Following are the strenghts and limitations of oral history:

(i) Oral history visits those areas of events which are not included in the formal domain. It also helps us in understanding trials and tribulations of common masses.

(ii) Oral history unfolds those mysterious vistas of events that helps us in graping experience and memories in det.

(iii) Oral history spots those points which would have remained in the dark sans oral sources.

(iv) Oral history permits historians to broaden the frontiers of their discipline. This provides information which is impossible to extract from government documents.

2. Following are the limitation of oral history:

(i) Many historians remain sceptical of oral history. They out rightly dismiss its veracity and put it in the category of fiction instead of facts.

(ii) In the absence of evidences, oral data seem to lack concreteness and the chronology may be imprecise.

(iii) Oral accounts are related with peripheral issues and that the small individual experiences which remain in memory are irrelevant to the unfolding to larger processes of history.

3. Oral sources helped us in understanding partition in a better way:

(i) Historians can use oral testimonies to collaborate written sources of the Indian holocaust and thus can help remove internal controversies and contradictions.

(ii) Oral sources have supported the official description of partition by providing a more personal edge.

(iii) The experiences it relates are pivotal to the story, so much so that oral sources should be incorporated to check and justice versa.

Or

The major four events happened that led to partition of British India:

1. Salt March

2. Quit India Movement

3. Hindu-Muslim conflict

4. Indian Independence.

1. Salt March: On 12 March, 1939, Gandhiji began walking from his Ashram at Sabarmati towards the ocean. Gandhiji wanted to say that the salt is made by nature by any effort, then why British make so much tax on it. This was very big

March that makes the British helpless.

2. Quit India Movement: After failure ofCripps Mission, Mahatma Gandhi decided to launch his third major movement against British rule. The Quit India campaign, which began in August 1942. It was a mass movement, bringing into its ambit hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians.

3. Hindu Muslim Conflicts: Early in 1946 fresh elections were held to the provincial legislatures. But the seats reserved for Muslims the league won an overwhelming majority cabinet mission in 1946 failed to get the congress and league to agree on a federal system that would keep India together. On the designated day, 16 August 1946, that was Jinnah called for a "Direct Action Day? to press the league's demand for Pakistan, blood riots broke out in Calcutta and spread to rural Bengal, Bihar, Punjab and all over the country. In some places, Hindu were the main sufferers in other places, Hindus.

4. Indian Independence: In February 1947, Wavell was replaced as viceroy by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten called one last round of talks, but when these too proved inconclusive, he common announced that British India would be freed but divided the formal transfer of power was fixed for 15 August..