While the bloody history of India's division invites unanimous regret and condemnation, retrospective views are divided. Indian views of partition are diverse with intellectuals from the left and right engaged in what are often zero-sum reflections. One narrative from the left is partition is an accomplished fact, and, nostalgia over "what if" counter-factuals is futile. Perhaps a noble instinct for harmony overrides the search for more complex enquiries into our past. Curiously, there is a general reluctance to deconstruct and critique the two-nation theory that formed the basis for partition. Is this because critical histories are seen as somehow equivalent to a conflictual outlook on today's Pakistan or even questioning its existence? Whatever the deeper reasons are, most narratives are unwilling to challenge the over determined master discourse: that partition was simply inevitable.

The narratives from the right are also prone to contradictions. The typical view is partition was good because it relieved India from a large section of a Muslim population that would have interfered with socio-political stability and undermined post-colonial India's resurgence. Contemporary Islamic radicalism and extremism in South Asia is viewed as vindicating this argument, evading the fact that such radicalism is a logical manifestation of partition. Such a crude communal construction is sometimes accompanied with a parallel outlook that highlights the adversity of partition — the collapse of a basic subcontinental cultural unity that preceded British colonialisation. This latter belief sits rather uncomfortably with the crude mirroring of the two-nation theory that endorses the division of the subcontinent on the basis of majority communities.

What do we make of these competing narratives? It is ironic that both the left and right, either explicitly or implicitly endorse communal constructions to formulate their histories. For the left, nationhood is understood largely via a Eurocentric historical standpoint where homogeneity is the only basis of a national community. The idea of India as an exceptional case with a deeper historical ethos and culture transcending religion and cohering an otherwise diverse polity is beyond the analytical repertoire of most left commentaries. Indeed, partition is not viewed and analysed as a conscious top-down political act but a natural, if regrettable, outcome of a Hindu-Muslim cleavage (regardless of whether these contestations were encouraged and perpetuated quite grand strategically by the Raj in the decades preceding 1947). For example, it is rarely noted that in the 1946 elections, despite all the communal exhortations by the Muslim League, the League received only 32 percent of the vote share in Punjab and 37 percent in Bengal, electoral results that can hardly be called a decisive referendum in favour of separatism. Anyhow, the fact that post-partition India with more Muslims than in Pakistan and a large Hindu majority can sustain a secular national identity remains a puzzle for the left.

For the right, the construction of an ancient Indian past built on a shared cultural ethos — that is part imagined and part real and not necessarily contingent on a precise territorial identity — views partition as a dramatic shock to India's unity. But for the political right, such a view is actually a deep contradiction to its own advancement and electoral rise since 1947. The political right, insofar as its communal ideology is concerned, would simply not have the traction that it has acquired after 1947 but for partition. Plainly put, there is a basic hypocrisy and inner contradiction in this worldview where the political right's ascendance as an electoral force was buttressed by partition even as strands of its ideological discourse espouses a subcontinental unity purportedly transcending communal ideas.