Nostalgia and Ressentiment

As I have stated previously, there is a tendency within the musealisation and oral historical work on the Partition to conflate Partition survivors’ nostalgia for their homeland with a refutation of bigotry. The ethnographic vignettes I have discussed in the previous chapter contain a number of nuances that problematise this assumption. In the vignettes of both Gangaram and Pooran Chand, we see that their nostalgia for their birthplace sits beside their Islamophobia and faith in majoritarian doctrines. This is most visible in Gangaram, whose frequent visits to Pakistan and warm relations with people in Mianwali sharply contrast his vitriolic outbursts in subsequent conversations. How might we make sense of these narratives?

One possible explanation for this might be found in James Scott's (1990) idea of hidden transcripts. Scott understands all human behaviour as a series of carefully crafted performances, as a compilation of public and hidden transcripts. According to Scott, both those in power and their subordinates perform public and hidden transcripts. In Scotts’ reckoning, a public transcript is an ‘open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate’ (2). For the dominated, Scott sees hidden transcripts as an everyday form of resistance and an essential part of revolutions and insurrections. Hidden transcripts are not just ‘speech acts’ but also ‘a whole range of practices’. Scott sees the border between the public and the hidden transcript as a ‘zone of struggle between dominant and subordinate’ rather than a solid wall frozen in space and time. In that sense, the hidden transcript is not ‘secret’ per say but one that is performed among a ‘restricted public’, a carefully selected audience (14).

There is some relevance of hidden transcripts to Gangaram's story. After all, Gangaram's contrasting perspectives could be seen as the oscillation from a public to a hidden transcript. We might regard his secular and reconciliatory posturing among his Pakistani friends as a public transcript that he enacts in contrast to the hidden transcript he revealed to me after we had become more familiar with each other. Thus, Gangaram's Islamophobic outbursts and text messages might be seen as a hidden transcript revealed to a ‘restricted public’ (14). This would partly explain why it took me some time to access that side of Gangaram.

However, the application of hidden transcripts to this context is also problematic for a number of reasons.