Reflections on History as Performance (an afsana for Abu)

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Omar H. Ali, Professor & Dean, Lloyd International Honors College (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: I recently traveled to India with my father, a muhajeer —"refugee" — who was returning home after fifty years. After leaving India to go to Pakistan in 1954 during the turbulent years following partition which displaced millions of Muslims and Hindus in the subcontinent, he entered engineering college in Karachi. At the age of fifteen, cut off from most of his immediate family, he threw himself into his studies, spent the summers on campus (not by choice) while other students went home, and, as a result, ended up graduating at the top of his class. Soon after graduation he received a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Traveling from one end of the world to another, he entered yet another tumultuous time and place: the Jim Crow South, where the modern civil rights movement — whose most visible leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been inspired by the non-violent political practices of Mahatma Gandhi — was under way.

Additional Information

Publication
World History Bulletin, Vol. XXI No. 2 (Fall 2005)
Language: English
Date: 2005
Keywords
India, muhajeer, partition, afsana , Traveling, homecoming ,

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