Cartography of Absence - An Inquiry Into Independence as Ritual Mutilation

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Case I. The Preliminary Surgical Loss

When the Union Jack came down in 1947, India was declared free, yet the map bled from its edges. Millions were displaced in the Partition, the world’s largest mass migration, and an estimated one to two million people were killed in communal violence. Freedom arrived, but it arrived circumcised. Its territory, cultures, and histories were cut away in order to fit a singular nationalist vision. In the nationalist narrative, this was a triumphant severance, the painful but necessary price of birth. But as postcolonial theorists like Homi K. Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee have argued, the “midnight moment” was not just the acquisition of sovereignty; it was also a moment of mimicry, where the newly independent state inherited the bureaucratic, linguistic, and hierarchical structures of its colonisers. The removal of the British was accompanied by an internal replication of their modes of control.

The claim I wish to make here is that freedom, in both its political and personal registers, often carries within it the logic of circumcision: something that is removed, allegedly for purification, protection, or a higher cause, but the removal itself becomes formative. This is not merely a metaphor for national birth pangs. Across cultures and geographies, ritual removal – be it foreskin, clitoris, language, land, or history, functions as a precondition for belonging. And just as in circumcision, the cut leaves a mark that both signifies and enforces membership, while producing an unhealable absence. The paradox is thus: Independence was framed as wholeness regained, yet it was produced by subtraction. The ritual of cutting, whether in the nation-state or in intimate cultural life, did not end with 1947. It continues as a controlled injury, ceremonially inflicted and legitimised through a language of necessity, in the name of purity, myth, and pride. To understand independence as ritual mutilation is to strip away its romance and examine its mechanics with surgical precision.

Circumcision, like independence movements, signals entry into a community, promises protection against contamination, and is often done without consent. In India, this meant not only ejecting British rule but also deliberately removing territories, peoples, and cultural forms that did not fit the nation-state’s emergent vision. Partition was the most violent manifestation of this logic, justified as the only way to ensure peace, yet permanently dismembering a social body intertwined for centuries. This loss was more than physical; it reconfigured identity through absence. The scar became proof of authenticity, “we bled, therefore we are,” woven into school textbooks, political speeches, and national holidays until the violence was subsumed into narrative utility.

Yet the bleeding did not stop. Cultures that had thrived in plurality, be it Sindhi in Pakistan, Punjabi in both Punjabs, Kashmiri Pandit traditions, tribal languages across central India, were pushed into extinction or exile. The amputations made at independence created a precedent: freedom equated with the cutting away of difference. A homogenising Hindi belt imagination increasingly pressed itself upon the fabric of the nation, smothering smaller literatures, dialects, and ways of life. Here the metaphor of circumcision becomes painfully literal; the nation celebrated the scar as identity, even as the wound continued to ooze.

And the cultural aftermath is everywhere. Take music for example, the folk traditions of Baloch, Sindhi, and Pashto singers, once shared across borders, now became “foreign,” pushed out of mainstream Indian soundscapes in favour of a Bollywood-driven homogeny. Writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, whose stories captured the unspeakable horror of Partition, found themselves hounded by obscenity trials, as if the state could cauterise the wound by silencing the one who described its bleeding. Even in cinema, films like Garam Hava (1973) showed how Partition fractured Muslim identity, yet such works remained exceptions in an industry that increasingly leaned on nationalist mythmaking. Today, the structuring of school syllabi reflects this loss too. Urdu literature, once central to India’s composite culture, was steadily diminished, replaced by a Sanskritised Hindi designed to serve the idea of a “pure” India. The irony is that in trying to preserve a mythic “whole,” the country sacrificed much of its lived complexity. The bleeding continues, not because the wound was accidental, but because the cut was foundational. What was excised in 1947 keeps haunting us in the form of disappearances, erasures, and silences.

This process is not value-neutral. In circumcision, the decision lies with elders or religious authorities; in independence, it lies with political elites and negotiating powers. The people are the site of the cut but rarely its authors. Nationalist discourse later recasts the act as a voluntary sacrifice undertaken by all. Independence, framed as liberation, was enacted as loss, carried out with intentionality, codified in law, and sanctified by tradition. The “freedom” we inherit is already shaped, scarred, by the choices of a generation that decided what must be removed for the nation to be “whole.” The danger is how easily this model becomes self-perpetuating. Once founded through amputation, the state learns that purity, unity, and belonging can be secured, at least rhetorically, through further removals: expelling minorities, outlawing dissent, erasing inconvenient histories. What begins as a single operation becomes a political habit. To speak of independence as ritual mutilation is therefore diagnostic: the founding moment sets the terms for future violence, embedding in the national psyche the idea that wholeness comes only through subtraction.

Case II. Complicating the Claim & Closing Arguments

Now, not all amputations are born of malice. Some are performed to save a life. Ending colonial rule did require removing certain institutions: the Royal Indian Navy’s subservience to the Crown, exploitative trade monopolies, and the language of racial superiority in law. A body ravaged by occupation cannot recover without shedding the gangrenous parts of its past. This was a necessary surgery. But the danger lies in what follows. The foundational amputation, sanctified by survival rhetoric, can become a habit. Once the state learns that identity can be strengthened, or at least made to appear so, through the removal of what it deems “unfit,” the knife becomes an instrument of governance.

India’s post-independence history shows this shift. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the Northeast grants extraordinary powers, effectively amputating democratic protections in the name of security. The abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir is framed as integration, but its unilateral execution and silencing of dissent function more like cauterisation—sealing the wound without addressing its cause. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam reduces belonging to paperwork, amputating communities who have lived on the land for generations. Each act appeals to unity, stability, or progress, carrying the inherited logic of the original independence cut: to save the whole, remove the part.

This logic also bleeds into culture. Urdu, once the lingua franca of poetry, is increasingly marginalised in public education. Regional cinemas, Manipuri, Bodo, Khasi, struggle for survival under the overwhelming shadow of Bollywood. Folk art forms like Tamasha or Nautanki, once thriving, are now treated as curiosities rather than living traditions. Even food is politicised. Beef bans dictate taste, amputating culinary cultures that sustained communities for centuries. Each erasure is defended as “necessary,” a small cut to protect the whole. This pattern is not unique to India. It can be seen in the Iranian regime’s suppression of women, the Taliban’s exclusion of women from public life, and even in liberal democracies’ encroachments on bodily autonomy in the name of tradition or security. What begins as a one-time crisis response evolves into a governing principle.

In ritual contexts, circumcision is meant to be final. In political life, the ritual can repeat endlessly. The body politic becomes an object of constant reshaping, each cut defended as tradition, each scar re-narrated as proof of authenticity. The result is not a healed body, but one in permanent recovery, never allowed to live with what remains. The challenge is to resist the seduction of purity. The postcolonial state, forged in necessary loss, must ask whether each subsequent loss is truly essential, or merely the repetition of founding trauma. Freedom must be reframed away from exclusion and towards presence, not the presence of scars alone, but of voices, languages, and cultures that survived despite the knife.

-by Bidisha Dam