Abstract: I return to the concept of the political to unpack the public life of Partition memory. In the past quarter century, the bid to document and archive the experiences of human suffering has produced a variety of rich accounts of Partition violence and expulsion. The 1947 Partition is now the subject of several virtual archives, museums as well as state rituals that serve as public memorials to the human tragedy that unfolded. Drawing attention to the aesthetics and politics of the popular history of Partition, I ask – whose wounds can be preserved, exhibited, and remembered in the public domain? What kinds of antagonisms are remembered or forgotten in the public performance of Partition memorialization? And finally, who precisely inhabits the category of “human” in this human tragedy? These questions allow us to critically reflect on the long history of silences as well as the increasingly de-politicized human subject of suffering that has come to occupy center stage in the popular history of Partition.