Disputing Borders on the Literary Terrain

Literature Compass, 2006

The division of British India into India and Pakistan in August 1947 was accompanied by the dislocation of between twelve and sixteen million people and the violent deaths of around a million. Punjab and Bengal, the two provinces that were divided, were the most affected but so were other parts of the country. After all, mixed populations (Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, and so on) were more the norm than not in rural and urban India, making the very notion of two homelands, one with a Muslim majority and another with a Hindu majority, somewhat difficult to realize. Apparently the leadership expected what was euphemistically referred to as “an orderly exchange of population” in spite of the fact that the boundaries were officially announced on August 17, 1947, that is, after the actual transfer of power to the two successor states on August 14–15, 1947. Individuals, families, and communities that found themselves on the “wrong” side of the border were dispossessed of land and home, faced with the threat of bodily harm, spent months on the road and in refugee camps, and began the long process of resettlement. The place where the shock and disbelief first register, as do attempts to negotiate an impossible history of violence, is the literary text. This article attempts to introduce a literature that self-identifies with this traumatic historical experience. Partition literature is best contextualized by developments in two academic, disciplinary fields: history and literary criticism. Disciplinary history has only recently acknowledged the need for a social history of Partition and literary criticism has only recently expanded to allow for ways of discussing a traumatic literature other than the limiting one of “literariness.” Thus the article attempts to interweave a discussion of Partition literature with a discussion of shifting critical approaches to it. By beginning with a look at Partition's erasure in disciplinary history, the article aims to encourage the readership to consider ways in which the historiographical has informed or shaped Partition literature and the history of its reception.

IJBAR (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BASIC AND APPLIED RESEARCH), 2019

Partition encompasses the division of a given territory peacefully and efficiently. The Partition of India in 1947, sordidly, led to a holocaust. The Holocaust took one million lives and an equal number being either displaced or rendered missing or refugee (Mufti 55). The Partition, ironically, has become bread and butter to politicians and capitalists on both sides of the border. Invariably these state operators are being operated by some non-state actors residing thousands of miles away from the site of strife and safe from being suspected or implicated. Surprisingly, little fiction of considerable importance and proportion on the Partition is available. The available literature is, again, not proportionate to the effects it had on the lives of people. The problem is not indecipherable though. Partition is a significant issue in the history of India and Pakistan with an ever-evolving pertinence. Now and then it rises from its ashes and claims lives. Sometimes the losses are of catastrophic proportion. There is no particular intellectual or rational constant on which a writer can delve for a long time while handling it. Emotions have always taken the upper hand while discussing Partition. The Partition and its ever-changing algorithm are comparable with the Israel-Palestine issue in the Middle-East. This paper has steered clear of such lopsided emotional discourses and focussed on the feel the universal vibes in the writings of some prominent writers of Pakistan and India who saw the dark days of Partition and subsequently ventilated their experiences in prose and verse. Through the looking glass of their writings, this paper will look-within the limited span of a research paper, of course-at the fate of humanity during a tumultuous phase in the history of two-nations, many partitions.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

Saundarya is a Junior Research Fellow, pursuing M.Phil. in English from the University of Delhi. She researches Dalit literature and culture and explores the politics of marginal literature and its representation. She has an M.A. in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. In her spare time, she experiments with her brush and paints anything and everything.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in …

Indian Partition fiction, on the one hand, records man's bestiality and savagery and on the other, attests to the fact that man is essentially sincere, committed to upholding humanity to survive and sustain itself. The paper contends to examine the fundamental goodness of some characters, which the Indian tradition underlines. By analyzing certain characters from Chaman Nahal's Azadi, Khuswant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas, Saadat Hasan Manto's short stories and two Indian films, Mr. and Mrs. Iyar, directed by Aparna Sen and Meghe Dhaka Tara by Ritwik Ghatak, the writer tries to bring home the truth that frenzy of insanity is not final and amidst the pall of darkness and threats of insanity, there is a ray of hope.

Yojana, 2022

2006

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Indialogs, 2016

Partition is a complex historical reality that continues to puzzle the minds of scholars, historians and imaginative writers. Ever since its occurrence, they have endeavored to comprehend the subtle nuances of the complex strands that shaped the making of this seminal event. Through a comparative analysis of Singh's Train to Pakistan and Sahni's Tamas, the present study attempts to examine, how the profoundly sensitive and deeply perceptive imagination of both Singh and Sahni create texts which re-enact, with sheer clarity and force, the violent happenings of partition. Thus they enable the readers to revision the complexities involved, create awareness/consciousness in them regarding those historical blunders, the consequences of which are still borne by the people, and also urge them to revise/reform their beliefs, thinking and practices so that their present as well as future is safeguarded against such catastrophic events.

This research aims to explore the heterogeneous realm of South Asian Literature in determining the public sphere of Partition of India and its integrational repercussions on the South Asian space. In this context, the study would focus on Indian and Pakistani writers Bapsi Sidhwa and Khushwant Singh in particular. Historiographic metafiction is studied as a determinant of public sphere and private sphere bearing a consequential approach to the region. The objective of this research is to explore South Asian literature pertaining to the event of partition and expound upon its role on the varied yet interconnected realm of South Asia. There is a gap in the studies with reference to South Asian Literature and its application on public sphere.

The last official colonial agenda and the first step towards methodized decolonization drawn and materialized by British supremacy that cursed the lives of millions is India's partition in 1947. The event of partition made space for basically two types of literary approaches: in the first phase, writers concentrated on the depiction of overwhelming violence and incredible confusion and in the second, came a revised form of narrative, a contrapuntal mode of conceiving partition and its various receptions apart from the metanarratives. The second body of writings celebrates a subversive critical engagement concentrated on the cosmopolitan modes of diasporic existence and attempted to bridge the boundaries of transnational, cultural, and religious disparities. The partition constitutes a field of transformation and a reverse discourse that became the condition of multiple possibilities. It also created a framework for the resurgence of nationalism and a glocal positionality of Indian diaspora. The paper investigates a theoretical as well as the very personal fight and plight (along with the political hoax) of the protagonists to survive in changing realities. The protagonists in the course of this short novel evolve into more 2 compassionate beings and mature a sort of hybridity in this partition puzzle. It forges to heal the rupture and aporia and embarks on a potential resistance, intervention, and translation. The article envisions a gateway to rise from racial apartheid and reconcile towards empathetic partition possibilities.