Cracow Indological Studies Vol. XX, No. 2 (2018), pp. 179–206 https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.20.2018.02.09 Maria Skakuj-Puri (Independent scholar, Delhi)
[email protected] Through the Lens of Time: The Partition in Krishna Sobti’s Autobiography, From Gujrat, Pakistan, to Gujrat, India* SUMMARY: In her latest book, Gujrāt pakistān se gujrāt hindustān tak (2017), Krishna Sobti (b. 1925), one of the best-known writers active on the Hindi literary scene, presents the reader with an autobiographical account focused on the events of 1947, where her personal experience of the Partition is reworked and presented in the guise of a novel. This paper proposes to analyse the stylistic devises (double frame approach, switching between the third-person and the first-person narratives, use of the dialogue, etc.) employed by the author to achieve her aim by drawing on the vast body of academic work on partition, violence, trauma and memory both in the local as well the global context. KEYWORDS: Krishna Sobti, autobiography, partition, 1947, violence, trauma, memory Alok Bhalla, one of the first scholars to analyze literary representations of the Partition in the bhasha literature,2 starts his well-known and * Sobti 2017a. So far there is no English translation of this book and my ren- dering of its Hindi title into English tries to keep close to the original. However, fol- lowing “Afterward” in a very recent publication, under the rubric Further Reading there is this item: Sobti, Krishna. A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. Delhi: Penguin. (Introduced and translated by Daisy Rockwell) (Mastur 2018: 391).