Proquest Dissertations

Exploration of the Language of Violence in South Asian Partition Fiction in English A Dissertation Presented by Beerendra Pandey to The Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University May 2004 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3131310 Copyright 2004 by Pandey, Beerendra All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3131310 Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by Beerendra Pandey 2004 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK at Stony Brook The Graduate School Beerendra Pandey We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Ph.D. degree, hereby recommend acceptance of the dissertation. He Cooper (Dfesertation Dfeser;n Director) Associate Professor of English Bruce Bashford (Chatiperson of Defense) Associate Professor of English David Sheehan Associate Professor of English /cy "”S. N. Sridhar (Outside Reader) Professor of Asian and Asian-American Studies State University of New York at Stony Brook This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School. ■ Dean of the Graduate School ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract of the Dissertation Exploration of the Language of Violence in South Asian Partition Fiction in English by Beerendra Pandey Doctor of Philosophy in English Stony Brook University 2004 The dissertation unravels the politics of the language of violence in South Asian English partition fiction. It contends that partition literature written between 1947 and the 1980s, with the exception of the short stories of Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, follows along the lines of nationalist historiography and fails to rise above the prose of otherness in its representation of the brutal violence that constituted the partition of India. By highlighting Manto’s subaltemist humanism through a discussion of his metairony, which locates and relives the relentless partition violence in the trauma of the ironic subjects, the dissertation proposes that the focus must shift from remembering partition as a mode of resistance to victimhood to remembering it as a trauma that has be confronted in order to come to grips with the realities of communal and neighborly tensions in South Asia. Ill Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In memoriam to my parents; Surya Narayan Pandey Vaidehi Pandey & Dedicated to my wife, Kalpana whose numerous sacrifices made the study possible Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents I. Historiography of 1947: Remembering Partition of India as a Trauma ...................................................................................................... 1-25 II. Irony, Metairony and Critical Humanism in Saadat Hasan Manto’s Partition Stories ......................................................................................... 26-44 III. Foregrounding Gandhi’s Sacrificial Death: Eliding Violence in Indian English Partition Fiction of the 1950s ......................................... 45-64 IV. Nailing Gandhi for Cracking India in Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges and Raj Gill’s The Rape.................................................... 65-89 V. Politics of the Language of Partition Violence in Chaman Nahal’s Azadi and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India............................................. 90-108 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Historiography of 1947: Remembering the Partition of India as a Trauma The decade of the 1940s marks a watershed in the history of India. It unfolded the events that saw the independence of India from the British colonial rule. The decolonization, however, took place simultaneously with the country’s partition into a primarily Hindu India and an exclusively Muslim Pakistan. Independence and partition came out of the womb of India’s struggle of deliverance from the colonial rule as twins: “A complex, contradictory reality is symbolized by 15 August 1947. A hard earned, prized independence was won but a bloody, tragic partition rent asunder the fabric of the emerging free nation. Freedom came, but with it partition” (Mahajan 392). For Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, partition “marks a watershed as much in people’s consciousness as in the lives of those who were uprooted and had to find themselves again, elsewhere” (“Abducted Women” 1). The defining moment of the partition of India was indeed the massive violence that constituted rather than accompanied it.' Even by a conservative estimate, ten million people took to the road in search of a new home. A million, however, did not make it. Trainloads of Indian and Pakistani citizens were killed. It is the singularly violent character of the event rather than what has been called its “high politics”^ that stands out: for the survivors “partition was violence, a cataclysm, a world (or worlds) tom apart” (author’s emphasis; Pandey, Remembering Partition 7). This ' Gyanendra Pandey, “The Prose of Otherness,”Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honor of Ranjit Guha, eds. David Arnold & David Hardiman (New Delhi; Oxford UP, 1994) 188-221. In the essay, Pandey criticizes Indian historians who, in his opinion, attempt to downplay the partition violence by using the word “accompany.” According to Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End o f the Raj (Calgary, Alberta: U of Calgary P, 2002), to say that violence accompanied partition “is to beg the question of agency” (340-41). ^ High politics, which refers to the negotiations among the British, the Congress, and the Muslim League, figure prominently in disciplinary history. Asim Roy’s “The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective,”India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization. Ed. Mushirul Hassan (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993: 101-131), reviews the historiography of the high politics of the partition of India. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. chapter seeks to investigate some of the ways in which the “high politics” historiography effaces partition violence. In order to do so, it focuses on the critique of the “high politics” historiography in the subaltern intervention, especially that of Gyanendra Pandey. It suggests, through the critique of Pandey’s revisionist historiography, that while the exploration of the inner life of the victims through a study of their memories— oral accounts, personal narratives and literary fragments—is indeed a welcome development, the focus must shift from remembering partition as a mode of resistance to victimhood to remembering it as a trauma that has be confronted, acted out (or worked through) in order to come to grips with the realities of communal and neighborly tensions in South Asia. A privileging of the gloss of nationality over objectivity characterizes the treatment of the high politics of 1947 in the histories of India and Pakistan. Depending whether the historian is an Indian or a Pakistani, the hero in one version is portrayed as the villain in the other. In the hero-villain swap game, the real subject matter of partition—the violence that constituted it—gets elided. While the elision of violence that the victims and the survivors suffered is deservedly criticized as elitist and modernizing in the recent subaltern intervention in the history of modem India, the political context that led to the violence in the first place cannot be dismissed either. A focus on the human dimension needs to be at least prefaced with a brief picture of the high politics that led to the violence. Markers such as community, sectarian strife and communal violence (besides the memory of pain and trauma) that receive the spotlight in studies of the human dimension of partition cannot be divorced from the political context that produced the markers in the first place. After all, they emerged from the protracted Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. political polemics between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League— polemics which gave rise to a set of oppositions such as nationalism versus ethnicity, secular versus communal, multi-religious pluralism versus Muslim monotheism, modem versus traditional, democratic versus authoritarian, and civilized versus barbaric in the discourses of the

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