Witnessing Partition

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 Witnessing Partition Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 Witnessing Partition Memory, History, Fiction TARUN K. SAINT Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 Memory, LONDONLONDONLONDON LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI First published 2010 by Routledge 912 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi 110 001 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 © 2010 Tarun K. Saint Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited D–156, Second Floor Sector 7, Noida 201 301 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-56443-4 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Negotiating the Effects of Historical Trauma: Novels of the 1940s and 50s 61 Partition’s Afterlife: Perspectives from the 1960s and 70s 115 Narrativising the ‘Time of Partition’: Writings since 1980 179 Short Stories about the Partition: Towards a Self-Refl exive Mode of Testimony 240 Reinventing Testimonial Fiction in the Wake of the Partition 294 Bibliography 309 Index 334 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge with thanks the help and/or suggestions extended by the following: The Partition Studies Group, including in its different versions Deeba Zafi r, Soofi a Siddiqui, Debjani Sengupta, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Meenakshie Verma, Alpana Kishore, Indivar Kamtekar, Anil Sethi, Mahmood Farooqui, Furrukh Khan and Shail Mayaram for many rewarding exchanges of ideas. Also Ira Bhaskar, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Isabel Hofmayr and Hina Nandrajog for materials and support at critical stages of the research. Dilip Menon, Rimli Bhattacharya, Aamir Mufti, Bidyut Chakraborty, Deepak Mehta and Prof. Harish Trivedi for discus- sions and materials that helped generate new perspectives. The Department of English, Delhi University, in particular Prof. Sumanyu Satpathy, for the invitation to present a paper at the seminar ‘Past the Post: New Literatures in English’. Ashis Nandy and Ravi Vasudevan for their generosity and patience. Colleagues at Hindu College, especially Tapan Basu and Lalita Subbu, for being there. The faculty at Jai Hind College, Mumbai, especially Kamal Jadhav, for the chance to present my ideas at the National Seminar on Partition Narratives. Urvashi Butalia for great Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 conversations during and after this seminar. Ravikant for many dialogues on issues previously explored in collaboration. M. Asaduddin for his patient reading of the draft of the manuscript and intellectual comradeship, as well as the invitation to be part of the workshop on Partition Literature at Jamia Millia Islamia. Prof. Alok Rai for invaluable inputs and critical encouragement. Suvir Kaul and Niaz Zaman for incisive critical comments, and Prof. Alok Bhalla for his meticulous reading of the thesis. viii Ó Witnessing Partition The in-house editorial staff at Routledge, especially Nilanjan Sarkar, and the anonymous referee. My father, Chand Kishore Saint, for reading the manuscript with care. Finally, I acknowledge the supportive guidance and incisive supervision of Prof. Udaya Kumar, without which this project could not have reached completion. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 Chapter 1 Introduction The partition of India, one of the most traumatic and disruptive events of the twentieth century, ushered in an era of uncertainty and dislocation following widespread collective violence, rape, arson and the displacement of millions of refugees across South Asia. Hitherto neglected aspects of this catastrophe, especially the experience of abducted women and divided Muslim families (for many of whom ‘the long partition’ remains a reality of everyday experience, as Vazira Zamindar argues), have been addressed in recent times, reconfi guring the historical archive.1 The basis for some of this questioning of prior assumptions about the historical experience of 1947 has been a revisiting of the literature of the partition. This corpus of writing has provided illuminating insights regarding the moral and psychic economy underpinning the near- genocidal violence that took place during 1947–48, as well as about the resistance to ideological formations that propagated such violence. Witnessing Partition focuses on literary representations of the partition, which, I will argue, offer crucial insights into the traumatic effects extreme violence has had on the collective psyche and imagination over time. Through contextual readings I hope to indicate the potential of selected texts, primarily novels and short stories, to stand as testimony to the horrors of collective violence.2 Major novels and short stories in English and in translation from Hindi, Urdu and in some instances, Punjabi, that negotiate Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 1 Zamindar provides an incisive account of the permit systems that were put in place in 1948 before passports were introduced by the two newly born nation–states, and the consequent problems of identity defi nition for many Muslims with relatives on both sides of the border. See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. See especially pp. 1–18, 79–157. 2 As we shall see, the study critiques the propensity to be infl uenced by dominant ideologies, as well as aestheticising/identitarian tendencies 2 Ó Witnessing Partition public as well as personal memories of the historical experience of the partition in North and Northwest India are discussed in the chapters to follow. Critical accounts of the partition and its afterlife in the social sciences provide the point of departure for the sub- sequent argument about the different strategies of representing the partition in literary writings across three generations from India and Pakistan.3 Theoretical debates dealing with history, memory, witnessing and trauma are invoked as I situate signifi cant fi ctional in fi ctional representations of the partition across three generations. I do not, however, attempt a detailed analysis of the problems with the com- position of testimonial voice in autobiographies, memoirs and other forms of life writings, or for that matter in interviews with survivors, even though I allude to important and sometimes ambivalent instances of such ‘witness accounts’ at various stages in the argument. My concern is rather with the interplay between the different registers of personal and public memory as encoded in fi ctional representations, survivor recollections and historical accounts. Kamra’s discussion of autobiographies and fi ctional texts about the partition as ‘psychotestimonies’ is pertinent in this regard, though with a different emphasis, which at times entails a too rapid sliding between witness accounts and fi ctional representation. See Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence and the Raj, New Delhi: Roli, 2002, pp. 165–200. 3 The experience of the partition in the East has been insuffi ciently addressed in partition historiography and literary criticism. However, this imbalance in partition studies has begun to be redressed in recent times. The major differences in historical memory and literary depictions of the event bring up questions that are beyond the scope of this study, which focuses on the specifi c context of the near-genocidal levels of violence in North and North-west India. For collections of stories about the Eastern experience of the partition, see Debjani Sengupta ed. Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals, New Delhi: Srishti, 2003 and Niaz Zaman ed. The Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 21:06 09 May 2016 Escape and Other Stories of 1947, Dhaka: The Univ. Press Ltd, 2000, as well as Zaman’s comparative analysis of novels about the partition, including novels from the East. See Niaz Zaman, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Joya Chatterji has made an important recent contribution to the historical debates on this subject, especially with reference to the experience of West Bengal’s Muslim minorities. See Joya Chatterjee, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–67, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 (rpt 2008), pp. 159–208. Introduction Ó 3 portrayals of the partition experience in context as modes of testimony that sought to articulate the inarticulable. The diffi culties of bearing witness in literary form to the cata- strophic dislocation of the partition are highlighted, as well as the fraught nature of such attempts to reconstruct traumatic and sometimes ambivalent memories of the event. Unlike a testimony in a court of law that becomes the basis for judgment in time-bound cases, I will argue that ‘fi ctive’ testimony as a paradoxical mode of truth-telling may achieve a resonance beyond the immediate context of suffering and trauma to which the writer bears witness. Derrida has shown how in its very attempt to exclude the possibility of fi ction, dissimulation, perjury and the lie, legal testimony remains haunted by literature.4 Important novels and short stories about the partition, I will contend, draw on literary precedents as well as the resources of individual and collective memory to make at times, oblique testimonial statements in a situation in which justice was rendered only partially.

Load more