Displacement, Trauma, Memory and Migration: Recognizing a Socio-political Struggle of the Indian Subcontinent from Saadat Hasan Manto's ‘Toba Tek Singh’ (1955) to Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019)

Abstract

For Indian literature, the partition of the Indian soil came as a catastrophe but it blessed the world with Saadat Hasan Manto. He had already established his name as a screenwriter in Bombay film industry and was a phenomenal part of Progressive Writers Association, before India was divided into two and he had to move to the other side of the border with his family. His life was nothing short of a rollercoaster ride and his experienced reality was captured by his pen in the stories like ‘Toba Tek Singh’(1955), ‘Thanda Gosht’(1950), ‘Khol Do’(1948) etc. The minutest and the most emotional representation of the aftermath of partition in his works goes beyond the definition of fiction. A modern day great and one of the finest postcolonial Indian Anglophone writers till date- Amitav Ghosh is another author whose writings often brood beyond the peripheries of fiction. His thoroughly-researched novels offer a scope of interdisciplinary, or even sometimes intertextual re-reading. I plan to take up Manto's ‘Toba Tek Singh’ (1955) and Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) as primary texts for a comparative study. The major themes common between these two texts, and between the authors as well, are displacement and migration. But drastic changes in approach towards memory and migration, from a personal and a political point of view, have taken place in between Manto's time and that of Ghosh. I will largely be touching upon the junctures of the radical change with the help of theories of postcolonialism, trauma studies, memory studies and theories of migration put forth by the likes of E.G. Ravenstein and Everett Lee. Other works by Manto and Ghosh will also be referred to on purpose. My paper will try to the metaphorical journey of Indian subcontinental sentiments from the historical past represented by Manto to the historic present that Ghosh writes about.