Rewriting Partition: Gender, Memory and Trauma in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 was one of the most catastrophic historical events that has subsequently impacted generations and will keep on influencing the posterity as well. Vazira Zamindar has coined a term ‘Long Partition’ to explain the lasting impression of this devastating event. Diasporas and Partition share a unique and symbiotic relationship. Partition triggered migration and further dislocations and can thus be held partly responsible for creating Diasporas abroad. Diaspora and Partition literature thus hinge on the dialectics of memory. The Partition of India generated a boom of a vibrant, sensitive, and poignant body of literature. The first and the second waves of Partition novels continued roughly until the '80s, but Partition manages to capture the literary imagination of writers even now. Contemporary Partition novels like Ice Candy Man (1992), Looking Through Glass (1995), What the Body Remembers (1999), A Life Long Ago (2012), An Unrestored Woman (2016), and The Night Diary (2018) are its brilliant examples. Shauna Singh Baldwin is a major novelist of the Indian Diaspora who calls herself a Diaspora dispersed by Partition. Her novel What the Body Remembers was published in 1999 but it was relaunched as a twentieth-anniversary edition in 2019 and is dedicated to her grandmother. The latter had personally experienced Partition and narrated its hoary details to Shauna Singh, and had inspired her to write the novel. What the Body Remembers is a partition novel revolving around Roop, Satya, and Sardarji. Considering questions of Partition's post-amnesia, memory, trauma, and Feminist historiography, my article calls for a renewed understanding of What the Body Remembers from the perspective mentioned above. Trauma it indeed was and memory was its matrix.