The Angst and Pangs of Partitioned Souls: A Study of Select Partition Novels

Abstract

Partition Literature finds expressions in various cultural tropes such as dislocation, displacement, violence, trauma, and communal disharmony wherein the common thread which binds all these tropes is a sense of lost home. As an event, Partition remains a visible trace in the national space which shapes the collective conscious and unconscious of the people who witnessed it and who study its reverberations. This paper intends to delve deeper into the historical and psychological aspects of Partition as a highly catastrophic event through Abdullah Hussein’s The Weary Generations (Udaas Naslein) and Kamleshwar's How Many Pakistan? or Partitions (Kitne Pakistan?). This paper intends to understand these texts as being metaphorical in nature. Apart from their literary nuances, these texts also act as a microcosm of collective trauma undergone by the people who witnessed Partition and as a symbol of multiple ruptures that took place geographically on both sides of the border leading to the fragmentation in the respective psyche. These texts will be studied in isolation as well as in relation to the larger crisis that the nation was witnessing post-Partition. The framework of the study would comprise revisiting Partition at the levels of dislocation, displacement, violence, trauma, and communal disharmony. Each of these cultural tropes will be analyzed along with the thematic reading of the understudy texts. In the process, the traumatic journey of undergoing and registering Partition both as a geographical and psychological rupture will be studied keeping in mind the concept of trauma which is understood as a severely disruptive experience that deeply impacts the self’s emotional positioning and perception of the outside world.