In most partition narratives, a ubiquitous sense of urgency is blocked by notions of shame, willful forgetting and erasures. Referring to selected works as Rajinder Singh Bedi’s short story “Lajwanti,” Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers and recent films like Khamosh Pani, this article will underscore the discursive implications of female silence or inchoate narrations and highlight the legitimate, feminist questions that these writers highlight. The fragmented memories and enforced silences of women in such narratives, especially those written by women writers attempt to decode the inaccessible stories to reveal patriarchal assumptions and question the nationalist-statist framework that denies female agency and address to Partition. My central argument in this article is built around examining selected literary and cultural representations of such an unspoken discourse through examination of the notion of female silence and opacity that becomes imperative for maintaining a closeted, totalizing notion of history. The concept of history, especially in the context of Indian independence and partition, reveals a strange bifurcation between the official history endorsing the Nehruvian and Gandhian vision of nation-formation, and the countless individual stories of tragic victimhood, and traumatic experiences. Likewise, scholarly books have attempted to explain and/or problematized the binarism implied in the public versus private discourses about partition. Many literary narratives about the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan have exhorted the Partition violence including mass killings, rape of women on both sides of the border as well as homelessness and abduction leading to a catastrophic loss in India’s recorded history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |