By Ratan Bhattacharjee
Indian Partition inspired impressive amount of historical, fictional and analytical texts and it is really difficult to find a new angle of research. But the recently published book from Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2018) reveals the unexpected nuances hidden under the layers of textuality the event has already gathered.
In all the plethora of scholarly studies on Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu Partition poetry and short stories, Urvashi Batalia’s The Other Side of Silence, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies there has been a constant attempt by Sikh, Muslim, Hindu or Parsee writers, poets and artists to reveal partition in its complexity with a focus on a phenomenon that engendered communal disorientation and still haunts the memories of the second generation Indians and Pakistanis.
This book is divided into four sections which attempt to reopen discussion on the tremendous impact the Partition had and still continues to have. In the first section entitled ‘Memory and History Writing’, there are three chapters with three well-written articles by Jagdish Batra, Anca Baicoianu and Ketaki Datta.
Batra mused in a personal narrative that “reading Partition literature is like taking a plunge into a river of blood and gore and being an unwilling witness to nauseating incidents of looting, rape and arson of unimaginable magnitude”. He focused on the fact that the written literature of partition proves inadequate in conveying the reality behind this catastrophic event. He discussed refugee problems from a new angle, analysed migrant-local relations in the context of Haryana and Punjab.
Anca Baicoianu, a Romanian Scholar, in the essay From Metonymy to Metaphor: Toward a Tropology of the Indian Partition in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction, wonderfully highlighted the tension reflected in Midnight’s Children.
The hybrid character of the tradition that Rushdie overtly embraces is rendered in the novel by means of intricate genealogies and multilayered heredity. The identity of his characters whose is a swirl of racial, ethnic, national and religious features and Anca focused on the political project of providing alternative interpretations to the “official, politicians” version of truth.
Baicoianu explores the applicability of Hayden White’s tropological analysis of the deep structures of historical imagination to Rushdie’s use of polyphony as a narrative device.
Section 2 entitled ‘Gendered Memory’ is more interesting for the papers of Elisabetta Marino in her discussion of Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s And What the Body Remembers. The focus in both the narratives is on Punjab in the analysis of the power-relation between genders.
The female characters in the novels are torn between tradition and modernity which act as metaphors of Mother India emblematically reproducing her history in their stories. The other editor, Daniela Rogobete, also takes into account the different types of memory at work in the understanding of Partition. Throughout the essay we find echoes of Partition as a story of re-negotiations or reordering personal stories and collective history.
A child narrator from the Parsee perspective narrates the story in Cracking India or Ice-Candy Man. The central trope of dismemberment introduces a binary logic meant to emphasise the idea of traumatic split representing partition in metaphors of birth, severance and sacrifice. Arunima Dey’s article is a continuation of the gendered memory theme.
Section III titled ‘Spatial Memory and Places of Remembrance’ has authors like Sharmistha Chatterjee, Olivia Balanescu and Kamayani Kumar contributed three papers in this section.
Balanescu deals with the postmodern rethinking of history for the way it challenges traditional notion of history and its grand narratives which attempt to make sense of the world according to one single truth. She explores the narrative of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns.
The final section significantly highlights the politics of representation and memory in film. Artistic representation of the trauma is the subject of Ritika Singh’s article. Films from Garam Hawa to Veer Zaara are aimed at understanding the after-effects of partition.
Cinema’s return to partition is an interesting subject and importance of studying such media is now well established in trauma theory. Viorel Stanescu and Alan Munton gave their deliberation on the interconnectivity of book film and screenplay.
Ritika Singh analysed beautifully ‘love in traumatic times’ by analysing Gadar and by focusing restorative love. Stanescue takes note of the interdisciplinary crossroads making extensive use of cinematic as well as historical studies.
The volume joins the many others that try to recuperate the untold stories so far. The subtitle of the book ‘Improbable lines’ refers to the demarcation not only in spatial terms as a comment on the arbitrariness of borders and territorial delimitation but also in ethical terms.
Book: The Partition of India: Beyond Improbable Lines; Editors: Daniela Rogobete and Elisabetta Marino; Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing UK; Price: Rs 550; Pages: 200
(The author is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Dum Dum Motijheel College, Kolkata, and can be reached at [email protected])