Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction [Hardcover]

This book interrogates representations  fiction, literary motifs and narratives  of the Partition of India. Delving into the writings of Khushwant Singh, Balachandra Rajan, Attia Hosain, Abdullah Hussein, Rahi Masoom Raza and Anita Desai, among many others, it highlights the modes of fictive testimony that sought to articulate the inarticulate  the experiences of trauma and violence, of loss and longing, and of diaspora and displacement. The author discusses representational techniques and formal innovations in writing across three generations of twentieth-century writers in India and Pakistan, invoking theoretical debates on history, memory, witnessing and trauma.

With a new afterword, the second edition of this volume draws attention to recent developments in Partition studies and sheds new light as regards ongoing debates about an event that still casts a shadow on contemporary South Asian society and culture. A key text, this is essential reading for scholars, researchers and students of literary criticism, South Asian studies, cultural studies and modern history.

Introduction 1. Negotiating the Effects of Historical Trauma: Novels of the 1940s and 1950s 2. Partitions Afterlife: Perspectives from the 1960s and 1970s 3. Narrativising the Time of Partition: Writings since 1980 4. Short Stories about the Partition: Towards a Self-Reflexive Mode of Testimony 5. Reinventing Testimonial Fiction in the Wake of the Partition. Afterword

This book deals with the representation of the Partition of India  the experience of trauma and violence  through fiction, literary motifs and narratives, and shows that in examining the nature of such testimony through history, cultural memory has a significant role to play.