Kunapipi XXV:2

SUKESHI KAMRA

Ruptured Histories: Literature on the Partition (India, 1947)

In 1994, the editors of the Indian Review of Books lamented: 'it would seem that the great writing that a cataclysmic event like the Partition should have produced is yet to come in full measure, and offer the catharsis that only literature perhaps can' (1). In the same year, Alok Bhalla, the editor of one of the first English-language collections of Partition literature reportedly stated in an interview: 'there is not just a lack of great literature, there is, more seriously, a lack of history' (qtd. in Ravikant 160).¹ This lament has taken on the force of tradition with Professor Jaidev commenting, in 1996, that Partition literature 'is not a gallery of well-wrought urns' (2) and Ian Talbot, in 1997, stating that the 'stereotypes and stylised emotional responses' typical of 'lesser novelists' is 'pervasive in much of the literature of partition, whether it has been produced by contemporaries or those distanced from the actual events' (105­106). As recently as 2001, an otherwise valuable collection of fiction and critical analysis of Partition, Translating Partition, opens with: 'The best of the literature that emerged in the wake of Partition' (Ravikant and Saint xi), reminding us that there is much literary production that is ignored because it has been found aesthetically wanting.²

Although I am not sure what exactly constitutes 'great' literature nor am I sure that there would be cross-cultural (within India) agreement about it, I suspect the disappointment voiced by many in the academic community, and the scant discussion of such literature, has something to do with the faithful observance of the literal we find in this literature as much as with the seemingly stereotypical treatment of Partition experience close to identical plots, characters, descriptions of violence, attempts at rationalising, slippages even (in general privileging one religious community over another).

Such a dismissal, regrettable for its own sake, is also regrettable because Partition literature has the potential to act as an intervention in Indian historiography by forcing attention to Indian social practice, which continues to be rendered uncomfortable by what Partition, the darker side of Independence, made visible. In other words, such a dismissal prevents us from extending consideration to such literature for what it is a response to a dominant historiography that has made Partition the 'other' of Independence, as Ravikant states: 'The nation has grown up, ritually counting and celebrating birthdays while systematically consigning the Partition to oblivion' (160). To take the point further, as he does in the article, the remembering of 'Independence' appears to