The subcontinent was divided decades ago. But Partition’s harvest of pain, violence and trauma continues to haunt us even today. In literature, as in life, its spectre rises time and again from the ashes of 1947, igniting memory as it locates itself in communal tension and rioting crowds. Metaphors and fictive narratives grapple with the human indulgence in bestial violence and navigate through varied psychological and emotional terrain. The nostalgia for the "perfect" past, the battle with the present moment as a lived routinised catastrophe, and an acute anxiety about renewal and restored vitality are some of the concerns of the texts chosen for study in this book. This volume of essays by Sukrita Paul Kumar is a step towards evolving critical perspectives over a large body of literature now available in this area, a literature with its own poetics. This literary repertoire calls for the consolidation of critical tools relevant to its own context. Essays in this book discuss the connection between Partition and literary modernism, cultural reorientations, the issue of Hindi-Urdu politics, "re-membering" of women survivors, macro-visions of Partition in some novels-all this through an intimate critiquing of the works of such writers as Qurratulain Hyder, Intizar Husain, Kamleshwar, Joginder Paul, Bhisham Sahni, Abdullah Hussein and many others.
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