Partition and Indian English Women Novelists

Partition of the Indian subcontinent impacted women in many particular ways. But their experiences have been generally subsumed or deflected in the meta/male narratives. Some recent feminist interventions have addressed the ellipses of history by exploring the effects of partition on women’s consciousness and subjectivity through alternative histories. The book Partition and Indian English Women Novelists projects partition fiction as ‘history’s creative counterpart’ and focuses on the cross-border gendered aspect of Partition. The study analyses the historiography of Partition in the novels of Attia Hosain, Mehr Nigar Masroor, Bapsi Sidhwa, Nina Sibal, Anita Kumar and Shauna Singh Baldwin and examines these writings as agential voices of the assertive ‘other’ working through ‘parallel’ strategies to approximate the ‘reality’ of Partition. The study explores the interstices of history by foregrounding the marginal in a comparative mode.