The trauma of India’s Partition in 1947 played out differently in diverse regions of the subcontinent. The division of Punjab in the West happened at one go and was sudden, cataclysmic, and violent. On the other hand, the Partition of Bengal was a slower process as the displacement took place in waves though the trauma was no less violent than in Punjab. Similarly in Sindh, Benaras, Kashmir and in Hyderabad the impact of 1947 was keenly felt but had different registers of remembrance and enunciations.
The anthology under review lays bare the elliptical ways of how whole communities felt, remembered and tried to resist the cataclysmic division and growth of sectarian hatred over a period of time and their affective impact on cultural practices. It takes stock of the literary, sociological and historical archive of the 1947 Partition across generations and borders that interrogate the absences in our memories and of our national histories in the subcontinent. This anthology has come about, in the editors’ own words, ‘on the margins of the South Asian Literary Association annual conference’ when the editors decided to have a one-day pre-conference to assess ‘the negative impact the 1947 Partition continues to have on South Asian populations at home and abroad’ (Preface). The editors had also noted ‘with a certain kind of sadness and irony how most well-known literary scholarship on the subject had rarely gone beyond a few well-known novels, short stories, poems, or films’ (p. ix). The second aspect of the confabulations that has brought about this volume is of wider interest both to the Partition scholar and to the lay reader in that literary works on 1947 continue to evoke interest and especially those that are ‘new’ and rarely talked about.