Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory
© 2006
The Partition of India in 1947 marked the birth of two modern nation-states and the end of British colonialism in South Asia. The move towards the 'two nation solution' was accompanied by an unprecedented mass migration (over twelve million people) to and from areas that would become India and Pakistan.
Diverse representations of the violence that accompanied this migration (including the abduction and sexual assault of over 75,000 women) can be found in fictional, historical, autobiographical, and recent scholarly works. Unsettling Partition examines short stories, novels, testimonies, and historiography that represent women's experiences of the Partition. Counter to the move for 'recovery' that informs some historical research on testimony and fictional representations of women's Partition experiences, Jill Didur argues for an attentiveness to the literary qualities of women's narratives that interrogate and unsettle monolithic accounts of the period.
Rather than attempt to seek out a 'hidden history' of this time, Didur examines how the literariness of Partition narratives undermines this possibility. Unsettling Partitions reinterprets the silences found in women's accounts of sectarian violence that accompanied Partition (sexual assault, abduction, displacement from their families) as a sign of their inability to find a language to articulate their experience without invoking metaphors of purity and pollution. Didur argues that these silences and ambiguities in women's stories should not be resolved, accounted for, translated, or recovered but understood as a critique of the project of patriarchal modernity.
Product Details
- Series: Heritage
- World Rights
- Page Count: 212 pages
- Dimensions: 6.3in x 0.8in x 9.3in
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Reviews
“Drawing an analogy between the stories of women lost during partition and the lost history of the event, Jill Didur highlights the fissures and silences in the narrative of India’s partition. It is a well-researched argument incorporating material from diverse sources - literary texts, personal testimonies and official documents. Her account, situated at the intersection of gender and nationalist discourse, reveals the gaps between state policy and its human consequences, which become available to us through literary representations.”
Meenakshi Mukherjee, literary critic and former professor in the Department of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India -
Author Information
Jill Didur is an associate professor in the Department of English at Concordia University.
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Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unsettling Partition
‘Making Men for the India of Tomorrow’? Gender and Nationalist Discourse in South Asia
Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India’s Partition
Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India
A Heart Divided: Education, Romance, and the Domestic Sphere in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition Narratives
Conclusion: Recovering the Nation?
Appendix A
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Subjects and Courses
