再現印度分裂:底層研究, 芭希席娃的《撕裂印度》,蒂帕梅塔的《塵土》

Abstract

This thesis investigates the problem of representing the Partition of India in 1947. It investigates the representation of the Partition in three sites—the Subaltern Studies project, Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India (1991), and Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1999)—with a particular focus upon the silence of the subaltern. The term “subaltern,” derived from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, has been used by the Subaltern Studies collective to designate the people who do not belong to the “elite”—the dominant groups. Composed of Indian historians, the Subaltern Studies collective initiated the Subaltern Studies project in the early 1980s, concentrating on the historiography, or the writing of history, of colonial India. The members of the Subaltern Studies collective have questioned the representation of the freedom moment of India in nationalist historiography and argued that, in nationalist historiography, only Independence and the elite leaders are celebrated whereas the Partition and the subaltern have been absent. Concerning the silence of the subaltern and the representation of the Partition in history, the Subaltern Studies project aims at revising nationalist historiography and recuperating the voice of the subaltern. The project of re-thinking the history of the Partition and re-examining the representation of the Partition and the place of the subaltern is a main target of the Subaltern Studies project; and it is also the main focus of this thesis. Chapter One of this thesis introduces the history of the Subaltern Studies project, from the appropriation and the definition of the term “subaltern” to the re-orientation of this project. A further issue of the subaltern is submitted: the “gendered” subaltern—women, in terms of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theories. After investigating the contours of Spivak’s perspectives, this chapter discusses the theories of Gyanendra Pandey, a member of the Subaltern Studies collective, regarding the problem of representing the violence of the Partition. Chapter Two investigates the representation of the Partition in Sidhwa’s semi-autobiographical novel Cracking India. Sidhwa adopts the point of view of an eight-year-old girl, Lenny, to narrate the girl’s experience of the Partition. Sidhwa focuses on the representation of the subaltern, directly representing the painful and gory side of the Partition. In this chapter, Pandey’s theories help to investigate the representation of the Partition in Cracking India. Chapter Three investigates the representation of the Partition in Mehta’s film Earth, a film version of Cracking India. Mehta’s employment of an unfixed point of view in this film enables us to see more facets of the Partition. Furthermore, this unfixed point of view also enables us to observe the multiple oppression of Lenny’s Hindu nanny. Mehta’s suspension of the representation of what happens to the Hindu nanny after she is abducted leaves a space for us to speculate upon the silence of the gendered subaltern. In this chapter, Spivak’s theories help us to investigate the dilemma of the gendered subaltern in the representation of the Partition. Chapter Four concludes the discussions of the representation of the Partition in the Subaltern Studies project, Sidhwa’s Cracking India, and Mehta’s Earth, contemplating the representation of the Partition and the subaltern. Through an investigation of the silence of the subaltern in these three sites, we can detect the limits of the representation of the Partition and obtain a chance to re-think and re-read this history from these alternative versions of the Partition.