“Ancestral Voices Prophesying War”: Investigating the Legacy of the 1947 Partition in the 21st-Century Indian Cultural Imagination of Nuclear War

Abstract

This article investigates the emergence of the Indian Partition of 1947 as an apocalyptic referent for twenty-first-century Indian cultural imagination of nuclear war with Pakistan, because of the Partition’s traumatic, genocidal imprint on the subcontinent’s cultural memory. We will show how performances of nuclear brinkmanship and nuclear anxiety in India have historically been and continue to be symptomatic of the themes the Partition has bequeathed to Indian literature—kinship, vengeance, identity, and mutual destruction on a gigantic scale. With reference to these themes, we will critically analyze three Indian cultural texts—Vikram Chandra’s novel Sacred Games (2006), its Netflix adaptation (2018–2019), and Sami Ahmad Khan’s novel Red Jihad (2012), especially focusing on the ways in which such texts attempt to feature and resolve Indo-Pakistani nuclear crises. We will demonstrate how these texts embody a cultural shift wherein the nuclear crisis ultimately underscores the urgency of healing Partition’s historical wounds.