Being Young, Becoming Political: Subjectivity and Urban Space in Early Partition Novels

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between political subjectivity and urban space in three novels written in the immediate aftermath of the Partition of India: Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided and Yashpal’s This Is Not That Dawn. Despite extensive thematic and structural similarities, these early Partition novels have never been considered together and through a historical lens. Each narrative features moments of reckoning when the young protagonists are faced with sudden demands to become political in a new way, for example by abandoning secular anti-colonialism for communitarianism. The diversity of their experiences and responses, from bitter resignation to open-ended struggle, reflects the difficulties of constructing unitary selves expressing deep interior convictions aligned with collective identities. These transformations of political subjectivities are situated in and shaped by the heterogeneous urban spaces of Lucknow and Lahore, which establish the conditions of possibility for coexistence and its limits.