Gender, Memory, Trauma: Women's Novels On The Partition Of India

Abstract

W riting from opposite sides of the “Great Divide” created by the partition of 1947, these two authors from Pakistan and India, Bapsi Sidhwa and Krishna Sobti, respectively, seem separated by more than nationality. Sobti writes in Hindi, Sidhwa in English: Sobti writes as a Punjabi Hindu who left Pakistan for India in the aftermath of partition, Sidhwa as a Parsi who stayed behind in Pakistan and subsequently moved to America. They belong, furthermore, to different generations (if we measure generation by the yardstick of distance from a critical event): Sidhwa is one of the “Midnight’s Children” generation, a writer who while not born in August 1947 was but a child at that moment, while Sobti, who was then twenty-seven years old, represents an older generation of partition survivors. Despite these differences, there is much that they share, and my epigraphs capture this shared territory. Both Sidhwa and Sobti are authors of partition narratives: narrative representations of the events leading up to, culminating in, and constituting the immediate aftermath of the partition of India. Both are women who have written novels, from an upper-middleclass perspective, about women whose lives were deeply affected by partition. In their choice of subject matter and narrative form, both respond to partition as a traumatic event. Sidhwa’s reference to images that have “haunted” her from childhood and Sobti’s acknowledgment of the twin demands of forgetting and remembrance suggest a self-imposed authorial task of negotiating between traumatic recall and narrative commemoration, and between different kinds of memory that inhabit and fragment not only nations and communities but also the