Out of motherland, in to(wards) homeland: Partition and the everyday(ness) of dis-placement in This is Not that Dawn (2015)

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This article analyses the critically-acclaimed, two-volume novel on India’s Partition, This is Not that Dawn (“Dawn”) written by Yashpal. Set in the pre-and-post-Partition cities of Lahore and Delhi, amongst others, Dawn provides a mimetic portrayal of the experiences of millions who found themselves out of motherland and in towards a new homeland with the Partition of India in 1947. The narrative assessment presented here chiefly underlines the place-based experiences that emerge as Dawn’s characters demonstrate intentional engagement with displacement in their everyday lives. Their evolving situatedness and sense of belonging show that displacement is enacted through/with/in/against place, where place is not only a location and a socio-spatial positionality but also that which conditioned the possibility for the characters to be oriented in and experience the world. By evaluating select literary narrations of such experiences in Dawn, this article uses literary geography as a means to arrive at an alternative epistemology to understanding displacement as a mode of being-in-place. Contextually, this article adds to the burgeoning interest in Indian Partition within geography by looking at the everyday(ness) of displacement in this “nation-forming” event.