Abstract
With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella, Khwabrau (Sleepwalkers), published in 1990. Sleepwalkers shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal “third space” that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality. Sleepwalkers is based on a time, many years after the Partition in the city of Karachi, and focuses on the “mohajirs” from Lucknow who construct a mnemonic existential space by constructing a simulacrum of pre-Partition Lucknow (now in India). This paper examines the reconceptualization of spaces through the realm of political nostalgia and the figure of the refugee subject “performing” this nostalgia. This nostalgic reconstruction of space, thus, becomes a “heterotopia” in Foucauldian terms, one that causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nation-hood. The refugee subjects’ subversion of the linearity of time opens a different time in the narration of a nation that necessitates that the wholeness of the “imagined” physical space of a nation be questioned.
Highlights
With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947
This essay focuses on a unique novella, Sleepwalkers (1990) by Joginder Paul, who was one of the active members of the Progressive Writers Movement in its heyday, as the Indian subcontinent drew near the catastrophic and bloody Partition of 1947 that ended the British Raj and split the land between India and Pakistan
Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers forms a significant text in the oeuvre of Partition literature and shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal “third space” that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality and the nationalist imaginary of the two nation-states
Summary
With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. The argument is divided into two parts—first, the essay explains how nostalgia and memory works in subversive ways to create this simulacrum of a lost home and land against the strict territoriality of nation-states post-Partition, between India and Pakistan.
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