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In probably his most famous speech, Jawaharlal Nehru, on the occasion of Indian independence, called upon the Indian people to redeem the tryst they had made with destiny and to face the challenges and chances of their newly gained freedom. But whatever the elation at independence, it was immediately offset and upset by the most gruesome horrors of partition as the different political actors could not agree on a common constitution and the Indian subcontinent was split into India, Pakistan and East Bengal (later to become Bangladesh). This foundationally violent political act of drawing new geographical boundaries not only led to an unprecedented exchange of population as it is still being called, during which millions of people had to leave their homes and belongings, but also to the most atrocious physical violence of rape, mutilation and mass killings the effects of which can still be felt in today’s political conflicts on the Indian subcontinent. The seminar will look at how narrative texts from different national, ethnic/religious and gendered perspectives such as Hassan Sadat Manto’s short stories, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ince-Candy Man, Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory Colony, 1950, or the films of Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition trilogy try to come to terms not only with the political implications of the partition in the context of decolonisation, but how literature attempts to find ways to make the trauma of unfathomable large-scale violence available to experience, representation and discursive negotiation in the first place. |
