Description
Book SynopsisThe Partition of India in 1947 marked the birth of two modern nation-states and the end of British colonialism in South Asia. The move towards the 'two nation solution' was accompanied by an unprecedented mass migration (over twelve million people) to and from areas that would become India and Pakistan.
Diverse representations of the violence that accompanied this migration (including the abduction and sexual assault of over 75,000 women) can be found in fictional, historical, autobiographical, and recent scholarly works. Unsettling Partition examines short stories, novels, testimonies, and historiography that represent women's experiences of the Partition. Counter to the move for 'recovery' that informs some historical research on testimony and fictional representations of women's Partition experiences, Jill Didur argues for an attentiveness to the literary qualities of women's narratives that interrogate and unsettle monolithic accounts of the period.
Rather than att
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Unsettling Partition 'Making Men for the India of Tomorrow'? Gender and Nationalist Discourse in South Asia Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India's Partition Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India A Heart Divided: Education, Romance, and the Domestic Sphere in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women's Partition Narratives Conclusion: Recovering the Nation? Appendix A Notes Bibliography Index
