Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Partition of India was one of the crucial moments marking the transition between the colonial and postcolonial era. Partition has become ever since a long-term process that continues to elicit political, cultural, and emotional contexts in South Asia. The creation of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asian Muslims involved the division of Bengal and Punjab along religious lines and while the celebratory narratives of decolonization and nationhood marked the official historiographies of 1947, trauma, loss and displacement were not part of the narrative. It was not until the 1980s that Partition received discursive space in official historiography or memory. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century revisionist historiographical, sociological, and cultural scholarship on the Partition was developed. Although the focus was first on testimonial narratives, oral histories, and empirical studies, more recent historiography of Partition has tended to open its archival scope and rely on literary texts as artifacts that catalyse untold memories. However, this widening of scope still takes for granted the absence of Eastern voices and so the lack of Bengali literary sources. The following essay questions the traces of the conjuncture of past and present, especially in remembering traumatic events/histories by focusing on the “aesthetics of remembering” as an umbrella concept within which to (re)consider the aftermath of a traumatic event. By doing so, the following paper aims to explore second-generation life narratives of members of the Bengali community, which can be representative of transgenerational traumas after the Partition of India.