Internalizing a Discourse: Reading Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers

Abstract

Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel What the Body Remembers is mostly remembered as a Partition novel. No doubt, one of the best Partition novels, the novel is also successful in exemplifying how grand-narratives bring us into adherence and train our minds to pass on the same to our coming generations. Baldwin’s characters are prisoners to these grand-narratives but they hardly realize that, and thereby make no effort to shirk away from these beliefs. This paper endeavors to study these characters in the light of this socializing process, and the transformation that it brings.