EXPLORATION OF RADICAL WOMANHOOD IN THE PARTITION NARRATIVES OF AMRITA PRITAM

Abstract

The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan led to the largest mass migration in human history. People had to be uprooted either from India or from Pakistan although many decided to stay in their ancestral lands. It was both a defining moment and a traumatic experience in history. Memories of Partition are in circulation even today, not because of its continued communal manifestations but also owing to the literature inspired by the Partition. Thematisations of the Partition in the genres of novels, short stories, drama, poetry, film, oral narratives, and formal history have all contributed to the new visibility of Partition. Partition novels celebrate the unique power of a culture to retain an awareness of loss in ways that emphasise the validity of secular spaces and the urgent need to revive them. The question of the cause of partition’s violence is a vast historical matter, which has to take into account several groupings of people, categorised according to religion, caste, caste and political allegiances and different geographical entities at a number of moments in time.