‘Times are different now’: The Ends of Partition in the Contemporary Urdu Short Story

Abstract

If collective violence arrives without a narrative, what then might constitute a ‘civilized willed response’ in writing out its trauma? Almost half a century had elapsed before historians began to excavate the experiences of physical and emotional violence that accompanied, and long survived, the partitioning of India in 1947.¹ While they have established at least some of the contours of what was lost to official nationalist histories, there is a general agreement that the experience itself, the complex effects of Partition violence and its elusive language of trauma, have yet to find an appropriate mode of critical analysis (see Das; Pandey ‘In Defense’; Van der Veer). The recent rhetoric of disciplinary failure, however, has been marked by a common recuperative gesture. At the moment in which hermeneutic frameworks for witnessing seem either to fail or to require further interrogation, the social scientist and the historian of Partition often turn to the fictitious testimony of literature — and frequently to the Urdu short story (Das 47; Pandey Remembering Partition 200–3). More than any other literary genre in the subcontinent, it is this medium that has been called on to supply the missing words in the reconstruction of the effects of Partition.

Violence is a total phenomenon, but it comes to us as a total fragment. Something terrible has happened and there is no plot, no narrative, only traces that lead nowhere. (Van der Veer 269)

When I now read descriptions of troubled parts of the world, in which violence appears primordial and inevitable […] I find myself asking, Is that all there was to it? Or is it possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form — or a style or a voice or a plot — that could accommodate both violence and the civilized willed response to it? (Ghosh 62)