Borders and Boundaries in Indian Partition Literature

Such was the magnitude of the devastation wrecked by the splitter of undivided India that it was, and is a mammoth task for writers to deal with it. Historians, for one, talked in aggregates: ten million refugees, two million of them dead, seventy-five g-force wo manpower raped and so on and so forth. These statistics fail to fall in even a fraction of the enormity of the tragedy that was the Partition. Statistics do not tell us how women must have matt-up while drowning themselves in wells lest they be abducted by men of the other community. Statistics fail to tell us how for most spate the deciding factor in choosing India or Pakistan was not governing or religion but insecurity. Statistics fail to even pinpoint at the trauma of husbands and wives, sons and mothers separated by the Radcliffe line. And the last thing that statistics or historical narratives can ever do is to smoothen on identity crises of innocent individuals at a while when identity could be altered by loot and rioting.

Identity

The Pakistani poet Harris Khalique is a Kashmiri, but he does not fit what he calls the Kashmiri stereotype ó No pink cheeks or bluish eyes, the only brother even darker than I am and the family just able to make out the difference among Pahari and Kashmiri.



His friends frequently ask him derisively, Sir, why donít you mediate between Pakistan and India? Kashmir is your land after all. Khaliqueís reply is that every townspeople in the subcontinent is to him what Toba Tek Singh was to Bishen Singh. I cannot mediate between India and Pakistan, he writes, I am an unresolved business of Partition myself. You are right. I am not Kashmiri. I am Kashmir. 1

Another Kashmiri, Saadat Hassan Manto, was so aggrieved by a similar identity crisis that it was, partially if not wholly, responsible for his alcoholism and eventual death about eight years after the Partition. Communal tensions in Bombay and persuasion by his family made him migrate to Pakistan in 1948. By this time, in a life...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



If you want to get a full essay, wisit our page: write my essay .