Partition Literature and Cinema

This book studies literary and cinematic representations of the Partition of India. It features essays on key texts - written and visual - including Train to Pakistan, Toba Tek Singh, Basti, Garm Hava, Pinjar, among others.

Jaydip Sarkar is Associate Professor at the Department of English, University B.T. & Evening College, West Bengal, India. He has edited and co-edited several books including Writing Difference: Nationalism, Identity and Literature (2014), Unmasking Power: Subjectivity and Resistance in Indian Drama in English (2014) and A Handbook of Rhetoric and Prosody (2018). Rupayan Mukherjee is Teaching Assistant at the Department of English, University B.T. & Evening College, West Bengal, India. His research interests include modernism, postmodern studies and South Asian literature.

Introduction: Literature and Film: An Alternative Archive of the Partition of India Part 1: Historical Reality: Texts of Response 1. Political Mayhems and the Moment of Rupture: Bhisham Sahni's Tamas 2. Ideology of Hatred and the Violent Making of Nations: Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan 3. Partition and the Shattered Familiar: Bapsi Sidhwa's The Ice-Candy Man 4. Saadat Hasan Manto's "Toba Tek Singh": A Nation Split by Trauma and Madness 5. Translating Trauma into Sublime: Gulzar's Response to Manto's "Toba Tek Singh" Part 2: Memory and Mnemonic: Of Homeland and Homelessness 6. Politics of Memory and the Myth of Homelessness: Intizar Husain's Basti 7. Redrawing the Borders of Nostalgia: A Reading of Ritwik Ghatak's Selected Short Stories 8. Memory of Home and the Impossibility of Return: Reading Jibanananda Das's "I Shall Return to This Bengal" and "I Have Seen Bengal's Face" 9.Tracing Erasure and Re-mapping the Memory Lane: Partition Movies of Ritwik Ghatak 10. From Home to Homeland: Negotiating Memory and Displacement in Dibyendu Palit's "Alam's own House" Part 3: Body-Politics: The Woman in Question 11. Decentrification and Gendered perspectives in Partition Narratives: An analysis of Garm Hava 12. Honour, Women's Body and Marginalisation: A Study of Amrita Pritam's Pinjar 13. History Versus (Her)story: Jyotirmoyee Devi's Epar Ganga Opar Ganga 14. Immanent Needs, Immediate Solutions: Body and Reconciliation in Manik Bandopadhyay's "The Final Solution" 15. The Aporiac Self: Feminine and the Poetics of Silence in Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani Post Script: Inverted Prisms, Imperfect Histories: Towards a Dalit Historiography of India's Partition