Remembering Partition: Literature Across Testimony, Oral Histories, and Postmemory

Abstract

The literature of the Partition of India has unfolded in successive phases, which signifies changing historical contexts, literary responses, and cultural perspectives. This paper argues that partition literature evolves through three overlapping phases that are defined less by chronology than by mediations of memory. In this context, phase 1 (c. 1947-mid 1960s) organizes witnesses into testimonial realism; phase 2 (c. 1975-1997) reframes the archive through feminist/subaltern oral histories and reflective realism; and phase 3 (c. 1997-present) relocates memory into postmemory’s transnational circuits and digital/visual forms. Across these phases, who remembers (survivor, inheritor), what counts as evidence (document, testimony, image), and how intimacy to the past is aesthetically produced all shift, rearchitecting and reframing South Asia’s cultural memory of Partition. By way of examining representative texts from multiple languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, and English, alongside critical scholarship by historians and theorists such as Gyanendra Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, Marianne Hirsch, and Alok Bhalla, the paper emphasizes the interdisciplinary significance of Partition studies. This paper also attempts to situate Partition narratives within broader frameworks of trauma theory, memory studies, and border studies, acknowledging the ongoing contributions of oral histories, digital archives, and visual media. This paper, therefore, takes the position that Partition literature, across its varied phases of expression and remembrance, continues to shape South Asian cultural memory in profound yet contested ways.