Subjectivities, memories, loss of pigskin bags, silver spittoons and the partition of India

Bibliographic Data

ID3487322
AuthorsAnanya Jahanara Kabir (0000-0003-1895-8412, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume4
Issue2
Pages245-264
Publication date2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInterventions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13698010220144315
OpenAlexW1977907339
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited7

The Partition of India was a traumatic event whose repercussions continue to impact on South Asian subjectivities in complex ways that scholarship on that event and its representations has recently begun to illuminate. This paper offers two methodological propositions, both broadly indebted to scholarship on the representation of the Holocaust, to those investigating narrative representations of Partition. First, it suggests that all investigations into the event of Partition should proceed from a radical awareness of subject position. Second, it argues that, in the absence of public rituals and spaces of mourning sanctioned by the nation-state, Partition narratives present alternative, albeit contested sites for such mourning. It then applies these propositions to Midnight's Children , Book One. While the symbols of the pigskin bag and the silver spittoon deployed therein enable us to trace the interrelations between minority subjectivities, collective memory, and cultural loss, the trope of fragmentation provides us with a formal index to the consequent fracturing of the narrative capacities of representation

Aesthetics · Art · Collective memory · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Law · Mathematics · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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