Partitioned Lives

Partitioned Lives

Author: Anjali Gera Roy

Publisher: Pearson Education India

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9788131714164

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contributed articles chiefly with reference to India.


Partition and the Practice of Memory

Partition and the Practice of Memory

Author: Churnjeet Mahn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-05

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 3319645161

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of narratives connected to memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders. It explores how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, through consideration of physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lost – that is, the cultural whole that was the cultural regions of Punjab and Bengal before Partition, as well as broader cultural "wholes" across South Asia, across religious and linguistic lines – alongside forces that deny such connections. The chapters address issues of heritage and memory through specific case-studies on present-day memorial, museological and commemoration practices, through which sometimes competing memorial landscapes have been constructed, and show how memories of past traumas and histories become inscribed into diverse forms of cultural heritage (the built landscape, literature, film).


The Other India

The Other India

Author: Om Prakash Dwivedi

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2013-01-03

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1443845019

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book engages with critical issues which create a proper understanding of how identities and belonging are imagined and constructed in postcolonial India. The contributors have examined various texts and movies to discuss the implicit communal nature of postcolonial India. The book attempts to discuss the different ways in which India is badly plagued by communal politics and terrorism, and to offer a cogent alternative for creating a strong solidarity among different communities in India.


National Identities in Pakistan

National Identities in Pakistan

Author: Cara Cilano

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1135225060

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1971, a war which took place in Pakistan that resulted in the establishment of two separate countries; East Pakistan became Bangladesh, leaving the remaining four western provinces to comprise a truncated Pakistan. This book examines how literature by those who remained Pakistanis acts as a cultural response to the threat the war posed to a nationalist identity. It provides an analysis of the writing by Pakistani authors in their attempt to deal with the radical shock of the war and shows how fiction about the war helps readers imagine what the paring down of the country means for any abiding articulation of a Pakistani group identification. The author discusses English-and Urdu-language fictions in the context of the historical debate about Pakistani nationalism, including how such nationalism informs literary culture, and in the contemporary interest in official apologies for the past. The author organises the literary analysis around four key issues: the domestic sphere and the family; the territorial limits of citizenship; multiculturalism, class, and nationalist history; and diasporic imaginings of the nation. These issues resonate across the fictions in both languages and the author's analysis of them traces how these works grapple with changing notions of what it means to be Pakistani after the civil war and offers an interesting discussion to studies in South Asia.


Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace

Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace

Author: Jenni Ramone

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1137569344

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. The book offers longer case studies on novels that stage important reading moments: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953), Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway (2001), Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), Chibundhu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). Chapters argue that while India’s literary market was disrupted by Partition, literature offers a means of moving beyond trauma; in post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Special Period led to exploitation of Cuban literary culture, resulting in texts that foreground reading spaces; in Nigeria, the market hosts meeting, negotiation, reflection, and trade, including the writer’s trade; while Black consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to challenge the UK literary market, a project still underway. This book is a vindication of reading, and of the resistant power and creative potential of local literary marketplaces. It insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.


Witnessing Partition

Witnessing Partition

Author: Tarun K. Saint

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 0429560001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book interrogates representations – fiction, literary motifs and narratives – of the Partition of India. Delving into the writings of Khushwant Singh, Balachandra Rajan, Attia Hosain, Abdullah Hussein, Rahi Masoom Raza and Anita Desai, among many others, it highlights the modes of ‘fictive’ testimony that sought to articulate the inarticulate – the experiences of trauma and violence, of loss and longing, and of diaspora and displacement. The author discusses representational techniques and formal innovations in writing across three generations of twentieth-century writers in India and Pakistan, invoking theoretical debates on history, memory, witnessing and trauma. With a new afterword, the second edition of this volume draws attention to recent developments in Partition studies and sheds new light as regards ongoing debates about an event that still casts a shadow on contemporary South Asian society and culture. A key text, this is essential reading for scholars, researchers and students of literary criticism, South Asian studies, cultural studies and modern history.


Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam

Author: Hina Nandrajog

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-01-06

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 100082215X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Amrita Pritam was a prominent Punjabi poet, novelist, and essayist who captured the realities of everyday life in the India of the early 1900s India and presented the unique voices of the women of the Indian subcontinent. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of the writer’s work by situating it in the context of not just Punjabi literature but Indian literature, while showcasing their continued relevance in contemporary times. With a career spanning over six decades, she Pritam produced over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages. This volume includes critical essays on her works as well as a selection of her poems and stories in translation including, ‘A Call to Waris Shah’ (Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah nu), The Skeleton (Pinjar) and Village No. 36 (Khabarnama Te Chak No. 36) and excerpts from other prominent writings to give readers a glimpse into Pritam’s her rich literary oeuvre as well as her legacy in a post-colonial India which is still grappling with many of the same taboos around gender, national and religious identity and women’s sexuality. It discusses the diversity of themes and socio-cultural realities in her writings works focusing especially on her writings on Punjab, agency of her women protagonists, national and communal identities and the testimonies of the traumas which the cataclysmic 1947 Partition of India brought on women. A writer who consistently subverted the existing social, political and patriarchal structures of her times, both in her life and in her writings, this book encapsulates the relevance of her writing and her voice in our times. Part of the ‘Writer in Context’ series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Hindi literature, Punjabi Literature, English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies and translation studies.


Trauma Texts

Trauma Texts

Author: Gillian Whitlock

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-11

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1317990269

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: partition narratives in India, Cambodian and Iranian rap, refugee letters from Nauru, graffiti in Tanzania, and the silent spaces of trauma in Chile and Guantanamo. The contexts and media of these autobiographical trauma texts are diverse, yet they are linked by attention to questions of who gets to speak/write/inscribe autobiographically and how and where and why, and how can silences in the wake of traumatic experiences be read. These essays deliberately set out to establish some new fields for research in trauma studies by reaching out to a broader global context, into various texts, media and artifacts, representing diverse histories with specific attention to different voices, bodies, memories and subjectivities. This collection addresses the contemporary circuits of trauma story, and the media and icons and narratives that carry trauma story to political effect and emotional affect. This book was previously published as two special issues of Life Writing.