Why looking into a historical event such as the Partition of India, relying on fiction? It is a fact that novelists, even before historians, have contributed to uncover the human tragedy of 1947 and their stories often have a declared intent to give voice to a horror which seems to elude language. The book Partition in Fiction: Gendered Perspectives reveals how the phenomenon of Partition—which meant displacement for millions of people and claimed countless lives—was dealt with in creative works; how novelists, who belonged to different generations and literary tendencies, rendered the material and social, emotional and psychological impact that political decisions had on common men’s and women’s lives; and how, as a consequence, the individuals’ and communities’ self-perception was modified. More specifically, the book offers a gender-based reading of Partition fiction. The underlying hypothesis in fact is that an undifferentiated approach to both men and women writers’ novels would not fully account for the respective literary tools employed to give prominence to the human experience of Partition. Thus, the analysis of the former proceeds mainly along common thematic lines, while the latter are dealt with separately, because of the great variety of strategies their authors adopt, strategies that, anyway, equally concur in the understanding of the fundamental role pressed on women as signifiers of boundaries, and consequently, as the battlefield where the integrity of community and country were contended. Women’s writing foregrounds the feminine point of view vis-à-vis an event that shaped the existence of thousands of women. The book will prove useful to the students and teachers of English literature and those doing research on the theme of Partition in literature.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction: The Trauma of Partition—PART I: Partition and Its Fallouts—1. Partition Narratives—PART II: Men’s Voices: Male Perspectives on Partition—2. The Treatment of Politics; 3. The Trauma of Separation and of Ruptured Identity; 4. The Representation of Violence, of its Source and Antidote—PART III: Women’s Voices: Female Perspectives on Partition—5. ‘An Alternative Archive of Partition’: Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column; 6. The Distant Echoes of Partition: Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day; 7. Shifting Identities, Women and Nation Building: Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man; 8. An Allegorical Approach to Partition: Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers; 9. A Second Generation’s Look at the Partition of India: Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters; 10. A ‘Decentralized’ Perspective on Partition: Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided, Mehr Nigar Masroor’s Shadows of Time, Sophia Mustafa’s Broken Reed, Anita Kumar’s The Night of the Seven Dawns; Conclusion; Bibliography