Partition Literature as Counter-History: Resisting Nationalist Narratives Through Memory and Fiction

Partition Literature as Counter-History: Resisting Nationalist Narratives Through Memory and Fiction

Vansh Wadhawan

Dr Ayush Vatsa

UG Dissertation

12 May 2025

Abstract

Partition fiction resists hegemonic nationalist explanations of the 1947 Partition of India by offering a counter-history grounded in memory and fiction. Contrary to political and territorial issues defining official histories, literary fiction places on center stage emotional trauma, identity crises, and social dislocations of expulsion and arrival that ordinary people go through. This research focuses on novels like Tamas by Bhisham Sahni, Train to Partition by Khushwant Singh, and Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa, demonstrating how these novels expose the gendered violence, communal rioting, and displacement which are customarily left out of state-sponsored histories (Sahni; Singh; Sidhwa). By foregrounding personal remembrances and oral accounts, these novels oppose the erasures present in nationalist historiography and reclaim silenced voices (Butalia 32).

The essay contends that Partition writing acts as resistance or "counter-history" by laying stress on the subjective experience over official monumentality and linear history (Butalia 45). Writers reconstruct Partition as a fragmented, contested space expressed in terms of trauma and memory. This literary counter-history not only sustains collective memory but also generates empathy and critical reflection towards processes of nation-making and selective amnesia.

Overall, Partition literature complicates master narratives by placing different views in the foreground and objecting to the unpalatable facts of Partition's human cost, calling for a more expansive understanding of South Asia's cultural and historical heritage.