Unhomely Nations: Minorities and Refugees of the Subcontinental Partition

Unhomely Nations: Minorities and Refugees of the Subcontinental Partitionl JISHA MENON Mohan Rakesh's short story "The Owner of Rubble" begins with a melancholy moment. Abdul Gani, a frail and elderly man from Lahore, steps off the bus from Lahore with tear-stained eyes and a toothless smile. After seven years, he is again in his beloved hometown, Amritsar. He looks around him. Amritsar, "a place of wonder and surprise," is both familiar and strange (67). His gaze, illumined by his memory, caresses the contours of his well-loved city - the same bustling marketplace, a new cinema, a vanished neighborhood. It was seven years ago, in 1947, on a hurried and manic night, that Gani took flight from home. Where was it now? Gani inquires of strangers the identity of a place that was once his own. Searching for his past, in a city of strangers, Gani comes upon a crying child. Her elder sister, in an effort to placate the child says, "Stop crying, you little devil! If you don't that Muslim will catch you and take you away!" (69). This remark, at once banal and bigoted, evokes the lingering memories of Partition , when thousands of women and children, defined primarily in terms of their ethnic identity, were abducted.' In the strategy for silencing the child, Rakesh plumbs the Partition, a compelling repository of anxieties. Soon, a rumor circulates around this prosaic incident that a Muslim was rrying to kidnap a child. Women and children rush indoors, quite literally rendering Gani the outsider. Unmindful of these quotidian partitions, Gani tentatively hobbies along to find his home. He arrives, guided by memory and strangers, at a heap of stone and ash. His horne was burnt down during the Partition riots. In an uncanny moment, Gani rums questioningly to Raka, lying regally by the rubble. Raka is startled. Does the old fool know that Raka killed his family ? Raka raped and murdered in the name of god. But in reality he killed for something more concrete - Gani's newly constructed house. Raka's violence was inspired by the banality of profit and so has fallen through the cracks of the grander narratives of the 1947 genocidal killings, sustained by religion or Modern Drama, 46:2 (Summer 2003) 182 Minorities and Refugees of the Subcontinental Partition 183 revenge. However, someone set the house on fire, and now Raka's plans, too, smolder in the rubble. The very windows that were shut as the screams of Chirag and his family echoed in the streets are now pried open to witness the confrontation of victim and perpetrator. The silent witnesses at the windows watch keenly as Gani intuitively looks away from Raka. He stoops down to examine the remains of his home, standing beneath the charred frame of the door, at the cusp of an inside and outside, ironically symbolizing the breakdown between the private and the public, the home and the world. "The Owner of Rubble" illuminates the polarization of the neighborhood into insiders and outsiders and interrogates the forms of sociality that Partition disrupted and engendered. The image of the charred door frame represents, in its desolate aura, what Freud has referred to as unheimlich, or "unhomely," which is the name for everything "that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light" (225). Or, as Homi Bhabha has elaborated, the unhomely is "the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-inthe -world" (445). The sense of violation is expressed poignantly through the image of the gnarled, twisted doorframe, which rewrites the everyday coordinates of domestic and public order into a narrative that transforms the relationship between the self and society. The unhomely sight of the resilient remains of the door reminds us that ambivalent personal memories are infonned and deformed by the wider reverberations of political history. That image of the charred door pervades this essay and asks how the bewildering scene of unhomeliness , the world-in-the-home, can lead us to imagine new fanTIs of moral communities or other "cosmopolitical" homes-in-the-world. "The Owner of Rubble" provides a template for the questions that preoccupy me here: how does the...