Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory

Jill Didur s Unsettling Partition is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of academic work on the 1947 partition of India that critically reflects on the relevance of literary texts for understanding the complexities of partition. As its title implies, Didur in her book attempts to “unsettle” questions regarding gender, partition, and nationalist politics. But instead of assuming that literary texts fill in the gaps in existing historical knowledge about the partition, she views literature as a “particularly appropriate place to consider how experience is mediated and the specific limits of what can be known about that experience” (140). Additionally, she attends to the “ ‘performative power’ of language mobilized in the act of reading with an emphasis on how literature intersects with the spheres of knowledge, politics, and history in its representation of India’s partition” (6). The topic, treated through detailed discussion of a wide range of literary and cultural texts, makes the book extremely useful for scholars working in the field.

To amplify her arguments and examine the role of literature in “bolstering or questioning the production of hegemonic nationalist imaginaries in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh” (6) both during and after partition, Didur examines, in five chapters and a conclusion, the following works: Rajender Singh Bedi’s short story “Lajwanti” (1951), Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning (1966), and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988). Written and published at different postpartition historical moments, these texts have remained pivotal in addressing issues that are of critical importance to her own argument: nationalist politics, refugee and abducted women, gender and the nation, trauma and silence, and the relationship between literary criticism and historiography. She examines the differences in the fictional and textual representations of the event, of religious and gendered communities, and of class and caste politics and practices, and through these differences illuminates the ways in which these stories as well as their language disrupt existing narratives that project a monolithic picture of partition. Such diversity of representation also enables her to emphasize the plurality of views on the partition and its violence.

In the introductory essay, Didur problematizes the notion of “partition” and unsettles any seamless attempt within historiography to construct partition and its relationship to gender in singular and easy terms. In the first chapter, Didur considers the intersections between gender and nationalism in South Asia and the partition as a moment reflective of the “patriarchal community-state alliance” (16). Through a reading of Bedi’s “Lajwanti” in chapter two, she explores the power of fiction in exposing the nexus of state and elite interests in the treatment of “abducted” women. Building on existing critical analysis, she argues, in chapter three, how Lenny in Cracking India manages to crack the patriarchal-nationalist code that re(asserts) itself in the aftermath of the partition. Her focus on Parsees, a community that was numerically in a minority but otherwise occupied a class position, and the significance that Sidhwa might have attached to its role in the nationalist construction is both refreshing and complex in complicating the story of partition that often gets viewed around the Hindu/Muslim axis. Chapter four, on Hosain’s novel, reveals the continuing effects of nationalism and partition in postcolonial India. Providing the long view of the gendered structure of the community to which the protagonist belongs, she analyzes the novel in terms of its “thematic concerns of love, education, and domesticity as unsettling the monolithic nationalism that comes to dominate India and Pakistan in the time of partition” (124). Chapter five is important for its reading of “silence” in Devi’s novel through its commemoration of partition violence that meditates on the impossibility of recovering what has been “lost, neglected, or misplaced” (155) and the paradoxical representation of being haunted by memories that cannot be remembered. Didur’s point is that literature itself is marked by silence about violence and that “this silence serves a pedagogical purpose in reframing an attitude toward partition history” (126). Addressing this issue is also an attempt to answer the larger question: “Should the goal of the writer, reader, or literary historiography be to attempt to identify or empathize with (and by implication ‘understand’) the experience of the Other or on the contrary, recognize the gap within and between the Others’ experience and her own?” (138). Answering this question, Didur counters scholarly arguments that see literature as providing/restoring the historical record. Rather, she argues, the “silences in ‘abducted’ women’s testimonies are a sign of the original incompleteness of history or an example of ‘loss as loss’ in the first instance” (139).

Didur’s achievement lies in her careful attention to what she identifies as a “rhetorically sensitive” reading of the texts—a phrase she borrows from Spivak. Her emphasis on the “literariness” (10) of literature and language, and meaning making through realism, fragmentation, and imagery is one of the distinguishing features of the book, crucial as it is in demonstrating how language mediates representations and perceptions of history, memory, experience, consciousness, and understanding of this event. As well, it is useful in pointing out how literary narratives destabilize “truth claims about the past, disrupt totalizing accounts of independence and the division of India, and work toward deterritorializing nationalist discourse” (11). Other interesting moments in the book include analyses of letters, diaries, autobiography, and advertisements such as the one for Parle Gluco tea biscuits in English language newspapers as the events of partition unfold in 1947. Didur points out how cultural representations such as the Parle Gluco biscuit ads at that time produce a rhetoric that nurtures masculine political power and reinscribes the home as the domain of women, especially mothers, and privilege patriarchal interests in the national imaginary—something that constituted the imagination in the treatment accorded to women during the partition. Overall, Didur’s intensive discussion of existing scholarship on nationalism and partition and their relationship to literary and cultural narratives ensures the valuable contribution made by Unsettling Partition.