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ABSTRACT
In this article, I suggest that the use of a science fiction short story, ‘A Visit to Partition World,’ by Tarun K. Saint in The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction(2019), to fictionalise the experience and after-effects of Partition in the formation of the nation, encourages readers to contemplate the after-life of Partition and re-evaluate its contemporary significance. The article discusses how the policies of the newly formed states, the course of historiography, and the silence around the event has perverted the transmission of memories resulting in violent after-effects, particularly in the form of inter-generational trauma. The short story compels us to re-evaluate the nature of nationalism with respect to a rapidly changing socio-cultural reality due to emerging technologies. Science fiction is used as a mode to address this interface and pitch alternative modes that demonstrate methods of critical engagement and commemoration of the event.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Roger Luckhurst, ‘The science-fictionalization of trauma: Remarks on narratives of alien abduction.’ Science Fiction Studies, 1998, pp. 32.
2 Ibid, p. 37.
3 Paulina Kamińska, ‘Science-fictionalization of trauma in the works of Doris Lessing.’ Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, 4 (2016), p. 85.
4 Ibid, p.88.
5 Seo-Young Chu, Do metaphors dream of literal sleep?: A science-fictional theory of representation (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 155.
6 Ibid, p.157.
7 Glyn Morgan, Imagining the Unimaginable: Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2020), Introduction.
8 Ibid
9 Tarun. K. Saint, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Hachette India, 2019), p. xxv
10 The country has experienced various kinds of religious tensions and conflicts at different points of time. Riots are probably the ‘final’ manifestation of intolerance and extreme distrust of the ‘Other,’ but these are preceded by instances of discrimination, verbal abuse, and institutional marginalization.
11 R. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
12 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, India–Pakistan Partition 1947 and forced migration. The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 2013.
13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006 (Original work published 1936).
14 The British government tasked Sir Cyril Radcliffe to separate and draw boundaries between India and Pakistan. The Radcliffe Commission was supposed to draw these boundaries and carve out the territories based on religious populations, socio-political concerns and irrigation and agricultural systems. However, the Commission was given only five weeks to divide around 4,50,000 km amongst a population of around 88 million. Several scholars believe that this hasty division caused wide-scale confusion and panic leading to extremely violent riots and massacres.
15 Sajal Nag, ‘Nationhood and Displacement in Indian subcontinent.’ Economic and Political Weekly, (2001), p. 4759.
16 Ibid
17 Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 65.
18 Ibid, p. 46
19 Ritika Singh, ‘Remember, recover: Trauma and transgenerational negotiations with the Indian Partition in This Side, That Side and the 1947 Partition Archive.’ EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2015, p.185-6.
20 Dhooleka S. Raj, Ignorance, forgetting, and family nostalgia: Partition, the nation state, and refugees in Delhi. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 44.2, 2000, p. 33.
21 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The long Partition and the making of modern South Asia: Refugees, boundaries, histories. (Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 2.
22 Zamindar, The Long Partition and the making of modern South Asia, p. 238.
23 Jisha Menon, Performance Of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p.1.
24 Ibid, p.5.
25 Public discourse often peddles the incomplete but popular perception that the Partition was orchestrated by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who both desired to be the Prime Ministers, thereby blaming high politics for the carnage. However, none of the politicians and administrative officers anticipated the level of violence that would tear the countries apart.
26 These discriminatory practices have increased exponentially in the past few years. Even today, areas with a majority Muslim population are often called ‘Mini-Pakistans’ and sloganeering during riots, even after independence, often ask the Muslims to go back to Pakistan.
27 Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (Routledge, 2010), p.10.
28 Marianne Hirsch, ‘The generation of postmemory.’ Poetics today, 29.1 (2008) 103–28. p. 106, 107
29 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of California Press, 2007), p.10.
30 Ibid
31 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 15.
32 Saint, Witnessing partition, p.11.
33 Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘Introduction: Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition’ In Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory (Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2016), p. 268. Pumla discusses this with reference to Holocaust survivors and their descendants but this understanding can also be applied here.
34 Priya Kumar, ‘Testimonies of Loss and Memory: Partition and the Haunting of a Nation’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1.2 (1999), p. 201.
35 Kumar, Testimonies of Loss and Memory, p. 203
36 One only has to remember the January 2020 riots in East Delhi that tore already ghettoized neighbourhoods apart to reflect upon the shadows of the Partition in our contemporary reality.
37 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), p. 2.
38 Gary K. Wolfe, Evaporating Genres: Essays on the Fantastic (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), p. viii.
39 Sherryl Vint, Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p.167.
40 For example, The Beast with Nine Billion Feet explores genetic engineering Island of Lost Girls (2016) by Manjula Padmanabhan portrays a ghoulish scenario in which the genetically engineered cloned Generals, ruling the government have instituted the xenophobic ideologies endorsed by Khap Panchayats. Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017) portrays a dystopian world where an unnamed city has been segregated into sectors along communal and caste lines, Signal Red by Rimi Chatterjee explores the relationship between the development of defense technologies and Right-wing ideologies.
41 In separate research articles and monographs, Suparno Banerjje and Priteegandha Naik suggest that Indian Science Fiction in English proceeded from a tradition dissimilar to the regional science fiction. See Indian Science Fiction:Patterns, History, and Hybridity(2020) and ‘The Science-Fictionalisation of Globalisation and Image Advertising in Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan.’
42 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, (Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 64-66.
43 Damien Broderick, ‘Reading Sf as a Mega-Text.’ in Rob Latham (ed.), Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings (Bloomsbury Academic), pp. 143-4.
44 Priteegandha Naik, ‘The Science-Fictionalisation of Globalisation and Image Advertising in Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan.’ Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, 7.1, pp. 18.
45 Michael P. Yogev, ‘The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature: Writing and Unwriting the Unbearable’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 5-2.18, (1993), p. 32–3
46 Gary K. Wolfe, ‘Introduction: Fantasy as Testimony’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 5-2.18 (1993), pp. 7-8.
47 Amanda Wicks, ‘All This Happened, More or Less’: The Science Fiction of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 55.3 (2014), p. 355.
48 Brian E. Crim, Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television (Rutgers University Press, 2020), p. 7.
49 Science fiction’s ability to provide a structure for the abnormal and unusual has been exploited since a long time, especially in the form of the trope of the ‘stranger’ and ‘strange lands’ – euphemisms for colonialism. This feature has also been subverted by sub-genres like Afro-futurism and Chicano-futurisms which wrestle back control to narrate their own stories.
50 Saint, A Visit to the Partition World, 2019, p.102.
51 Ibid, p.100.
52 Ibid, p. 95-6.
53 Ibid, 2019, p.97.
54 Ted Svensson, ‘Curating the Partition: dissonant heritage and Indian nation building’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27.2 (2020), p. 219.
55 Here, I refer to the phrase ‘heritage industry’ coined by Robert Hewison to describe the process of conservation, interpretation, and commercialisation of the past in UK to invoke a sense of nostalgia for England’s glorious past. Despite a systematic development of this discipline in the form of Heritage Management, there have been several debates about the sanitisation and flattening of history in such places of historical importance.
56 Svensson, Curating the Partition, p. 218.
57 Personal correspondence
58 Churnjeet Mahn and Anne Murphy. ‘Introduction: Partition and the Practice of Memory.’ In Partition and the Practice of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 3.
59 Mahn and Murphy, Introduction, p.5.
60 Saint, A Visit to the Partition World, 2019, p.100.
61 James E. Young, ‘The counter-monument: memory against itself in Germany today.’ Critical inquiry, 18.2 (1992), p. 273
62 Ibid, p.279.
63 quoted in Singh et al., See ‘Introduction: The Long Partition and Beyond.’ In Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics, Lexington Books, 2016, p. xxi
64 Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, J. Collective memory and cultural identity. New German Critique, 65 (1995), pp. 126-127.
65 Assmann and Czaplicka, Collective memory and cultural identity, p.129.
66 Assmann and Czaplicka, Collective memory and cultural identity, p.130.
67 Singh, Remember, recover, p.193.
68 Saint’s father, a Partition survivor, also gifted him a translation of Manto’s short stories. See, Saint, Witnessing Partition, p. 224. I found that there was a constant blurring of boundaries between the fictional and the real in the real. In the personal correspondence, Saint commented: ‘Fictional representation is never autonomous, and folds back into history and the personal domain in complex ways.’
69 Quoted in Gregory Higginbotham’s journal article: ‘Seeking roots and tracing lineages: constructing a framework of reference for roots and genealogical tourism.’ Journal of Heritage Tourism, 7.3 (2012), p. 189-203.
70 Tim Edensor and Uma Kothari. 2004 ‘Sweetening colonialism: A Mauritian Themed Resort.’ In M. Lasansky & B. McLaren (eds.) Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (Berg, 2004), p. 195.
71 Saint, A Visit to the Partition World, 2019, p. 102-103.
72 Saint, A Visit to the Partition World, 2019, p. 97.
73 Urvashi Butalia. ‘Community, state and gender: some reflections on the Partition of India.’ Oxford literary review, 16.1, 33-67. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 32.
74 Arjun Appadurai & Carol Breckenridge. ‘Museums are good to think: Heritage on view in India.’ In D. Preziosi & C. Farago (eds.), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Routledge, 2018), p. 693.
75 Jatin Jain. ‘Museum and museum-like structures: the politics of exhibition and nationalism in India.’ Exhibitionist (Spring’11), (2011), p. 51.
76 Preziosi, D., & Farago, C. ‘General Introduction: What Are Museums For?’ In D. Preziosi & C. Farago (eds.), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Routledge, 2018), pp. 4–5
77 Here, I mean the travel enabled by the virtual reality systems in the short story
78 Christiane Hartnack. ‘Roots and routes: the partition of British India in Indian social memories.’ Journal of Historical Sociology 25.2 (2012), p. 249
79 Here, I refer to the cognitive distance between the traumatic event and the individual
80 Saint, Witnessing Partition, p. 222.
81 Personal correspondence
82 As described by James E. Young
83 Saint, A Visit to the Partition World, 2019, p. 106.
84 Personal correspondence