https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.064
Partition Beyond History: Affect, Memory, and the Ethics of Survival
AARUSHI DATTA
English Honors Student
St Xaviers College (Autonomous), Kolkata
Email: saachi0106@gmail.com
Abstract: This paper reimagines the trauma of Partition of 1947 through the lens of the affective inheritance that continues to impact the emotional afterlives of those who survive and subsequent generations. It posits memory as an active agent reshaping identities, communal relationships and everyday life across generations. It examines how affect survives where memory fails. The paper challenges the conventional ethics of survival by dismantling rigid binaries. Central to the study are survivors who faced with brutal atrocities often inhabit spaces of moral ambiguousness and challenge the limits and possibilities of closure forged by justice and reconciliation. It also foregrounds the gendered dimensions of brutality, how experiences are distinct yet interconnected, collective yet personal. Employing a qualitative methodology grounded in trauma theory, affect theory and literary analysis, the paper examines how Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, “Another Community” by RK Narayan and Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar challenge the linear temporality of historical trauma. It demonstrates how these texts present trauma as an absolute temporal collapse that blurs the binaries of past and present, imagination and lived reality. It examines how South Asian Partition Literature transforms trauma into affective archives where catastrophe is preserved not in official documents but in emotional afterlives of the survivors. It ultimately argues how violence is carried for ages and eventual transforms into an archive of memories, silence and interrupted speeches instead of a moment of extra ordinary violent rupture. The paper offers new understanding how collective catastrophe exceeds historical documentation and Partition becomes an enduring structure of feeling rather than a singular episode of political violence, arguing that its trauma persists through affective residues that resist historical closure.
Keywords: Partition of 1947, Trauma Studies, Affect Theory, Affective Inheritance, Emotional Afterlives, Affective Archives, South Asian Partition Literature
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