Secondary and Theoretical Works
- Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba (2015)
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- More specifically: “Defining The Terms: Colonialism, Imperialism, Neo-Colonialism, Postcolonialism,” “Colonialism and Literature,” “Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Discourse”
- Also from Loomba: South Asian Feminisms
- Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind C. Morris (2010)
- More specifically: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
- Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, Jayita Sengupta (2012)
- Request if the library can buy a copy
- More specifically: “Introduction,” “Living the Dream: Narrating a Landscape Lost and a Land Left Behind,” “The Emblematic Body: Women and Nationalism in Partition Narratives”
- Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, Jill Didur (2006)
- More specifically: “Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India’s Partition,” “Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” “At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition Narratives”
- Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998)
- “The Translator’s Task,” Walter Benjamin (1923, translated 1997)
- Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
- Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Academic Journals
- Verge: Studies in Global Asias
- Journal of Postcolonial Studies
- Literature in History
- Genre (for content on approaching historical fiction)
Key Terms
- Postcoloniality
- World Literature
- Partition
- Subaltern
Primary Texts
- Pinjar (The Skeleton), Amrita Pritam (1950, translated 2009)
- Ice-Candy Man (also titled Cracking India), Bapsi Sidhwa (1988)
- The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia (1998)
- A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, Krishna Sobti
- Tomb of Sand, Gitanjali Shree
In conversation with Professor Kersh, Professor Sider Jost, Professor Seiler, Professor Haque, and Zana Mody (one of my tutors from studying abroad), I have created a broad reading list; it includes some new titles and some works to revisit more specifically under the lens of this project.
In terms of theory and secondary works, I am motivated by what it means to even access these primary texts; this involves consciously thinking about this genre as historical fiction. What does it mean for these women-authored novels to function as works of historical fiction that answer a lack of actual women’s voices in the real-life historical archives of Partition? What does it mean for these works to either be published or translated to English relatively recently, regardless of when they were written? In short, not only am I searching for secondary texts that define postcoloniality and the oral history project of the Partition archives, but I’m also looking for theory that can help answer precisely why it’s so difficult to locate these texts in an English-speaking sphere (both for purchase and for academia). For context, my hunt for physical copies of these primary texts was a quest triangulated across the United States, the United Kingdom, and India—what does it mean to “discover” (for lack of a better word) female-authored novels on the female experience of Partition?
On the level of content, I am captivated by a larger trend of microcosmic representations (be it clothing, language, even names) of macrocosmic violence (here, the struggle between India and Pakistan) within domestic spaces and women’s lives. What does this pattern mean? Why are there smaller representations of communal conflict in women’s day-to-day lives against the backdrop of postcolonial state formation (especially considering that women themselves are often read as an extension of the state, like in the case of Bharat Mata)? I want to move away from the traditional reading of physical women’s bodies in Partition literature and move towards a study of their inner lives. So many narratives chart the effects of dismemberment, rape, and abduction on the physical female body, but what happens to women mentally?
Update:
My main goal with my updated reading list was to whittle down the mass of texts I previously listed into something more manageable. This involved shifting certain titles into different sections and breaking down larger readings into specific chapters that are most helpful to this project. My secondary and theoretical works have not shifted drastically, though I’ve broken most of them down in more bite-sized pieces; personally, this more in-depth listing makes the project feel more approachable. I’ve cut Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature byGilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature by Rebecca L. Walkowitz for now, though certain ideas from these texts might become more relevant if I shift more of my focus to translation; for now, Benjamin’s “The Translator’s Task” seems to be a suitable enough look into the politics of translation. At the stage of research I’m currently in, it’s been fruitful to focus my energies on theoretical texts that explicitly focus on the juncture of literature and Partition.
In terms of academic journals, I surveyed The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies for useful articles related to Partition and narrowed the results down to two articles: “The invisible holocaust and the journey as an exodus: the poisoned village and the stranger city” by Ashis Nandy and “Partition’s other avatars” by Roy Parama. The latter article proposed a new book (Violent Belongings by Kavita Daiya) potentially worth looking at in the context of Partition literature and the state of the physical landscape, though I’m not sure I want to tackle chapters from this book until I’ve read my selections from the Didur and the Sengupta. I greatly narrowed down the list of journals I had after doing a preliminary search into what each publication had on Partition specifically. I still need to peruse Verge: Studies in Global Asias, but the refinement of my keywords is helping this process. I included “Partition” as an updated key term.
When it comes to my primary texts, I realized that I would never be able to do justice to a book so large in scope as Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, so I struck the 1000-page tome from my reading list. Given just how vast of a narrative the novel is, it feels as though including it in my thesis would be too broad for the scope and space limitations of the project. I also tentatively cut Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There from my original reading list. I’ve read the novel once before, and it didn’t necessarily speak to me in the same way as Pinjar or Ice-Candy Man. If it seems relevant as I continue my research, I can always revisit the text. I moved The Other Side of Silence (1998) by Urvashi Butalia from Secondary Works to Primary Texts for now since the bulk of my historical background comes from this nonfiction feminist oral history. I’m almost solidly set on Pinjar (1950) and Ice-Candy Man (1988) as the focus texts for my thesis. The temporal gap between the two also provides a place for analysis in the larger context of Partition literature as answering a gap in the historical archives. Both texts are authored by female writers who directly experienced Partition violence. Pinjar was originally published in Punjabi and then translated into English in 2009; the novel tracks the kidnapping and forced marriage of Puro, a young Hindu girl, to a Muslim man shortly before Partition. Ice-Candy Man centers on Lenny, a young Parsi girl living with polio in Lahore, as she witnesses brutal violence enacted on those around her.