Secondary and Theoretical Works
– Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba
(Also from Loomba: South Asian Feminisms)
– Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind C. Morris
(Specifically: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)
– Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Rebecca L. Walkowitz
– Borders and Partitions in South Asia, Jayita Sengupta
– Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, Jill Didur
– The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia
– Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin
– “The Translator’s Task,” Walter Benjamin
– Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Academic Journals
– Journal of Postcolonial Studies
– Verge: Studies in Global Asias
– Literature in History
– Genre (for content on approaching historical fiction)
Key Terms
– Postcoloniality
– World Literature
– Subaltern
Primary Texts
– Pinjar (The Skeleton), Amrita Pritam
– Ice-Candy Man (also titled Cracking India), Bapsi Sidhwa
– 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?