REWRITING HISTORY THROUGH FICTION: A STUDY OF CROSS-BORDER PARTITION FICTIONS (Pages 29- 37) by Dr. Uttam Kumar Jena in THE ENGLISH INDIA / ISSN: 2321-1172 (Online); 2347-2634 (Print)

The partition of India in 1947 comes not only as a geographical division but divides the population on religious lines. The so-far-compromised ethnic, religious, cultural differences become alive again to assume monstrous proportions and both Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims pounce upon each other with an ancient rage determined to annihilate each other from the face of their religiously defined nations. Though there is no dearth of a continuous and uninterrupted endeavour on the part of the historians, on both sides of the border, to come out with a logical connotation of partition, they fail in their task because of the very bewildering and confusing nature of its accompanying violence. But this collective communal insanity, which the historians call as an ‘aberration,’ has profoundly been dealt with in the fictional narratives of both sides of the border. Instead of searching for the essential causes for the violence such narratives explore the impact of violence on the lives of the common masses who are uprooted, killed or turned to be refugees in an alien land imposed upon them as their ‘nation’.he partition of India in 1947 comes not only as a geographical division but divides the population on religious lines. The so-far-compromised ethnic, religious, cultural differences become alive again to assume monstrous proportions and both Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims pounce upon each other with an ancient rage determined to annihilate each other from the face of their religiously defined nations. Though there is no dearth of a continuous and uninterrupted endeavour on the part of the historians, on both sides of the border, to come out with a logical connotation of partition, they fail in their task because of the very bewildering and confusing nature of its accompanying violence. But this collective communal insanity, which the historians call as an ‘aberration,’ has profoundly been dealt with in the fictional narratives of both sides of the border. Instead of searching for the essential causes for the violence such narratives explore the impact of violence on the lives of the common masses who are uprooted, killed or turned to be refugees in an alien land imposed upon them as their ‘nation’.Keywords: Partition, Historiography, Ideology, Violence, Pain, Trauma, Loss, Memory etc.