REWRITING HISTORY THROUGH FICTION: A STUDY OF CROSSBORDER PARTITION FICTIONS (Pages 61-69) by Dr. Uttam Kumar Jena in Indian Journals

The partition of India in 1947he partition of India in 1947comes not only as ageographical division butdivides the population onreligious lines. The so-farcompromisedethnic, religious,cultural differences become alive again to assumemonstrous proportions and both Hindus/Sikhs andMuslims pounce upon each other with an ancientrage determined to annihilate each other from theface of their religiously defined nations. Thoughthere is no dearth of a continuous anduninterrupted endeavour on the part of thehistorians, on both sides of the border, to come outwith a logical connotation of partition, they fail intheir task because of the very bewildering andconfusing nature of its accompanying violence. Butthis collective communal insanity, which thehistorians call as an ‘aberration,’ has profoundlybeen dealt with in the fictional narratives of bothsides of the border. Instead of searching for theessential causes for the violence such narrativesexplore the impact of violence on the lives of thecommon masses who are uprooted, killed or turnedto be refugees in an alien land imposed upon themas their ‘nation’.Keywords: Partition, Historiography,Ideology, Violence, Pain, Trauma, Loss,Memory etc.