Crisis and Memory- Trauma, Testimony and Collective Remembering in Partition Narratives

Abstract

The 1947 Partition was considered the most cataclysmic crisis in Indian history. Based on an arbitrary line drawn on a map, it was not merely the division of a nation into two parts, but the division of people and hearts. Further, it came along with dystopian instances of exodus, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and unfathomable communal violence committed by people on either side of the border. The victims of Partition were deeply scarred by the trauma of their uprooting and they did not find solace in their new homelands. Consequently, a new branch of literature emerged to serve as a testimony to the horrific experiences of the victims, their ordeal, and their longing for lost homes. This intensified the steam of mistrust among communities, which continued to blow the whistle of violence through several other catastrophic incidents. Naturally, even after seventy-five years, the question remains as to whether there is any resolution to this psychological unrest. Therefore, in this paper, I wish to explore the works of authors such as Manto, Amitav Ghosh, Prativa Basu, and others who attempted to find a way to vent their agony and resolve peace with their daunting memories through their writing. I further intend to put forth Derrida's concept of 'forgiveness' and seek how, only through mutual empathy and by forgiving the "unforgivable," the denouement for this forbidding tale can be reached and mental peace may be achieved.

Headnote

Abstract

The 1947 Partition was considered the most cataclysmic crisis in Indian history. Based on an arbitrary line drawn on a map, it was not merely the division of a nation into two parts, but the division of people and hearts. Further, it came along with dystopian instances of exodus, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and unfathomable communal violence committed by people on either side of the border. The victims of Partition were deeply scarred by the trauma of their uprooting and they did not find solace in their new homelands. Consequently, a new branch of literature emerged to serve as a testimony to the horrific experiences of the victims, their ordeal, and their longing for lost homes. This intensified the steam of mistrust among communities, which continued to blow the whistle of violence through several other catastrophic incidents. Naturally, even after seventy-five years, the question remains as to whether there is any resolution to this psychological unrest. Therefore, in this paper, I wish to explore the works of authors such as Manto, Amitav Ghosh, Prativa Basu, and others who attempted to find a way to vent their agony and resolve peace with their daunting memories through their writing. I further intend to put forth Derrida's concept of 'forgiveness' and seek how, only through mutual empathy and by forgiving the "unforgivable," the denouement for this forbidding tale can be reached and mental peace may be achieved.

Keywords: Partition, Crisis, Trauma, Collective Aphasia, Mistrust, Forgiveness.

Introduction

On every 15th August, the social media handle of every Indian gets flooded with celebratory posts of Independent India. Our government never holds back in innovating new ways, each year, to celebrate the occasion more grandly. Like in 2022, they announced the initiative of 'Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav' with the objective to "commemorate 75 years of independence". Yet there are few people who raise the question - "are we really independent?" The question might seem frivolous because of the context it is mostly used in, but when thought about, it does hold quite a lot of weight. The event of India becoming an independent nation has been so meticulously inculcated into our minds as a jubilant one since so long, that we have become desensitized about the most horrific outcome of it - the fateful Partition. Are we really independent from the horrors of Partition or are we just evading the discussion perpetually to defend ourselves from the psychological trauma that it causes. Ashis Nandi in the forward of Mapmaking (2011) talks about how "Independence came packaged in genocide, necrophilia, ethnic cleansing, massive uprooting and the collapse of a moral universe" (pp. xi) and yet the "earlier generation" hardly made any "grudging admission that the human suffering accompanying the event was at least as important as Independence" (p. xi). The question remains as to why unlike the Palestinian communities across the world who come together in their respective countries on 15th May every year to observe 'al Nakba' or the 'Day of Catastrophe' marking a long, ongoing history of homelessness, refugee-ism, violence and often despair, the Indians rather chose to stay silent about their excruciating plight during their exodus. Even a prolific film-maker like Ritwik Ghatak never really spoke out directly about the aftermath of Partition in his films, but used it as a backdrop to depict human predicament in general, such as in the movie Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960).

However, there were few authors and artists whose contributions we were able to trace the history of partition not merely as a political event of migration and rehabilitation but as a host of events accompanied by violence, mass slaughter, rape, kidnap, and every other form of barbarity that there is in the face of this earth. The primary objective of this paper, therefore, is to focus on the works of such authors like Sadat Hasan Manto, Pratibha Basu, Manik Bandopadhyay, Mahesh Dattani and Amitav Ghosh and film directors such as Srijit Mukherjee, Rakesh Omprakash Mehra and others who were able to move beyond the rejoicing of independence and mourn 15th August as the day associated with the drawing of the 'Radcliffe line'.

Partition: An Arbitrary Decision

Partition refers to the concept of dividing anything into two or more parts. However, for Indians it only brings to mind the ghastly tragic culmination of the two hundred years long British Colonialism. The process firstly began with the 'divide and rule' policy of the British colonizers leading to the Partition of Bengal in 1905 into Western Bengal dominated by Hindus and Eastern Bengal dominated by Muslims and finally developed into the 'Two Nation' theory dividing the whole nation into Pakistan and Hindustan, leading to the perpetual animosity between the two nations as well as the two communities. In this regard, Mushirul Hasan in India's Partition Process (1993) aptly explains how the "two-nation theory is grounded in the mistaken belief that Hindu-Muslims constitute exclusive autonomous entities and that religious loyalty takes precedence over ties and bonds of relationship based on tangible inter-social connections" (p. 36).

The Partition of 1947 is considered to be one of most cataclysmic events after the Holocaust in the Post-colonial era. On the 14th August 2022 issue of Rabibasariya, Satyaranjan Das in his article 'Bivajoner Parishromik Teen Hazar Pound', explicates how in 1945, after announcing their decision to free India of their rule, the British never paid any serious attention to the ongoing tussle between Congress and the Muslim League. In order to rid themselves off of any further complications, they decided to grant Muhammad Ali Jinnah a separate nation and summoned Sir Cyril Radcliffe to divide the regions of Punjab and Bengal, inhabited by eight crore and eighty lakh people, within merely five weeks. Cyril had never been to India before, and yet he was given the responsibility of deciding the fate of these people as he was considered to be "unbiased" for the very same reason. Renowned poet W. B. Auden, vehemently ridiculed this whimsical venture, in his poem 'Partition':

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odd

With their different diets and incompatible gods. (Auden, 1966)

The arbitrariness of this 'tailor-made Partition' has also been explored in a recent film titled Rcjkahini (2015) by Srijit Mukherjee. The movie captures the story of resistance by a group of prostitutes, who are rejected from the society of apparent 'bhodroloks'. It happens so that the Radcliffe line drawn on the map of then India, passes across their brothel and they are ordered to evict the premise. However, they decide to fight back, and in doing so, they are ultimately burnt alive in their compound. Of the many phenomenal sequences, the most striking one in the movie is the last scene in which amidst the fire devouring the prostitutes within their compound, one of the oldest members of the brothel, Thamma reads out the Jauhar episode of Rani Padmavati from a translated version, elevating themselves to the position of Padmini giving up their lives in order to save their honour and their home. This movie vividly depicts how erratic the decision of Partition was, in which, within a night's time, one's home was divided into two parts - one in Pakistan and the other in Hindustan, just by the stroke of a pen. The futility of this is also delineated by Amitav Ghosh in his novel The Shadow Lines (1988) through Thakuma's utter disappointment when she comes to know that she won't be able see any "border-line" between India and East Pakistan while flying to Dacca from Calcutta. She wonders to her dismay, "if there aren't any trenches or anything, how are people to know? ... where's the difference then? What was it all for then - Partition and all the killing and everything - if there isn't something in between?" (Ghosh, 2019, p. 167)

Partition Literature: Testimony of the Mass Uproot and the Resultant Chaos

As a result of this arbitrary project, approximately two crore people were uprooted, nearly ten lakh were killed or rendered disabled, and nearly one lakh women were raped or forced to convert religion. Although the official figures stated only numbers, there was hardly any documentation of real human stories or their appalling experiences. Thus, in order to recount those memories, as Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side cf Silence (1998) asserts, one must rely only on oral history. However, Ashis Nandi observes in Mapmaking (2011) that most of the victims either chose silence as their "psychological defence" (p. xi) from the traumatic memories or "a case of cultivated aphasia" (p. xiv) took over the minds of these people. Nonetheless, the artistic selves of contemporary writers of that time seemed to overcome their initial reticence, which inspired them to produce some of the finest psychological documentation of the Partition. Thus, a branch of literature emerged to serve as a testimony to the horrific experiences of the victims, their ordeals, and their longing for their lost homes.

Sadat Hasan Manto's 'Toba Тек Singh' is one of the first works to delineate very realistically the picture of how after partition people were forced to migrate and leave their ancestral place unwillingly and unlawfully; and how they were divided in the name of religion, spreading religious hatred among people especially the Hindus and the Muslims. Manto locates his story in a lunatic asylum situated in Pakistan, the inmates of which have to be divided between the two nations deciding on their religion after Partition. He takes the theme of Partition to the world of the insane, highlighting the political absurdity of the Partition itself, and at the same time deals with the themes of alienation, dislocation as trauma, sense of place in identity, breakdown of communication, and issues unresolved by the partition of India. The madman, Bishan Singh, who hails from a small village, Toba Тек Singh that lies in the Pakistan side of Punjab, is unable to fathom the fact that the splitting of the subcontinent requires him to cross the border line and forget his homeland forever. In a skillful and obtrusive manner, Manto succeeded in investing the identity of a person with the identity of a place. The portrayal of Bishan Singh to have never been seen to sit or lie down in the past fifteen years, suggests Bishan Singh and Toba Тек Singh have almost become synonymous and interchangeable by the time we come to the conclusion of the story. While their migration to India, when Bishan Singh comes to know that his village lies in Pakistan, Bishan Singh refuses to be coaxed into believing that Toba Тек Singh will be moved where he wants it to be moved. He runs and stands firmly at a spot in the middle of the two countries, refusing to be stirred until dawn when everyone hears a piercing cry coming out of Bishen Singh, who now lies face down on the ground. On one side of him lay Hindustan and on the other lay Pakistan and "In between, on a strip of no man's land that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singin" (p. 220)т In his death, Bishan Singh succeeds in avoiding the exile that stares him in face. His piercing cry and death on the strip of no man's land symbolizes both Bishen Singh's as well as Manto's ultimate rejection and critique of the "vivisection of the Mother" India, as Mahatma Gandhi called it (Wolpert, 2002, p. 8)t Toba Тек Singh's death is an act of defiance, a symbol of protest and rebellion, a challenge to history and a refusal to accept the political identity thrust on him by arbitrary decisions of policy-makers.

Women: The Silent but Resilient Victims

Apart from the reports of families being divided, homes being destroyed, crops being left to rot, one of the most brutal aspects of the Partition was the widespread sexual savagery - women were abducted and raped by men of not only the 'other' religion but indeed sometimes by men of their own religion as well. Thus, many women after the partition decided to remain within the zone of silence in order to shield themselves from being questioned about their survival story. Such experiences frame Prativa Basu's "The Marooned" and Manik Bandopadhyay's "The Final Solution".

"The Marooned" helps to recreate the texture of life in the refugee camps and the picture of the contemporary established society by national governments to deal with the huge influx of migrants. Basu vividly captures the difficulties of providing infrastructure, relief, and eventually rehabilitation in the camps, as local officials sought to encourage families and women to support themselves by finding employment or starting small enterprises. Basu's story exposes how the political chaos of partition made women universally vulnerable to men with predatory and exploitative instincts. Ritu Menon and Kamla В hasin in Borders and Boundaries: Women in India 's Partition (1998) observed that a woman's body during the partition crisis was treated as a sight where one ethnic group tried to prove its religious supremacy. As a result, the middle-aged widow, Bindubashini, without any patriarch, along with her widowed daughter in law, Uttara and her two young granddaughters, Mrinalini and Bulu, are compelled to leave their ancestral land and take abode in the Muslim dominated Bangladesh and migrate to India. Yet, they fall easy prey to rapacious men of their own "trusted" community. The title of Basu's story, 'The Marooned' or 'Dukulhara' brings out their homelessness on both sides of the border, having to abruptly abandon their original homeland and having no safe shelter in their new place of refuge. The throes of migration have been meticulously scripted by Basu as she depicts - "Across the vast fields the government had arranged for two ropes to be stretched from one end to the other, serving as passage. Thousands of people entered the narrow passage." (Basu, 2011, p. 161) Wild instincts are unleashed amongst the faceless crowd so that some "Clawed at the female bodies in the crowd, some picked pockets, taking away the meagre cash one carried for the road." (Basu, p. 161) Though Bindubashini's family wears as many ornaments as they can, "carry the minimum possible cash and gold", they lose "almost everything" before crossing the border (p. 160). After two days of incessant walking, they reach Hindustan, and come to a huge mango orchard where the "tired starving bodies of men and women" slump to the ground "like logs of woods." (p. 163) Forty-eight children from 12 families hurdle their mothers in the cold. While Bindubashini's younger granddaughter, Bulu, starts suffering from high fever, a "rough, harsh, masculine hand" (p. 163) tries to pull Bulu away to abuse or molest her. A terrified Uttara clasped her daughter. However, sadly enough, Bull succumbs to fever. Soon refugee women from the working class find means of survival as part-time domestics in local households and their little daughters start begging in the streets. The sudden influx of female refugees creates an opportunity for prosperous lustful men to dupe and sexually exploit them. As a result, Bindubasini and her family are victimised by the rich black-marketeer, Rajit Lochan, who sexually violates Uttara and then abandons her at some brothel, takes Milu to his friend, Shashishekhar to deflower and debauch her, and ultimately brutally kills Bindubasini as she is unfit to gratify the libidinous drives of the lascivious men. Ultimately, Bindubasini loses everything she once gracefully possessed: home, homeland, family, dignity, and hope.

Manik Bandopadhayay, however, unlike Basu captures a tale of resistance rather than helplessness in his story 'The Final Solution'. It portrays a picturesque description of the destitute and miserable condition of Mallika's family affected by the partition of Bengal. The deplorable condition of homeless refugees can be vividly discerned through the author's description - "Everything, everyone was squeezed there - Mallika, her husband Bhushan, their two and-half-year-old son Khokan and her widow sister-in-law Asha; tin suitcase, beddings, bundles, pots and pans." (Bandopadhayay, 2011, p. 36) In the topsy-turvy condition of post-partition, there were some chance-seekers like Pramatha and his assistant Ramlochan who used to come to the destitute families in the pretence of help and would lure married women of those families into prostitution with the offer to provide them with money. Mallika too had to accept Pramatha's proposal with a pinch of salt at first, finding no way out for survival. It was her motherly affection that compelled Mallika to keep pace on the perverted path. Nonetheless, Mallika could no longer tolerate the exploitation of the Pramatha. When all the ways seemed closed to Mallika, she thought the murder of her exploiter to be the only "solution" for their survival in this infernal world. 'The Final Solution' finds Mallika assimilating into the subordination exercised upon women. However, unlike Bindubasini and her family, she acquires agency by reclaiming authority upon her body. Mallika chooses compliance as a form of survival strategy only until gender politics at play do not hold her in its grip.

Another astounding depiction of woeful refugee conditions is shown in Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's film Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013). The movie is based on the life of the Olympic winner athlete, Milkha Singh, who hails from a Sikh family in Govindpur, Punjab province of present Pakistan. The first part of the movie explores how Singh's present is haunted by his traumatic childhood memory of his parents being slaughtered during Partition. After being orphaned by religious violence, he reaches a refugee camp in Delhi, where he meets his married sister's family. The portrayal of his life in the impoverished camp, with him sleeping beside his sister, cramped up while his brother-in-law forced himself on his sister, creating a daunting picture of how dreadful it could have been for the immigrants.

Attempts of Rehabilitation and the Gaze of the Natives

Though the Ministry of Rehabilitation under the Government of India managed to set up habitable shelters for the refugees by the 1950s, the so-called natives never considered them as their citizens. In Bengal, the differentiation of 'bangai', migrants from East Bengal and 'ghoti', the residents of West Bengal, and the emotional connection with the 'epar bangia' or the 'opar bangia' talks a lot about the inhibitions they had for each other. To date even in simple things like a football match between East Bengal and Mohan Bagan, the supporters of East Bengal team are derogatorily called out as '...' (kanta taar), which refers to the marks of the barbed wire on the backs of the refugees from East Bengal. Even after seventy - five years of mass displacement, these migrants couldn't fully secure a respectable gaze from their fellow community members, in whom they sought shelter, away from their blood-thirsty religious other. It is a very common notion that a 'bangai' is a person pleasing diplomat, who would never take your side when in need. A person who lost his home, his homeland, and his family in some cases and was thrust into a new land altogether to call that his homeland and to make a living for himself, how would he not become a diplomatic individual and teach his successors to not be the same? A person who has witnessed how devilish a known fellow human can turn, how would he trust someone enough once again to take his side? It would need years of healing for him to be rid of the trauma and subsequent reticence that he has garnered for his defence.

This also brings elements of diaspora into discourse. This is evident in the nostalgia of the migrants for the land they had to leave behind and their ardent need to keep their culture alive. A very recurrent phenomenon among these migrants is the surfacing of Alzheimer's disease during old age, in which they tend to lose memory of their present life and their past idyllic memory of their childhood in their native land in Punjab or Bangladesh. This has been beautifully explored in the movie Belasuru (2022) by Shiboprasad Mukheijee and Nandita Roy. One of the protagonists, Biswanath Sarkar's wife, Arati, hailing from Bangladesh before her marriage, suffers from Alzheimer in her 60s and she seems to gradually forget everyone in her family, including her children and her husband. The only names she reiterates are her childhood playmates and the only places she recognises are the places from Bangladesh where she initially belonged.

Leena Gangopadhyay and Saibal Banerjee's film, Maati (2018), on the other hand, focuses on another unexplored facet of Partition - the perception of the migrants, on both sides of the border, about each other. Meghla Chowdhury, who is a second-generation successor of her immigrant grandfather, had never visited her ancestral house in Bangladesh. She eventually gets an opportunity to visit the place and comes to know the truth regarding the murder of her grandmother in their ancestral abode. She discovers that the family of a man named Jamil had occupied their house after it was left vacant by her grandmother's death. She is left embittered towards Jamil after this revelation. However, when she confronts him, he raises a very pertinent question to her - if the vacant houses in East Bengal were occupied by refugees from India, the refugees from East Bengal, too, must have occupied the vacant houses in India left behind by the migrants. How is it fair for only her to feel victimized? This sheds light on how the splitting of the two nations, concerning one's religious faith never saw a variation in the ravaging impact for either of the two communities. Both nations faced similar dreadful fates in their attempt to rehabilitate in a place with people of 'similar faith and culture', with people whom they could 'trust'. It is as ironic as it sounds in retrospect.

The Germ of Mistrust and the Saga of Violence

The seed of intolerance and discrimination that the English colonizers have successfully implanted in our minds could not be eliminated even after this strategically imposed mass eviction, called the Partition. Even though the victims managed to break through their initial collective aphasia by documenting their narratives through literature, they were still far from coming to terms with the memories that continued to haunt them. This intensified the steam of mistrust among communities, which continued to blow the whistle of violence through several other catastrophic events, even today. India gained independence in 1947 by paying its price in the form of Partition into two halves. However, Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh are clasped together as West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Unfortunately, this not only raised issues because of the geographical situation but also because of the cultural and linguistic differences between both parts of the nation. East Pakistan felt left out of the representation in governance and claimed a separate nation, leading to the 'Mukti Juddho'. Although Bangladesh finally gained liberation from Pakistan with the help of India in 1971, India's interference in the matter resulted in the infamous 1971 Indo-Рак War. The saga of "division of hearts" continued. Following this war, in the 1980s a separatist movement called the Khalistan movement took larger shape in Punjab, seeking to create a homeland for Sikh diaspora, establishing an ethno-religious sovereign state called Khalistan. The insurgency took a violent shape, and the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi had to sanction Operation Blue Star within the holy premise of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, deeply hurting the religious sentiments of the Sikhs. Consequently, in 1984 she was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards. This in turn, turned the nation against the Sikhs, leading to nationwide genocide of Sikhs, especially in Delhi and Bihar region. The fright and alarm of the Sikhs during this time brought back all the terrible memories of Partition. Works like, Amitav Ghosh's 'The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi' (1995) and the National award-winning film, Punjab 1984 (2014), brilliantly depict the atrocious acts performed against Sikhs - arrested without a warrant, tortured within cells, burnt alive, women raped in front of their family, and the horrors go on and on. Again, in the 1990s India witnessed yet another violent insurgency in the Indian-administered Kashmir valley demanding an Islamic state, which lead to the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Muslim-majority province. This is another example of how much Britishers have inculcated the feeling of hatred between Hindus and Muslims, in their attempt to 'divide and rule'. The scale of the human massacre and barbarity that occurred during the mass migration was unfathomable. The movie The Kashmir Files (2022) astoundingly documents such few episodes of slaughter and violence with so much accuracy that it becomes quite impossible to keep staring at the screen at times. This was the immensity of ruthlessness that the Pandits had to face, just because they belonged to the religious 'other' of the perpetrators. Finally, one of the incidents that had a massive impact on India's history of religious disharmony was the Babri Masjid demolition in the 1990s. Anand Patwardhan in his documentary Ram ke Naam (In the Name of God) (1992), enumerates the events that led up to the D-day and exposes how the event was less of an outrage from the native inhabitants and more of a political stunt. Mahesh Dattani, too, in this play, Final Solutions (1993) explores the topic of communal friction between the Hindus and the Muslims and throws light on how the resultant prejudice and fanaticism have roots in the traumatic memories of the Partition that are exploited by policy-makers to serve their purpose of again 'divide and rule'.

Is the Trauma and the Consequent Mental Turmoil Resolvable?

The victims of Partition were deeply scarred by the trauma of their uprooting and hardly did they find solace in their new homelands. Their trauma was aggravated even more as they had to relive the memory of loss and fright every time communal riots broke out in any part of the nation. Even after seventy-five years, therefore, one question keeps glaring as to whether there is any resolution to this psychological unrest. To answer this, it is necessary to raise the question of how the Holocaust survivors made peace with their daunting memories and moved on. In the case of Holocaust survivors, their mental turmoil was comforted by the fact that there was a clear demarcation between the good and the bad. Even though it took quite a while for the accounts of the barbarity to reach the ears of the world and for the people to be able to believe that such an extent of bestiality was possible, after the final revelation there stood no debate about who was at wrong and who the wronged. So, they got the opportunity to vent their agony by voicing their horrible experiences as they were assured that their trauma could not be countered with whataboutism. However, for the Partition victims, there was no such demarcation. The perpetrators on either side of the border were not innately devilish like Hitler and his army who meticulously planned their modus operandi to inflict torture as systematically as possible. In the context of the Partition, these people were commoners mostly propelled by 'mass-mentality' which was ignited by the policy-makers and men-in-power to exploit the emotions of the masses for their political gain. Thus, the survivors were well aware that their narrative would be countered with the narratives from across the border, cancelling the validity of their account and there would be no one individual to blame for their devastation. So, to seek a resolution for such a complex mishap, acknowledging the immensity of the horrors becomes most important. In that, the recent initiative of the Indian government to observe 14th August as 'Partition Horrors Remembrance Day', may be considered as a great move to commemorate the victims and their sufferings during the Partition. Following this first step, one needs to go back to the basics and agree with Mahesh Dattani that the only possible solution to give this chaos a rest is forgiveness and mutual empathy. Understandably, the process of forgiving and letting go of the terrible memories may seem to be a prolonged and hopeless venture and some might argue that it is a utopic approach as well. In that case, Jaques Derrida's 2001 treatise, 'On Forgiveness' may serve as a guide to explain, "if there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm." (pp. 32) Derrida further elucidates in Acts cf Religion (2002), "forgiveness must therefore do the impossible; it must undergo the test (epreuve) and ordeal of its own impossibility in forgiving the unforgivable." (Derida, 2002, pp. 385-386) Therefore, in attempting to do so and keeping the conversation about the incident alive the denouement for this forbidding tale can possibly be reached, and mental peace be achieved.

Sidebar

Bio-note

Tandrima Das is an aspiring academician. She recently post-graduated in English literature from Shri Shikshayatan College under University of Calcutta. Previously, she completed her graduation from Gokhale Memorial Girls' College under the same university and in the same subject. Presently, she is preparing for UGC NET to venture into the boundless world of academic research. Her areas of interest are Partition literature, Trauma studies and Film studies.

Email: [email protected]

References

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