LITERATURE OF PARTITION: AN ANALYSIS OF SUFFERING AFTER 1947

The British announced the division of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan in August 1947, and turned it into a diabolical region. This was a path way for wickedness, violence and pure evil to erupt into a powerful mass and soar out of control, consuming everyone who came in its way! Pakistan was preferred by the Muslims and India was preferred by the Sikhs and Hindus, and hence they moved into the respective regions with the prospects of peace and better living. They wanted to live in harmony with their own religious and ethnic identities. The irony was, that the mass scale migration entailed crimes of unprecedented violence, murders, rapes and bestiality. An account of the exact number of people who were victims of the partition trauma is difficult to ascertain, however, its impact can be compared to that of the effects of the Great War on Britain or the Second World War on Japan and France. The effects of the tragedy of the partition encounter gave rise to the fictional explorations in an attempt to define the inner turmoil and the social complexities that plagued the subcontinent thereafter. The Partition of India has been the main theme of the discussions and novels that have been written in India. The novels and articles articulated the inexorable logic of partition as an offshoot of fundamentalism and fanaticism, that were sparked due to the hardening communal attitudes of the religious and ethnic groups. These novels were placed in a new genre of the Partition novel! The novels of this genre, depicted the throes of Partition that relentlessly divided friends and effectively and realistically explained the vulnerability of human understanding and life. The petition was considered as a proven mishap as it led the people to turn to fanaticism in no time throwing away all their sanity! There was no difference between being human and savage if people people kill each other. People ought to have faith in justice and the rule of law. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The world must be made a better place to live in.