While the traumatic impact of Partition on Punjab has been extensively examined, this paper undertakes a reading of Masoom Reza’s novels, Aadha Gaon (1960) and Os ki Boond (1970) to examine UP Muslims trauma of Partition in terms of homelessness and their minoritization in postcolonial India. Against a background of historical facts, the paper demonstrates how these novels as literary-testimonies mediate questions of belongingness and nationalism. By reimagining identity in terms of affective place based belongingness to home, they show how conceiving nationalism in terms of communal identities engenders trauma through home becoming an unheimlich space. Depicting the community’s life in the 1940s until the early years of independence, Aadha Gaon paints a poignant picture of loss of home and the reduction of the community to minorities in their own home. Os ki Boond carries forward the narrative in the 1950s and against the backdrop of rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism and growth of Jana Sangh, further probes the socio-political processes of making minority citizen-subjects in independent India. The paper draws upon postcolonial studies of trauma to posit the local genre of anchalik-upanayas (loosely, regional novel) as the medium through which the texts engage with the community’s trauma of long Partition.

Ideology and cinematic representation are crucially linked even though a film’s positioning of itself with respect to dominant state ideology may differ thus contesting the idea that films always serve as ideological state apparatus. In this context, the paper reflects on the complex ways in which the ideological positioning – advertently or inadvertently – of cinematic representations of Partition in Hindi films of the 2000s interacts with dominant state ideology to frame the relationship between self and other with the terms denoting India/Hindu and Pakistan/Muslim, respectively. Through an analysis of the representation of the India–Pakistan border in four films – Pinjar (2003), Veer-Zaara (2004), Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (2014) – the paper argues that mainstream Hindi films are largely reflective of the state ideology, although to varying degrees and at times in spite of themselves. In contrast, a low budget film as Kya Dilli Kya Lahore completely subverts the dominant ideology through its sensitive but incisive critique of the border.

Literary narratives constitute memory-archives that challenge state silencing of anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. The paper draws upon Rigney’sidea of ‘agency of the aesthetic’ in generating memorability to show how cultural representations participate in unforgetting of traumatic pasts. The paper argues that in creating memorability of a difficult history, the texts bring state narrative to a limit and open an alternative space where confrontation with traumatic-memories does not preclude possibility of hope. The texts feed into ‘memory-as-relevance’ as the mediation of memories of trauma, resilience, and hope carries possibility of effectuating subtle changes in the dominant narrative of anti-Sikh pogrom.

Reading to Amrita Pritam's Pinjar to highlight the continuity between historical and insidious trauma

Ideology and cinematic representation are crucially linked even though a film’s positioning of itself with respect to dominant state ideology may differ thus contesting the idea that films always serve as ideological state apparatus. In this context, the paper reflects on the complex ways in which the ideological positioning – advertently or inadvertently – of cinematic representations of Partition in Hindi films of the 2000s interacts with dominant state ideology to frame the relationship between self and other with the terms denoting India/Hindu and Pakistan/Muslim, respectively. Through an analysis of the representation of the India–Pakistan border in four films – Pinjar (2003), Veer-Zaara (2004), Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (2014) – the paper argues that mainstream Hindi films are largely reflective of the state ideology, although to varying degrees and at times in spite of themselves. In contrast, a low budget film as Kya Dilli Kya Lahore completely subverts the dominant ideology through its sensitive but incisive critique of the border.