Publications

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.