Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory

212 Pages·2006·1.01 MB·English

by  Jill Didur

UNSETTLING PARTITION: LITERATURE, GENDER, MEMORY
This page intentionally left blank
JILL DIDUR
Unsettling Partition
Literature, Gender, Memory
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN-13: 978-08020-7997-8
ISBN-10: 0-8020-7997-0
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Didur, Jill, 1965–
Unsettling partition : literature, gender, memory / Jill Didur.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-7997-8
ISBN-10: 0-8020-7997-0
1. Indic fiction (English) – 20th century – History and criticism.
2. India – History – Partition, 1947 – In literature. 3. Partition,
Territorial, in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5. Violence
in literature. 6. Nationalism in literature. 7. Women in literature.
I. Title.
(cid:0)
PK5416.D53 2006 823.91409954 C2005-904567-1
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to
its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
For my family
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Unsettling Partition 3
1 ‘Making Men for the India of Tomorrow’? Gender and
Nationalist Discourse in South Asia 21
2 Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in
Historiography through Narratives of India’s Partition 42
3 Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of
Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India 67
4 A Heart Divided: Education, Romance, and the Domestic
Sphere in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column 94
5 At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian
Women’s Partition Narratives 125
Conclusion: Recovering the Nation? 157
AppendixA 163
Notes 165
Bibliography 181
Index 197
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to many teachers, colleagues, and friends for the encour-
agement and support they have given me during the course of writing
this book. I thank my teachers at York University in Toronto, especially
my supervisor Arun Mukherjee, Terry Goldie, and Marie-Christine
Leps. I am grateful for the support and encouragement I received from
Meenakshi Mukherjee at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi while
this research was in its early stages. I am indebted to the faculty at the
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, especially
Tejaswini Niranjana and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, as well as Alok Bhalla at
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad, for
the opportunity to develop and present some of the ideas in this book at
their institutions while I was a visiting fellow at CSCS.
I thank my colleagues, students, and the staff in the Department of
English at Concordia University in Montreal for providing me with a
friendly and supportive intellectual environment. I thank friends who
have inspired and encouraged me while I completed this project: Peter
Babiak, Neil Badmington, Ritu Birla, Stephanie Bolster, Jason Camlot,
Patrick Carroll, Bina Friewald, Craig Gordon, Allyson Hadwin, Teresa
Heffernan, Stacey Johnson, Anna Kasier, Mwikali Kieti, Rita Kothari,
David McGimpsey, Radhika Mongia, Anne-Marie Renzoni, Eve
Saunders, Yumna Siddiqi, Kate Sterns, Charis Thompson, and Joost
Vandenborre. At the University of Toronto Press, many thanks to my
editor Jill McConkey for having faith in the manuscript, Barbara Porter
for shepherding it through the publication process, and Jim Leahy for
copy-editing. I am especially grateful to the Press’s anonymous readers
for their detailed and insightful comments on the original manuscript. I
thank Juliet Dunphy and my research assistant Heather Jessup for
helping me prepare the manuscript for review and typesetting.