1st Edition

In the Shadow of Partition Seventy-Five Years and Beyond

Edited By Nalini Iyer, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard Copyright 2025
190 Pages
by Routledge

190 Pages
by Routledge

190 Pages
by Routledge

This book brings together conversations about the Partition and its haunting residues in the present as represented in literary, visual, oral, and material cultures of the subcontinent and beyond. The seventy-fifth anniversary of Partition confronts scholars with significantly new subjects for reflection. The question of historical memory has now largely transformed to one of its reproductions... Read more

Introduction: The Partition at 75+

Nalini Iyer and Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

 

1. Grooving on at Seventy-Five: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Rushdie, and the Indian Muslim’s Ecstatic Return

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

 

2. “Ancestral Voices Prophesying War”: Investigating the Legacy of the 1947 Partition in the 21st-Century Indian Cultural Imagination of Nuclear War

Souvik Kar and Shuhita Bhattacharjee

 

3. Retooling Trauma: Partition as Celebratory Nationalism in Neoliberal Metropolitan Cinema

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

 

4. Materializing the Memory: The Shawl in Partition Narratives

Anjali Tripathy

 

5. Death and Life in the Bordersand: On the Queer Remembrance of Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

Weiling Deng

 

6. “The Story of Our Shame”: Confronting the Silenced ‘Bihari’ Other in Mahmud Rahman’s “Kerosene”

Satyendra Singh

 

7. Hypereventing History: Ecological and Political Disaster in Bengali Dalit Narratives on Partition

Samrat Sengupta

 

8. Synchronizing the Dalan, Chandal Aesthetics and Namashudrayan in Manoranjan Byapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life

Praggnaparamita Biswas and Anup Shekhar Chakraborty

 

9. Partition in Bangla Little Magazines: Trajectories of Politics and Culture

Ayan Choudhury and Akshaya K. Rath

 

10. Entangled by Borders: Bodies, Citizenship, and Gender in Assam

Ragini Chakraborty

 

11. Descendants of a Difficult Past: Narratives of the Sindhi Partition Refugees in Bangalore

Aiswarya Sanath and Anjali Gera Roy

 

Biography

Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University and Chief Editor of South Asian Review. Among her numerous publications is the co-edited book Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics.

 

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard is Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, USA. She is the author of Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence. She also translates Bengali poetry and fiction, including Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Blood and Bani Basu’s The Continents Between.