Influence of the Partition of India in Literature

Indian fiction in English has matured itself over the years. It has become more expressive and experimental, both thematically and stylistically, than ever, and has come to establish itself as an indigenous branch of world literature. With the passage of time novel in English became recognized as an effective vehicle of human relationships in Indian society. Novelists since the formative years of this genre have been exploring through it, human relationships in the complex Indian society. R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Shashi Despande, Arundhti Roy, Kiran Desai, Jumpha Lahiri, Geeta Mehta, and Githa Hariharan etc., have produced social novels which deal with the theory of human relationships in the traditional and

The book contains the stories of first and second generation Indian immigrants, as well as a few stories involving ideas of otherness among communities in India. The stories revolve around the difficulties of relationships, communication and a loss of identity for those in diaspora. No matter where the story takes place, the characters struggle with the same feelings of exile and the struggle between the two worlds by which they are torn. The stories deal with the always shifting lines between gender, sexuality, and social status within a diaspora. Whether the character be a homeless woman from India or an Indian male student in the United States, all the characters display the effects of displacement in a

The paper presents the current situation of the people of Kashmir. It is the study ofShahnaz Bashir’s- The Half Mother. The novels satirize the political and bureaucratic system, India’s tyrannical role and the Military oppression in Kashmir. The title of the paper is The Sufferings and Struggle of a Mother (Haleema) for her Disappeared Son (Imran) - In Shahnaz Bashir’s- Half Mother. Kashmir is a very beautiful place and was a princely state up to 1953 with its own prime minister. It is why Kashmir is generally known as paradise on earth and this paradise has become not hell but the ‘capital of hell’ due to mass killing, murder mystery, displacement, disappearance and sexual harassment, by military and paramilitary forces. The paper deals with

Diaspora is a displacement of a community or individual from one geographical region to another geographical region. Indian English Fiction is repleted with several instance of diasporic issues where the artist makes an effective endeavour to present India’s rich varied culture, tradition, and heritage while living in abroad. Like Amit Chaudhuri’s fourth novel “A New World” under the prespective of diasporic issues such as rootlessness, identity crisis, nostalgia, homesickness, conflict between tradition, and modernity etc., He is not a diaspora writer. Amit Chaudhuri is writing in the great Bengali tradition. Chaudhuri differ in almost everything realities being portrayed to their intellectual mooring, narrative concerns and use of language. The central character Jayojit Chatterjee,

“Let us always remember that we are all children of our mother country. Indeed, I have never worked in any other spirit than that I am an Indian and owe a duty to my country and to all my countrymen. Whether I am a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Parsi or any other creed, I am above all an Indian. Our country is India; our nationality is Indian.”

The dominant idiom of Indian writing today is firmly entrenched in pain, anxiety of displacement, nostalgia, yearning to belong to roots, and so on. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are two such novels that explore the tragedy of man on several levels using different perspectives. Both the novels are about averted culture-clash tragedies, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, and about Indian sensibilities.

Bharathi Mukherjee’s later novels Jasmine(1989), The Holder of the World(1993) and Leave It to Me(1997) comprised her last creative phase conveniently termed here as the phase of immigration. By now she has travelled a long distance in terms of thematic perception and character portrayal. Beginning with an expatriate’s uprooted identity in the early 70’s, her creative faculty explored the transitional dilemma of characters in early 80’s, whose acculturation bids were occasionally thwarted by the complexity of cultural plurality in the adopted land. However, after the publication of The Middleman(1998), the process of cultural acclimatization appears to be complete and the characters betray the confidence of an immigrant, almost a naturalized citizen, in facing the challenges of human life.

The present paper attempts to assess the consequences ensued due to the cultural hybridity of two generation of characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. The first immigrants - Ashoke and Ashima transmit the Bengali culture to their US born children Gogol and Sonia who in turn, transmit the American cultural patterns to their parents. The psychological writhe of the Indian mother Ashima trying to adjust herself in the American culture and endeavoring to inculcate the moral values archetype of India into her children, is the primary focus of the novel. The paper centers on the reflection of Jhumpa Lahiri’s own inclination for Bengali culture and cultural hybridity through a variety of characters painted by her in the novel The Namesake.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s second story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” presents the relationship between an Indian family and their friend Mr. Pirzada, a Bangladeshi migrant. The narrator of the story is a ten year old girl Lilia who is not aware of the history of the Indian subcontinent related to freedom struggle, civil war of East Pakistani etc. We see that Mr. Pirzada, Lilia’s father and mother take dinner with one another while at the same time they listen to the evening news. Though they are now in America but they want to know what is going on in their native places. It shows their longings for their respective countries though they are

An event that has relation to war today is the tension in the northern region of India, Punjab, where the Sikh holy book was ripped up and thrown. Many Sikhs gathered in a peaceful protest, trying to bring to justice the people who were responsible, but the police ended up shooting and killing two peaceful protestors. Simran Jeet Singh, is one of the authors, who writes on this topic. He takes up this topic, because it represents part of the unjust that happened to Sikhs in 1984 where they were killed and murdered in the thousands by the Indian government. Singh says, “I was born in the United States in the summer of 1984, during the height of the anti- Sikh violence in Punjab” (Singh 1). He goes on to say how he feels the pain of his Sikh brothers and sisters who were killed in the year 1984, for their religious beliefs. Background about Singh shows us the importance of mediated narratives, as they show that Singh is trying to raise awareness about the issues going on in Punjab in an attempt to try to avoid the destruction that happened in 1984. Another one of these authors is Nirmala Ganapathy, who is part of The Straits Times. She takes up the same interest as Singh, as she works to raise awareness on the issues affecting her homeland of India. She writes about why Sikhs have been blocking major roads in India and the influence this has. Her curiosity is what has

In a Passage to India the author, E. M Forster sends the message of India’s mistreatment and misrepresentation by Britain. Throughout the novel, the reader is able to observe how British and Indian characters are treated differently. The author demonstrates the British perspective of Indians being the ignorant characters in the novel, whose company leads to troubles. Another aspect of the British perspective is that Indians are being treated as inferiors to the British in their own country, because if it were not for the British, the social and political order in India will descend into chaos. The author demonstration of the British perspective encourages the reader to feel sympathetic towards Indians. Whenever Aziz and Ronny meet, Ronny

Originally written in Punjabi by in 1950 as Pinjar, it was translated by Khushwant Singh, who himself wrote poignant tales of partition and dehumanization

The Partition of India in August, 1947 was a significant event in history that accounted for the separation of one of the world’s oldest civilization into two, independent nations – Pakistan and India. Like many other wars in history, The Partition of India was instigated by religious, political and social conflict. This resulted in violence, discrimination and the largest human displacement in contemporary history. While the Partition was well-studied, much of our understanding was focused on the political side of history, not the human side of it. This was why oral history played an important role in manifesting the complexity of a historical event. Our focus here is Maya Rani’s testimony from Butalia’s book, The Other Side of Silence:

Lenny, who begins the novel as a very naïve young Parsi girl, “comes to understand that the foundations of violence in her surroundings are largely gendered and that the experience of this violence is differentiated along gender lines” (Rastegar 27). Lenny witnesses the evolution of Ayah’s suitors, (who are Parsi, Hindu and Muslim), from men interested in being with Ayah to men who are desperate to control Ayah. As Partition gets more violent, Ice Candy Man, one of Ayah’s suitors who is Muslim, “takes on the role of a minor nationalist leader in their area” and eventually coordinates a mob of Muslims to come to the Sethi house an abduct Lenny, who is Hindu (Rastegar 27). When Lenny witnesses the change in behavior of Ayah’s suitors she feels like

E.M. Forster’s classic novel “A Passage to India” tells the story of a young doctor, Dr. Aziz, and his interactions with the British citizens who are residing in India during the time of the British Raj. Throughout the novel, the reader gets many different viewpoints on the people and the culture of India during this point in history. The reader sees through the eyes of the Indian people primarily through the character of Dr. Aziz, and the perceptions of the British through the characters of Mr. Fielding, Adela Quested, and Mrs. Moore. Through the different characters, and their differing viewpoints, the reader can see that Forster was creating a work that expressed a criticism that he held of the behavior of the British towards their Indian subjects.