In August 1947, at the moments of its independence, India was also partitioned into two countries, Pakistan for Muslims and India as a secular state (but mostly for the Hindus). This Partition resulted in the largest transaction of humans across state borders: 12 million refugees crossed the borders in a space of a few months, leaving behind their ancestral homes, lands, most of their material possessions, and even family members who had opted to stay. The death toll through slaughter, contagious diseases, and malnutrition is estimated at 2 million. The intensely happy and victorious moment of independence has deep trauma at its underside: India is a nation unachieved.
While India celebrates Independence every year, the particularities of Partition, the individual and cultural memories of it, is only now being spoken or written about, 60 years later. The ambivalence towards 1947 is visible among Indian English writers in the fact that less than 20 works of fiction have been written about this traumatic upheaval that affected the lives of most people in the two countries. In this paper I wish to examine two aspects of this fiction: firstly, how does the framework of trauma and cultural memory which was specifically developed in Europe and used particularly within Holocaust studies function in non-western situations and postcolonial fiction? Secondly, I will explore women’s fiction and analyse alternative ways of reading Partition fiction and the recuperation of cultural memory.