The partition of India was a critical event in the history of not only the Indian Subcontinent but also in the South East Asian region, certainly a defining moment owing to the violence and mass migration that followed the event. As it also led to the birth of two nations (India and Pakistan) and the creation of another new nation (Bangladesh) three decades later, the event of 1947 foreshadowed the emerging notions of the nation in the Indian subcontinent. The event of the partition of India when started getting reflected and represented in literature, it brought out the nuances of our understanding of the term nation with the legacy of partition in its backdrop. This paper aims to look into this intricate picture of the nation in becoming.

The paper aspires to make an enquiry into the following:

1. To understand the representation of partition of India in the select works.

2. To make an enquiry into the evolution of India as a nation in the backdrop of partition.

3. To understand partition as a critical moment of nation making.

Any academic debate on the evolution of India as a nation post-Independence leads to questions such as- Is the image of 'homeland' an imaginary site? What is the home and where is it for people on the move? Is it a family, home, community, village or, more broadly, a nation? A nation may be a geographical territory, a construct or an imaginative geographical locale. India as a nation is a highly fragmented unity. It is an intricate web of communities interwoven within them. Apart from these, the regional, linguistic, economic, cultural, social and political dimensions make it more complicated. The very idea of the nation is, therefore, never fixed/static; it is perpetually in the process of making or becoming. Attempts at imaging India in literary narratives are varied and complex because the very perception of India defies consensus. According to K.C.Baral, "the affiliate relationship between a nation and its citizens is mediated at different levels under different conditions in which the nation does not exist simply as an impersonal representation". From this dimension, the chosen works provide us with alternative national spaces.

As Bipan Chandra opines, “a nation is the product of a concrete historical process. Its formation and therefore viability and longevity can be studied only by examining its concrete historical development and not through static definitions…” (112). The formation or the making of a nation is not a linear or single process. Being a process of becoming, it would face challenges constantly and go through ruptured path. Whether the process is interrupted or not depends on how it is viewed, defended and promoted. The process also requires constant redefinitions (Bipan Chandra, 17). From thisperspective, the selected novels make an attempt to redefine the nation from the contemporary events as against the backdrop of partition.

The post-modern belief in the construction of a nation as an imagined concept clearly needs to be qualified in the context of evolution of India as nation (Bodh Prakash, 73). The idea of India as a national identity might have been an imagined concept initially, but it acquired clear contours in the anti-imperial struggle for freedom as Sunlight on a Broken Column views this emergence of the nation through freedom movement. Then the idea of the nation is passed through different incidents in the subsequent decades, as works like Tamas, Pages Stained with Blood, Lajja and Blood Brothers negotiate them.

Notions of a Nation in Becoming: Literary responses to the Reverberations of the Partition of India:

The chosen novels – Attia Hosain's Sunlight ona Broken Column (1961), Bhisham Sahni's Tamas (1973), Indira Goswami's Pages Stained with Blood (1988), Taslima Nasrin's Lajja (1993), and M.J.Akbar'sBlood Brothers (2006) have all been published in the last fifty years, with one novel being selected from each of the decades after the 1960s. The selected novels thus share common contexts and characteristics that define the nation as it evolves into the 21^st century with all the baggage that its turbulent communal past has bequeathed to it. In these texts, it is seen that memories of Partition cast long shadows over the evolving fabric of the new nation, contesting its spaces, challenging its borders, and destabilizing its structures.

These texts display a continuing process of contestation of received histories in tandem with an evolving democracy. What is apparent in the selected works is that the energies of almost two generations have been employed in rebuilding lives shattered by the violent uprooting of Partition. This process of rebuilding –– of the nation and lives –– is constantly challenged, altered and redefined with every repeated instance of violence in the decades after Partition. Thus, the experiences of women, violence and trauma during and after Partition, as the chosen works delineate them, are a part of the complex process of nation making that we have inherited today as a legacy of the Partition.

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain consists of four parts covering a period of about twenty years in the life of Laila, in an orthodox aristocratic Muslim family. In the beginning of the novel, politics hardly touches Laila’s life. It is a time of instant political activities when both the Hindus and the Muslims are together in their struggle against the British. The novelist tries to trace the causes of the growth of communal hatred and partly blames the British and partly the leaders of both communities. The novel then, captures the moment that brought in the agent of redefining people, community and nation.

The setting of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas is of a few days before Partition when the whole Indian subcontinent was engulfed by communal riots. People moved away from their belief and trust in each other and indulged in heinous acts in a collective frenzy. Tamas is a kaleidoscope of the events during Partition. This research aims at finding out how the novel foresees the redefining of India through communally charged events. 

Pages Stained with Blood by Indira Goswami depicts the gory Sikh pogrom in Delhi as an aftermath of the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in June 1984. Pages Stained with Blood demonstrates the ugly side of violence into which the emerging Indian nation is drifting. Moreover, the novel also demonstrates that violence is becoming the only tool for settling issues, as insanity takes over civility- challenging the integrity of society as well as of the nation. The novel then, tries to understand the event of 1984, which is indeed one of the critical events after Partition that contests the construction of the idea of nation.

Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja is the story of the choices that a Hindu family makes when being caught in the orgy of violence which erupted after the demolition of Babri masjid in India. Blood Brothers by M.J.Akbar watches with awe the growing tension between the Hindus and Muslims of Telinipara who have been living together in peace for centuries. The novel is an advocate of peace, an example to demonstrate the fact that disputes can be settled with the strong determination of peace-loving people. Published in 2006, at a time when the zealots are rising in India at an alarming rate to churn violence, the novel seeks solutions for social tensions and looks forward to peace.

Blood Brothers is also the story of how the nation is being constructed. It speaks about the India in the making: the starving farmer, the struggling mill-workers, the caste hierarchy, commerce, colony; the zealot forcing the fringe to violence, the sagely warrior of peace, neighbours who die for neighbours’ sake, the Partition of India and the fracture of souls, India emerging under the Nehru era.

It is seen from a reading of the selected texts that the evolution of the concept of India as a nation becomes more nuanced along with the freedom movement. For instance, in Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) Laila, an orphaned daughter of a Muslim family is surrounded by relatives and University friends caught up in politics. This evolution of the concept of the nation goes parallel to her evolution from the family into the society as she too is being drifted into this current of formation of the nation.  Thus, her evolution within the traditional family that observes purdah is, in a sense, an enabling phase that has a parallel with the evolution of national consciousness.

It is also seen that these texts, along with challenging the national spaces, also try either to provide or to become themselves alternative national spaces. The displaced families in Lajja and Tamas look forward to move and settle down in a new space and begin life afresh. Characters in Sunlight on a Broken Column decide either to settle down in the existing space (India) or to shift to a newly created space (Pakistan). Blood Brothers provides us the space of communal harmony instead of a communally charged space. Pages Stained with Blood provides us with the violent space that is emerging in the ruptured path of nation making. Since these texts represent different periods after independence, their views try to alter or replace the national spaces.

These narratives of Partition amplify the human cost of Partition, examining the complexities of a bruised nation at the social, psychological and religious level of consciousness. The accounts of women who suffered during Partition are vivid with memories of loss and violence, the experience of abduction and widowhood, of rehabilitation. This is also a part of the nation narrative. If the freedom movement was a long-lasting struggle against the British, the Partition was a defining moment both in the life of the newly created nation as well as that of its citizens. Partition no longer remained just a cataclysmic event that needed to be recorded, but more a phenomenon to be explored and theorized. Partition literature also raises some of the most profound questions about Indian politics regarding the issues of nationalism and secularism, the politics of religion and language and the failures of 1947.

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