British India's Partition: Critiquing Entanglements of Memory and Catastrophe of Places

The study aims to discover the heteroclite and cohabitation of society comprising of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindu contemporary for centuries till the partition of British India in 1947 and birth of India and Pakistan. It posits a reading of experiences of the authors in a postcolonial nation, identifying the potential of victim’s articulations of the traumatic Partition drawing upon contemporary scholarships such as the likes of Khushwant Singh, Sadat Manto, Yasmin Khan, Abdullah Hussein and Amrita Pritam. The paper deliberately avoids the conventional analysis of Partition narrowly conflating it with newly assumed religious identities of the refugees. Through this partition reading, an attempt is made to show the fissures that accompany the progressions and developments of an identity formed on the basis of religion in a postcolonial encounter, the trauma of which does not actually translate into a purely communal consciousness. By exposing religion as a force that restrained victims in the name of - honor and spirituality, writings show that identity shaped in the case of refugees is highly intricate and psychologically nuanced