MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND THE SILENT WOUNDS OF PARTITION: A LITERARY STUDY OF TRAUMA, BELONGING, AND NARRATIVE IN SOUTH ASIAN WRITING

Abstract

The Partition of British India in 1947 remains one of the most consequential ruptures in South Asian history, reshaping homes, languages, kinship networks, and the ways communities narrate belonging. This article examines how literary narratives represent the relationship between collective violence and private memory, with particular attention to trauma, displacement, identity, silence, and the recovery of suppressed histories. Using a qualitative, interpretive approach informed by memory studies, postcolonial criticism, and trauma theory, the paper considers how literary form can register experiences that resist linear narration. Fragmented chronology, recurring images, unreliable recollection, symbolic spaces, and multilingual expression are discussed as strategies through which writers expose the limits of official histories and the complexity of personal testimony. The article argues that literature does not merely preserve historical information; it also explores the emotional and ethical dimensions of remembering, including the uneven distribution of voice and recognition. It further suggests that belonging after mass displacement is rarely represented as a simple return to an undamaged past. Instead, identity emerges through negotiation among inherited memories, new social circumstances, linguistic affiliations, and silences passed between generations. The study is conceptual and text-oriented, offering an analytical framework for future close readings rather than claiming new archival or interview findings. It concludes that responsible literary engagement with Partition memory must acknowledge historical specificity, the diversity of affected communities, and the limits of representing another person’s suffering.