The Partition of the Indian subcontinent – into India and Pakistan in 1947 – was one of the crucial moments marking the break between the colonial and postcolonial era. My project is invested in exploring the Partition not merely in terms of the events of August 1947, but as an ongoing process that continues to splinter political, cultural, emotional and sexual life-worlds in South Asia. My dissertation seeks to map analytical pathways to locate the Partition and the attendant formations of minoritization and sectarian violence as continuing, unfolding processes that constitute postcolonial nation-building. It examines the far-reaching presence of these formations in current configurations of politics, culture and subjectivity by mobilizing the interdisciplinary scope of affect-mediated Trauma and Memory Studies and Postcolonial Studies, in conjunction with literary analysis. My project draws on a wide range of cultural artifacts such as poetry, cantillatory performance, mourning rituals, testimonials, archaeological ruins, short stories and novels to develop a heuristic and affective re-organization of post-Partition South Asia. It seeks to illuminate through frameworks of memory, melancholia, trauma, affect and postcoloniality how the ongoing effects of the past shape the present, which in turn, offers us ways to reimagine the future.This dissertation reaches out to recent work developing a vernacular framework to analyze violence, trauma and loss in South Asia. Critics of trauma theory argue that clinical approaches developed in specific Euro-American socio-cultural contexts often write over postcolonial systems of knowledge-making, mourning, and recovery. Ananya Kabir, Kumkum Sangari, and other postcolonial critics are seeking to develop a vernacularized framework to view violence, trauma and loss in South Asia. It is at this challenging threshold of affect-mediated postcoloniality and trauma studies that my work asks to be located.
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