ABSTRACT
In documenting Partition as a traumatic experience, scholars have pointed to the imbrication of the physical, social and psychological forms of trauma, borrowing the tools of trauma theory. Although the physical cannot be isolated from the social and the psychological, the third chapter “Intangible Violence” focuses on the direct, structural and cultural violence experienced by survivors and their children in the years that followed the Partition. At a broad level, intangible violence may be defined as the loss of potential realizations, particularly that of “the hinge generation,” the knowledge of poisoned relations and the loss of intellectual uncertainty. At a specific level, it is translated as the loss not only of privilege and status but also of language and culture through the pressure on survivors to assimilate into host cultures.
