ABSTRACT
The fifth chapter, “They Stuttered: Non-Narratives of the Unsayable,” borrows Giles Deleuze’s notion of language as a stutter and Veena Das’s idea of the unsayable to foreground the gaps in stories that punctuate the authoritative narratives of Partition scripted by survivors both for private and public circulation and for intergenerational transmission. In narrating stories, memory works by eliding traumatic experiences or transforming them into acts of agency but is betrayed by language that screams, stammers, stutters or comes to a halt. Unlike consensual narratives rehearsed and retold by narrators to each other and others, including to their succeeding generations, these stutters in language, as narrators skip over some parts of the narrative while dwelling in great detail on others, go completely silent or slip into incoherent speech, disrupt survivors’ authoritative narratives to call attention to the unsayable, untold and unscripted part of the stories.
