ABSTRACT
Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar: The Skeleton (first published in 1950) and her poetry represent the author’s memory of the Partition violence that she witnessed as a young Sikh woman, showing her attempts to transform the trauma into narrative and cultural memory. Sikh women, who became objects of others’ agency, particularly through rhetoric of nationalism, attempt to transform themselves as agents of their own identities by recovering repressed memories and retelling them, aiming to reconnect with humanity. What is involved in the reconstruction of the self for cultural and personal trauma survivors when the past is abruptly severed from the self? Many survivors of trauma, I argue, are slowly able to reconstruct their lives; to transform themselves from victim to survivor, trauma must become narratable, so that witnessing can occur and the traumatized subjects can heal. In order to remake oneself, the trauma survivor must shift from being an object to a subject. Pritam’s poems are scattered with signs of her traumatic fragmentation from the time when women’s bodies were constructed through violence, as a new nation-state was being created. In reading her texts, I argue that Pritam, who witnessed Partition violence, attempts to reintegrate her fragmented self through writing about her memories of the Partition violence.
