ABSTRACT
In the light of poststructuralist thoerising that establishes a vital link between trauma and subjectivity, this chapter examines the representation of state violence in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991) with a sharp focus on the child narrator/protagonist figure in these novels. The paper engages with the politics of representation of such incidents i.e. the 1975 proclamation of National Emergency in India in the former and the 1947 Partition leading to the formation of India and Pakistan in the latter and evaluates their painful and traumatic consequences for the child-subjects. Its attempt, here, has thus been to decipher the ideological underpinnings of the novelistic treatment of such occurrences marked, as they are, by the violence and oppression forced by the postcolonial state on its own citizens.
