ABSTRACT
Khwabrau (translated as Sleepwalkers in 1998) is a unique document on the Partition and the migration that follows it. It is one of Joginder Paul’s most seminal creative works, a heart-wrenching fictional outpouring first published in 1991. It brings out the poignance of a major historical and social event which the reader understands as the Partition but without Paul even once referencing that fact directly. The Partition is the core of Khwabrau through its continuous ‘absence’ in its protagonist’s life, brilliantly portraying the aftermath of a horrifying period of history through the tropes of memory and madness. The concepts of place and time, even of dreaming and waking up, are all blurred with no clear divisions between them. Nothing is what it seems anymore. Paul looks at the fallout of the Partition and brings to the forefront the violence and tragedy that it unleashed in an indirect cycle of pain and sorrow seen through the post-Partition trauma that Deewane Maulvi Sahab, the protagonist, undergoes. In the extract presented here from the first chapter of the novel, the recreated world of the mohajirs in a new land is brought alive with all the lilt and vibrance of the past, its universe contained in the question, ‘Have you seen Lucknow in Karachi?’
