ABSTRACT
With the advent of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Urdu literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella Khwabrau (1990/1991; translated as Sleepwalkers in 1999). Sleepwalkers shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal ‘third space’ that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality. The novella is based on a time many years after the Partition in the city of Karachi, and focuses on the mohajirs from Lucknow who construct a mnemonic existential space by constructing a simulacrum of pre-Partition Lucknow (now in India). This essay examines the reconceptualisation of spaces through the realm of political nostalgia and the figure of the refugee subject ‘performing’ this nostalgia. This nostalgic reconstruction of space, thus, becomes a ‘heterotopia’ in Foucauldian terms, one that causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nationhood. The refugee subjects’ subversion of the linearity of time opens a different time in the narration of a nation that necessitates that the wholeness of the ‘imagined’ physical space of a nation be questioned.
