ABSTRACT
India witnessed the agony and the ecstasy over the massacres and festivities engendered by its partition. Many a marriage procession and a funeral cortege was seen making its way to its destination, without ever reaching it. Kamleshwar’s novel is ostensibly born out of the terrible ferment that marked India’s Partition in 1947. It opens with a backdrop that foregrounds, as the novelist says in an interview with Alok Bhalla, ‘the lived reality of a particular period’. Kamleshwar lived through the events that led to the traumatic aftermath of Partition, perceiving history and its realities as ‘a complex mixture of external events and inner anxieties’. The novel fictionally foregrounds the machinations of the British Empire and its agents in the times when the boundaries and the basics of India’s Partition were being drawn up. In poetic vein, Kamleshwar presents a strange brooding atmosphere that enveloped the land in the year of India’s Independence and partition.
