ABSTRACT
Examining the art produced in the immediate aftermath of Partition by two survivor-artists, Satish Gujral and S. L. Parasher, this chapter engages with what their art can tell us about Partition as an event and experience. Presenting an in-depth engagement with the body of work produced by each artist, it reads what the art captures of the artists’ experience of Partition’s trauma: comprising violence, loss, and grief. It examines their art produced in response to Partition as expression and record of the artists’ individual experiences and, thus, art as a valid testimonial, witness account or document of Partition, in all its subjectivity. The third, and greater, focus is on the trauma of Partition as conveyed by the two artistic responses. The chapter navigates a key question: if, in essence, trauma is ‘unspeakable’ and evades speech, in what ways does visual art – non-verbal and non-linear in nature – make the telling possible? It studies the art produced in the specific temporal moment of Partition’s immediate aftermath via an engagement with ‘trauma theory’ as espoused by a range of thinkers led by Cathy Caruth, which has emphasised the ‘impossibility’ of speech in the immediacy of trauma. Through the detailed engagement with the two artists’ responses, the study interrogates such assumptions/beliefs of trauma theory, briefly exploring recent scholarship on affective responses to trauma as practiced in the non-Western world. The study explores how art can provide a similar affective means: to express trauma in the absence of speech.
