ABSTRACT
Years ago, E. M. Forster had implied in A Passage to India (1924) about the impossibility of human personal friendship in pre-Partition colonial India. The separation Forster speaks of indirectly underscores many more unpredictable partitions of the homeland so that even today, the subcontinental past replete with divisions keeps haunting its present. Much later, the children of the turmoil—Raja Rao in Kanthapura (1938) and Ahmed Ali in Twilight in Delhi (1940)—search in confusion for some ungraspable friendly environment in the Indo-Pak subcontinent. Does this then allow the colonial nationalistic chaos to make way for postcolonial transnationalistic conditions for remembering lost alliances or establishing new contact zones of human relationships in the partitioned subcontinent? Under an environment of bewildering divisions depicted in Kanthapura and Twilight differently, the search for love and friendship remains central to their thematic unity. This chapter offers a reading of Partition and its decay in the light of postcolonial transnational hybridity to foreground the prevailing sense of loss and make us realise the kind of humanism promoted by the author-friends Rao and Ali.
