ABSTRACT
Alternative and atypical modes of literary witnessing and remembrance often appear in signifi cant short stories about the partition, as we shall see in the discussion of this sub-genre of partition literature. Such ‘fi ctive’ testimony often stems from the desire to retrieve voices that for all practical purposes had been silenced, given the collective amnesia engendered by the discursive context of mainstream nationalist accounts, as shown earlier.1 Progressive writers such as Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai reinvented the Urdu afsana or short story form in the 1930s and 40s while negotiating the pressures of colonial modernity and processes of internal reform.2
