ABSTRACT
As we have seen, collective violence during the partition was of an unprecedented magnitude, approaching genocidal levels of intensity in certain regions. Furthermore, there was a qualitative transformation in the nature of violence in comparison to previous episodes of communal rioting. This was especially the case with respect to the targeting of women, but also in relation to new forms of reciprocal violence, including ethnic cleansing. This posed specifi c problems, both in terms of remembrance and representation. The processes leading up to the partition and the fi endish violence that took place between 1946 and 1948 had both a direct and a more elusive impact on the Indo-Islamic cultural amalgam that had developed over centuries and the civilisational forms of memory that preserved this. These were manifested in often belated effects on individual and collective consciousness and in the form of postmemory (a memory of trauma transmitted to the next generation). This study has sought to map the differentiated effects of partition violence through an analysis of literary representations for, as we have seen, literary images can often give a sharper sense of the shifting contours of historical trauma. Forms of testimonial fi ction, I have sought to show, often evolved a double mode of address, speaking to past and present while engaging in a responsible way with memories of the moral catastrophe of the partition, even as lesser modes of fi ctional representation succumbed to the pressures of dominant ideologies, identitarian tendencies or the temptation to aestheticise suffering.
