Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory

by Jill Didur

Overview

Unsettling Partitions reinterprets the silences found in women’s accounts of sectarian violence that accompanied Partition as a sign of their inability to find a language to articulate their experience without invoking metaphors of purity and pollution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442615052
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Publication date:	02/25/2006
Series:	Heritage Series
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jill Didur is an associate professor in the Department of English at Concordia University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Unsettling Partition

'Making Men for the India of Tomorrow'? Gender and Nationalist Discourse in South Asia

Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India's Partition

Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India

A Heart Divided: Education, Romance, and the Domestic Sphere in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column

At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women's Partition Narratives

Conclusion: Recovering the Nation?

Appendix A

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Meenakshi Mukherjee

“Drawing an analogy between the stories of women lost during partition and the lost history of the event, Jill Didur highlights the fissures and silences in the narrative of India’s partition. It is a well-researched argument incorporating material from diverse sources - literary texts, personal testimonies and official documents. Her account, situated at the intersection of gender and nationalist discourse, reveals the gaps between state policy and its human consequences, which become available to us through literary representations.”

Editorial Reviews

"Drawing an analogy between the stories of women lost during partition and the lost history of the event, Jill Didur highlights the fissures and silences in the narrative of India's partition. It is a well-researched argument incorporating material from diverse sources - literary texts, personal testimonies and official documents. Her account, situated at the intersection of gender and nationalist discourse, reveals the gaps between state policy and its human consequences, which become available to us through literary representations."—Meenakshi Mukherjee, literary critic and former professor in the Department of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

From the Publisher