A Lull in the Language:

Language as a Zone of Problematization in Selected Partition Narratives

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 was a defining moment in the socio-cultural and political history of the Indian subcontinent. Although elided as an acarpous incident to the appeal of a decolonized India forwarded by the saga of India’s independence at midnight, the Partition of India and the birth of Pakistan are two incidents indelibly important to our cultural topography. As such feminist scholars, writers, creative and critical thinkers composed a series of narratives dramatizing, illustrating, problematizing the Partition problem from a literary, cultural and humanistic point of view.  The present research paper reads two such creative works that problematize the ideology of division, the violence of rioting and particularly, the sectarian nature of human viciousness. However, the paper performs this task by reading the language of the two short stories and underscoring how etymological and philological qualities of a language can be used to creatively represent and illustrate a violent incident.