Description
"Surviving Violence" works at the intersections of literary theory, history, ethics and ethnography to explore questions pertaining to the experiential dimensions of violence, survival, memory and testimony in the specific context of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. As a subcontinental holocaust of immense consequence entailing the dislocation of millions of people (the largest exchange of populations in history), the death of at least a million people, and the abduction, rape and sexual mutilation of countless women, the 1947 partition of British India into the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan underlies the very origin of nation-statehood in the subcontinent; it is only recently, however, that humanities' scholarship has begun to address this historic trauma and its evolving legacies in our world. This project takes its point of departure from the recent proliferation of theoretical and imaginative testimonial material on the partition. Locating this contemporary (re-)turn to partition within the current political context of the emergence of Hindu majoritarian politics and the escalation of religious violence in the subcontinent, the research begins by asking: what might it mean to "bear witness," to remember, and to memorialize a traumatic event in the history of a nation? What does it mean to return to the "silences" of a nation? Drawing upon theoretical arguments on trauma, memory, survival and testimony, this project aims to rethink partition not just as the most shattering event of religious violence in the history of the subcontinent, but also as the founding trauma of subcontinental nationalism that continues to remain intrinsic to the trajectories of contemporary geo-politics in South Asia. The play on "Surviving" is meant to convey the double sense of the word: living through and beyond a violent event, as well in the sense of a violence that survives in collective and generational memory.
