My central argument in this article is built around examining selected literary and cultural representations of such an unspoken discourse through examination of the notion of female silence and opacity that becomes imperative for maintaining a closeted, totalizing notion of history. The concept of history, especially in the context of Indian independence and partition, reveals a strange bifurcation between the official history endorsing the Nehruvian and Gandhian vision of nation-formation, and the countless individual stories of tragic victimhood, and traumatic experiences. Likewise, scholarly books have attempted to explain and/or problematized the binarism implied in the public versus private discourses about partition. Many literary narratives about the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan have exhorted the Partition violence including mass killings, rape of women on both sides of the border as well as homelessness and abduction leading to a catastrophic loss in India’s recorded history.
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