Published Online:December 2024
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES031224
Author Name:Puja Ghosh and Averi Mukhopadhyay
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:24-37
In Indian history, national politics churned the poisonous aftermath of partition poignantly on people living on the borderlands of Pakistan and India, especially on women, as they were mostly at the receiving end of the gendered pathology of partition. In the postcolonial period, a separate domain, known as partition literature, emerged to validate the unrecorded historical truth of the past in its power to represent the other side of dominant history. Feminist writers have dealt with the gendered dynamics of partition, exploring the violence and examining the female agency by questioning the political decision of nationalist leaders. Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand is one such novel focusing on the plight of Chandraprabha Devi, or Ma, the female survivor of violent partition. She returns to Pakistan after decades of partition just to critique the political root of partition. The paper negotiates how she questions the political correctness of partition by challenging the nation-sponsored impunity to perpetrators of gendered violence. It also focuses on the gender pathology of partition through the experience of Chandraprabha Devi.
In 1947, the nationalist leaders of India came to an agreement with the erstwhile British colonizers to liberate the nation from colonial oppression and to divide the colonial India into two nations—India and Pakistan. When