Multiple Perspectives of Violence |

ABSTRACT:

The partition of the India is atrauma in which India was arbitrarily and forcefully divided. Modern writers ofIndian descent are constantly looking backward at this traumatic experience toexplore the relationship between violence and the myth of nation-building. Thedialectics of violence, particularly characterizing the partition of thesub-continent, indeed exercised many a creative soul to articulate an artisticresponse to the life event. The contours of this creative endeavour, in fact,parallel the multiple manifestations of this phenomenon in actuality thatconstantly and with an ever increasing intensity explodes through the fluid andyet uncrystallised socio-cultural and political matrix of India. Writingnarratives of partition, in a sense, have almost become an obsession with thewriters of south-Asian descent. It also becomes inevitable to rememorize thepast which either they have personally experienced or heard about it throughfamily lore and legends. The present paper has focus on exploring theconnection between violence and the construction of a nation, and the ways inwhich the intrusion of public violence into private homes and neighborhoodsbecame constitutive of the partition, with a special emphasis on the artisticreconstruction of the experience dealt with the partition in Indian writing inEnglish.