Insights into the Partition Literature

The most important event in India's history was the partition of India. This event led many writers to pen stories, unforgettable in nature. To throw more light on the literature written on the partition of India, you can read an article Kousik Adhikari on The Literary Yard:

In 1947, India got freedom from the British raj after some two hundred years of foreign yoke and consequentlypartition. Partition is such a major event that it can be described as the watershed in not only India’s history but in almost all the other fields including literature. The provinces which had to endure the direct trauma and tremor of partition contributed to this subgenre, it’s very natural. But the fact remains is that even the less affected and not affected provinces had shared vast amount of literature on the subject. Virtually all fiction from Northern and Eastern India whether in English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, has produced in this line in different forms of literature and arts -poetry, song, cinema, paintings etc. Today the legacy of 1947 looms much larger than ever before on the subcontinent with its rising communal tension, mutual distrust. Partition has actually proved to be a trauma from which the subcontinent has never fully recovered. Though Alok Bhalla, in his ‘Introduction’ to a collection of partition stories in English translation, states that when it comes to partition, “there is not just a lack of great literature, there is, more seriously, a lack of great history.” This comment may be true in some extent. This is perhaps because Indian historiography has focused more on independence, the boon, the deliverance form the foreign rule than on its associated curse-partition. However, the lack of great literature can be debated and even the historians generally feel agreed to one point that literature represented the various aspects and experiences of partition much better. We can here safely quote Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose, who in their seminal book on South Asian History commented that, “The colossal human tragedy of the partition and its continuing aftermath has been better conveyed by the more sensitive creative writers and artists-for example in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories and Ritwik Ghatak’s film-than by historians.”