Gendered Trauma and Collective Memory in the Partition Fiction of Amrita Pritam and Bapsi Sidhwa

Abstract

One of the most traumatic events in South Asian history is the Partition of India in 1947, which resulted in unprecedented levels of violence, displacement, communal division, and psychological trauma. The Partition narratives in the literature have been an important means of holding the memories of survivors and questioning the ideology that allowed violence to occur. This paper compares and contrasts the Partition narratives of Amrita Pritam and Bapsi Sidhwa, focusing on Amrita Pritam's Pinjar and Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man (also known as Cracking India), to examine trauma, memory, and gendered resilience. This study explores how both writers foregrounded the experiences of women in the context of the larger political catastrophe of the Partition and challenged the dominant patriarchal narratives and their marginalization of women's experiences. By employing a comparative literary methodology that draws on trauma theory, feminist criticism, and memory studies, the paper examines trauma's conceptualization as abduction, displacement, violation of the body, and fragmentation of the emotions. It also delves into the ways in which memory is an ethical and cultural repository through which women negotiate identity, survival, and agency. Pritam's story focuses on the sad psychological repercussions of expelled uprootings and male violence, while Sidhwa's piece is written in a fractured first-person child’s POV as he watches communal harmony disintegrate. In both cases, the writers recreate women not only as victims but also as symbols of endurance, moral resistance, and resistance in gender. This paper proposes that the stories of Pritam and Sidhwa add much to the ongoing discussion on Partition literature, gender studies, postcolonial memory, trauma studies, and feminist history. Their writings remain relevant in debates on violence, nationalism, identities, and collective memory in South Asia.