The seminar aims to introduce students to the major novels written about the partition of India in 1947 which caused millions of deaths and displacement of innocent people. Indeed, the division of the Indian subcontinent into the two separate nation-states of India and Pakistan has generated a great amount of literature in English, which came to prominence with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s historical novel Midnight’s Children in 1981. Both Indian and Pakistani writers have captured the apocalyptic event in their novels to bring out the impact of partition on the lives of common people. By fictionalising history, the selected novels in this seminar render voice to the suffering and sacrifices of different communities in India, particularly Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, who began to fight against each other in the name of ethnic and religious differences around the time the British were ready to leave India and divide it into two independent countries. The main objective of the course is to examine how Hindi, Muslim and Parsee writers imagine partition in their novels; how they mourn the demise of India as a multicultural society and the loss of a common past and history; and how they highlight the tragedy of individual and family in the wake of partition as one of the historical catastrophes. Upon completion of the course, it is expected that students can show their understanding of the novels of partition in class presentation and in the exam or term-paper. |
- Trainer/in: Nadia Butt
- Trainer/in: Tasnim El Fechtali
- Trainer/in: Michelle Stork