Juxtaposing the Victim and the Perpetrator in Sadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Open It’ and ‘Cold Meat’

In the compass of partition literature depiction of violence and its consequent trauma has been at the centre/ heart and in such delineation of violence – both physical and psychological- there is the unmistakable presence of a sense of being lost in a world of incommunicable experience on the part of the victims/ protagonist. The violence and the consequent trauma they experienced was a life-changing one and the haunting incident corroded them within. Often such nightmarish experiences seize their volition and sensibility to such an extent that they lose their sanity and equilibrium and become altogether different entity. People of all walks of life were its victims; however, needless to say that the worst and most ill-fated were the women on either side of the border. At the same time, on the other hand there are occasions, though rare, when the perpetrator of the violence himself has become the victim- a prey to his own bestiality and inhuman barbarity. In this paper my objective is to present this duality with reference to two short stories of Sadat Hassan Manto – ‘Open It’ and ‘Cold Meat’ and to light on the presentation of violence that overtly unlocks the gruesome exercise of atrocity and inhumanity.

Sacks of Mutilated Breasts: Violence against Women and Body Politics in Partition Literature

South Asian writers’ partition accounts attest that women from all backgrounds of culture and religion were the worst victims of the newly-created India-Pakistan border of 1947. Women's bodies were kidnapped, stripped naked, raped, disfigured (their breasts were cut off), engraved with religious symbols, and slain before being transported in train carriages to the "other" side of the border. Taking the romantic example of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988), we will look at the symbol of women's breasts, following on the theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on power and governmentality, framed within the rhetoric of Mother India, where violence against women is a commonplace Bapsis Sidhwa’s theory of women's rights. As a result, we will examine the passage of sacks of damaged breasts as a horrible testimony to Partition history and as a metaphor for border crossing, undermining the nation's stability. In light of Julia Kristen's abjection theory, we will view female corpses with damaged breasts as abject who push the bounds of normative society, exposing its frailty. Finally, the novel covered in this document can be seen both as a disgraceful condemnation of a brutal de/colonial process and as a witch for feminist resistance (doing Herstory). The agony and grief of mutilated women's bodies are depicted in authors such as Bapsi Sidhwa to reveal the dialectic of history/body (the trajectory of the violation of women's rights).

Implementing Partition: Proceedings of the Punjab Partition Committee, July–August, 1947

This article focuses on the workings of the Punjab Partition Committee in the crucial months of July and August 1947. In bringing new material to the historiography of partition, this article challenges the widely held assumption that the Punjab Partition Committee did not deliver. It argues that one must assess and value the large degree of cooperation and agreement between Punjab political leaders on the Committee, despite the charged political and communal atmosphere of the summer of 1947. Furthermore, it argues that the Committee created a limited sense of order during the disarray that prevailed in the run-up to the Transfer of Power. This order was brought about by the cooperation and work of the ‘middle tier’—the bureaucrats and other officials who are often missing from partition literature. The article shows the hard, bureaucratic—yet human—side of partition during these deliberations: at the same time as these people were carrying out partition, they were also suffering its effects. Finally, the Committee's negotiations show how the soon-to-be-established provinces and dominions were setting up their respective states through the procurement of assets and resources.

Adaptation or Historical Anomaly?: Partition Narratives and Their Visual Counterparts

This research accentuates the presence of multi-layered histories within partition literature and its adaptations as a historiographic mise en abyme— an interpretive multiplicity of historical narratives. The aim is to highlight, probe and eventually determine the significance of addressing multivocality within sensitive historical accounts when told through the aesthetic mediums of fiction and film. In the context of this research, the traditional narrative of the partition of the Subcontinent includes political and nationalistic attitudes on both sides of the divide. The research sets out to explore the extent to which these overreaching accounts and wide-ranging versions of the partition empower the concerned entities to give subjective meanings to their partition experiences. Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House (2017), which is partly based on the memoirs of Louis Mountbatten, documented in Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (1976) is taken as the case study, with reference to its source text. The primary trigger of this research is the debate between the Traditionalist and Revisionist school of Historiography, as it seeks to examine the inherent problematic nature of revisionist partition history on text and on screen. This research presents the textual and film narratives of partition as alternative archives, whose authenticity and validity is yet to be established, in comparison with the historical documents/texts. It advocates the necessity to constantly re-evaluate and reinterpret history in the light of new facts; however, all attempts to revise history in the name of aesthetics, without merit and evidence, should be recognized as subjective versions.