The Poetics of Violence Changing Contours of Communal Representation

Abstract

The Partition of India swept in its August storms all life and love, leaving for the desolate newlineindividual a fragmented Self, a butchered faith, and an abandoned home that locks behind newlineits doors the past of their romance with the homeland. In their stunning moment of newlinetragedy, the individual envelopes their shrill cries with silences as a mediation and newlinenegotiation with their trauma, where the silence that conceals violence becomes greater newlinethan the violence it conceals. The research work reads these silences of the individual newlineacross all binary of the Self and the Other to decipher the nuances of language and its newlineselective inability to express and surface grief. It addresses the curiosity of literary newlineventures on how the magnitudinal event of the division, responding to which language newlineescapes all expression, also demands to be written about. The postulation of the thesis has newlinebeen founded on the three junctures of language: silence, speech, and dialogue that weave newlinethe poetics of trauma, based on the premise of memory. It engages with select fictional newlineand nonfictional texts to form an alternate understanding and reading of the Partition of newlineIndia through the relationship between language, trauma and memory. In its discourse of newlinereading literature as an alternate and empathetic space for the refugee to negotiate with newlinetheir refuge, the thesis reads literature as a space of memory, and a memory of space... newline