Chapter 9 The Present and the Future of the Past: the Lasting Gift of the Indian Partition Trauma
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Abstract
The wounds of many communities in different parts of the world remain unhealed as they struggle with how to remember traumatic events as well as to reinvent selves and societies. As individual recollection of past events inevitably becomes forever lost, it is crucial to comprehend the process of transmission of a traumatic past. This research paper originates in a number of fundamental and challenging questions regarding the operation of traumatic memory as far as the partition of 1947 in the region of the Indian subcontinent is concerned. These questions relate to how we can appropriately respond to the suffering of the other, the ways that this suffering is handed down and ‘remembered’ by future generations as well as to the possibility of transformation of the memory of the atrocious events of the Partition to healing, resistance and an altered view of history and our place in it. The cumulative effects of recent events in South Asia, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which derailed the ongoing India-Pakistan peace talks, as well as the ongoing dispute for Kashmir render these questions even more urgent. The aim of this chapter is to delve into exploring the idea of a transgenerational transmission of trauma analysing Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) in order to emphasise its role in creating a liminal space where generations cross the frontiers of time and the ghosts of the past remind us of our ethical responsibility to the suffering other. For this purpose, it invokes Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of the phantom, which highlights the psychic effects of the concealed. The analysis of the novel also uses the lens of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, a concept used to describe the relationship between the children of survivors of collective trauma and the parental experiences.