Subversion of Patriarchal Violence in Pritam's The Skeleton and Baldwin's Family Ties

Abstract

This dissertation concentrates on Amrita Pritam's The Skeleton and Shauna Singh Baldwin's "Family Ties". Written on the backdrop of the partition violence of India in 1947, these texts explore the plight of women victims during and at the aftermath of partition. The main objective of this study is to analyze the writer's humanistic intervention in The Skeleton and the political use of irony in "Family Ties" while dealing with issues of partition violence. The concept of humanism and the politics of irony has been used in the texts respectively in The Skeleton and "Family Ties" to excavate and undercut the bourgeois and patriarchal natures of violence that remains largely in Indian historiography.