Partition Violence and Refugee Experience in Chaman Nahal’s Azadi

Abstract

The present study downplays the recent cultural politics approach to Chaman Nahal’s Azadi. It attempts at concentrating on the refugee experience as obtaining in the novel. What makes this Sahitya Academy Prize winning novel in 1978 a partition classic, it is concluded, is its capturing of the specificity of the refugee experience. Lala Kanshi Ram’s experience of trauma results in a disintegration of his ego and a rupture in the continuity of being. He and others like him face a twin challenge: physical uprooting and psychic trauma. While the older generation seems to be succumbing under the weight of the psychological scar, the younger generations like Arun and Sunanda mature through the traumatic experience. They not only rediscover a sense of meaning but they also lead the older generations towards a path of recovery. The particular theory of Partition Violence and Refugee Experience comes from Miranda Alcock’s Refugee Trauma- the Assault on Meaning and Miriam George’s A Theoretical Understanding of Refugee Trauma. By thus dramatizing the delineation of the refugee trauma in Azadi, the thesis concludes that it is one great refugee novels.