Recapturing the Trauma of Partition of India: A Reading of Manto's Short Stories
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Department of English
Abstract
The partition history of India carries the traumatic experience of sectarian
violence which even has been the indigenous phenomenon of India. Independence
brought with it the trauma of the country's partition which made millions homeless
and brought in calculable misery in its wake. As several creative writers who move
round on the literary battlefield of partition, Saadat Hasan Manto's stories also deal
with psychosis of divisiveness, of dismembering, the rupture with the past and
unprecedented violence of absurd dimensions,trauma and even death. Besides
depicting the deep pangs of partition, Manto brought to the forefront the lasting
unspeakable psychic pain of the sufferers' to the present as 'trauma'.Be they the
characters of" She is Alive","A Lump of Cold Flesh","The Last Solute"or "Three
and a Half Annas", the life of the sufferers' portrayed by Man to leaves one shocked
and scattered. Not even the Indo-Pak conflict on Kashmir escaped the master's
attention. "The Last Solute", "Toba Tek Singh", are his tribute to the comradeship
between the Indian and Pak armed forces of those days and the long-lasting haunting
images of these episodes are the outcome of the psychic trauma.