Ethics of Memory in Pritam’s The Skeleton and Sidhwa’s Cracking India

Abstract

This dissertation examines two partition fictions, The Skeleton by Amrita Pritam and Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa. It undertakes this examination through an application of the theoretical notion of the distinction between morality and ethics in Avishai Margalit's The Ethics of Memory. The main argument is that The Skeleton comes out as much more qualitative novel than Cracking India because the former is flush with the morality of memory whereas the latter is contaminated with the Pakistani national ethics of memory. Whereas morality of memory makes Pritam's The Skeleton build on the sense of humanistic responsibility, Cracking India degenerates into the language of cultural trauma, which represents national ethics towards the image of Pakistani Muslims. By means of mortality of memory, Pritam succeeds to avoid identitarian politics and 'Prose of Otherness' while Sidhwa cannot move beyond identitarian politics' and, therefore, prose of otherness about non-Prsis and 'non-Pakistanis' has been constructed because of the use of 'ethics of memory.'