Partition Violence and Refugee Experience in Chaman Nahal’s Azadi
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Central Department of English
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.