Counter History of Partition Violence: Feminist Edge of Irony of Partition Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers and “Family Ties”.

Abstract

The ramification of the partition violence of 1947 is still felt in different forms in different parts of the Sub-continent in the form of the communal disturbances. The seed of communal hostility did not develop all of a sudden but the age long agony of losing political power, and imperialist’s strategy of ‘divide and rule’ were the stimulants of inciting the communal feelings among the Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. In this communal violence women have been the most hapless victims. This paper focuses on the ironic mode of narrating partition violence from a feminist angle. It focuses on how Baldwin politically deploys irony as weapon in critiquing Indian patriarchal historiography that retains silence about women’s victimization. Linda Hutcheon asserts irony as the tool used by voiceless groups in subverting and resisting power. Baldwin has successfully exploited the cutting edge of irony in analyzing the bourgeois patriarchal ideology from the margin of the female victims. The first part of the dissertation is the introduction of Partition violence, and the second consists of the theory of political irony followed by the observations about ironizing violence in Baldwin’s fiction. The third chapter is revelation of political irony in “The Family Ties” and What the Body Remembers and the last chapter sums up the dissertation.