Trauma, Language, and
Belonging: Regional Literary Responses to the Partition of
India
Maitray Kaushik
ABSTRACT
This paper examines how the trauma of the 1947
Partition continues to shape regional Indian narratives, collective
memory, and the linguistic imagination of the subcontinent. While
the historical event is often framed through national archives, I
have always felt that literature remains the most honest space where
the emotional weight of displacement truly survives. Through close
attention to Punjabi, Bengali, and Urdu narrative traditions, this
study argues that regional voices document forms of suffering that
official histories repeatedly overlook. Texts emerging from these
languages not only record violence and migration but also reveal
quieter anxieties—fractured identities, cultural disorientation, and
generational silence. Throughout this exploration, I gradually began
to notice how Partition also impacted English-language literature in
India, destabilizing vocabularies around belonging and nationhood.
The sudden shift in borders forced writers to renegotiate language
itself as a space of memory and loss. Many scholars have suggested
that trauma resurfaces through fractured narrative structures, and I
agree that regional storytelling often adopts disjointed timelines
to echo psychological turbulence. By analyzing testimonial
fragments, fiction, and community-based oral narratives, this paper
highlights how literature performs the work of remembrance when
institutions fail. Ultimately, I argue that the representation of
Partition trauma in regional Indian narratives preserves emotional
truths essential for future reconciliation. Through literature,
displaced communities reclaim the agency to narrate their own
suffering, ensuring that trauma does not dissolve into silence but
evolves as a living archive.
Keywords: Collective Memory; Displacement; Partition Trauma;
Postcolonial Identity; Regional Indian Literature..
