Drawn Lines in/as This Side That Side: A socio-analytic study of Partition Narratives

Abstract

This Side That Side: Restorying Partition (2013) curated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh is a collection of Partition stories by the authors and artists from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. The graphic stories depict how the historical and the political events influence the very ordinary ways of living by transposing and situating the everyday life within the larger context of history and politics which eventually impact the dynamics of the people and the place. This Side That Side employs the medium of comics to explore the emotional dynamics which operate in the daily lives embedded within the socio-political context of Partition. In this paper, I will examine how the Partition stories told in comics medium play with the spaces – the space of drawn images and photographic images in the panel as well as the empty space in the gutter – in order to archive the hitherto non-archived accounts of human subjectivity. This Side That Side quite literally draws lines between people and nations to depict the anxieties, irrationality, migration, violence and trauma that accompanies the territorial disruptions associated with the Partition of 1947 and 1971. Unlike other forms of documentation, graphic novel medium “give shape to lost histories and bodies” (Chute, 38). The visual-verbal medium of graphic novel allows us to uniquely ‘see’ the materialization of history and serve as the fitting example of the scission or fracture (between language and discourse, sound and speech, inarticulate and articulate expression, and experience and knowledge). I will argue that these partition narratives have specific implications for memory studies in their enactment of epistemological crisis that tends to destroy the perceptions of time and space. By taking a cue from Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995)and Deleuze’s concept of l’evenement (the event) from The Logic of Sense (1990), I will argue that these narratives and their graphic and non-linguistic encounters seem to negate language. The flashbacks and hallucinations, the amnesia and emotional numbing are to be treated as events. I will argue that memory studies can offer ways of thinking and engaging with these events as instances of broader cultural symptoms