Enduring Places: Lost Homes in Partition Literary Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines two literary narratives, Reena Nanda’s family history/biography of her mother, From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story (2018) and Intizar Husain’s Basti (originally published in Urdu in 1979; 1995), recounted from the perspective of the migrant generation, who find their former homes on the other side of the newly drawn borders, and offer an eloquent illustration of how Partition disrupted the sense of “placeness” and belonging for millions of people who were overnight turned into strangers in places they thought of as their homes. Exploring the affective significance of pre-displacement homes in these literary works, I ask: what kind of memory work are these fictions of lost homes/lost dwelling-places doing? I read both literary works as powerful exilic narratives that articulate a deep yearning for lost homes lying across the Radcliffe border. I argue that lost home-places in both literary narratives serve a very important critical function that go beyond the nostalgia for home, which is of course a characteristic of many exilic and diasporic narratives, or even beyond the topophilia that geographers like Tuan have described so eloquently. Each remembered place—Quetta and the fictional town of Rupnagar in India—serves as a concrete setting for depicting the “historical plurality of lived worlds” (Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar) or what Jacques Derrida calls the “living together” of different religious communities, a “living together” that was rendered untenable by the concept of Partition. I end with the suggestion that this alternative understanding of Partition as loss and exile may be read as a refusal to accept the teleological narrative of nationalism, while also attesting to the deep-seated and abiding ties between what are often presented as ontologically opposed identities and places.