‘I have been awake ever since I have come here’: Sleep, Space and Madness in Partition Literature

Abstract

Even though a large portion of violence was concentrated at nighttime, a lot of people had to leave their homes and migrate under the safety of darkness, and many people suffered from sleeplessness in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, not a lot of attention has been paid to the effects of these nocturnal experiences on the population. This paper will act as a corrective to the ‘night blindness’ in Partition studies by looking at an important, yet overlooked, aspect of the night with respect to the rehabilitation experiences of refugees in the aftermath of Partition – sleep. By drawing a corelation between the politics of space and sleep in the post-partition landscape, this paper will trace the pervasive presence of insomnia in narratives written around Partition. Through a close reading of fictional texts written by Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Intizar Hussain, two prominent writers on Partition, this paper will argue how the cycles of allotment houses and the formation of squatter colonies during the Partition resisted ‘rootedness’, leading to sleeplessness and insomnia, using the phenomenological frameworks drawn by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A critical analysis of these texts will reveal how insomnia functioned in exacerbating the traumatic mindscapes of refugees. This paper will not only bring to light overlooked experiences of Partition but also underscore the importance of sleep for the rehabilitation of refugees during precarious times.