ROOTS AND RUPTURES: HOME, FAMILY, AND BELONGING IN SOUTH ASIAN PARTITION FICTION

Abstract

Few symbols of rootedness and belonging can match the power of home. The ancestral home, in particular, is featured in fiction as anchoring a stable self amid the mutability and change of the wider world. In South Asian fiction, the projection of home into the distant future as the space that will one day be inherited by one’s children and grandchildren is particularly significant. As a means of extending one’s self beyond the mortal frame, the home carries an emotional charge in South Asia that is hard to rival. This paper offers close readings of three Partition short stories in which home is pitted against another powerful symbol of belonging prominent in South Asian fiction: family. In my brief sampling of a much more widespread trend in Partition fiction, older protagonists, when pushed to choose between home and family, tend to pick the former. The attachment to home is so strong that they are willing to let go of family, no matter how heavily the odds seem stacked against this choice. While this pattern lends itself quite readily to an essentialization of older people as typically wary of change, with their foundations much like the houses they inhabit, dug deep into the soil, this paper reads the act of choosing spatial over familial affiliation as a de-essentializing move. In this context, families are shown to be performative rather than organic, core groups of blood-related kin, upending existing ways of plotting identity at the intersections of age and gender, religion and nation, body and landscape.