The Hindu Refugee in Hindi Literature: Rethinking Displacement in Chandrakanta’s and Alka Saraogi’s Novels

Abstract

The figure of the vulnerable Hindu refugee was rekindled in public imagination with a recent amendment to citizenship laws in India, which simultaneously undermined the rights of the country’s Muslim minorities. But as scholars of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan have long argued, this antagonistic relationship was the very foundation of the State’s claim to sovereignty, especially as women victims of the Partition were “recovered” by a proxy-patriarchal State to uphold the sanctity of the Hindu family. This paper foregrounds such invisibilized fissures through reading the figure of the Hindu refugee in the Hindi historical novel. By critiquing accounts of displacement after the 1947 and 1971 Indo-Pakistani wars in the novels of Chandrakanta and Alka Saraogi, I show how upper-caste Hindu refugees—Kashmiri Pandits and Marwari merchants respectively—are naturalized as the only legitimate beneficiaries of postcolonial citizenship. I argue that the memorialization of the violence incurred by Hindu refugees is often a form of what Aniket Jaaware called a “chronotope of envelopment”, wherein the past is the exclusive province of the always-already settled Hindu family threatened by an intrusive otherness. This otherness is ascribed to the Muslim or Dalit insurgent, whose political aspirations are rendered excessively abject. By situating the Hindu refugee within this dialectic, I ask if we can remember the afterlives of 1947 without instrumentalizing its violence yet again.