Home Journal List بازیافت Volume-34-35 Article Details

Loss and Latency of Migration in Basti

Abstract

The partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 was a crucial rupture in which the creation of boarders became the defining traumatic event of the history. This paper is invested in exploring the representation of 1947’s and 1971’s partition in Intizar Husain’s novel Basti through the psychoanalytic and theoretical paradigm of trauma extracted from Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. It primarily focuses on the discursive representation of trauma as an ongoing process for the immigrants who migrated as a result of partition. In Basti the loss is elucidated, lightened and dignified by the return of memories and these memories become the source of creating space for that loss in the consciousness of the displaced person. Husain himself was an immigrant who first migrated from village Rupnagar to Vayaspur and then from Vayaspur to Lahore (Pakistan). Therefore, in his writing there is an amalgamation of his personal experiences with the experiences of his characters which develops a blur boundary between fiction and reality. Memory and nostalgia are two driving forces in his narrative. In this regard, he has accentuated the personal memoirs of the sufferers’ vis-à-vis the perpetual nostalgia of migration. I argue that the identity of an immigrant becomes vulnerable when it is subjected to the assimilation of the foreign land and its culture. I consider trauma as a conceptual lens to examine how the geographical reconstruction of borders leads to the reconstruction of individual as well as collective identity. The paramount impression of trauma is incorporated in the memory system. This paper pursues to find through the system of memory, how the progressive impacts of the past shape the present and offers us means to rethink future.

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