| Title: | Lifting The Veil? Reconsidering the Task of Literary Historiography |
| Author: | Jill Didur |
| Publication: | Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies / Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group |
| Enumeration: | Vol. 3, No. 3 pp. 446 - 451/November 1, 2001 |
| Abstract: | This article responds to recent work on partition narratives concerned with recovering historical evidence about the treatment of 'abducted' women during and after India's partition. It attempts to theorize the silence surrounding the details of sectarian violence that recurs in testimonies and literary representations of these events. I argue that the loss of an archive this silence suggests necessitates scholars to adopt a pedagogy for the study of partition history which moves away from a model that seeks to 'recover' the past and instead focuses on how totalizing representational strategies smooth over ambivalent responses to the birth of the modern nation-state. The desire to 'recover' the experience of 'abducted' women in order to correct the historical 'record' is shown to share the same modernist assumptions that informed the state-sanctioned Recovery Operation. Given that the stated goal of much work on women's experience of partition is to critique the assumptions behind this operation and explore how attention to gender identity can disrupt past and present hegemonic definitions of national identity, a wariness of these kinds of retellings would seem to be in order.
Keywords:
'ABDUCTED' Women Gender History Literature Partition South Asia
Source of Abstract: Provided by Publisher |
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