Trauma Narratives: A Psychological Study on the Select Partition Writing

Abstract

The history of partition has been the history of trauma and dislocation. The deficiency in recounting the history of trauma is that humanity awarded cardinal forces rather than emphasising the victims' vulnerability. The traumatic experience is stored in an unconscious part of the brain as a photographic negative. Trauma studies examine trauma's psychological, rhetorical, and cultural impact on literature and society. Scholars study the psychological and social aspects that influence a person's understanding of a traumatic experience and how language influences such an experience. This paper tries to investigate the trauma narrative from multiple perspectives. First, the individual trauma narrative is analysed from man, woman and child outlooks. Second, the collective trauma narrative analyses the communal distress during the partition and the aftermath creates enmity among the Hindus and Muslims who once lived calmly as brothers and sisters. Literary giants like SaadatHasanManto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, RanaDasgupta, and BhishamSahni are evident in how they employ fiction to depict the individual and social reality of those who endured enormous suffering during India's division that is investigated with trauma narrative.