Spatial Visions: Mobility and the Social Order in Pakistani Women’s English-Language Partition Fiction

Authors

  • Cara Cilano, Michigan State University, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v10i1.774

Abstract

Two fictions by Pakistani women about the “long partition,†a concept introduced by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar to refer to the temporally expansive “postcolonial burden of [the] political partition†of the subcontinent (3), provide unique insights into a vision of emplaced citizenship from a non-Muslim minority perspective. Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1991 novel Cracking India, for instance, offers readers an opportunity to understand territories as spaces created through mobility of and interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims during the partition era. The novel’s historical focus brings forth questions about how places and groups affected and were affected by the British withdrawal from the subcontinent, the violence that ensued, and the efforts to (re-) constitute place and peoples – or, a social order – that occurred subsequently. Similarly, Maniza Naqvi’s 2008 novel A Matter of Detail features toothless efforts to reclaim place through mobility so as to reanimate a belonging changed or hidden in the aftermath of partition and the development of an increasingly religiously intolerant Pakistan. While I make no claim to the unmediated representational abilities of partition fiction, I do contend that novels like Sidhwa’s and Naqvi’s grant imaginative insights into lived experiences and possibilities, which, in turn, can motivate alternative social orders. For instance, Cracking India demonstrates the effects of the dissolution of one type of order and the struggles to establish alternatives in the newly created Pakistan. In contrast, A Matter of Detail considers the consequences of the durability of a social order when alternatives fail.

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Author Biography

Cara Cilano, Michigan State University, USA

Cara Cilano is Chair and Professor of English at Michigan State University. She’s the author of National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction; Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation, State; and Post-9/11 Espionage Fiction in the US and Pakistan: Spies and ‘Terrorists.’ Her next book project examines spatial visions of Pakistan through the Cold War period and after.

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How to Cite

Cilano, Michigan State University, USA, C. (2016). Spatial Visions: Mobility and the Social Order in Pakistani Women’s English-Language Partition Fiction. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 10(1), 113–127. https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v10i1.774

Issue

Section

Section I: Articles on South Asian Women’s Writing