Re-Mapping the Ordinary: Everyday Spaces and Subaltern Voices in Partition Short Stories

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to re-examine Indian Partition short stories through a subaltern and spatial lens to argue that the ordinary spaces of courtyard, kitchens, trains, asylums and refugee camps function as counter-archives of resistance and trauma. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of everyday practices, Henry Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of subaltern speech, and Homi Bhabha’s perspective on the ambivalence of nationhood, this paper reflects upon how Partition literature remaps quotidian and the domestic into critical sites of historical remembrance. the paper situates Partition not merely as a singular rupture of history but also as a lived continuum of memory and displacement, through close reading of some stories by Rajinder Singh Bedi, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Krishna Sobti, Bhisham Sahni, Intizar Husain, Khushwant Singh and Jamila Hashmi. It asserts and argues that such stories ponder over the interdependence of the political and personal, the border and the home, and narration and silence —thereby changing ordinary spaces into testimonies of human endurance.