Volume VI Special Issue I January 2026

Name of Author : Harleen Kaur, Prof. Sanjana Shamshery

Title of the paper : Narrating the Unspeakable: Fragmented Memory and the Aesthetics of Trauma in Womens Partition Narratives

Abstract: The Partition of India in 1947, one of the largest and most violent dislocations in modern history, continues to haunt the collective and cultural memory of South Asia. Womens narratives of Partition often inhabit the fragile intersection of memory and silence, where trauma disrupts both experience and narration. This paper explores how literary fragmentation becomes an aesthetic and ethical mode of representing what Cathy Caruth terms the unclaimed experience which resists full articulation. Through close readings of Supriya Singhs The Girls Ate Last, Anis Kidwais In Freedoms Shade, and Saaz Aggarwals Sindh Stories from a Vanished Homeland, the paper examines how disjointed narrative structures, disrupted temporalities, and elliptical storytelling mirror the fractured psyche of the Partition survivors. Drawing upon Dori Laubs notion of bearing witness and Marianne Hirschs theory of postmemory, it analyzes how these texts reconstruct history through intergenerational remembrance and gendered subjectivity. The paper argues that silence, repetition, and narrative gaps function as textual embodiments of trauma spaces where language falters but memory persists. By situating these womens voices within the broader framework of trauma and postmemory studies, the paper suggests that narrative fragmentation is not merely symptomatic of psychic rupture but also a transformative act of survival and reclamation. In reassembling fragments of loss and longing, these narratives transform trauma into testimony, and silence into speech reimagining belonging and healing across borders.

Keywords : Partition, trauma, memory, postmemory, womens narratives

DOI :

Page Number : 162-168