Afrida Masooma
Volume-XI, Issue-IV, July 2023
Volume-XI, Issue-IV, July 2023 | ||
Published Online: 31.07.2023 | Page No: 196-203 | |||
Scrutinizing the
Spotlight: A Socio-Feminist Study of the Partition Fictions of Barak Valley,
Assam
Afrida Masooma, Former research Scholar, Centre
for North East and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India | |
The partition of India in 1947 though has been studied from multiple prisms; women have never been a subject of discussion in the dominant discourses of the partition. Women were considered mute objects and commodities only to be possessed in all partition historiographies whether they are nationalist or social. The experiences of the women and their voices in the discourse of partition have been ignored and overlooked. Not only did the political historiography ignore the women’s experiences of the partition, the literary historiography too overlooked the women’s plight while representing the partition in the literary productions. These unattended women questions in the partition historiography have recently been identified as a major blind spot to be recovered for scholarly inquiry. The partition fictions of Barak Valley, Assam, being no exception, also made no effort to accommodate the women in their representation of the partition. Rather women in those fictions are presented as symbols of male possessions. This paper is aimed at analysing two representative partition fictions of Barak Valley, Assam, visbilizing women characters and their representation in them. The selected fictions are Bindu Bindu Jol (2019) by Sekhar Das and Wakeup Call (2012) by Amitabh Dev Choudhury. | |
Keywords: Partition, Fiction, Women, Representation, Visibilization, Barak Valley, Assam |