Title: Muhajir Narratives of Homes Lost and Found: Nostalgia and Belonging in the Novels of Intizar Husain and the Columns of The Daily Pasban
Abstract: The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into India and Pakistan (comprising two 'wings' on the west and east of British India) is one of the most colossal and significant redrawing of national borders in recent history.Marked by unprecedented violence and displacement, India's emergence from colonialism and the birth of Pakistan have spawned a messy history of strained geopolitical relations, perennially fraught borders, liminal borderlands, communal identity-based politics, and a long trail of personal narratives of divided families and fractured identities.This collective experience of a continuing, mnemohistorical sense of dislocation that haunts the narrative of postcolonial South Asia is somewhat encapsulated by what Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar has called the 'long partition' (Zamindar 2007).Central to this idea of the 'long partition' is the experience of losing and renegotiating belonging.Does national belonging confine itself to national borders?Is the homeland always congruous to the nation?How do those who have chosen to migrate or been displaced come to terms with the reallocation of national identity?And finally, what are the different meanings and significance attached to 'home' in the context of Partition-related migration and violence?The historiography of Partition initially occupied itself primarily with approaching it as a political event with largely political causes and consequences.A shift in this approach occurred when the lens of enquiry was refocused on its protracted and continuing human cost using oral testimonies and memory.However, the questions as mentioned above and their implications figure most potently and organically in what has been called Partition literature: the corpus of literary and creative writing on and around Partition.This essay looks at how the themes of displacement, loss of home and homeland, and the notion of a never-ending state of exile for those who crossed the refashioned national borders in 1947 find articulation in Partition literature.This is done by focusing on the works of Intizar Husain : one of the most renowned and prolific Urdu writers of Pakistan