Subverting the Nation-State Through Post-Partition Nostalgia: Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers

With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella, Khwabrau (Sleepwalkers), p...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Humanities (Basel) 2019, Vol.8 (1), p.19
Main Author: Ghosh, Amrita
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Collective memory
Comparative literature
Foucault
heterotopia
India
Indian literature
Litteraturvetenskap
Memory
Nation states
nation-state
Nostalgia
Novellas
Novels
Pakistan
partition
Partition fiction
Paul, Joginder
Realism
Refugees
Simulation
Trauma
Urdu language
Writers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella, Khwabrau (Sleepwalkers), published in 1990. Sleepwalkers shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal “third space” that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality. Sleepwalkers is based on a time, many years after the Partition in the city of Karachi, and focuses on the “mohajirs” from Lucknow who construct a mnemonic existential space by constructing a simulacrum of pre-Partition Lucknow (now in India). This paper examines the reconceptualization of spaces through the realm of political nostalgia and the figure of the refugee subject “performing” this nostalgia. This nostalgic reconstruction of space, thus, becomes a “heterotopia” in Foucauldian terms, one that causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nation-hood. The refugee subjects’ subversion of the linearity of time opens a different time in the narration of a nation that necessitates that the wholeness of the “imagined” physical space of a nation be questioned.
ISSN:2076-0787
2076-0787
DOI:10.3390/h8010019