Saraswati’s Inkpot: Memory, the body and Mother India in Indian women’s post-Partition literature

The thesis “Saraswati’s Inkpot: Memory, the body and Mother India in Indian women’s post-Partition literature” explores how the imaginative quality of literature can enrich our understanding of women’s histories of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. The ever-growing genre of Partition literature has been posited as an alternative archive to official historiography, offering space to marginalised experiences and a more human- centred perspective towards Partition. Just as feminist historiography reconfigures our understanding of Partition by focalising gendered violence, reading Partition fiction both authored by and centring women reshapes how we encounter the legacies of these events. Yet creating fictional testimony risks problematically, even paternalistically, “speaking for” the margins and potentially reiterating the patriarchal symbolism generated by gendered violence. In an analysis of The River Churning (1967) by Jyotirmoyee Devi, Clear Light of Day (1980) by Anita Desai and Tomb of Sand (2018) by Geetanjali Shree, “Saraswati’s Inkpot” considers what understanding we may gain from indirect, fragmented and elusive representations of women’s Partition histories. Each novel is structured through memory and speaks to the “post-” of post-Partition literature, evaluating their protagonists’ experiences of 1947 from a temporal distance and highlighting the mediated nature of testimony. These authors subvert traditional masculinist representations of Mother India in order to both examine and expose patriarchal violence enacted on women, with a particular critique of familial and intracommunity violence while evading reductive representations of violence inflicted by the “other”. Each text sensitively and empathetically scrutinises bodily suffering, and rejects sensationalising accounts of violence. Through these representations, the novels resist being used to “recover” women’s unrecoverable testimonies and instead reiterate the incompleteness of the archive itself.