Divided land, divided bodies: Representations of nationalism and violence in literature and films on the Partition of India

This dissertation attempts to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on Partition of India through a study of its literary and cinematic representations. The study examines the foray of the national politics into the local in the 1940s to analyze how nationalism and communal politics interrupted and rearranged life in North India. In an introduction and four chapters, the study addresses questions such as how do novels and films negotiate representations of nationalism produced at specific moments in history that are rife with socio-political divisions such as the Partition? Flow are they fraught with contemporary nationalist-fundamentalist politics?;Through close readings and critical analyses of texts, I argue that whereas literary writings and films sporadically venture into polarized representations of Partition history, both modes offer alternative histories that endorse communal harmony and promote a gendered critique of the Partition. Such representations gain significance as sectarian violence, with its roots in the Partition, continues to affect the populations of India and Pakistan, and has profound implications for South Asian diasporic communities spread around the globe, including in Canada.;The first chapter explores national and local, imagined and territorial identities, with a specific discussion of the incursions of national politics into the rural life during Partition in Rahi Masoom Reza's The Feuding Families of Village Gangauli (1966) and Manoj Punj's Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, Boota Singh (Martyr of Love, Boota Singh 1998). Against my analysis of the superimposition of national identities onto local identities, the second chapter examines the representations of railways in Bollywood cinema, including Chhalia (1960); Train to Pakistan (1997); Earth (1998); and Gadar (2001). I argue that trains become sites of national politics, violence, separation and union, and thus serve as a microcosm of Partition. Examining the casting of the woman's body as the national body in texts such as Pinjar (2003), the third chapter reads the representations of Ramayana/Purity narrative that acquired specific shape during Partition to control and destroy, ab/use and reject, recover and rehabilitate women's bodies. Chapter four analyzes the emergence of Partition narratives in the South Asian diaspora in Canada, and the shape that nationalism acquires in Deepa Mehta's Earth (1998) and Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers (2001).;Keywords: South Asian literature and culture; Bollywood; Partition; Nationalism; Violence; Home; Kinship; Religion; Secularism, Communalism; Hindutva; Gender; Diaspora; Memory; Postmemory; Punjab; India; Pakistan; territorial identity; individual identity; Hindu Mythology: Rahi Masoom Reza; Deepa Mehta; Shauna Singh Baldwin; Manoj Punj: Pamela Rooks; Manmohan Desai; I.S. Johar, Yash Chopra; Anil Sharma; Chandraprakash Dwivedi...