My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory... more
My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory urge to map South Asia as an “ancient palimpsest” to “know if there was any real connection between the past and the present” (Nehru 25) is echoed in Qurratulain Hyder’s feminist novel Sita Betrayed (1960), which, however, casts memorialization in more uncanny, melancholic terms. Hyder constructs a trans-subcontinental trauma sensorium – a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences – to contain the marginalized histories of the Partition dispossessed obscured by the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian nation confidently claimed, or the “newness” of an Islamic birth distanced from the subcontinent’s past, that Pakistan declared. Hyder’s composition of a sensorium of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest allows spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. By exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. Hyder’s mobilization of melancholia and haunting, significantly, offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect-mediated postcolonial trauma theory.
A bilingual Research Journal in the form of a book series edited and published by Prof. Arshad Masood Hashmi for the Department of Urdu, Jai Prakash University, Chhapra. The issue contains papers written by Dr. Najeeba Arif, Dr Mehr... more
A bilingual Research Journal in the form of a book series edited and published by Prof. Arshad Masood Hashmi for the Department of Urdu, Jai Prakash University, Chhapra. The issue contains papers written by Dr. Najeeba Arif, Dr Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Dr. Nasir Abbas Naiyyar, Dr. Maula Bakhsh, Dr. Arshad Masood Hashmi, Dr. Shahab Zafar Azmi, Zehra Mehdi and Huzaifa Pandit.
Some scholars, including Grutman (20092) and Popovič (1975), believe that self-translation of literary works should be defined essentially as translation, whereas others recognize that works translated by their authors have their own... more
Some scholars, including Grutman (20092) and Popovič (1975), believe that self-translation of literary works should be defined essentially as translation, whereas others recognize that works translated by their authors have their own specificities and cannot be described as the mere output of translating. The Indian writer Qurratulain Hyder is among the famous authors who wrote their literary works in two different languages, in this case Urdu and English. The novel Āg kā dariyā, allegedly her masterpiece, written in 1959, was transcreated in English in 1998. A comparison of the two versions shows notable differences and sheds light on the peculiarities of creative writing in English and in Urdu in the Indian Subcontinent. Āg kā dariyā, however, is not the only example of rewriting by Qurratulain Hyder. Among her other works, the short story Ḥasab nasab, rewritten in English as Honour, shows some similarities with Āg kā dariyā. Our conclusion is that self-translation may be considered as a rewriting, and possibly a new original. The article is followed by the translation into Italian of both the Urdu and English versions.
