Exploration of the language of violence in South Asian partition fiction in English

The dissertation unravels the politics of the language of violence in South Asian English partition fiction. It contends that partition literature written between 1947 and the 1980s, with the exception of the short stories of Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, follows along the lines of nationalist historiography and fails to rise above the prose of otherness in its representation of the brutal violence that constituted the partition of India. By highlighting Manto's subalternist humanism through a discussion of his metairony, which locates and relives the relentless partition violence in the trauma of the ironic subjects, the dissertation proposes that the focus must shift from remembering partition as a mode of resistance to victimhood to remembering it as a trauma that has be confronted in order to come to grips with the realities of communal and neighborly tensions in South Asia.