The partitioned subject: Narrative, nationalism, and silent subjectivity in Khushwant Singh's 'Train to Pakistan'

In the summer of 1947 the British government granted India its independence and partitioned the colony into two nations: the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India. The partition displaced over 10 million people and an estimated one million people died in this transfer of populations. Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) provides a narrative account of the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, which marked a bloody period of South Asian history. Building from previous scholarship on post-colonial national identities and the process by which post-colonial nationalism makes itself coherent, this project demonstrates the way in which individual subjectivity is altered by partition by engaging with Khushwant Singh's novel.;In order to illustrate the contours of a partitioned subject, this project has three interrelated sections. Chapter One provides a history of the 1947 Partition of India and a discussion of Khushwant Singh's novel, and draws upon the work of a group of theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben to address the complexities of the relationships between the post-colonial and partition state, a subject that, with the exception of Joe Clearly's Literature, Partition, and the Nation State, few have addressed. Chapter Two advances a detailed analysis of Train to Pakistan and argues that the narrative is a historically contingent account of silence. Lastly, Chapter Three argues that the silence of the "partitioned subject" is much more than a split subject, but marks a historical threshold instituted by the territorial act of partition itself.