Witnessing Partition: Trauma, Memory, and History in Khushwant Singh’s Fiction

Abstract

Khushwant Singh’s major novels, particularly Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, and Delhi, are acclaimed for their subtle portrayal of the traumatic legacy of the 1947 Partition and its aftermath, and this article, through its qualitative literary analysis, reinterprets his fiction through the lens of trauma studies by way of drawing on theories by Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Kali Tal to foreground how these works portray psychological, collective, and generational trauma. The paper also foregrounds the way(s) the writer writes with detached, quasi-historical objectivity and uses recurring animalistic metaphors to lay bare the dehumanising impact of communal violence. As exemplified by the ghost train of massacred bodies in Train to Pakistan, the dying words of Sabhrai in Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and the enigmatic figure of Bhagmati in Delhi convey unspeakable horrors obliquely, signifying the layered dimensions of trauma. This paper attempts to analyse how Singh’s dual role as a novelist and historian enables a uniquely candid yet compassionate chronicle of partition trauma and thus offers fresh insight into partition literature and the processes of cultural memory and healing.