Modern India

The understanding of ‘home’ in Partition stories is as near to religiosity and ideological affinity, based on emotions and cultural associations which human beings have with their region, community and identity-sponsor as the physical house. Most people forgot their old social and cultural bondage that day when the 1947 India Partition took place, and millions were compelled to leave their homes. Partition literature unfolds the kind of loss by showing how ‘home’, what was once a heaven, turns out to be a space of division, alienation and in many cases remembrance.

Themes in the Concept of “Home” in Partition Literature
Loss and Displacement
There is paradigmatic dramatization of how dislocation affects people by presenting a paradigmatic example of how they are stripped off all that is familiar. The authors describe, indeed rather pain-fully, how the house becomes a place inhabited by strangers…a home becomes a source of suffering. So, the old notion of home as a stable, steady, and secure location to which one returns at the end of the day shifts and changes with the uns secure and perpetually on the move.

Memory and Nostalgia
For many Partition witnesses, the home was left behind – and it is a place of memory and desire. Most of the literature under discussion idealizes the life that was leading pre partition and searching for the lost homeland. Shmo aims at the construct of a physical house that everyone can go back to, which however is merely an imprint in the writers’ head.

Identity and Belonging
Home’ as Opiah maintains is often tied with identity in Partition literature. Famine, war and the demands of new homes that have to be built affects characters’ identity in the works. Many authors talk about how, in the line after Partition, individuals try to shear new existence and how memories of the original home serve both as a source of solace, a refuge and a constant reminder of a fractured entity.

Division and Alienation
A family is being driven apart; one community is being split away from another, an ideology of home is division; interreligious political discourses which are prevalent during this time narrate more about the ways in which shared homes and neighborhoods were being divided and people regarded the other as stranger.  It brings about some sense of dislocation not only by the physical home but from the neighbors, friends, and loved ones left behind as well.

Survival and Resilience
However, the comprehension of Partition literature also encompasses tales of human potential in endurance. The description of fire and the broken walls and homes and the ability to construct something anew helps to comprehend the character of people’s instinct for survival. Although the meaning of ‘home’ is changing and getting rebuilt, the passion for new grounds is a testament for surviving.

Examples of some partition literature include:
Hopes for the survival of Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas elaborate these features. These writers build an interface through different characters to express how people bear the separate loss of homes and selfhood, representing the residual pain and suffering trough the Partition.

Partition literature, therefore, employs a fairly conservative concept of ‘home’ as an emblem to comment on displacement, memory, self & survival at one of the worst acts of human history. Through these stories, the reader is afforded the opportunity to think upon the interrelation of home, self, and community and that ‘home’, like the self, is as much a condition as it is a house.