Through the Lens of Time: The Partition in Krishna Sobti’s Autobiography, "From Gujrat, Pakistan, to Gujrat, India"

Abstract

In her latest book, Gujrāt pakistān se gujrāt hindustān tak (2017), Krishna Sobti (b. 1925), one of the best-known writers active on the Hindi literary scene, presents the reader with an autobiographical account focused on the events of 1947, where her personal experience of the Partition is reworked and presented in the guise of a novel. This paper proposes to analyse the stylistic devises (double frame approach, switching between the third-person and the first-person narratives, use of the dialogue, etc.) employed by the author to achieve her aim by drawing on the vast body of academic work on partition, violence, trauma and memory both in the local as well the global context. Alok Bhalla, one of the first scholars to analyze literary representations of the Partition in the bhasha literature, 2 starts his well-known and * Sobti 2017a. So far there is no English translation of this book and my rendering of its Hindi title into English tries to keep close to the original. However, following "Afterward" in a very recent publication, under the rubric Further Reading there is this item: Sobti, Krishna. A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. Delhi: Penguin. (Introduced and translated by Daisy Rockwell) (Mastur 2018: 391). As there is no year of publication given, further scrutiny (of Penguin India website) reveals that the book is to be published in early 2019. Moreover, I would like to highlight the fact that throughout the paper I use the English version of personal names and surnames, especially of well-known personalities, as such versions of their names appear in the English-language books and printed media, hence Krishna Sobti instead of Kr ˳ ṣṇā Sobtī.2 Alok Bhalla, a scholar and translator, focuses on literary works, mostly stories, in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu.