The Affective Dwellings: Migration, Violence and the Quotidian in the Literary Narratives of India’s Partition

This article engages with the preponderance of quotidian violence by invoking the affective registers of “trauma” and “nostalgia” in the literature on India’s Partition. It specifically attends to the category of “soft violence” and its far-reaching consequences in the Post-Partition society. The paper reads an array of short stories, beginning with “Phundane” by Sadaat Hasan Manto, intersectionally with other literary texts that deal with disfigured domestic situations as an index of the madness, raging outside. In “Phundane” the trauma is etched into the bodies of​ ​women as brides, mothers, and “bearers” of aborted lives within the domestic​ ​enclosure in a world of all-engulfing terror. The other texts focus on the precipitation​ ​of slow agonising tragedy amidst intense hardship in refugee settlements which​ ​constitutes the very anathema of home. They together construct an​ affective​ arc of violence​ ​through the trappings of trauma, nostalgia, and other memories that fall between them, to show how the Partition that unmoored the intimate coordinates of relationship, is sustained in the normative experiences of the quotidian.