Partition Literature.

1238 Words5 Pages
Looking at Partition through Tamas. “Partition literature can be roughly defined as the creative attempt to make sense of one of the worst pogroms in human memory. In trying to grapple with the enormity of misery, writers dealing with this period, obsessively deployed imageries of rape, violence and destruction.” - Anuradha Marwah Roy History has always fascinated authors, odes have been written by poets on Independence. Wars and revolutions have been the topics of many a great works of fiction eg, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ ‘War and peace’ ‘Farewell to Arms’. The Partition of India was a historical yet traumatic event with serious underlying consequences. The violence that entailed was unexpected, uncalled for, unprecedented, absolutely barbaric and savage in nature. The most sorrowful part about it was the end it brought, to a long history of communal co-existence. Man looked at his brother with suspicion and mistrust. Many authors have attempted to explore and explain this tumultary period. Very few deal with the holocaust of partition in their writings. Some of them are unable to explain the violence and thus recreate the atmosphere with their words, they paint elaborate scenes of the horrors that they witnessed. ‘Tamas’ by Bhisham Sahni is a perfect example of this. Govind Nihalani, puts it well in the foreward to the book when he says, “A traumatic historical event usually finds the artistic literary response twice .Tamas is the reflective response to the Partition of India-one of the most tragic events in the recent history of the Indian sub-continent.” ‘ Tamas’ literally means darkness and the novel lives up to its name as the audience is plunged into the deadly dark
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