Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Margaret Bourke-White’s Partition Photographs: Clash of Narratives or Postmemory Project?

• Authors: Sarma Ira
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Memories of the Partition of India have, over the last decades, been constructed through a broad range of media, such as biographical memory, historiography, or literature. An interesting more recent example of remembrance is the illustrated golden jubilee edition of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (2006) which features more than 60 of photographs of the US-American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White and a wide range of editorial paratexts. An analysis of this new edition will show that the textual and visual narratives thus combined differ widely and do not support each other as the editor Pramod Kapoor claims. However, if we look at the project as a whole we find it to be more than simply an “illustrated version” of the original novel. Rather, it can be seen as what Marianne Hirsch has called a ‘postmemory’ project: Kapoor connects different viewpoints and narratives and thus finds a form of expressing his own view of Partition and the ways the second generation should deal with it.

Keywords

EN

Partition of India; 1947; literature; photography; narratives; Train to Pakistan; Khushwant Singh; Margaret Bourke-White; Life magazine; postmemory

• Publisher: Księgarnia Akademicka
• Journal: Cracow Indological Studies
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 17: Crossing over “on the Birds’ Wings”: South Asian Literature in Local and Global Contexts
• Pages: 269-292

Contributors

author

Sarma Ira

• Leipzig University

References

• Baughman, J. L. 2001. Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Bhalla, A. 1999. Memory, History and Fictional Representations of the Partition. Economic and Political Weekly ‘34,44 (Oct. 30): 3119–3128.
• Bourke-White, M. 1947. The Great Migration. Life, 3 November 1947: 117–125.
• Bourke-White, M. 1949. Halfway to Freedom. A Report on the New India in the Words and Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Butalia, U. 2000.The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Butalia, U. 2001. Partition and Memory. Seminar, 497 (January). Online: http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/497/497%20urvashi%20butalia.htm, accessed on: 26.5.2015.
• Butalia, U. Partition. The Long Shadow. New Delhi: Zubaan.
• Doss, E. L. 2001. Looking at “Life” Magazine. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Edey, M. and Sullivan, C. 1978. Great Photographic Essays from Life. Boston: New York Graphic Society.
• Goldberg, V. 1987. Margaret Bourke-White. A Biography. Reading/MA.- Menlo Park/CA.-et.al.: Addison-Wesley
• Herzstein, R.E. 2005. Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hirsch, M. 2001. Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory. The Yale Journal of Criticism ‘14, 1: 5–37.
• Hirsch, M. 2008. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today ‘29,1:103–128.
• Hirsch, M. and Spitzer, L. 2006. What’s Wrong with this Picture? Archival Photographs in Contemporary Narratives. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies ‘05,2: 229–252.
• Joshua, A. 2006. United by Partition. The Hindu, 6 August 2006. Online: www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/united-by-partition/article3219128.ece, accessed on: 26.5.2015.
• Kamra, S. 2015. Engaging Traumatic Histories: The 1947 Partition of India in Collective Memory. In: Butalia, U. 2015. Partition. The Long Shadow. New Delhi: Zubaan: 155–177.
• Kapoor, P. 2004. How I Made It. The Telegraph, 21 December 2004. Online:www.telegraphindia.com/1041221/asp/jobs/story_4124852.asp, accessed on: 13.5.2015.
• Kapoor, P. 2010. Witness to Life and Freedom. Margaret Bourke-White in India and Pakistan. New Delhi: Roli Books.
• Luce, H. R. 1936. A Prospectus of a New Magazine. New York.
• Luce, H. R. 1941. The American Century. Life, 17 February 1941: 61–65.
• Luce, H. R. 1949. Destiny and Dollars. A New World Is Shaping Around the U.S., and the British Crisis Is Wart of the Change. Life, 12 September 1949: 50–51.
• Pandey, G. 2001. Remembering Partition. Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rathbone, B. 2000. Walker Evans. A Biography. Boston-New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Sengupta, S. 2006. Bearing Steady Witness to Partition’s Wounds. The New York Times, 21 September 2006. Online: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E5DE1131F932A1575AC0A9609C8B63, accessed on: 26.5.2015.
• Singh, K. 1968-69. Interview with Khushwant Singh. Mahfil, ‘05,1/2:27–42.
• Singh, K. 1996. Partition Voices: Khushwant Singh, Interview by Andrew Whitehead. Online: http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/partition-voices.html, accessed on: 16.5.2015.
• Singh, K. 2006. Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Roli Books (tenth impression, 2011).
• Solomon-Godeau, A. 2004. Remote Control. Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s Dispatches from the Image Wars. Artforum International, ‘62,10: 61–64.
• Stott, W. 1973. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Vials, C. 2006. The Popular Front in the American Century: “Life” Magazine, Margaret Bourke-White, and Consumer Realism, 1936–1941. American Periodicals, ‘16,1: 74–102.

Identifiers

DOI

10.12797/CIS.17.2015.17.14