What is it about?
This is about the act of witnessing. The article analyses a select number of hindi films which portray the violence during the period of the partition/ independence of India and Pakistan.
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Why is it important?
The academic discourse of the mass violence that took place during the Partition/Independence of India and Pakistan has acquired certain maturity over the decades. The corpus of literature generated has been insightful and path-breaking. In the backdrop of this scholarship, the current article attempts to engage with the experiences of witnessing and emphasize upon transformative potential of such encounters. With few Partition-based Hindi films, this study also looks at the landscape of the Partition on the celluloid, where the screen converges with history and where the memory of trauma generates guilt. Mobilising the fieldwork conducted seventeen–eighteen years ago in Delhi, Ajmer and Jammu along with the cinematic representations and written corpus on the Partition, an engagement with the figure of a witness in this article will hopefully allow us to engage with memory, archive and the mass violence with fresh questions and perspectives
Perspectives
This articles tells a history of the Partition and Independence through a selected Hindi cinema from 1950s and from later decades. Keywords: Partition violence, Hindi films, trauma, witnessing, mourning, cinematic memory, guilt
Sadan Jha
Centre for Social Studies
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Watching the Trauma: Witnessing the Partition, History and Sociology of South Asia, May 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2230807518778161.
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