Leela Gandhi in her book Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction argues that the colonial encounter is not simply – “a reservoir of raw political experiences…[it is] characterized by…writing about the cultural and political identities of the colonized subjects”. This paper seeks to analyze Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novel Pinjar (1950) or The Skeleton in this light. It posits a reading of women’s experiences in a postcolonial nation, identifying the potential of feminist articulations of the traumatic Partition of 1947 by drawing upon contemporary scholarship such as the likes of Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia and Gyanendra Pandey. The paper consciously avoids the stereotypical analysis of Partition narrowly conflating it with newly assumed religious identities of the refugees. Through this reading of Pinjar, an attempt is made to show the fissures that accompany processes of a “gendered” identity formation in a postcolonial encounter, the trauma of which does not neatly translate into a purely communal consciousness. By exposing religion as a force that constrains women in the name of “honor” and chastity, Pinjar shows that identity formation in the case of relocated women is highly complex and psychologically nuanced. This psychological and gendered exploration of postcoloniality through Pinjar is radically different, exposing religion as a constraining force and expressive of the frenzy that accompanies arbitrary drawing of borders, the irrational contestation between the powers that be and ultimately woman’s body as the site of its enactment.

Author Name: Girija Suri

URL: View PDF

Keywords: Partition, religion, nation, women, communal, body, recovery, identity, patriarchy, postcolonial, trauma.

ISSN: 2454-2296

EISSN: 2395-0897

EOI/DOI:

Add Citation Views: 1

---