Through the Lens of Time: The Partition in Krishna Sobti’s Autobiography, "From Gujrat, Pakistan, to Gujrat, India"

Abstract

Through the Lens of Time: The Partition in Krishna Sobti’s Autobiography, "From Gujrat, Pakistan, to Gujrat, India" In her latest book, Gujrāt Pakistān se Gujrāt Hindustān tak (2017), Krishna Sobti (b. 1925), one of the best-known writers active on the Hindi literary scene, presents the reader with an autobiographical account focused on the events of 1947, where her personal experience of the Partition is reworked and presented in the guise of a novel. This paper proposes to analyse the stylistic devises (double frame approach, switching between the third-person and the first-person narratives, use of the dialogue, etc.) employed by the author to achieve her aim by drawing on the vast body of academic work on partition, violence, trauma and memory both in the local as well the global context.

Keywords

• Krishna Sobti
• autobiography
• partition
• 1947
• violence
• trauma