Haunted Homelands: The Ghosts of Partition in Pakistan, India and Palestine

Haunted Homelands argues that the ghosts of Partition intrude into, unsettle, and shape contemporary life in Pakistan, India, and Palestine/Israel. These Partitions have extensive historical overlap: occurring within months of each other, with both territorial divisions emerging as imperial mechanisms to contend with the nationalist aspirations of minority communities. As critics including Aamir R. Mufti (2007), and Faisal Devji (2013) argue, comparing these Partitions addresses the concurrent, entangled threads of colonialism, nation-building, and minority belonging in the twentieth century. But I argue that it is not just the confluence of historical, political factors which connects these two Partitions. Both Partitions manifest contemporarily in various intersecting ways — spatially, socially, psychically, and affectively. Haunting, as a critical paradigm which is attentive to the transgressive and the uncontainable, allows us to think through the expansiveness of these Partitions' contemporary impacts. Haunted Homelands uses literature to widen the discourse of comparative Partition studies, situating the subjective, intimate and imaginative alongside the political and national, showing how these domains all continue to be populated with Partitions’ ghosts. I draw on works by Abraham and Torok, Derrida, and Gordon to develop a framework of haunting which addresses the Partitions of India and Palestine as not just discrete, past events, but as conditions of contemporary life. Chapter 1 focuses on how Partition enmeshed the spaces it left behind in a perpetual state of melancholia. I use the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi to highlight how literary responses to Partition functioned both as an avenue to ventriloquize Partition’s dead and to begin the work of mourning (even as this work, like Partition, remained fundamentally incomplete.) Chapter 2 addresses how the eruption of borders between and around individuals resulted in communities being rendered diasporic in their own homelands. Looking at Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (1997) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988), I argue that these diasporic-at-home communities were spectrally liminal: entrapped in a purgatorial state between here-and-there-ness, now-and-then-ness. Chapter 3 discusses the archival imaginations presented in Naji Al-Ali’s Handala comics, and Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of A Separation (2017) to examine how re-orienting what we think of as ‘history’ allows us to understand how the spectral hand of the past reaches into, and shapes, the present. Haunted Homelands concludes by arguing that literature allows us to engage with the ghosts of Partition productively, and to radically rethink the prefigured categories of the nation, the present, the Other, and the Self.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Hosain, Raniya

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Morgenstern, Chana

• Haunting
• India
• Pakistan
• Palestine
• Partition
• Postcolonial Literature

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/20adbfb3-ce42-4a7d-a7f5-ad747074519d/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.123134

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392437