Watching the Trauma: Witnessing the Partition

Abstract 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.