I

India’s emergence as an independent nation was marred by the horrors of a Partition drawn on sketchy lines that split the country apart and led to what is commonly described as the division of hearts, inflicting a deep sense of trauma upon the individual and leaving entire generations of communities fraught with a sense of social as well as psychological instability. The memories of Partition that severed the coherent sense of space and self—otherwise repressed, undocumented, and otherized—found their expression in trauma narratives. Thus, a wide body of literature, including but not limited to memoirs, poetry, short stories, bildungsromans, paintings, sculptures, and art installations, made the trauma that had been denied visibility for so long accessible to us. This paper delves into art history as a means of narrativizing the trauma of Partition, focusing on how the canvases of Tyeb Mehta, Anjolie Ela Menon, and Zarina Hashmi become the medium of expression of the artists’ personal encounter with Partition and reflect their fragmented sense of self and search for a coherent identity. The canvas functions as a mnemonic of the "personal element intrinsic in public pain" (1) that helps the artists come to terms with their trauma that they could not have accepted or elucidated otherwise. The canvas of these artists, therefore, becomes a space that records how the severing of space creates a crisis for the self and how the self tries to weave the pieces back together to initiate a process of recovery. By examining the artworks in view of Urvashi Butalia’s feminist work, ‘The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India’, and Cathy Caruth’s ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History’, this paper peels off the layers of colour on the canvas of the aforementioned artists and looks at Partition as seen in art to increase our understanding of trauma and memory, spaces, and their relationships with the self.

 

These artists, having had such close experiences of the Partition that have been imprinted on their minds as an indelible traumatic memory, "carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptoms of a history that they cannot entirely possess" (2). Their art coalesces at the same "specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet" (3). At the heart of these paintings "is thus an enigmatic testimony not only to the nature of violent events but to what, in trauma, resists simple comprehension" (4). It is through representation that it is "traversed and ... crossed" and thus the non-verbal medium of painting helps these artist-victims "to process what has happened" (5). The development of such a trauma narrative in turn becomes a significant step in trauma recovery, as through each stage of painting, there is an increase in the sense of control over the traumatic events, which "produce profound and lasting change in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition, and memory" (6). Central to this process of representation is also imagination, which further aids the victims in gaining a "sense of experience". As Saul Friedlander pointed out, trauma is resolved only "when memory comes" (7); in public life, these memories, whose residues often surface through free associations according to psychoanalysis, appear through the creation of art. All of these artists and their tales on the canvas deal with this aspect of trauma, which "brings with it the need to witness, to speak, and to somehow make an impression on the world that records the outrage of the moment" (8). It is through this multi-layered, multi-dimensional process that the artists gain an anchor to define their sense of self, which, owing to the geographical severing of the landscape, has been fractured.

 

II

Tyeb Mehta, whose works are now considered benchmarks of Indian modernism, "grew up in the Crawford Market neighbourhood of Mumbai within the orthodox Shiite community of the Dawoodi Bohras" (9) amidst the "cataclysmic violence, epic upheaval, and bewilderment of Partition" and "the anxieties and turbulences of Independence". As a Muslim, these experiences were more profound and intimate for him, and Mehta's paintings embody this "undercurrent of violence, which were elements of his childhood" (10). As a child, during the Partition, Tyeb witnessed a young Muslim man being mobbed, slaughtered, and stoned to death in the street below the window of his Mohammed Ali Road-house, virtually a Muslim ghetto area. A young Tyeb had fallen "sick with fever for days afterwards, and the image still haunts me today. I am paralysed by the sight of blood. Violence of any kind, even shouting…"(11). The smashed figure had found its way into his art as the recurring motif of the Falling Figure. In The Falling Figure, comparable to Edward Munch's The Scream (1893), Mehta represents this primal fear that would haunt him till his very last days. "The dreadfully mutilated, disfigured, flayed flesh (12)" on the canvas, which seems to be "hurtling downwards … suspended, limbs speeding like a projectile, and an expression of frozen horror on his face" (13), mirrors Mehta’s self — fractured by his childhood trauma of the Partition. Throughout his life, he would work "with images that haunted him, burning themselves deep into his mental circuitry [...] these obsessional images, autobiographical in import, gradually gained significance as Tyeb externalised them, reflected on them, and allowed them to shimmer against the wider canvas of society" (14). This plummeting protagonist gravitating towards the metaphorical abyss suggests a more universal and existential human crisis, typical to those who, like Mehta, experience such trauma of dislocation that severs their hitherto sense of identity and belongingness.Mehta, fascinated by Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman's monochromatic "Zip" paintings, initiated what was called his Diagonal Series, violently dividing the canvascape diagonally—as if it were the country after Partition—thereby creating "a certain dislocation" which enabled him to "distribute and divide a figure within the two created triangles and automatically disjoint and fragment it" (15). It was a "grotesque tableau" (16) where the canvas-space resembled the new map with the Radcliffe Line zigzagging through, cleaving asunder the two landmasses, and the fragmented and disjointed figure was essentially the self that had been dislocated from its previous sense of wholeness due to the fracturing of the space.

 

To Mehta, the Trussed Bull (1956), another of his vital imagery that he would repeat in several paintings, was associated with the widespread post-partition sense of disillusionment. For Mehta, the bull was a "powerful animal, and when its legs are tied down and thrown down, it’s an assault on life itself" (17). The bull became a synonym for that "national condition, the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies" (18), and critical metaphor of the national and the individual self that had failed to achieve the stability that the Partition had promised—instead it had been further ruptured owing to the violence that only intensified after the Partition. The trauma narrative of Partition in Mehta's expressionist paintings is for him: "my life… my reaction to something I see or experience and is very private" (19)—it is his struggle to reflect and find a coherence sense of self, to create a space for that self wherein he can come to terms with the catastrophic history, which is "so stark that it couldn’t be happening outside that it can only be happening in a dream. And in your dream, it is a nightmare" (20). This nightmare would never leave him. Neither would these images, nor his anguish, nor his canvas forever live to bear "the freight of trauma" (21) allowing us, the secondary witnesses, to experience the "trauma virtually by putting oneself in the others position while recognising the difference of that position and hence not taking their place" (22). 

 

III

Anjolie Ela Menon was seven years old at the time of Partition, when she fled Rawalpindi with the rest of her family. "I grew up and became a painter," she once said, "It strikes me as very strange that very little came out of those experiences [of Partition]. I think we don’t want to remember. (23)"

 

Menon is part of a coterie of avant-garde contemporary female artists who broke away from convention to chart a new course of freedom and empowerment in their arts. Her artworks, such as the series Coming Home, depict the feminine face very frequently— shadowed in melancholy, the eyes specifically darkened as if the worldview of women itself has been distorted by patriarchal themes, themes of red interplaying with an indistinct, ambiguous background to suggest the violence that is interwoven into the mundane lives of her protagonists. There are few overt references to Partition in her work; as Menon said, the act of remembering the kind of uninhibited and rampant terror and violence that was caused by Partition is one that encounters specific resistance. Urvashi Butalia talks about this in her work ‘The Other Side of Silence’, which very consciously seeks out the narratives of women, who experienced first-hand Partition trauma, especially in the Rawalpindi area. Most of Anjolie Ela Menon’s works are based in the present, marking her position as a contemporary artist, but what is the present, after all, if not a retelling of the past? This is seen most clearly in her work Mataji, in which we see an old woman, presumably a grandmother, who is sitting on a charpai and knitting a red garment. Knitting is an act that is very closely linked to the way we tell stories and is generally associated with old age. Fragments of memory are selectively drawn from an experience and layered in such a way as to make cohesive sense out of the overall meaninglessness that surrounds temporal reality, just as threads are woven and interwoven with each other to make a whole garment. This is true for Anjolie Ela Menon herself, whose memory of Partition oscillates between trying to escape violence during the riots following Partition, and becoming a witness to the violence meted out to people around her in the process. As Cathy Caruth says, "the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.” (24) When her father’s friend, who was a Hindu, was found lying dead surrounded by a pool of blood in Murree, which she describes as a ‘lovely hill station in Pakistan’, Menon’s father decided that their family had to get out of the house immediately. She remembers "being made to lie on the floor of the truck because all along the 30-mile journey to army headquarters at Rawalpindi, our vehicle was being fired on by snipers." They made it to Delhi on a military plane, but the violence didn’t end there. The day Menon’s family arrived at their aunt’s house in Delhi, her Muslim dhobi staggered into the house clutching his abdomen. His stomach had been slashed, and he was holding his intestines. Menon remembers trains arriving from Pakistan full of dead bodies, an image reminiscent of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan. Another significant memory that she retains is her father’s recollections of the refugee scene between Rawalpindi and Delhi, where he had worked to provide emergency relief. Menon says that, "My father told us about thousands of refugees and the river Jhelum, which had run red with blood.” (25) 

 

Although these scenes seem distant and unreal in the face of the present, Menon can make sense out of them only through the process of remembering and conceptualising in Mataji — the redness of the garment that her protagonist is knitting contrasted with the pallid dullness of her surroundings, a mnemonic for the trauma of Partition that is drawn from different fragments of memory and woven or knitted together, to try to understand how it has shaped the present. The crows surrounding Mataji are a representation of the urban scene, a motif that Menon returns to in most of her paintings since she remembers crows being the only birds present in her own urban settings. Within the urban scene, framed within a tapestry surrounded by crows, sits Mataji, the ubiquitous storyteller who makes sense out of the trauma of the past through the action of remembering.

 

In Menon’s work, the self that surfaces is central to the question posed by Nietzsche in his Genealogy: "We are unknown to ourselves[…]We have never truly sought ourselves- how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?…So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves. (26)" The recurrent metaphors with regards to the true self are of masks, veils, theatres, and stage plays, and the only possible answers as to the formulation of such a self lie in the regurgitating of memories which have been consciously repressed for fear of the danger that they pose to the stability of the present. Menon’s art lies in refashioning the self in the shadows of precisely such memories.

 

IV

"…when you’re young, you don’t get it..[] it hit me much later" (27), Zarina once said while speaking about the immensity of the sense of dislocation and homelessness experienced by people during Partition. Paul de Man’s critical theory about reference and impact, as seen through the lens of trauma theory insists, precisely, on the inescapability of its belated impact. Zarina Hashmi did not migrate during the partition. She lived through it as a ten- year-old, then left the country when she got married at the age of twenty one, while her family relocated to Karachi. She travelled extensively from this point on, with her education and exposure to art consequently coming from the places she visited. What is significant is her self-description, when living in New York since 1976, as that of an exile. Equally significant is her attribution of her greatest loss as being that of language. Dislocation and homelessness returned to Zarina, along with the incomprehensibility of what had occurred, over the course of her life. It sprang up clear and stark in her artwork, drawing in thousands of survivors of Partition who had experienced trauma differently, but who connected with the kind of cultural fracture that she depicted.One of her most famous works, ‘Dividing Line’, shows a thick, jagged black line running across a cream page, otherwise also dotted with black but of a less defined nature, reminiscent of the Radcliffe Line separating India from Pakistan. The line reappears in the woodcut Atlas of My World, signifying the magnitude of collective trauma it caused by the snaky black demarcation running beyond the borders of Southeast Asia, rupturing it. Zarina once talked about how she liked woodblock printing because she wanted to ‘gouge the lines out’, much as boundaries had been gouged out during Partition. The violence of the act seems almost contradictory to the structural purity of Hashmi’s lines—a reminder of how cartography elides over the violence that went hand in hand with the formation of these boundaries. Zarina Hashmi’s sense of loss of both home and language is a frequent motif in her work. Letters from her sister, written sparsely in the Nastaliq script, find a place between thick black lines. One letter in particular is a reminder of immense grief, loss, and trauma. The letter conveys news of the death of Hashmi’s mother after their relocation to Karachi, and seems very short, almost brusque. Zarina pasted the geometrical frameworks of a house onto the letter, with three walls bordering it and a triangular roof covering it; an attempt to collate all that she had left of a home and family. Maps overlay more of these letters. The minimalism of these designs is both a reminder of how the violent aftermath of Partition has been continually repressed for years in the face of the nation-state and how it has nevertheless structured our lives in the present day scenario. The letters signify the importance of language in Hashmi’s life, writing is a way to bridge the gulf of distance, geographical boundaries, and separation from home, or hijr. Peter McCormick, in his paper titled ‘The Concept of the Self in Political Thought’ discusses how Greek philosophy saw the individual as the agonal self, deriving from the Greek word agon meaning to contest, necessary for the formulation of a specific social form called the polis (28). If the analogy is carried forward and the citizen is considered only the smallest subunit of the nation, then Zarina Hashmi’s art becomes the most explicit evidence of the tearing apart of political identity to lay bare the vulnerable human being, dependent on social security for survival and no longer finding it in their surroundings. The word agonal becomes linked to the more contemporary word agony, and we see Zarina constantly trying to configure a space that is not hedged in by cartography, to create primarily a full sense of the loss that has been suffered by the post-partition individual (and the minimalism of her works, in a paradoxical sense, has a major role to play here), and to reconstruct in some capacity a home that no longer exists through language, though here again, lines appear to show how arbitrarily drawn boundaries have constricted the imagination itself and invaded all attempts of reclamation of a stable identity with secure attachments. 

 

V

 

There has always been a lacuna in art history when it comes to the depiction of trauma as experienced by women by female artists during Partition. In this sense, the creative canvases of Menon and Zarina become significant, for they manage to portray the turmoil of the female self trying to come to terms with the trauma caused by the partition of the space. While many aspects of post-partition trauma, such as dislocation, displacement, homelessness, and intergenerational trauma, the incomprehensibility of experience, and a background of the violence that surrounds the lives of women have been touched upon by these artists, a far larger history of violence is written upon women’s bodies that is covered up and not easily spoken of by women themselves.  

Artists or even writers who are able to perceive the female body as ‘the Other’ can still co opt the horror of these stories and make it a part of their discourse, as evident by so many male writers and artists who take up the mantle of telling women’s stories. In literature itself, it is only as late as the 1980s when women begin to document the accounts of rape, murder, and abduction that have taken place on both sides of the border. A social worker named Kamlaben Patel wrote a part memoir, part documentary book titled Mool Suta Ukhde (Torn from the Roots), in which she recounted nearly 75,000 women having been raped and abducted, and if Kashmir was taken into account, close to a 100,000. When asked why she hadn’t written the book earlier, she said, "I found it difficult to believe that human beings could be like this…I have seen such abnormal things, I kept asking myself, what is there to write, why should I write it…"(29). Therefore, an acute feminist lens is needed to study the documentation of the Partition experience, to analyse where the feminine self stands, and how it has since then navigated through the silence, trauma, and crisis of space and identity. Nevertheless, as we achieve more distance from Partition, if only in a temporal sense, the hope of being able to revisit the point of violation, the circumstances that led up to it, and the silence that surrounds the histories of women becomes stronger. Urvashi Butalia’s ‘The Other Side of Silence’ and Aanchal Malhotra’s ‘Remnants of a Separation’ are prime examples of this. As Butalia describes the hesitance that people showed when talking about women who had ‘disappeared’, she says that here, "in this small crack covered over by silence, lay the many hidden histories of Partition, the histories that describe the dark side of freedom."(30)

 

It is to study this history that we seek to understand how trauma operates today, to understand more intimately the violence that has shaped and continues to shape our lives in this subcontinent. As William Dalrymple says: "In Delhi, a hard-line right-wing government rejects dialogue with Islamabad. Both countries find themselves more vulnerable than ever to religious extremism. In a sense, 1947 has yet to come to an end" (31) – these trauma narratives thus become contemporaneous; the deep entrenched fear and anxiety of the artists expressed in their paintings seem to echo even 75 years after the horrific convulsions of the Partition, reminding us that the Partition is "ever present", that "it could no longer be put away inside the cover of history books," and we "could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else" (32). The legacy of Mehta, Menon, Zarina, and a thousand others like them lives on as both countries move ahead, maintaining, and in worst cases further nurturing, the division of the land and the heart, while the self remains suspended in an indefinite sense of instability as the space remains gapingly fractured.

 

——

Notes and References:

 

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Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations In Memory, Edited, with Introductions, by Cathy Caruth, The John Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 3-13.

 

Caruth, Cathy. “INTRODUCTION: THE WOUND AND THE VOICE.” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 1-10.

 

Caruth, Cathy. “INTRODUCTION: THE WOUND AND THE VOICE.” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 1-10.

 

Singh, Jasmeet. “Painting the Trauma of Partition.” Academia, www.academia.edu/30477238/Painting_the_trauma_of_partition. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

 

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery, Basic Books, 1992.

 

Singh, Jasmeet. “Painting the Trauma of Partition.” Academia, www.academia.edu/30477238/Painting_the_trauma_of_partition. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

 

Parasher, Prajna Paramita. “A Long Walk Out From Partition.” Partition: The Long Shadow, Edited by Urvashi Butalia. Penguin Publishers, 2015, pp. 231-263.

 

 Bose, Arani. “Tyeb Mehta (1925 – 2009)”. ArtAsiaPacific, Sep/Oct 2009. li367-91.members.linode.com/Magazine/65/TyebMehta19252009

 

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Martyris, Nina. “Tyeb Mehta stood for hope over hype.” Times of India, 2009.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/tyeb-mehta-stood-for-hope-over-hype/articleshow/4730820.cms 

 

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 Dalmia, Yashodhara. “The Last Supper”. The Making of Modern Indian Art, The Progressives, OXFORD University Press, 2001, pp. 218.

 

Hoskote, Ranjit and Arun Vadehra. Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images and Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005.

 

Mehta, Tyeb. “Tyeb Mehta: Diagonal XV.” Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009), Christie's, 2018. www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6158278 

 

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“Tyeb Mehta”. Artiana, tyeb-mehta.com/. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

 

Tripathi, Shailaja. "Early works of Tyeb Mehta and the birth of his key motifs...bull and falling figure." Stir World, 2020, www.stirworld.com/think-opinions-early-works-of-tyeb-mehta-and-the-birth-of-his-key-motifsbull-and-falling-figure.

 

Hoskote, Ranjit and Arun Vadehra. Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images and Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005.

 

Singh, Jasmeet. “Painting the Trauma of Partition.” Academia, www.academia.edu/30477238/Painting_the_trauma_of_partition. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

 

Mohsin, Moni. “The wounds have never healed’: living through the terror of partition.” The Gaurdian, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/02/wounds-have-never-healed-living-through-terror-partition-indiapakistan-1947.

 

Caruth, Cathy. “INTRODUCTION: THE WOUND AND THE VOICE.” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 1-10.

 

Mohsin, Moni. “The wounds have never healed’: living through the terror of partition.” The Gaurdian, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/02/wounds-have-never-healed-living-through-terror-partition-indiapakistan-1947.

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford University Press, 1999.

 

“Zarina Hashmi — ‘My Work is About Writing' | TateShots.” YouTube, uploaded by Tate, 2013, https://youtu.be/jXJpbpvcMDU

 

McCormick, Peter. “The Concept of the Self in Political Thought.” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, vol. 12, no. 4, 1979, pp. 689–725, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230202. Accessed 20 Feb. 2023.

 

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side Of Violence: Voice from the Partition of India, Penguin Books, 1998.

 

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side Of Violence: Voice from the Partition of India, Penguin Books, 1998.

 

Dalrymple, William. “The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition.” The New Yorker, 2015, www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple/amp.

 

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side Of Violence: Voice from the Partition of India, Penguin Books, 1998.