‘Friends From an Earlier Life’: Radical Possibilities of Nostalgic Melancholy in Poems of the 1947 Indian Partition

Abstract

Este artículo estudia la poesía sobre la Partición, tanto la contemporánea con los hechos como la que se ha generado después. Prestaré atención a poemas en bengalí, urdu e inglés, de autores como Agha Shahid Ali, Jibanananda Das, Faiz Ahmed Faiz y Achintya Kumar Sengupta, que hacen memoria de esa violencia, así como de su legado de desestructuración alienación. También estudiaré la melancolía poética como instrumento para responder y renegociar las identidades forzadas abocadas por la Partición. La melancolía poética puede leerse como una enmienda a la división de India como un hecho imperialista, que a la vez desafía la apropiación histórica que han hecho los estados poscoloniales de esa violencia.

This paper will examine poetic responses to the trauma of Partition, and will consider both poetry written at the time and since. I will examine works in Bengali, Urdu and English, by such poets as Agha Shahid Ali, Jibanananda Das, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Achintya Kumar Sengupta. I will examine how poets deal with the memory of the violence and the resulting legacy of dislocation and alienation. I will examine the possibilities of poetic melancholy as a tool in order to respond to and negotiate the enforced and violent change in identities that Partition precipitated. In the process, I will make a case for the radical potential of what might be called nostalgic melancholy. I argue that in these cases poetic melancholy can be read as a corrective to the imperialist act of Partition, as well as a gesture which defies the nationalist appropriation of history by the independent, postcolonial states. I will analyse how poets from both countries have tried, through their writing, to question the very legitimacy of the border that divides them.