Narrating the Wound: Psychoanalytic and Cultural Representations of PTSD in South Asian Partition Literature

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Partition fiction, analysing how literary narratives capture the psychic scars of the 1947 Partition of India. Drawing on cultural theory and psychoanalysis, the study argues that fiction by Saadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Bhisham Sahni articulates trauma as a collective cultural wound and an individual psychological rupture. Using Cathy Caruth’s theories of trauma, Freud’s model of the return of the repressed, and postcolonial cultural frameworks, the paper explores narrative strategies that convey flashbacks, fragmentation, and the uncanny. These fictions render the violence of Partition not only as a historical fact but as a pervasive, haunting psychological presence, challenging nationalist historiographies that sanitize or erase suffering. By foregrounding PTSD in these narratives, the paper highlights literature’s vital role in witnessing and working through cultural trauma.