Recalling the Past: Political Turmoil and Displacement in Siddhartha Gigoo’s Garden of Solitude

Memory studies is a multidisciplinary branch which integrates academic strings from the fields of literature, education, anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology and sociology. The inception of this field was through examining and studying how human beings remember things and it extended and grew by looking at how memory of the public or societies were formed. Some important theorists of memory studies include Maurice Halbwachs, Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, Paul Ricoeur, etc. Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude is his debut novel which throws light on the plight of kashmiri pandits and their lives in displacement in the novel. The aims and objectives of this paper is to apply Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory and the concept of post memory by Marianne Hirsch to analyse the elements of memory in The Garden of solitude. Halbwachs stated that individuals cannot recall and remember things independently of their group contexts. He looked at individual and collective memories as means to through which social groups draw an individual’s sense of identity and belonging. Marianne Hirsh in “The Generation of Postmemory” says “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (103). It is the transmission of trauma from individuals who experienced trauma first hand to their second and third generation.