Ruptured, Reinvented and Re-ruptured Home in Bhisham Sahni's Short Story "Pali" (1989)

<p>Amidst the heightened political tension between India and Pakistan, in this paper,<br>I will focus on children’s experiences in the history of the conflict between the<br>two countries through the analysis of Bhisham Sahni’s short story “Pali”. As<br>elsewhere in any other postcolonial nations, India was also under the threat of<br>different forms of conflict during the postcolonial, post independent phase,<br>partly due to the poor economic and social conditions that the colonial rule left<br>us with and partly due to the power struggles within and among the different<br>regions in the nation, and also due to the co-habitation of various religious,<br>ethnic and linguistic groups. This complex situation of India at the wake of its<br>independence in 1947 led to its bifurcation into two separate countries, India and<br>Pakistan.<br>My essay explores how children’s experience of conflict can be situated within<br>the discourses of nation, borders, inclusion and exclusion during the Partition of<br>1947. What are the complexities in identity, citizenship, rights and marginalisation<br>in children’s predicaments during and after conflicts? How do the changing<br>dynamics and configurations of ‘home’ during conflicts affect children? How, in<br>the context of conflict, does ‘home’ act as a site of violence and also as a space<br>of refuge? How does the existence of concepts like honour and pollution lead to<br>the systemic violence of children’s lives during the Partition? How does a literary<br>text represent children’s experiences of violence and help in unveiling another<br>version of the same event that is otherwise invisible? These are some of the<br>questions that are discussed in my essay through the analysis of Sahni’s “Pali”.</p>