The Inescapability of Trauma in Post-Partition India: A Psychoanalytic Exploration through Literature and Film

In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), Cathy Caruth writes, “The oscillation between crises of death and the correlative crises of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of the event and the story of the unbearable of its survival…” (Caruth 7). This article draws on Caruth’s theorisation of trauma, grounded in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to analyse the inevitable and repetitive nature of trauma in post-Partition India. Focusing on Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Thanda Gosht” (1950) and Ritwik Ghatak’s film Subarnarekha (1965), this article explores how trauma persists beyond the original event, inscribing itself in language, memory, and identity. Employing an interdisciplinary framework encompassing psychoanalysis, literary criticism, film studies, and postcolonial theory, this study examines the indelible effects of historical trauma on individual and collective subjectivities. The aim is not to compare but to critically assess the representation of trauma in two different mediums, underscoring the shared thematic core that trauma, in its unassimilable nature, returns and haunts survivors long after the event.