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Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Author(s): 
Vishnupriya Sengupta
Publisher/Sponsor: 
Taylor & Francis Online
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10350330903361174

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988).