PARTITION AND THE HUMAN BODY: A CRITICAL PERUSAL OF SHOBHA RAO’S AN RESTORED WOMAN AND OTHER STORIES

Abstract

The paper attempts to situate ShobhaRao’s An Restored Woman and Other Stories in center of the socio-political turmoil of Partition. It aims to foreground the difference between written and experiential realities of the victims. It also intends to map both subtle and extreme forms of violence perpetrated on humanbody during the mass-slaughter of 1947.Human body has always been pivotal to different social models and cultural paradigms and Partition is no exception. In order to estimate the physical and mental trauma of the victims, two potential yet under-explored literary genres i.e. Women Writing and Short Story are yoked together. In the course of the paper, major focus will be on therioters who got so blinded by resentment that they did not regard the body (both male and female) as a dignified entity but a mass of flesh. It also examines multiple ways in which the body was objectified, pillaged, slashed and killed during the aforementioned massacre.