Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part H (2024)

The Partition of India in 1947 is the most traumatic experience in South Asian history, creating mass displacement, contemporaneous violence of a kind never before witnessed and continuing cultural disarticulation. Indian English literature has been continually drawn back towards the event, probing its political, social, and emotional afterlife in memory. This research examines how Khushwant Singh's iconic novel, Train to Pakistan, engages with Partition and collective memory narratives. Examining the narrative structure of the novel, characterization, employment of historical context, and symbolic imagery, this research shows how Singh creates Partition not so much as an historical occurrence, but as a multifaceted lived experience inextricably linked into collective and individual consciousness. Drawing from trauma theory, postcolonial memory studies, and narrative historiography, the paper here places Singh's novel in the larger corpus of Partition literature and demonstrates how fiction is a powerful site for remembering the past.