Partition’s purusharthis : recovery and resilience in Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach

Abstract

The unequal power hierarchy implicit in the Indian state and local response to the refugee crisis post-Partition is reflected in the creation of docile subjectivity of the refugee that is enshrined in the terminology “sharanarthi”. The Nehruvian ideology of self-rehabilitation, coupled with the Punjabi ethnocultural stereotype of stoicism, enterprise, etc., and religious practices enjoined in Sikh scriptures, however, privileged Punjabi refugees’ self-construction as purusharthi instead of as hapless victims at the mercy of the state. In this context, the essay undertakes a reading of Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach to argue that in charting the transformation from refugee to local, the narrative deploys the trope of purushartha common in survivor accounts but subverts its normative patriarchal connotation to furnish an ideology of gendered purushartha. Using demotic concepts of gali-moholla and biradari, metaphoric and tangible community spaces are identified as affective terrain that assists in rebuilding and assimilation. The utopianism of both the purusharthi’s journey of recovery as well as the community spaces from within which recovery needs to be understood is problematized through textual analysis and the novel’s social realist form to show the perpetuation of the pre-Partition masculine code of honour that continued to structure state and survivor conversations on recovery, its meaning and limits. The essay, thus, contributes to literary studies of Partition by highlighting the other face of Partition trauma – recovery.