PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA AND WAR MEMORY IN MANTO’S SHORT STORIES: INDIAN PARTITION IN FOCUS

Abstract

The current study has taken into consideration Saadat Hassan Manto’s fiction about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent. This study aims to highlight the narratives of psychological trauma and war memories in the traumatized characters of Manto, caused by the havoc of partition. Manto, an eyewitness of Partition, played a significant role in highlighting the brutality of partition with brutal honesty, reflected in his short stories all those events which propagated violence, murders, rapes, abducting, abusing,
psychological scars, horrible emotionality, and the gloomy milieu during the wartime of partition. This study has presented a detailed overview of psychological trauma and war memories in Manto’s selected short stories and highlighted those events of despair which resulted in the untold memory of the experience in the victims of partition. The theoretical framework which has been used is Trauma theory, taken fro Cathy Carruth’sTrauma Exploration in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience Trauma, Narrative and History (1996).