Memory and History: A Comparative Study of Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 remains a deeply traumatic event, shaping historical narratives and personal memories. Literature on Partition serves as a critical site where memory and history intersect, offering nuanced insights into the human dimensions of this historical rupture. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (1998) and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) exemplify this interplay through different narrative approaches. Butalia foregrounds oral testimonies, particularly of marginalized voices, challenging conventional historiography by highlighting personal recollections often omitted from official accounts. Singh’s novel, in contrast, employs fiction to depict the complexities of communal identities, morality, and violence, embedding individual experiences within a broader historical framework. This study applies the theoretical perspectives of Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory, Paul Ricoeur’s narrative memory, and Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire to analyze how these works mediate the tensions between subjective memory and objective history. Through comparative analysis, this paper argues that Butalia and Singh reconstruct Partition history by integrating emotional and personal dimensions, underscoring literature’s role as a counter-narrative to dominant historical discourses. By examining the representations of memory and history in these texts, this study highlights the ongoing significance of Partition literature in shaping historical consciousness and collective identity.