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Spatial Violence, Displacement, and Cultural Memory in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence
Subject area: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities · Area of research: India Writing in English
Abstract
The Partition of British India in 1947 was not only a territorial reconfiguration that created two sovereign states but also a radical reorganization of everyday spaces, relations, identities, and affective attachments. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence (2023) reflects on the Bengal Partition through the overlapping lives of three sisters—Priya, Deepa, and Jamini—whose lives reveal the personal impacts of political boundary-making. Previous academic work on the novel has addressed women’s suffering, feminist historiography, trauma, nationalism, postmemory, and sisterhood. This article offers an alternative critical intervention by reading independence through the interlinked notions of spatial violence, bordering, displacement, and belonging. The article, drawing on recent studies on the Partition, spatial humanities, migration studies, and literary approaches to home, argues that Divakaruni represents the Partition as a process of spatial transformation, where familiar domestic, communal, and public spaces become contested territories. The political border thus enters into everyday life, before and beyond its mapping representation. This article develops the idea of “spatiality of unbelonging” to describe the condition where geographical, social, cultural, and affective relationships with home are simultaneously fractured. The three characters represent various modalities of spatial negotiation. Priya’s transition from domestic restriction to professional space; Deepa’s crossing the communal boundaries in her relationship with Raza; and Jamini’s experience of destruction and reconstruction of domestic space. The study further argues that memory, family relations, cultural practices, and professional identity act as counter-spaces in which displaced subjects reconstruct belonging. Independence contributes to the growing field of Bengal Partition Studies and shows the ongoing significance of literary narratives to global partition studies by moving critical focus from partition as territorial division to partition as the transformation of lived space
Keywords
belonging, Bengal Partition, bordering, cultural memory, displacement, home, Partition Studies, spatial violence
References
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How to cite this paper
@article{1723225,
author = {Dr. Anu R},
title = {Spatial Violence, Displacement, and Cultural Memory in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2026},
volume = {10},
number = {3},
pages = {4173-4199},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1723225.pdf},
abstract = {The Partition of British India in 1947 was not only a territorial reconfiguration that created two sovereign states but also a radical reorganization of everyday spaces, relations, identities, and affective attachments. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence (2023) reflects on the Bengal Partition through the overlapping lives of three sisters—Priya, Deepa, and Jamini—whose lives reveal the personal impacts of political boundary-making. Previous academic work on the novel has addressed women’s suffering, feminist historiography, trauma, nationalism, postmemory, and sisterhood. This article offers an alternative critical intervention by reading independence through the interlinked notions of spatial violence, bordering, displacement, and belonging. The article, drawing on recent studies on the Partition, spatial humanities, migration studies, and literary approaches to home, argues that Divakaruni represents the Partition as a process of spatial transformation, where familiar domestic, communal, and public spaces become contested territories. The political border thus enters into everyday life, before and beyond its mapping representation. This article develops the idea of “spatiality of unbelonging” to describe the condition where geographical, social, cultural, and affective relationships with home are simultaneously fractured. The three characters represent various modalities of spatial negotiation. Priya’s transition from domestic restriction to professional space; Deepa’s crossing the communal boundaries in her relationship with Raza; and Jamini’s experience of destruction and reconstruction of domestic space. The study further argues that memory, family relations, cultural practices, and professional identity act as counter-spaces in which displaced subjects reconstruct belonging. Independence contributes to the growing field of Bengal Partition Studies and shows the ongoing significance of literary narratives to global partition studies by moving critical focus from partition as territorial division to partition as the transformation of lived space},
keywords = {belonging, Bengal Partition, bordering, cultural memory, displacement, home, Partition Studies, spatial violence},
month = {September},
}