Basti As A Partition Novel.

Basti as a partition novel.
For a considerable lot of immigrants, the event of partition survived through the memory and
recollection of the past more than through recorded history. Migration as an experience of exile,
loss, and longing, is at the center of Hussain's narrative. Basti has an unwavering focus on the pain
of migration and the psychological trauma of the migrant’s post-deracination.
Memory as an imaginative power “can potentially be used to insert personal narrative to challenge
the hegemony of official history”. However, the memory of partition is “not a straightforward
remembrance of a historical event” but a site of the “inevitable aspect of independence”. In Basti,
Intizar Hussain fictionalizes the diverse post-partition response associated with past communal
differences. Therefore, the part of the novel set against the backdrop of the the1971 partition (the
partition of Bengal and Pakistan) is a fine discourse on the cracked reality of the creation of
Pakistan. It explores the formation of a new country from the perspective of an ordinary Pakistani
who dreams of an ideal homeland. Hussain constructs the migrants’ experience of displacement
from India, re-settlement in Pakistan, and their consequential lives subjected to the chaos of another
war.
In Basti, Zakir, as a migrant, is hopeful of a new beginning, however, further segmentation of

Pakistan disillusions him. Analogically, Intizar Hussain envisages the migration of Muslims, the
hijrat of Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Madina. Hussain says in his essay “Hamare Ahd ka
Adab” (Literature of Our Times), “if one accepts such a conception of hijrat, it can be seen as not
merely an external event, but as a sort of spiritual state…. The meaning of Pakistan at the time was
hijrat from one age to another”. However, bearing in mind the post-partition socio-political affairs
of Pakistan, Hussain, later on, termed it a failed migration.
The Muslims faced this massive migration for a greater purpose. They failed to resume their old
lives and were left traumatized. These dashed expectations of the immigrants gave birth to a sense
of loss and rootlessness and they became nostalgic for their past. Zakir’s father, similarly
concerned, had even had a shroud brought from Karbala and had had a grave reserved for himself in
Rupnagar. For him, the loss of his land and his home was an irretrievable one. It signifies the
importance of the shroud and the grave in the life of a Muslim, as Zakir’s Ammijan was more
worried about her death than the problems of life.
Edward Said asserts that “exile and memory go together”; it depends on how a person remembers
his past and how he uses it to see the future. Certainly, the event of partition had created an
insurmountable vacuum in the social and religious lives of the immigrants. Zakir, as a migrant in a
new country, becomes an epithet of trauma. He and his friends do not find any sense of affiliation
with the new people and the country due to the underlying socio-political divides. This
maladjustment forces Zakir to take refuge in his memories.
The trauma of dislocation turns out to be an undying reality for the immigrants. Therefore, in Basti,
the transition is not an immediate shift, rather it is a gradual process. Here, Zakir explicitly
represents the scars of trauma. They are physically and psychologically dislocated migrants who,
after surviving traumatic events of partition, emerge, unrecognizable to themselves. For this very
reason, Zakir turns to history to erase the foreignness that has become a part of him. Thus, Zakir’s
consciousness has moved away from the world outside toward, what Jennifer Yusen labels as, the
internal “geography of trauma”.
Basti, therefore, is an account of a broken reality, a testimony to the suffering underlining the
creation of Pakistan. As we have not learned our lesson from the mistakes of the partition period,
history recurs in futile cycles. Hence, to recall is to recollect and assemble different components of
one’s identity to give their legitimacy and a “sense of cultural identity”. It is a continuous cycle of
departure, arrivals, and eternal returns.
@sahanakash.

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Basti as a partition novel.

In Basti, Zakir, as a migrant, is hopeful of a new beginning, however, further segmentation of

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