Erasing the line: Memory as resistance in Tarun Bhatnagar's partition story

By Ravi Ranjan* 

The Radcliffe Line, drawn in 1947 by a British lawyer who had never previously visited the Indian subcontinent, remains one of the most violent cartographic acts of the twentieth century. Yet its violence was not merely territorial. As Tarun Bhatnagar's story "Grandmother, Multan and Touch and Go" demonstrates with extraordinary subtlety, the line fractured something far more intimate than maps or political boundaries—it tore through the fabric of memory, language, domestic intimacy, and the human soul.

Bhatnagar, a distinguished Hindi writer and senior civil servant, has produced a work that stands among the rare literary achievements capable of viewing Partition not as a political event or communal catastrophe, but as a wound that continues to breathe within generations of displaced families. Through the seemingly simple framework of a grandmother who cannot stop talking about her lost city, the story unfolds a profound meditation on postcolonial displacement, the resistance of memory against official history, and the possibility of human compassion transcending the rigid borders of the modern nation-state.

At the heart of the story lies the grandmother herself—not merely an elderly woman remembering the past, but a living embodiment of what postcolonial theory terms the "subaltern voice." Her Multan is no longer a city on any map; it is a geography preserved entirely within her body, her breath, her incessant speech, and the ordinary objects she has guarded for decades. When the narrator observes that "the memories of that city were as if they were on rent or belonged to someone else," the story captures something essential about the psychology of displacement: even one's own past becomes insecure, subject to eviction.

The grandmother's constant repetition of the same stories—which her family dismisses as the mechanical output of a "tape recorder"—is not senility or sentimentality. It is the only mechanism available to a traumatised consciousness for keeping a lost world alive. The story thus redefines memory not as a passive archive but as an active form of resistance against the violence of political cartography.

The child narrator's imagination provides the story with its most devastating metaphor. When he suggests that the Radcliffe Line can be erased with the "touch and go"—the compass or divider from his geometry box—his innocence becomes the vehicle for a profound ethical critique of modern border politics. Unlike the adults who have accepted Partition as an immutable historical necessity, the child refuses to naturalise the line. He sees only his grandmother's grief, and his solution is therefore simple and human: erase what causes suffering. This seemingly naive gesture exposes the artificiality of all political borders, revealing them not as natural truths but as decisions made by power, and therefore reversible by human imagination. The child's perspective offers an alternative moral consciousness, one that prioritises compassion over nationalism, relationships over abstractions, and the visible tears of an old woman over the invisible claims of state sovereignty.

The story also unfolds a deeply feminist critique of displacement, articulated through the grandmother's devastating observation that "a woman has to leave every roof where she lives." This single sentence opens an entire philosophical world. A woman's life, the story suggests, is already constituted by continuous displacement—from the parental home to the marital home, and then frequently to another home after widowhood. Partition intensifies this gendered condition of homelessness by adding political violence to patriarchal structure. For the grandmother, Multan was not merely a birthplace but the one place where her existence felt whole, where her language, her childhood friends, her mother's voice, and her cultural world were intact. Partition did not just take away a city; it destroyed the continuity of her selfhood. The family's tendency to mock her memories as madness or foreignness represents a deeper refusal to acknowledge this historical pain, a denial that the story refuses to accept.

Objects function in the narrative as what the paper terms a "private archive" or an "alternative museum" of Partition. The grandmother's walnut-wood chest contains Multani clay, an Urdu book, old photographs, a box of Sohan Halwa, spectacles, letters, and fragments of lace. These are not sentimental keepsakes but the physical remains of a lost civilisation, preserved precisely because official history has no place for them. Where the nation-state records Partition through treaties, statistics, and political analysis, the grandmother preserves it through the smell of soil, the texture of paper, the taste of sweets. The chest thus becomes a site of resistance against the erasures of hegemonic memory. It proves that history breathes not only in documents but also in the intimate objects that displaced people carry across borders, refusing to abandon the material evidence of their former existence.

Language itself emerges as the story's most persistent home. When the grandmother describes Saraiki as "sweet like a piece of sugar candy," she is not merely commenting on linguistic aesthetics. She is identifying language as the only geography that Partition could not fully expropriate. The multilingual texture of the narrative—Hindi, Urdu, Saraiki, Pashto, and Punjabi flowing into one another—reconstructs the shared cultural world that the Radcliffe Line sought to sever. When the grandmother hums a Pashto song in the refugee camp and is scolded for singing the music of "Pakistanis," the story exposes how nationalism transforms shared cultural heritage into suspicious objects. The grandmother refuses this logic. For her, languages are not citizens of nations but inhabitants of memory, and no border can compel her to forget the sweetness of Saraiki or the intimacy of Urdu.

The story's treatment of intergenerational memory adds an ethical dimension to its postcolonial critique. The grandmother's eventual transfer of the "key to Multan" to her grandson is not merely the handing over of a chest's lock but the transmission of historical responsibility. Marianne Hirsch's concept of "postmemory" illuminates this moment: the grandson will now carry within himself a trauma he did not directly experience, an attachment to a city he has never seen, a grief that belongs to his grandmother's body but will continue in his consciousness after her death. This inheritance is neither pathological nor sentimental. It is the only available mechanism through which the moral lessons of history—its wounds, its warnings, its humanity—can survive the deaths of those who witnessed it directly. The child who once teased his grandmother becomes the guardian of her Multan, suggesting that compassion can be cultivated across generations even when political systems refuse reconciliation.

Ultimately, Bhatnagar's story achieves something remarkable. It refuses to let Partition remain a closed chapter, a historical event safely confined to the past. By locating the tragedy not in political speeches or communal violence but in an old woman's speech, her chest of objects, her relationship with her grandson, and her endless, repetitive, stubborn talking about a city that no longer belongs to her country, the narrative insists that the violence of borders continues to live within human bodies long after maps are drawn and treaties signed. The grandmother's final declaration that "Multan will only be left when this old woman dies" captures both the tragedy and the resistance of the displaced consciousness.

But because she has handed the key to her grandson, Multan does not die with her. It passes into the next generation—not as a political claim on territory, but as a moral claim on memory, a reminder that no line drawn by colonial power can entirely destroy the cultural geographies that reside in human hearts. In this sense, the story offers not despair but a fragile, poignant hope: that compassion, language, and the intimate transmission of memory between generations may outlast the violence of nations.

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*Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper