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In Susan Rubin Suleiman's study on the child survivors of the Holocaust, she introduces "the 1.5 generation", which refer to the child survivors who fall between the more distinct groups of the first generation (adults who witnessed the Holocaust) and the second generation (children of the adult survivors). Her classification remains relevant in the context of children who experienced the Partitions, “too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there” (Suleiman 278). In much of the scholarship on the Partitions of the 1940s and 1970s, with its violent reverberations being felt across all of South Asia, seldom have children featured as children. It is indeed a mammoth task, comprising of greater complexities that the nature of childhood and children entail, escaping the usual categorizations into which adults more easily fall. Suleiman's coining of the category of "1.5 generation" then, I believe, is a rather befitting term to address the vulnerable group of children during times of conflict – while the decimal point suggests an alternative historiographic intervention, it is also one that is so naturally placed between the well-defined 'whole' generations of individuals that to-date its lack of comprehensive discussion in the discourse surrounding the Partitions is concerning.

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There are yet undocumented lives of children during the Partitions who were orphaned overnight, those who got lost in the chaos of forced migrations, those killed in the name of honour and protection, and even children who were caught up in the throes of religious indoctrination and were themselves perpetrators of grave violence. These are stories that can no longer be documented 'authentically' today, not only because many were killed but also because even if they survived, their memories are now inevitably coloured by an adult consciousness, such as that of Sudershana Kumari. In recent decades, literary representations of the Partitions, as "a mode of surrogate testimony" (Saint 47), have attempted to recover lost experiences of children further. Consciously distancing themselves from the impassive reproduction of events that preoccupy official narratives, fictive testimonies embark on a quest that brings the individual, such as the figure of the child, to the center of history.

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The purpose of this essay is to analyze two works of Partition literature in light of their subversive engagement with history and particularly with their young subjects. The essay will discuss two figures from the canon of Partition literature – Zakir from Basti (Intizar Husain, 1979, trans. from Urdu, 2007) and the young Narrator from The Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh, 1988). To be sure, these novels are written by adults remembering the events of 1947 and its aftermath in various ways, and the issue of "an inherent inaccessibility, between the concept of 'child' and the adult minds that create it" (Honeyman 4) remains unsolved. However, what makes these texts worthy of analysis is the interaction between children and the history of their nation(s). There is a great emphasis on attempts to understand the cataclysmic events in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947 through the perspectives of children and youth, to contest popular notions of memory and history, and problematize the predominant yet rather limiting discourse of innocence and vulnerability that usually surround children.

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"He wasn't at all a child anymore! After Bi Amma's passing, and the departure from Rupnagar, it was as though he had all at once grown up, as though his childhood had been left behind in Rupnagar." (Basti 32)

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Rupnagar, the city of beauty – where birds' calls from the woods echo till Brindaban, where the woodpecker holds under its wing a letter from King Solomon to Queen Sheba, and where the wind rhymes with the tales of the glorious multicultural past of India. Zakir’s early childhood [2] in this small town is coloured by the tales from Hindu and Islamic culture that flow seamlessly into one another. He runs to and from his father Abba Jan, a Muslim scholar, and Bhagat-ji, a teller of Hindu stories, absorbing different notions of how the world was created, episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and lyrical verses and sayings of Prophet Muhammad from the Quran. Zakir is raised in the rich and secular atmosphere of Rupnagar in undivided India, and "an image of the world [takes] shape in his mind" (Basti 6). This is the image that stays with Zakir at every turning point of his life – when he moves to the newly formed Pakistan during the Partition as a young man, and two decades later, when he witnesses the political turmoil of the Indo-Pak war in 1971.

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Intizar Husain's Basti, written in 1979, anticipates Linda Hutcheon's “historiographic metafiction” genre, which refers to postmodern works of historical fiction. In many self-reflexive ways, the novel invokes the collective unconscious of the people of India before the Partition(s) took place. The movement between the past and the present in the novel is exceptionally fluid, mirroring the nature of Zakir’s thoughts and memories of his childhood. It briefly yet poignantly allows us a chance to perceive things from the point of view of an “ex-centric”, a child, growing up in what is to be an increasingly troubled world. Moreover, the novel is engaged in blurring the boundaries between historical fact and experiential event, and therefore in preventing the past “from being conclusive and teleological” (Hutcheon 110).

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Husain bestows upon young Zakir a kaleidoscopic, cultural memory which stands in contrast to the disharmony of the Partitions. One of the most impressionistic stories that resonates with Zakir throughout the novel is that of Cain and Abel, the slaying of brother by brother, telling of the Partitions that will come years later. His confusion at the betrayal, violence, and pain is not merely the result of a natural childhood innocence, but also because it is at odds with the informal knowledge in the form of memories and stories that he has been actively accumulating from the moment of his socialisation into society. Zakir’s critical understanding of the political upheavals in the subcontinent occurs in terms of the cultural myths and stories he gathered in his childhood. In many ways, Basti seems to suggest that unlike when an adult gives meaning to and articulates childhood experiences, Zakir, whose name literally means “the one who remembers”, is deeply reliant on his childhood knowledge and the lore of a mythical past to find a language that can make sense of his painful present-day reality.

In Basti, Zakir recognises intimately the enormity of the loss he is experiencing. His dislocation in the world of chaos causes him to withdraw into “an imaginative geography that lends itself to the representation and mapping of wartime experience” (Haase 3). Zakir’s childhood spaces in the novel are configured mythically as well – the forest of Rupnagar begins with the Black Temple and its grand pipal tree. Beyond the temple is the Karbala, a reference to the important Shi’a site of the battle where the grandson of Prophet Muhammed was martyred. Even beyond is the Ravan Wood, a wasteland except for a single banyan tree at its center, where Zakir and his two friends Bundu and Habib used to catch rain-bugs. Rupnagar then comes to mean more than merely a physical location. As a site of cultural memory, it is “a structure of sentiment produced through imagination, memorialization, recollection and visualization” (Sumathi Ramaswamy qtd. in Jain 24).

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Even though as a young man Zakir is initially filled with a familiar wonderment and sense of freedom as he moves to Pakistan, his feelings of the loss of a home loom large. This recognition of the loss of a childhood home during forced migration is expressed by real survivors too: “Everyone thinks oh, this eight-year-old, he’s too little. No one thinks he’ll have any understanding or any emotions about what they are going through and I will never, ever forget that in my life. They were talking and I knew that we are leaving this place” (Uzair, b. 1945; Raychaudhuri 73). Uzair, the speaker, is adamant his younger self, an equally important witness of the separation, be given the agency that he deserves. His testimony is a comment on how sometimes adults fail to recognise the legitimacy of children's feelings in times of crisis, and otherwise have a penchant for generalising their emotions as incomprehensibility.

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When we largely encounter an adult Zakir stuck in a menagerie of memories, he does not, as Naomi Sokoloff puts it whilst discussing adult narratives about children during the Holocaust, “[lay] authoritative claim to his interpretations of the past” (Sokoloff 261). Indeed, Zakir is painfully aware of his inability to confront his past and successfully make sense of his present: “I’m on the run from my own history, and catching my breath in the present. Escapist. But the merciless present pushes us back again toward our history” (Basti 68).

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“I was a child, and like all the children around me, I grew up believing in the truth of the precepts that were available to me:…I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality.” (The Shadow Lines 241)

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Upon finishing The Shadow Lines (1988), one may wonder why, in a novel so rich with details, we never learn the name of the young narrator. Aside from regular markers of his age, we also draw a complete blank at his appearance. This peculiarity perhaps finds a diagnosis in Marianne Hirsch’s explanation of the concept of “postmemory”. She writes, “[to] grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors” (Hirsch 5). The narrator of The Shadow Lines is a collector of his family’s stories from a noticeably young age. He shares a close relationship with his older relatives' personal and cultural trauma, particularly his grandmother Tha’mma and his young uncle Tridib. Like Zakir, a large part of the narrator’s childhood is spent assimilating the stories and images of past events through “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch 5) and their increasing relevance in his understanding of the present. Over the course of the novel, we realize that the narrator’s own memory is so intricately linked to those of his close relatives, that even when twice, or thrice removed from their past experiences, the narrative sustains a sense of authenticity, “reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial norms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (Hirsch 33).

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The Shadow Lines is a unique piece of work because although it has a single narrator, it includes “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg qtd. in Kabir 129). Ghosh has interwoven multiple childhoods, each telling of lasting traumas from different periods, which echo within members of the same family. We read about young Tha’mma’s and her sister Mayadebi’s partitioned house in Dhaka during the 1910s, nine-year-old Tridib’s memories of the bombings in London during the Second World War, the narrator’s nine-year old cousin Ila’s experiences of racism in London in 1960, thirteen-year old Robi’s experience of his elder brother Tridib’s mob lynching in 1964 in Dhaka, and in the same week, the eleven-year old narrator’s personal encounter with mob violence in Calcutta.

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In the 1960s, an elderly Th’amma is bewildered at learning that there is no tangible marker or border which separates India and East Pakistan – “What was it all for then – partition and all the killing and everything – if there isn’t something in between?” (TSL 167). Her nervousness about the invisibility of the division of Bengal stems from her own childhood experience of the territorial division of her joint family home in Jindabahar Lane in Dhaka. With family disputes intensifying between her father and his brother Jethamoshai, and with “no other alternative” in sight, it was decided that the house was to be partitioned by a wooden wall that “ploughed right through” doors and lavatories and nameplates. A striking metaphor that foreshadows the Partition, Ghosh writes:

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They had all longed for the house to be divided when the quarrels were at their worst, but once it had actually happened and each family had moved into their own part of it, instead of the peace they had so much looked forward to, they found a strange, eerie silence had descended on the house. It was never the same again after that; the life went out of it. (TSL 136)