{ The Partition of India, 1947: immolation in medium-brown streams. In the dark soil: heart-holes. The shapes of our new countries buried with the bodies.
[ That year, our breath blackened within us. Rusted away into the fresh iron under our feet. In our hands.
[ The subaltern could hardly speak.¹ But the subsumed, the self-mutilated? Did we even have a voice?²
[ Distance, especially temporal, is a feared night we must traverse.³ …
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ¹ (Perhaps Spivak should have asked: “When were we hollowed—emptied from within?”)
² (As if I really do now. As if independence could be prescribed.)
³ Here is a truth you don’t want to hear: Partition feels like a dream I’ve never woken up from. The seven decades were never long enough.
[ Where do I begin? The words come out in spirals.⁴ As much as I’d like to fault myself for this messy traversal, I cannot help but remember: this is an imitation of our history.⁵
[ The postcolonial narrative can only write in circumlocutions. In tangles. I find my way in the dark, because that is the only way I know.
[ How long did I run? Deceive? Maybe I scrambled all the fragments and laid them out in front of you, like a pile of autumn leaves.⁶
[ I cannot help but wonder: After all these years, how does this history materialize onto me?
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ⁴And maybe for the better. I compress them under my thumb like a spring (or perhaps like DNA, or a mosquito). One day I will allow them to curve out into the world. Set them loose, if they are still breathing.
⁵As if I can bear this weight. (No, bear it with innocence.)
⁶When you wade in, that crunch of tiny bones under your feet. And you—witness to the violence, a gaze full of needles. Your pitch-dark pupils entry wounds.
[ Our stories weigh more than the condensation of memory on our wine glasses.⁷ & maybe even this story—or a part of it—has been told before. My role is performative. A voice on a page.⁸
[ Seventy-five million women were raped on the border of India and Pakistan in 1947. The others were instructed to kill themselves to avoid that dishonor.
[ Over one million civilians perished. Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims—we washed our hands in the same river. That new snake that curved through Punjab, Rajputana, Sind.⁹
[ Ayesha Jalal: “A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”¹⁰
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ⁷(Now that our words are alive, I long for my skin to feel them.)
⁸But who is caught in my net—circumscribed? Implicated? For whom do I speak, if I speak at all?
⁹Have we forgotten it so soon, the mirage of its stained scales? At one moment brown, at another, deep red?
…
{ I know about living. I am alive the way milk- swirls in coffee beg for separation. I waver between particle and wave, crudity and sentience.¹¹
[ Sometimes I swear I can feel the blood on my hands—my hands.¹²
[ I wonder: must I condemn myself?¹³ ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
¹⁰ A story my grandmother once told me: 1947. A quiet, stifling night. We jolted awake to the tinny din of the town alarm. It was not the first midnight attack. The screams nearly drowned the messy hiss of iron. We tore through the night. East. This was twenty kilometers from Amritsar, the bloody heart of Indian independence. We had learned nothing. Years later, we found out that our town’s watchman had been killed while staving off the attackers. He hadn’t been included in the original death toll because, like the attackers, he was Muslim.
¹¹ I am either unbelievably alive in the present or smeared across the past. But we are all subject to the pangs of our history. Eventually, classification loses its tail in the dirt.
¹² & I wonder why the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t wider. Why the ships brought the pangs with us, like a disease.
¹³ Whenever I ask this—which I do often—I feel the haunt of Partition on my neck. My blood runs painfully warm under my skin. The walls we’ve
[ The distance between us transpires before I can retreat into its curvature. Only a hollow in our wake. ¹⁴ …
[ Here is a truth you have always taken for granted: The colored spots you see when you close your eyes (“eye-floaters”) are the remants of shadows cast onto your retinas by fibers in your eyes. These patterns can shift or grow more intense as you age. ¹⁵ ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ erected have followed us. I see them in the mirror, on the days I’m able to meet my own gaze. I see them in my Pakistani friend’s eyes, too. (Perhaps we’ve erected them ourselves, beneath our eyelids.) When someone calls him a terrorist & my first instinct is not to defend him but to wonder, when will they mistake my religion for his. & when we are together and I look at him and all I can think about is: we are so indistinguishable it hurts. When, in the eyes of the world, we are all the same, but in ours we could never even share a name, let alone a neighborhood. Not for millions of lives. Our families. Not for our own conscience, nor for the neat eloquence of a single moment. Nothing is clear enough to glance through.
¹⁴ Even though our skin brushes the same against starlight, and our breaths combined easy in the night wind, I don’t see my friend anymore.
¹⁵ Here is a truth I have always taken for granted: The color I see when I close my eyes deepens over time. The world seems to concentrate at the extremum of
[ Even across the ocean, I can see the line of Partition. It is right in front of me.
…
[ We know the grind of decades on the human heart. ¹⁶
[ An offering: ¹⁷
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ my pupil and grow dense with saturation. As if all the color in the world couldn’t support it. Usually when this happens, I realize my eyes are open. The image becomes the afterimage. What remains is all that is. For us, anyway, it is all there will ever be.
¹⁶ (But our bodies intuit allurement here, even if we can speak only in whispers. Tucked at the bottom, beneath the cusps of sounds. Within the skin of the page.)
¹⁷ To breathe the air wet with murder. To sink into the soil palms-first. To witness the violation seep into our skin. Under the moonlight—we know.
[ Bits of leather, the pages of a book, the mud under our feet; all our gods are made from these.
[ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²²
…
¹⁸ Our words arc only towards the dirt. Fastened to the past. We bury them alongside the others. Our soil full of them. It’s easier that way.
¹⁹ The ash remains, at right angles. Fingers full of wet earth. The ground beneath us descending into singularity.
²⁰ At the center: likeness. The eyes like porcelain. A beautiful fracture.
²¹ & what remains is apparition. Do the dead sing through me, or have I devoured them? The first person plural cannot be borne by one body, but in the crevices of the page.
²² To cleave is to split into two adhesive parts. The boundary is clear now, but where was it before? When did our repulsion start?
Acknowledgements:
“Does the Subaltern Speak?” is a seminal essay in postcolonial theory by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak.
The phrase “Your pitch-dark pupils entry wounds” is inspired by Ocean Vuong’s poem “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.”
The phrase “grind of decades on the human heart” is adapted from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s poem “The Founding of Yuba City.”
-- Srinaath Kidambi Perangur is a musician, poet, translator, and scholar. He has received several prizes and grants for his work, through which he attempts to untangle questions of Indian identity, performativity, and postcoloniality. He attends Brown University, where he studies Sanskrit Classics.