Ageing, Borders and Female Subjectivity: Reimagining Partition Memory in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 has been one of the most traumatic and transformative events in the history of South Asia which caused tremendous displacement, broken identities, and memories that continue to echo across generations and impact on literary and cultural discourses. The Partition narrative was one that predominantly explored issues of violence, migration, and national attachment in the initial years, but the present day fiction has shifted its focus to the more intimate spaces of memory, ageing, gender and subjectivity. This is the place where Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand (2022), translated from the Hindi Ret Samadhi by Daisy Rockwell, is decidedly most innovative – with the ultimate and unlikely quest of a 80 year old woman across geographies, psychology, and ideology to find a lost past. An old woman is the main character, which offers a subversive portrait of old age, nationhood and historical trauma as seen through the lens of an international travelogue. This paper looks at the ways Tomb of Sand performs Partition memory in relation to the interwoven modes of female subjectivity, ageing, and border-crossing. Based on theories of performativity from Judith Butler, postmemory from Marianne Hirsch, trauma from Cathy Caruth, border consciousness from Gloria Anzaldúa, ageing from Kathleen Woodward, age ideology from Margaret Morganroth Gullette, imagined communities from Benedict Anderson and cultural memory from Jan and Aleida Assmann, the study suggests that old age in the novel is not a symbol of decline but rather a position of resistance, discovery and historical recovery. In the end, Tomb of Sand is a strong statement in modern south Asian literature, in which growing old is seen as emancipation, remembering is a form of resistance, and transnationalism is a way of reclaiming selfhood.