The essay is an attempt to analyse Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel as a literary work in which topography and existence, life and literature entwine. The essay is divided into three parts, each part has a particular focus. The part entitled Indeterminate Zone concentrates on the paratext in an attempt to see how it channels reader’s anticipation with regard to the content of the book. In the second part: Zone of the City: the image of Delhi in its chosen (re)constructions within the novel is examined. Here, particular attention is paid to the reconstruction of space and time within the novel. The last section of the paper, Zone of the Body speaks of the body and the symbolic roles it plays within the novel.
Memories of the Partition of India have, over the last decades, been constructed through a broad range of media, such as biographical memory, historiography, or literature. An interesting more recent example of remembrance is the illustrated golden jubilee edition of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (2006) which features more than 60 of photographs of the US-American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White and a wide range of editorial paratexts. An analysis of this new edition will show that the textual and visual narratives thus combined differ widely and do not support each other as the editor Pramod Kapoor claims. However, if we look at the project as a whole we find it to be more than simply an “illustrated version” of the original novel. Rather, it can be seen as what Marianne Hirsch has called a ‘postmemory’ project: Kapoor connects different viewpoints and narratives and thus finds a form of expressing his own view of Partition and the ways the second generation should deal with it.
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