Storytelling In A Brief Look At Partition, By James Baldwin

The novel consistently reflects upon the power of storytelling in the formation of Sikh subjectivity. Assimilating diverse and sometimes competing “stories” narrated by different characters, it cues the reader early on that in fact, “stories are not told for the telling, but for the teaching,” drawing attention to its own pedagogical intent (Baldwin 146). Within the novel, men dominate the domain of storytelling, and even when women tell the stories; it is often men who control the narrative. Bhutalia writes, “Many people had urged me to talk to Mangal Singh, and I was curious about him. His legendary status in his neighbourhood came from the fact that, at Partition, he and his two brothers were said to have killed the women and children of their family, seventeen of them, before setting off across

Instead, he used the word ‘martyred’” (194). “The novel illustrates effectively how the representational apparatus of Sikh communal culture produces a “martyrological consciousness” integral to the processes of Sikh (and particularly Sikh male) subjectification in a moment of violent political transition. The master narrative of such events within the family or community is constituted by men’s stories, which are typically “told in the heroic mode” and emphasize the valor of the dead woman through a strict disavowal of fear and pain (55). Women’s narrations, on the other hand, gender the realities of their lived experience differently—even though they might appear to broadly resemble the dominant narration of the men, they depart at significant points to challenge male narrations, if only implicitly” (Baldwin). Bhutalia writes, “But why kill the women and children? Did they not deserve a chance to live? Mangal Singh insisted that the women and children had ‘offered’ themselves up for death because death was preferable to what would almost certainly have happened: conversion and rape”