Silence After Testimony: The Refusal of Realism in Rajiv Mudgal’s O Yasmeen…
Silence After Testimony: The Refusal of Realism in Rajiv Mudgal’s O Yasmeen… Aarya Sharma Abstract This paper posits that Rajiv Mudgal’s O Yasmeen… (A Cartography of Grief) marks a distinctive shift in South Asian Partition literature, moving from a "testimonial phase"—characterized by the urgency to document violence—to a "post-testimonial" cartography of psychic endurance. By eschewing linear realism in favor of a hybrid, allegorical structure, the novel critiques the voyeuristic consumption of female trauma. Through a close reading of the protagonist Bose, whose psychoanalytic intellectualism fails to grasp the reality of violence, and the titular Yasmeen, whose silence functions as an ethical boundary, this essay argues that Mudgal reconfigures the Partition narrative. It is no longer an event to be resolved through storytelling, but a durational silence that resists the "colonial grammar" of closure. I. Introduction: Beyond the Archive of Pain ...
