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

The canon of Partition literature has long been governed by a moral imperative: to speak the unspeakable. From Manto’s visceral sketches to Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, the foundational texts of 1947 operate on a forensic impulse, assuming that the exposure of violence is the precursor to justice. However, Rajiv Mudgal’s O Yasmeen… suggests that after decades of archival retrieval, the act of "witnessing" risks becoming a performative ritual. Mudgal proposes a different approach: a "Cartography of Grief" where maps are drawn not on land, but on "skin, silence, and memory itself".

Mudgal’s text is not interested in the graphic redistribution of blame. Instead, it interrogates the very tools we use to understand historical trauma. By fracturing the narrative between the metaphysical "Chand’s Tea House" and the historical reality of Dr. Somnath Bose, the text suggests that realism is insufficient to hold the weight of this specific grief. Realism demands a beginning and an end; Mudgal offers only a "fermentation" where "grief brews into spirit".

II. The Allegorical Rupture: Chand’s Tea House as Liminal Space

Contemporary historical fiction often relies on immersive realism. Mudgal, conversely, opens with a deliberate rupture of reality. The setting of Part I, Chand’s Tea House, functions as a purgatorial space where "Chand’s Tea House holds every book ever written," including those "authors had drowned in rivers". Here, the characters are not named historical subjects but archetypes of moral injury: The Pistol Man, The Monk, The Man with Bandaged Wrists.

This allegorical mode allows Mudgal to strip the violence of its political specificity—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—and focus on the psychic residue of the act. The "Pistol Man," for instance, is haunted not by the politics of the Raj, but by the weight of a specific "sidearm... stamped FOR DEFENCE" that ultimately killed a child. By removing the socio-political context, the text forces a confrontation with the act of violence rather than its justification.

The tea house serves as a critique of the "ledger-book" approach to history. When a tax collector enters wanting to "weigh wisdom, measure it into invoices," he is defeated by the silence of the books. This establishes the novel’s central thesis: trauma cannot be codified, accounted for, or "shelved"; it must be "steeped".

III. The Failure of Theory: Bose and the Colonial Psyche

If the Tea House represents the spiritual processing of grief, the narrative of Dr. Somnath Bose represents the failure of intellectualism. Bose is a fascinating deviation from the typical Partition protagonist. He is not a passive victim but a psychoanalyst, a man who believes that the "neurotic structure of colonial submission... can be undone". He attempts to map the riots through Freud, lecturing on "Mass Neurosis" even as the train carries him toward a massacre.

The tragedy of Bose is the tragedy of the liberal intellect in the face of primal violence. He believes that "Law restrains impulse", but he is taunted by an "Anonymous Man"—perhaps a hallucination, perhaps a conscience—who mocks him: "While you draw trauma maps, they bleed".

The text savagely deconstructs Bose’s reliance on Western theory. He is accused of being a "Brown sahib" whose theories "bloom only in colonies". Mudgal suggests that the tools of the colonizer (psychoanalysis, bureaucracy, maps) are useless against the indigenous rage of Partition. Bose’s descent into the "Government Cabin"—a surreal bureaucracy where files bear the number 64546 and the room itself cannot decide which country it belongs to—is a dramatization of this cognitive collapse. He tries to navigate the border with logic, but the border operates like a "knife" that cuts through his maps.

IV. Yasmeen’s Silence: A Feminist Anti-Archive

The most radical intervention of the text lies in its treatment of Yasmeen. In traditional romances set against political turmoil, the woman is the territory to be claimed or protected. Mudgal subverts this by making Yasmeen the elusive editor of the narrative, rather than its subject.

In the flashback sequences, Yasmeen is the one who annotates Bose’s life, promising "Footnotes guaranteed". She is the active intellect, challenging his reliance on theory: "You think too much, Bose". However, post-Partition, she recedes into a silence that Bose (and the reader) struggles to penetrate.

When Bose finally tracks her to Dhaka, he expects a scene of reconciliation or at least explanation. Instead, he encounters a woman who has "buried" the girl she was. Her refusal to return to him is not a plot twist; it is an ethical stance. When Aslam, her brother, tells Bose, "She doesn’t want to see you. Respect that," he marks a boundary that Partition literature rarely draws: the right of the victim not to be reintegrated into the protagonist's story.

Her final letter is a masterwork of refusal. She writes, "I used to believe love could survive history... But love, it turns out, is not a god". By tearing the letter after reading it, Bose participates in this silence, acknowledging that "some memories are safer scattered than stored".

V. Partition as Afterlife, Not Event

The novel’s circular structure—returning repeatedly to Chand’s Tea House, unfinished stories, and suspended time—rejects the idea that Partition belongs to the past. Instead, it is portrayed as an ongoing psychic geography, mapped onto language, memory, and silence. In this sense, O Yasmeen… marks a late-stage intervention in Partition literature: one written not from immediacy or recollection, but from historical saturation.

Within Partition literature, women’s suffering is often articulated through violated bodies, forced migrations, or recovery narratives that reintegrate them into patriarchal order. Even feminist interventions tend to demand articulation as empowerment. Mudgal refuses this paradigm. Yasmeen’s silence is not imposed by the narrative; it is protected by it. Unlike Bose, whose interiority is relentlessly examined, Yasmeen is denied psychological exposition. Her trauma is not made legible for male understanding, liberal empathy, or historical closure.

By the time the novel shifts to the more historically grounded narrative of Bose and Yasmeen, the reader has been trained to read for resonance rather than event. Partition appears not as riot scenes or political chronology but as delay, silence, and moral paralysis. The novel thus replaces the historiographic question “What happened?” with the ethical question “What persists?”

Yasmeen’s letter is the novel’s only sustained moment of her speech, yet it is decisively non-dialogic. It does not invite response or reconciliation. Instead, it names Bose’s silence, marks the burial of her former self, and closes the moral account. This mode of address is crucial. Unlike confessional or testimonial speech, the letter refuses therapeutic exchange. It is speech that forecloses interpretation, reinforcing the novel’s feminist ethic of withholding rather than disclosure.

VI. Conclusion: The Refusal of the Map

Canonical Partition literature—such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories—emerges from an urgent testimonial impulse. These texts assume that violence must be shown, that silence risks erasure, and that literary representation serves a moral duty to history. Women’s bodies, in particular, become central sites where the violence of Partition is rendered legible.

While this tradition performs an indispensable historical function, it also establishes a normative aesthetic: realism as ethics, speech as justice, and narration as recovery. Later writers such as Amitav Ghosh (The Shadow Lines) and Intizar Husain complicate this model by shifting focus from event to memory, but they retain narrative coherence and retrospective articulation. Mudgal’s novel departs more radically. It questions whether the act of narrating trauma—especially female trauma—has itself become a ritualized consumption rather than an ethical encounter.

The subtitle, A Cartography of Grief, is ironic. The novel ultimately proves that grief cannot be mapped. The "Anonymous Man" tells Bose that "Truth without power is a lantern in a cyclone", yet the novel ends not with power, but with the quiet persistence of the "Child" and the stories in the tea house.

Mudgal refuses the "happy ending" of reunification. The partition of the lovers is permanent, mirroring the partition of the land. But in this separation, a new form of dignity is found. As Chand observes, "Love... must refuse its own fiction". The text leaves us not with a resolved history, but with a persistent, resonant hum—a "last refrain" that survives even when the singer has vanished. O Yasmeen… does not try to heal the wound of 1947; it merely, and respectfully, traces its shape.