Volume-XII, Special Issue, April 2026 |
Unmapped Grief: Partition, Identity, and the Land as Archive in Rashmi Narzary's An Unfinished Search Debolina Chaulay, Research Scholar Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India |
Received: 07.04.2026 | Accepted: 09.04.2026 | Published Online: 10.04.2026 | Page No: 312-316 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.specialW.296 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
The novel An Unfinished Search by Rashmi Narzary (2023) follows the life of three generations of the Hazratkandi family of the village that was transferred to Pakistan and, later, to Bangladesh. This paper interprets the novel under three intersecting factors of the marginalisation of Assam in the narration of Partition, the identity crisis of the in-between territories, and the ability of land as a living memory of forgotten history. It claims that Narzary frames Northeast India not as a fringe location but as a center of trauma of Partition. History that has not been captured by human institutions has been preserved by the land of Malegarh, with unnamed graves and undefined national identity. To illustrate how the novel expands geography of the Partition literature and recovers a silenced archive, the paper relies on postcolonial theory, border studies, and ecocritical frameworks. | ||
Keywords: Partition literature, Northeast India, Assam, identity, border studies, postcolonial memory, ecocriticism, land as archive |