Representing the Unrepresentable in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Abstract

This article looks closely at Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day from the critical perspective of trauma studies with a particular focus on the representational crisis posed by individual and collective catastrophic events. It positions the novel within the category of partition fiction so as to enable a contextual reading—one that takes the literary-historical milieu as well as the evolution of the genre into consideration. Such positioning makes comparison and cross-referencing between texts possible. Any traumatic event causes a mnemonic gap in the individual victim’s consciousness and a politically motivated suppression of memory on the level of the collective. This problematizes its representation in the realistic mode, and partition novelists, especially from the 1980s and onwards, have resorted to indirect means to represent this massive disruption of social cohesion in the subcontinental history. Anita Desai, for example, uses the motifs of sibling rivalry and fragility of social relationships to imply the antagonism between India and Pakistan as well as Hindus and Muslims. Clear Light of Day gives its audience a localized view of history in the sense that it illustrates the profound consequences of the Partition on the members of the Das family. This article has attempted to explore how this localized view through indirect means of representation may yield insights into the intersecting points of public and private traumas and their recovery.