Literary fiction is strewn with stories of how trauma, dislocation, and displacement permeate into human consciousness, and often alter perceptions of self and identity. Whether it is the incomprehensible madness of Bhushan Singh, in Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, which has become something of a trope to underline the inarticulate aspects of the Partition; the permanent and numbing discontent in the novels of Khadija Mastur; or the questions of an oscillating self and belonging in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
In a first of its kind, The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India, published in 2018, finds its editors, psychiatrists Sanjeev