Postmemory, Homeland and Partition: A Reading of Sorayya Khan’s Five Queen’s Road

This article deals with the workings of “postmemory” in the aftermath of partition as depicted in the novel Five Queen’s Road (2009) Sorayya Khan, focusing on family histories entangled with the image of home and land. The long-lasting impacts of partition left an indelible mark on the human psyche in such a way that the generations after who were born and brought up outside the nation-state and who worked for various places are still suffering post-partition trauma. Even though they have no lived experiences of partition yet they continue with the traumatic memories of their first generation through the lens of postmemory. This article examines how Sorayya Khan, as a second-generation writer on partition, inherited memories of her parental generations through listening to stories and the image of the house “Five Queen Road”. Posing Dina Lal’s emotional attachment to his homeland, this study stresses the collective remembrance of the people who did not choose to be displaced and their traumatic past that continues to “bleed” from the first generation to the subsequent generation. Finally, this article traces how the traumatic memory of past generations reverberates in post-partition generations and provides them with a new perspective for understanding partition across the globe.