Visual Grammar of Viraha in the Paintings of Select Partition Artists

Decades have passed, yet South Asia continues to grapple with cartographic anxieties invoked by the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. This paper addresses Partition as an unresolved cultural trauma, examining how its post-memories have been transgenerationally transmitted. Partition translated into a violent ‘unhoming’ for millions and, in the process, caused a deep sense of viraha—longing for the unruptured past. Art and literature from the subcontinent have represented this viraha—as a persistent longing for the lost home and culture. This paper, with its focus on the work of artists such as S.L. Parasher, Satish Gujral, Zarina Hashmi and Krupa Makhija, explores how artists have represented the memories, post memories and prosthetic memories of Partition trauma. In the process of collective mourning, art serves as a tool for ‘aesthetic wit(h)nessing’.Footnote1 While official historiography has provides ‘systemic’ truths about Partition, artistic discourses translate the profound sense of loss of home.