Trauma Beyond Borders: Comparative Perspectives on War, Memory, and Forced Migration in German and Hindi Literature

Abstract This article reads trauma, memory, and forced migration comparatively across W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1974). The two novels come out of separate twentieth-century catastrophes, the Holocaust and the Partition of India, yet they meet on a common problem: how literature represents collective violence once it has settled into individual and cultural memory. Holocaust writing and Partition writing have each produced large and largely self-contained critical traditions, but sustained cross-linguistic comparison between them is still rare, and the disciplinary reasons for that silence have themselves become a subject of debate. Taking Rothberg’s (2009) account of multidirectional memory together with Craps’s (2013) critique of the Eurocentric formation of trauma theory as its point of departure, this study treats the two texts as structurally analogous rather than historically linked, and asks what becomes visible when a German Holocaust novel and a Hindi Partition novel are placed within a single interpretive frame. The method is qualitative and typological, grounded in close reading and organised around seven recurring analytical dimensions. Both novels, the analysis finds, narrate trauma not as a bounded event but as a recurring structural condition, staged through disordered time, unstable or deferred testimony, and the loss of home as a category that violence dismantles before law can protect it. Sebald’s photographic and architectural melancholia and Sahni’s procedural social realism arrive, by very different formal routes, at the same refusal of narrative closure, and each positions literature as a supplementary archive where official history and law fall short. The article specifies a research gap in comparative, cross-linguistic trauma studies bridging European and South Asian literary responses to mass violence, and proposes this pairing as a model for future work on forced migration in world literature. Keywords: comparative literature; trauma studies; memory studies; forced migration; Holocaust literature; Partition literature; multidirectional memory; postcolonial witnessing