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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19372612 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p><strong>Abstract:</strong> The 1947 Indian Partition was not merely a cartographic or political rupture but a large-scale crisis of bodily and psychological well-being. Forced displacement, communal violence, hunger, and prolonged uncertainty transformed everyday existence into a condition of physical exhaustion, injury, and mental distress. This chapter examines how such lived experiences of health, vulnerability, and survival are preserved through material artefacts associated with Partition. Moving beyond official archives and statist histories, the chapter draws on Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices: Untold British Stories to read objects, domestic remnants, and visual traces as sites of embodied memory. These artefacts record experiences of fear, illness, hunger, loss, and psychological rupture, often difficult to articulate in testimonial or narrative form. By treating artefacts as material inscriptions of bodily suffering and mental trauma, the chapter reframes Partition as a lived health catastrophe rather than solely a historical event of displacement. The chapter further foregrounds practices of care and survival embedded in these material traces, including acts of tending to injured bodies, preserving food, sustaining familial bonds, and managing emotional shock under conditions of extreme precarity. Such practices reveal how well-being was negotiated amid instability and violence. Through this focus, the chapter argues that artefact-based narratives offer critical insight into the intimate health histories of Partition, expanding understandings of trauma, care, and vulnerability within the broader human experience of suffering and survival.</p> <p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Indian partition, lived health, trauma, material memory, care practices</p>