Digital Object Identifier
This paper examines Nandita Bhavnani’s The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India (2014) as a landmark work that repositions the Sindhi Partition experience within the broader discourse of Indian English Partition literature. Unlike the dominant Punjabi-centric narratives that construct 1947 as a story of territorial division, Bhavnani’s text reveals a qualitatively different trauma—one of total civilizational erasure. Sindhi Hindus did not lose half a homeland; they lost an entire world. Drawing on postcolonial theory, trauma studies, diaspora theory, and memory studies—specifically the frameworks of Avtar Brah, Cathy Caruth, Pierre Nora, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—this paper argues that The Making of Exile constructs Sindhi displacement as a threefold loss: loss of territory, loss of language, and loss of cultural memory.
Dr Anshika Makhijani. “Erased, Not Divided: Sindhi Partition, Statelessness, and the Imagined Homeland in Nandita Bhavnani’s The Making of Exile.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 678–689. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.44.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com