Fractured Bodies, Fractured Forms: Gendered Memory and Regional Trauma in Partition Short Fiction

India’s 1947 Partition’s literary history has tended to record violence against women as ancillary to political breakdown, and a critical rift has appeared between event and gendered memory. Scholarship before has considered gender or trauma separately, but has inadequately considered how narrative form encodes women’s psychic, social, and symbolic burden in different geographical regions. This research provides an intervention by reading short stories from Bengal and Punjab, by Selina Hossain, Ramapada Chaudhury, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Pratibha Basu, through a twin lens of trauma and gender theory, illustrating how narrative form becomes an extension of trauma. Unlike previous scholarship, this model offers a regionally comparative model, illustrating how Bengal’s widespread, systemic violence yields stories of interiority, mourning, and circular memory, and Punjab’s short, violent breakdown yields symbolic repression and mythic closure. Close reading, informed by Caruth’s trauma theory and Butalia’s feminist historiography, encodes violence as physical, social, and psychological. Fragmented narrative, silences, and deferred temporality are discovered to be formal strategies by which women’s trauma is shaped and conveyed. Women are not only formed as victims of violence but also as fractured narrators of national memory. The texts are counter-historical testimonies, resistant to state-sponsored erasure. The research provides a methodological contribution by positioning trauma in narrative form, arguing that Partition literature must be read not just for thematic content but for how its structure formally performs historical violence in different physical terrains.