Analysis Of Perfect Eight

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In Perfect Eight together with the ownership of a generational past, the workings of the traumatic memory are passed on in this “intergenerational act of transfer” (Hirsch, 104) from Ma to Ira. Ira’s personal story from the very beginning becomes a way of carrying forward her mother’s story by appropriating her trauma and memory of partition .Ira’s particular relation to her parental past described, analysed and evoked in the novel can be seen as a “syndrome of belatedness or post-ness and can be variedly termed as “absent memory, inherited memory, belated memory prosthetic memory, vicarious witnessing , received history or postmemory”( Hirsch,105).These terms reveal a number of contentious suppositions: that descendants of survivors ( of …show more content…

In Patiala, in Ira’s neighbourhood as in other parts of Punjab, in a mirror image of the partition Hindus and Sikhs who knew no differences suddenly turn against each other with hatred. Bhinderwale, whom Papu imagines is no threat, tries to convince the Hindus and Sikhs that they did not belong together. With Operation Blue Star that led to the storming of the Golden Temple to flush out terrorists, violence and counter violence now unfolds. With the Indian prime minister shot dead by her Sikh body guards, Sikhs are the persecuted minority in the anti-Sikh carnage that engulfs the country. Moudgil juxtaposes the shifting minority –majority locations when she shows Ira a Hindu in a Sikh dominated Patiala persecuted as a minority. In a postmemory recollection of partition violence the mass killings of the Sikhs and Hindus fills the air with hatred, fear and suspicion where once peace and tranquillity had reigned, neighbours turn against neighbours as is evident . Identities that had remained fluid concretise in the postcolonial state. The simmering violence in Ayodhya which reaches its climax in the demolition of the Babri Masjid at the end of the novel spreads to Bangalore where Ira settles down after her marriage. The assault on Ira by the conductor of a bus she is travelling in, in the presence of cold and indifferent fellow-passengers brings to her mind her mother’s journey from Lahore towards the Indian border. The mindless attack on a movie theatre, rekindles her postmemory of the age old

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