Find in Library

With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella, <i>Khwabrau</i> (<i>Sleepwalkers</i>), published in 1990. <i>Sleepwalkers</i> shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal &#8220;third space&#8222; that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality. <i>Sleepwalkers</i> is based on a time, many years after the Partition in the city of Karachi, and focuses on the &#8220;mohajirs&#8222; from Lucknow who construct a mnemonic existential space by constructing a simulacrum of pre-Partition Lucknow (now in India). This paper examines the reconceptualization of spaces through the realm of political nostalgia and the figure of the refugee subject &#8220;performing&#8222; this nostalgia. This nostalgic reconstruction of space, thus, becomes a &#8220;heterotopia&#8222; in Foucauldian terms, one that causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nation-hood. The refugee subjects&#8217; subversion of the linearity of time opens a different time in the narration of a nation that necessitates that the wholeness of the &#8220;imagined&#8222; physical space of a nation be questioned.