Women in Partition Literature: A Comparative Study of Women's Representations in India's Partition Literature

Methodology

This paper is based on a qualitative study conducted on eight literary texts and is based on research for the author’s Master’s thesis titled “Women, History, and Fiction: A study of women’s representation in India’s Partition literature”. The methodology for both this paper and and the abovementioned thesis is to carry out textual analysis on the eight chosen literary texts – four of which are literary pieces from Punjab’s partition literature and the other four are literary pieces from Bengal’s Partition literature. Textual analysis as a methodology first received recognition in literature and according to Alan Mckee (2001) performing textual analysis means making an educated guess about the most likely interpretations a text can have. The interpretations that a person arrives at by using the methodology of textual analysis will depend on the kind of sensitivity the concerned person has and the context within which research is being performed. John Scott (1990) points out that in textual analysis there is a mediation between the context in which the author produced the text and the context in which the researcher reads or analyses it. It must be understood that a text cannot be interpreted by separating it from its context of production (Scott, 1990). However it must also be remembered that there is no single correct interpretation of a text - there can be a large number of interpretations of a text but only some of these interpretations will be relevant to the context and purpose of a research (McKee, 2001).