Material Afterlives and the Psychology of Displacement: Trauma, Memory, and Narrative Form in Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation 

Harleen Kaur

Assistant Professor, Department of English,

Amar Shaheed Baba Ajit Singh Jujhar Singh Memorial College, Bela.

Prof. Sanjana Shamshery

Department of English, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla.

Abstract
The Partition of India in 1947, besides being a geographical partition, involved a long-term psychological displacement. Remnants of a Separation by Aanchal Malhotra is the subject of the study in this paper in which the interrelationship between trauma, memory and narrative reconstruction is explored. In the place of official historiography or state archives, Malhotra builds a counter-archive of ordinary objects that survivors carried across the border, such as clothes, kitchenware, letters and photographs. These items serve as memory anchors, and they often record affective histories beyond those captured in a written record. It is suggested that the paper portrays trauma as an ongoing condition of the psyche that is carried along by memory, not as a history (past) or a moment of rupture (present). The stories are rich, episodic, and sometimes hesitant, silent, and repeated. All of these formal elements are related to the fractured nature of the memory of trauma. These narrative gaps are highlighted as a mode of ethical representation in the book, which rejects linear closure and embraces narrative discontinuity. The study also considers the role of longing, inheritance and intergenerational transmission in the formation of diasporic identities in the wake of displacement. Partition is a type of cultural trauma that is taken on in isolation and is also remembered collectively. Remnants of a Separation explores the nature of storytelling as a means to reach wholeness without obliterating rupture and foregrounds material culture as a storytelling catalyst. In conclusion, this paper proposes that through its attention to objects, Malhotra’s writing broadens the literary conversation about trauma and illuminates the possibilities of storytelling as a way to make imperfect and scattered things important and reconstructive, to make memories.

Keywords: Memory, Partition trauma, Diasporic identity, Narrative discontinuity, Material culture.