From Sensory Disruption to Sensory Resistance: A Critical Enquiry from Partition to Contemporary Majoritarianism

Any oppressive state order equips a sensory model for society to compel commoners to consume a manufactured definition of sensing the world through the sensory faculties in the manner they want us to. In this context, the idea of refusal can counter-hegemonize the state-sponsored order and assert alternative “sensuous epistemologies”. This paper, thereby, attempts to bring in sensory aspects to propose an alternative framework of resistance to any kind of sensory divide propagated by divisive policymakers. This essay, hence, highlights two aspects: first, how the Partition of India can be seen as a sensory disruption caused by the power structure to retain dominance from the colonial era to the present context of India; and second, how Partition literature can offer us a sensory critique of this dominance. The literature of the Partition has time and again reflected the empirics of the workings of the senses associated with the “idea” and the “materialization” of that idea in the form of the Partition of India. Claiming the Partition of India as a sensory disruption, this essay approaches the very material nature of the Partition that has been intergenerationally and intragenerationally affecting us until now. Existing Partition scholarship lacks the sensory lens to understand the possibilities that literature offers by redistributing the “ordinary forms of sensory experiences” that have been affecting readers across time and space. Having said that, literature can expose and simultaneously reinforce sensory divides and sensory associations or bonds among communities. Research on Partition literature has poignantly showcased—if analyzed from a sensory lens—a canvas of sensory entropy as a result of the Partition and a space of sensory resistance. This is achieved by exposing the politics working behind the materialization of this psychosomatic and territorial divide from colonial times to the rising tendencies of majoritarianism in present-day India.