Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988).

"In recent years the theme of the long afterlife of the Partition of India has emerged as a major preoccupation in Partition Studies in South Asia. Drawing upon this burgeoning field of scholarship, the present thesis is an attempt to study this long afterlife in a specific geographical context and its specifics. But, more significantly, the thesis is an attempt to suggest that it is the very dynamic of post-Partition displacement and relocation that determines why the afterlife cannot but be long.