Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers

“Why does a woman choose to die? A shadow woman whispers in Roop’s ear, ‘Sometimes we choose to die because it is the only way to be heard and seen, little sister’.” (What the Body Remembers 526) Evidently, this book is a sustained analysis of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s partition novel What the Body Remembers in the light of feminism and post-colonialism. But the work goes beyond the scope of a single novel as it compares many other works of similar nature and engages in an in-depth examination of the key concerns of post-colonial feminism such as subordination of body, its resistance and the narrative mode of allegory. Other important contemporary concerns that the book enunciates are women’s disgraceful position in a patriarchally structured and controlled society, erasure of her-story from the history of the nation and the contradiction inherent in “woman-as-nation” to problematize India’s post-coloniality vis-à-vis women. The book invites attention as its author sensitizes us to the terrible human cost of trauma and loss of trust and alerts us to the dangers of communal passion that surround us now as much as they did in the past. She tries to show us suffering on account of communal violence has remained unmitigated, for what is shown as happening then in the novel is still happening now. This book pays special importance to “remembering without repetition” as a solution to communal upheaval. “If you do not learn what you were meant to learn from your past lives, you are condemned to repeat them” (Prologue What the Body Remembers 11)