The Echoes of Inner Conflicts and Resilience: War, Partition, and the Representation of Trauma in Aanchal Malhotra’s The Book of Everlasting Things

Abstract

Violence, assault, and war wreak havoc on peaceful communities while inflicting deep and lasting injuries on their victims, and the 1947 Partition of India remains the most traumatic such rupture the subcontinent has ever undergone. As a medium of discourse, literature portrays the multidimensional aspects of human life under such catastrophe, exploring its psychological, cultural, and socio-political wounds. This paper examines how Aanchal Malhotra memorialises the Partition and the First World War in her debut novel The Book of Everlasting Things (2022). It argues that the novel represents trauma not as a single catastrophic event but as an inheritance transmitted across generations through material and sensory media such as journals, photographs, letters, and above all scent and that it locates resilience in the disciplined labour of perfumery, through which the protagonist, Samir Vij, converts an inherited wound into a livable narrative of self. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma’s belatedness, Judith Herman’s stages of recovery, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between acting out and working through, the paper contends that Malhotra’s principal contribution to Partition fiction is an olfactory archive: an aesthetic in which smell functions simultaneously as the trigger of traumatic return and as the medium of repair.