Unbecoming Malloban: Trauma, Diaspora, and the Dis/abled Subject

Abstract

This paper examines Jibanananda Das’s Malloban (1948) through the intersecting lenses of diaspora, memory, trauma, and disability studies to explore the protagonist’s fractured psyche as an allegory for the displaced refugee’s existential crisis in an urban capitalist society. Tracing the ontology of fragmentation the paper situates Malloban in the precept of trauma fiction, thereby interrogating how diasporic trauma, fragmented memory, and cognitive detachment intertwine to shape Malloban’s identity. Building on studies in disability and the insights of trauma theory/ies, the paper studies Malloban’s “madness” as symptomatic of his gradual cognitive catastrophe. Malloban’s cognitive disability, however, is read not as impairment but as a form of adaptive detachment necessitated by the disorienting chaos of post-Partition dislocation. It further explores Malloban’s detachment as a reflection of how the traumatized, diasporic, disabled ‘self’ transforms into the ‘other’ while the subject undergoes a continual of ‘unbecoming’ that entails a threatening detour toward an ontological disconnect. Through rigorous close reading and critical theoretical engagement, this paper positions Malloban as both a lament and celebration for the fractured and dislocated. The research maps the existential burdens of urban capitalist modernity onto the broader experiences of systemic disenfranchisement and exclusion, and expands critical dialogues on diaspora, displacement, and deterritorialized selfhood in South Asian trauma literature.