ARTICLE Being Young, Becoming Political: Subjectivity and Urban Space in Early Partition Novels Mircea Raianu History Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA ABSTRACT This article discusses the relationship between political subjectivity and urban space in three novels written in the immediate after- math of the Partition of India: Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided and Yashpal’s This Is Not That Dawn. Despite extensive thematic and structural similar- ities, these early Partition novels have never been considered together and through a historical lens. Each narrative features moments of reckoning when the young protagonists are faced with sudden demands to become political in a new way, for example by abandoning secular anti-colonialism for communitar- ianism. The diversity of their experiences and responses, from bitter resignation to open-ended struggle, reflects the difficulties of constructing unitary selves expressing deep interior convictions aligned with collective identities. These transformations of political subjectivities are situated in and shaped by the heterogeneous urban spaces of Lucknow and Lahore, which establish the condi- tions of possibility for coexistence and its limits. KEYWORDS Cities; Lahore; Lucknow; novels; Partition; politics; space; subjectivity In the years leading up to the Independence and Partition of India, young people were challenged to suddenly (and often radically) transform their political selves. This phenomenon provides the animating concern of several novels written during or soon after the events of 1947. Here I focus on Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too (originally published as Mere Bhi Sanamkhane in Urdu), Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (originally published in English) and Yashpal’s This Is Not That Dawn (originally published as Jhutha Sach in Hindi). Despite extensive thematic and struc- tural similarities, these three works have never been considered together. Each narra- tive is punctured by moments of reckoning, when protagonists are faced with the demand to become political in a new way—to defend one’s own community above all others, or to put religious identity above class solidarity. The refashioning of political subjectivity produces multiple interconnected effects: breaking up close-knit groups of friends, ending love affairs, questioning deeply held beliefs, and ultimately ß 2023 South Asian Studies Association of Australia CONTACT Mircea Raianu mcraianu@gmail.com This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 2023, VOL. 46, NO. 3, 648–664 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2204013