T he aim of my research paper is to study the political issues and historical trauma as portrayed by Chaman Nahal in his novel Azadi. It is well said that literature is mirror of life. Literature, it is generally believed, reflects the period during which it is produced. A literary man is as much a product of his society as his art is product of his own reaction to it. Even the greatest of artists is sometimes a conscious exponent of his time-spirit. The time-spirit is the total outcome, the quintessential accretion, of all the political, social, religious, and scientific changes of particular age. Literature always expresses the thoughts and sentiments of human mind which is closely connected with and conditioned by the age. Thus literature of any writer reflects his or her zeitgeist or the Time-Spirit. No writer can escape the influence of his age. It must be granted, while pursuing the history of literature of any country, that a writer is not only influenced by society, but that he or she influences it. August 1947 marks the end of the British Raj in the Subcontinent. The departure of the British from the subcontinent led to the creation of two independent states - India and Pakistan. The division was based on the ‘two-nation theory’ with the argument that the Hindus and the Muslims cannot coexist together as one nation as both have distinct social, cultural and religious identities. The Muslim majority regions of Punjab and Bengal were divided with West Punjab and East Bengal forming West and East Pakistan, and India in the middle of the two. This resulted in massive and violent migration of the people across the border. Muslims moved into Pakistan, and Sikhs and Hindus moved into India with the prospects of a peaceful and better life to preserve their own religious as well as ethnic identities. The mass scale migration leading to crimes of unprecedented communal violence, rapes, murders, and savagery. P. Roy says that “it is very difficult to give an exact account of the people who became the victims of the partition trauma but its impact can be compared to that of great war on Britain or the second world war on Japan and France “ (Roy 365). The tragedy of the Partition encounter has given rise to fictional explorations with an attempt to define the inner turmoil and social complexes that plagued the subcontinent. The incredible suffering and bewilderment of the people of the subcontinent has been a favourite theme with the Indian and Pakistani writers. There is no dearth of writings about the Partition of India, the socio-political Portrayal of Political Issues and Historical Trauma in Chaman Nahal’s Azadi ARABATI PRADEEP KUMAR Contemporary Discourse, 7, 1(2016): 103-108 ISSN 0976-3686