Trains
of Trauma: Partition as Memory in Marvel’s Ms. Marvel
Anik Das,
PhD Research Scholar,
Department of English,
University of Gour Banga,
West Bengal, India.
Abstract: This essay examines the
representation of the 1947 Partition of British India in Marvel Studios’ Ms. Marvel (2022), situating the
series within the frameworks of cultural and material memory studies, trauma
theory, and postcolonial thought. While Partition historiography often
emphasizes political rupture and demographic violence, Ms. Marvel foregrounds the intimate legacies of displacement
through intergenerational storytelling. The essay analyzes how the train
station sequence operates as a lieu de
mémoire, translating collective trauma into sensory fragments of sound
and image. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, Aanchal
Malhotra’s theorization of material memory, and Cathy Caruth’s insights on
trauma’s belatedness, the essay argues that the show frames Partition as an
inherited wound mediated through silences, heirlooms, and fragmented
narratives. At the same time, by embedding Partition within the superhero
genre, Ms. Marvel reframes
catastrophe as a means of survival, transforming memory into resilience.
Ultimately, the essay suggests that Ms.
Marvel exemplifies how global popular culture can act as a site of
remembrance, offering diasporic and transnational audiences a renewed
engagement with histories of displacement and belonging.
Keywords: Partition, Cultural memory,
Trauma, Diaspora, Superhero genre
Introduction
The
Partition of British India in 1947 remains one of the most cataclysmic events
of the twentieth century. In the span of a few months, approximately twelve
million people were displaced, and as many as two million perished in the
violence caused by the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan
(Butalia 3). While historians have documented Partition through political and
demographic lenses, cultural representations have often focused on its human
dimensions, through memories, materialities, and traumas. The Disney+ series Ms.
Marvel (2022), a product of Marvel Studios’ global superhero franchise,
offers an unexpected yet engaging encounter with the Partition. Particularly
striking is its depiction of the crowded train station, where countless people
struggle to board departing trains, embodying the disarray, panic, and rupture
of migration. This essay argues that Ms. Marvel reframes the Partition
not only as a historical event but also as an intergenerational memory that
continues to shape diasporic identities. Through its visual rendering of the
train scene, the series translates trauma into affective spectacle for global
audiences, while representing and reimagining suppressed narratives of South
Asian displacement. Employing textual-visual analysis alongside frameworks from
trauma studies, memory studies, and postcolonial theory, this essay examines
how Ms. Marvel’s Partition sequence recounts the history of fractured
nationhood through migration and loss, situating it within the superhero
genre’s emphasis on resilience and survivability.
Partition
as Cultural Memory
Unlike
histories of independence that focus on nation-building, Partition narratives
often foreground the trauma of forced migration and the fractured belonging. In
Ms. Marvel, the train sequence becomes what Pierre Nora terms a lieu
de mémoire, i.e., a site of memory where the past is symbolically preserved
and reactivated. For Kamala Khan, the Pakistani-American protagonist, Partition
is not lived history but an inherited trauma passed down through family memory.
Kamala’s great-grandparents on her mother’s side, Aisha and Hasan, lived in a
village in pre-independence India. Their daughter Sana, Kamala’s grandmother,
was lost on the railway platform while trying to board the last train going to
the newly formed State of Pakistan. She eventually found his father and escaped
the chaos, embedding the memories deeply in the family’s lineage. As for Sana’s
mother, Aisha, in Episode 2, Kamala’s father, Yusuf, speculates, “She disappeared
that night, just like many others did” (Ms. Marvel 00:28:57). Sana’s survival
underscores both the trauma of displacement and the enduring resilience that
has been passed down through generations. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’
is crucial here: the later generation experiences the trauma of their
predecessors not through direct recall but through mediated images, stories,
and silences. According to her, the post-generation “reinforce[s] the living
connection between past and present, between the generation of witnesses and
survivors and the generation after” (48). Kamala embodies this process,
inheriting her grandmother Sana’s experience of being separated from her father
during Partition and reimagining it through her own diasporic consciousness.
While
theories of postmemory highlight how Partition persists through belated and
fragmentary transmission, Aanchal Malhotra foregrounds the material and
intimate dimension of memory. Partition exists not only in the political
history of nations, but also in the private histories of families, in stories
carried in silence, in fragments, in heirlooms. In families affected by the
Partition, the topic was often avoided directly, but hinted at in silences,
unfinished sentences, and the way objects were guarded. With regards to this
silence, concealment, and unspoken histories, Aachal Malhotra observes in Remnants
of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory (2017),
“For the most part, those who witnessed it have either consigned parts of their
memory to old age, or have sheathed it in utter silence, folding skillfully
into the crevasses of their minds the painful experiences of displacement,
violence and immeasurable loss” (“Introduction”). Kamala’s mother, Muneeba,
although not a direct witness to the events, also avoids talking about
Partition, embodying these silences and untold or half-told stories. Sana’s
fragmented storytelling and the heirloom bangle (belonging to Aisha and passed
onto Kamala) reveal that Partition is remembered not as a singular narrative
but as scattered, intimate, and material memories. Malhotra notes, “The memory
buried within ‘things’ sometimes is greater than what we are able to recollect
as the years pass. Memory dilutes, but the object remains unaltered”
(“Introduction”). Through the bangle, Kamala finds a trigger that makes her see
fragmentary visions of the past. In it, she finds a portal into the time of
Partition, thus transforming personal inheritance into historical
consciousness. Moreover, Partition in Ms. Marvel operates within what
Cathy Caruth calls the experience of trauma, an event that resists full
representation but resurfaces through fragmented, belated images, i.e.,
“delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other
intrusive phenomena” (11). The train station sequence does not provide a
comprehensive history; instead, it offers sensory fragments of chaos (shouting,
running, clambering aboard trains) that gesture toward the incomprehensibility
of trauma. By doing so, Ms. Marvel positions Partition not merely as
history but as cultural memory, transmitted across generations through
affective storytelling.
Visual
Analysis of the Train Scene
The
train is one of the most enduring symbols of Partition. Trains carried millions
of refugees across hastily drawn borders. This grim reality has been powerfully
memorialized across diverse cultural productions. Literature and film from
Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) to Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal
Gandhar (1961) have turned to the train as both a literal and symbolic
vehicle of this rupture. Ms. Marvel continues this tradition, using the
train station as a cinematic site of memory. The mise-en-scène of the sequence
is crucial. The camera captures the press of bodies, the cacophony of desperate
voices, and the uncertainty of direction, i.e., people rushing simultaneously
to leave and to stay. The dim, dust-filled lighting and hurried camera
movements evoke instability, while the sound design amplifies chaos through the
roar of engines and overlapping shouts. Traumatic memory is often fragmentary,
as representational completeness is impossible. In “The Traumatic Paradox:
Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events” (1997),
Janet Walker observes, the most effective works figure the traumatic past as
“meaningful yet … fragmentary, virtually unspeakable, and striated with fantasy
constructions” (809).Ms. Marvel’s Partition sequence reflects this
fragmentary quality, but it also consciously frames itself as intergenerational
memory. Oscar-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directed Episodes 4
(“Seeing Red”) and 5 (“Time and Again”) of the series. She acknowledges that
the platform scene, as shown in these episodes, was indeed a journey through intergenerational
memory lane:
When we were standing
on the platform there were close to a thousand extras on set in the scene where
we’d gone back into 1947. When Kamala was walking on the platform, listening to
these snatches of conversations, there was a moment when all of us on set
couldn't believe that we were able to recreate Partition and tell this story to
this generation. For that time we were filming her walking through that
platform, we really were transported into 1947. Each one of us felt the pain of
what those families were going through and it felt like we were bearing witness
to history. (Mehrotra)
Her
words highlight how the production itself became an act of remembrance,
collapsing temporal distance by re-enacting Partition for a new generation of
viewers.
Most
significantly, the scene dramatizes Sana’s childhood separation from her
father, Yusuf. As she is lost in the crowd, Kamala travels back in time to
witness and ultimately ensure Sana’s reunion. This blending of superhero
fantasy with historical trauma highlights how memory is never a neutral
recording but an act of mediation and reconstruction. The show does not aim for
historical accuracy in a documentary sense; rather, it dramatizes the
disorientation of displacement through stylized spectacle, allowing audiences,
especially diasporic viewers, to feel the urgency of Partition’s rupture. By
using the train as a symbol of both mobility and immobility, Ms. Marvel
underscores the paradox of Partition migration: movement promised safety but
also entailed vulnerability, loss, and violence. The scene’s crowded trains
thus become metaphors for fractured nations, incomplete departures, and
unresolved memories.
Diaspora,
Identity, and Postcolonial Hybridity
While
Ms. Marvel reconstructs Partition for a global audience, it does so
through a distinctly diasporic lens. Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim
teenager from Jersey City, embodies what Homi Bhabha terms hybridity: the third
space that “breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside”
(Bhabha 116). This hybridity is explicitly voiced in the series when Kamala’s
grandmother, Sana, explains, “Even at my age, I’m still trying to figure out
who I am. My passport is Pakistani, my roots are in India. And in between all
of this, there is a border. There is a border marked with blood and pain.
People are claiming their identity based on an idea some old Englishmen had
when they were fleeing the country” (Ms. Marvel 00:25:20). The line
captures both the arbitrariness and the violence of Partition’s border-making,
while also reflecting the fractured and hybrid identity Kamala inherits. Her
encounter with Partition is thus mediated not through nationalistic histories
but through fragmented family memory, reimagined across oceans and decades. On
one hand, Ms. Marvel recovers silenced narratives by centering Muslim
experiences of Partition, which have often been marginalized in dominant Indian
historiography. On the other hand, as Ananya Jahanara Kabir argues, Partition
memory is always refracted by ‘post-amnesia,’ which is “a symptomatic return to
explorations of places lost to the immediate post-1947 and post-1971
generations through a combination of psychological and political imperatives”
(26). Taken together, these strands reveal how Ms. Marvel both restores
marginalized Muslim voices of Partition and frames them through the fractured,
belated lens of diasporic memory.
The
diasporic lens also enables new forms of connection. For Kamala, learning about
Partition is a way of understanding her own fragmented identity, i.e., as an American,
Pakistani, Muslim, and superhero. It is also through this process that she
gains access to the gendered channels in which the intimate memories of
Partition circulate. Urvashi Butalia observes that apart from the history
books, the Partition also “exists privately in the stories told and retold
inside so many households in India and Pakistan” (4).Partition stories are
often told within families, passed down through women’s voices, silences, and
everyday memories— “their speech, their silences, the half-said things, the
nuances” (Kabir 126). Ms. Marvel foregrounds this intergenerational
female storytelling, positioning Partition as both a national trauma and a
personal inheritance.
Superhero
Genre and Resilience
What
makes Ms. Marvel’s depiction of Partition distinctive is its integration
into the superhero genre. Traditionally, Partition literature and film
emphasize suffering, loss, and silence, whether in works such as Khushwant
Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Manto’s short stories, including “Toba
Tek Singh” (1955), or Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic laments in Komal Gandhar (1961).
Ms. Marvel, however, reframes the Partition within a narrative of resilience
and empowerment. In the train sequence, Kamala not only witnesses the trauma of
Partition but actively participates in ensuring her grandmother’s survival. By
using her powers to guide young Sana back to her father, Kamala transforms a
memory of loss into a story of survival. This intervention illustrates the
potential of the superhero genre to reimagine traumatic histories not solely as
victimhood but as endurance and continuity.
At
the same time, this narrative raises ethical questions. Does transforming
Partition into a site of superhero action risk trivializing its violence? Or
does it offer new possibilities for engaging younger audiences with histories
often excluded from school curricula? The answer may lie in the dual function
of popular culture. In her book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of
American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (2004), Alison Landsberg
conceptualises ‘prosthetic memory’ as a form of memory that “emerges at the
interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an
experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum” (2). Such memories
“originate outside a person’s lived experience and yet are taken on and worn by
that person through mass cultural technologies of memory” (19).In other words,
mass media can create personal memories of events one did not live through, and
at the same time foster empathy and shared social responsibility. Ms. Marvel
exemplifies this, enabling global audiences, many with no direct connection to
South Asia, to engage with Partition memory through visual spectacle. As such,
the series not only represents Partition but also redefines how it can be
remembered. It frames Partition simultaneously as trauma and resilience,
silence and storytelling, fracture and continuity.
Conclusion
Ms.
Marvel’s depiction of Partition, particularly its crowded
train scene, offers a powerful case study in how popular culture mediates
historical trauma. By blending textual-visual strategies with intergenerational
memory, the series translates Partition into a form accessible to global
audiences while foregrounding the diasporic inheritance of trauma. Through
memory studies, we see how the show functions as a lieu de mémoire,
preserving the Partition as cultural memory. Through postcolonial theory, we
recognize how Kamala Khan’s diasporic hybridity refracts this trauma across
generations and geographies. And through the superhero genre, we understand how
Partition can be reimagined not only as a catastrophe but as resilience. Ultimately,
Ms. Marvel illustrates that even within the structures of global
entertainment; popular culture can serve as an archive of suppressed histories.
The crowded trains of Partition, once filled with silence and loss, reemerge as
sites of memory, enabling new generations to inherit, question, and reimagine
the traumas of the past.
Work
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Kabir,
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