The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 is an “originary trauma” in which the former British India is arbitrarily and forcefully divided. Many writers of South Asian descent are constantly looking backward at this traumatic experience to explore the relationship between violence and the myth of nation-building. Writing Partition narratives, in a sense, is almost like a compulsory act of “rememory” for the generations of South Asian peoples who have either personally experienced Partition or heard about it through family lore and legends. In this paper, I focus on exploring the connections between violence and the construction of nation-states, with a special emphasis on the artistic reconstruction of personal encounters with violence as represented in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991).