Rehearsing the Partition: Gendered Violence in aur Kitne Tukde

Feminist Review, 2006

This article argues that the specifically sexual nature of the political violence of the 1947 Partition of British India installs women's bodies as unambiguously sexed and ethnic. Through an analysis of Kirti Jain's 2001 theatre production of Aur Kitne Tukde (How Many Fragments?), I consider how Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs appropriate colonialist and nationalist ideologies surrounding the notion of 'woman' as repository of cultural value. The women in Jain's play are not a priori subjects who experience violence but rather the experience of violence makes (and unmakes) them as gendered, ethnic and national subjects. I argue that they come into subjecthood after a violent objectification and are reconstituted by their experience of national and sexual violence. The performance of nationalism-through embodied acts of sexual violence, conversion, martyrdom and state violence-is enacted upon female bodies that are transformed into political artefacts. I ask how bodies are staged and commodified by acts of political violence and argue that marking female bodies through acts of political violence constitutes a mode of transcription to communicate with other men that will encounter this body.

2019

The partition narratives of South Asian authors are testimony to the fact that women of all ethnic and religious backgrounds were the greatest victims of the newly created border between India and Pakistan in 1947. Women’s bodies were abducted, stripped naked, raped, mutilated (their breasts cut off), carved with religious symbols and murdered to be sent in train wagons to the “other” side of the border. Taking Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988) as a narrative example of the importance of women’s point of view and as central figures of the violent conflict, we will examine the symbol of the female breasts, following Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s theories on power and governmentality, framed in the rhetoric of Mother India, as the violence inflicted upon women was equivalent to a sacrilege against one’s religion, family and country. Therefore, we will examine the passage of sacks of mutilated breasts as a terrifying testimonio about Partition history fic...

Pune Research: An International Journal in English, 2013

The two new states of India and Pakistan came into being as a result of a division on the basis of religion and were demarcated by arbitrary borders1 a division which was accompanied by unprecedented mass migration, violent deaths, sexual assaults, and prolonged trauma and was legitimatized through the idea of revenge fraught with the trauma of gender and sexuality. It was a revenge that discriminated along the lines of religion and ethnicity while the atrocities were committed especially against women and their bodies. Women were not only objects but also witness to violence. Their bodies became contested sites of violence upon which external identities ascribed their meanings and yet most of the written histories on Partition lack any close female perspective. The need of the hour is, as Joan Kelly advocates, to restore women to history and to restore our history to women with the aim to "make women a focus of enquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative"; in other words, to construct women as a historical subject and through this construction. The impetus provided by the recent researchers like Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, and Veena Das, who documented oral histories and official records of Hindu and Sikh families' and communities' refusal to accept women subjected to sexual violence in the riots. Contextualizing the feminist historiography and narrativizing history, provided by these researchers, of the Partition, this paper examines the situation of the recovered women through a reading of Lalithambika Antharjanam’s short story “A Leaf in the Storm”.

3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 2016

The 1947 Partition of British India, otherwise simply known as Partition, marked not only the births of India and Pakistan, but also one of modern history's largest human mass migrations, in which an estimated million died and thousands of women were subjected to horrifying acts of engendered violence. Scholars, such as Menon and Bhasin (1998) as well as Butalia (2000), have conceptualised engendered violence during Partition as a violation of women's bodies, sexualities and psyches by men in general, manifested in various forms ranging from abduction and rape to honour killing and bodily mutilations. However, this study is limited to examining how honour killing is depicted as a form of such violence in the novel Partitions (2011) by Amit Majmudar. More importantly, it examines how depictions of the honour killing of women during Partition in the selected text can also be read as manifestations of the negative underside of the concept of biopower conceptualised by Foucault, in which mass death and destruction are necessary to ensure the survival of future generations. This study reveals, based on textual evidence surrounding the botched honour killing of the character Simran Kaur, that the honour killing of women during Partition is due to the perception of the time, place and society that women, as well as their sexuality, are symbolic constructions of male honour. This subsequently leads to women being viewed by their own men-folk as threats against the honour of their respective religions and communities in times of communal strife.

Womanhood, 2024

This study delves into the historical exploitation of women as symbols to advance colonial, nationalist, and religious communal agendas, particularly focusing on the Indian subcontinent. Through an analysis of various events, including the British response to widow immolation, the Bengal Renaissance, and the aftermath of the Partition of India, the study highlights how women's plight was manipulated to serve broader political goals. Drawing from sources such as Tanika Sarkar's Rebels, Wives, Saints and Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence, the study underscores the dual nature of women's victimization: first by patriarchal structures and then by the instrumentalization of their suffering to bolster ideological narratives. It argues that despite purported humanitarian concerns, women's agency and well-being were often overlooked, with their experiences reduced to mere symbols in the pursuit of power and national identity. This study aims to shed light on the complex intersections of gender, politics, and power dynamics in historical contexts. Examining the instrumentalization of women's suffering for political ends prompts reflection on the ethical implications of using marginalized groups as symbols to promote ostensibly progressive agendas.

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2010

International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR), 2024

The play Where Did I Leave My Purdah?, written by Mahesh Dattani, explores the trauma and legacy of the Partition of India through a theatrical lens, weaving themes of gender, violence, and memory. Set against the backdrop of post-Partition India, the play centers on an aging actress, Nazia, who reflects on her experiences as both a survivor of Partition violence and a pioneering woman in Indian theater. By using the metaphor of the “purdah” (veil), Dattani highlights the intersection of public and private identities and the cultural expectations surrounding women’s bodies. The play addresses gendered violence, showing how women were particularly vulnerable during Partition, not only physically but also psychologically, as they were often forced to navigate shame, silence, and survival in patriarchal contexts. Memory plays a central role, as Nazia revisits her traumatic past and grapples with the selective nature of her recollections, shaped by both her personal choices and societal expectations. The play thus serves as a poignant commentary on how collective memories of Partition continue to impact individual lives, particularly for women whose stories were often marginalized or erased. Dattani’s work underscores the resilience of those who survived and the ongoing struggle for agency in the aftermath of communal violence. Through Nazia’s story, Where Did I Leave My Purdah? provides a compelling theatrical narrative that reflects on how trauma, memory, and identity intertwine in the shadow of historical upheaval.

The partition of India, one of the most terribly traumatizing attempts of a forced geopolitical restructuring of human lives, is the greatest of human tragedies in the twentieth century. The mountainous shame and violence inflicted upon the women during the riot was not possible for the historians to record about. Literature has relived and recreated these 'hard' truths by fictionalizing the colossal desecration of human values. This paper aims to explore the Indian partition fiction from a humanist perspective. The academic objective of this paper is to present a detailed textual analysis of one classical text on the partition i.e., Amrita Pritam's Pinjar. Such a study is bound to be interdisciplinary and it will borrow from history, ethics, culture studies and philosophy as an overall theoretical base.

2019

This paper was presented at the two day national conference held at GGSIPU, New Delhi in February 2019. The session was chaired by professor Somdutta Mandal The Partition of India was a cataclysmic event that altered the socio-cultural topography of the Indian subcontinent. Coming at the heels of the grand narrative of India's glorious independence, the Partition of India became the problematic occasion the echo of which still reverberates in contemporary conflicts. As such, Partition needs to be acknowledged more forcefully as an indelible part of India's national history. With an intention to develop a composite understanding of the complexities of the Partition experience, the paper reads Saadat Hasan Manto's literary vignettes in Black Marginalia (Siyah Hashye) to examine how these minimalist cultural texts document the sectarian violence of the time. Through an intensive study of Manto's vignettes on Partition, the paper attempts to understand how religion as the quintessential factor that incited communal and gender violence during the Partition is forcefully critiqued by Manto in Siyah Hashye. By problematizing the politics and poetics ofManto's vignetteson Partition as cultural representations that documented the phenomenon, the paper aims to assert the significance of these cultural texts as supplementary historiography of the Partition as well as underline the importance of religion as the essential element that stimulated communal violence. The Partition of India in 1947 grafted a new history of the Indian subcontinent wherein the noun freedom transmogrified to assume the aspects of violence that shook the foundations of the new nation states of India and Pakistan respectively. Remembered as a catastrophe, that Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya calls-dramatic‖ with its-refugee movements, whose scale even at that time was described as unprecedented in human history‖ (Tan and Kudaisya 8), Partition questions the very idea of cartographic negotiation of national borders. The problem that manifests before us, therefore, is how this tectonic shift in the cultural history of the Indian subcontinent happen in the first place? How and why, most importantly, twelve million people were forced to vacate their natal homes and cross borders in an unprecedented

2017

This article will take as its case study the 1947 India/Pakistan partition, and is based on a large oral history project, which took place over the last five years. In this article, I focus on selected excerpts from some of my interviews, examining the ways in which people describe religious belief, practice, prejudice and violence as corporeal experiences, with markers of religiosity often inscribed on the body. I examine how the corporeality of religious violence was not an aberration from everyday religious practices, but in effect an extension of religion as an embodied entity. In turn, I will examine how these embodied practices are reflected in the actual oral history interview itself. I will make a case for the importance of studying oral history as an embodied methodology, and the need to concentrate not just on the verbal interactions between interviewee and interviewer, but also on the meeting of the two bodies and the communication that occurs, or fails to occur between t...