Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition

The Paradox of Independence

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317293880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Partition occurring simultaneously with British decolonization of the Indian subcontinent led to the formation of independent India and Pakistan. While the political and communal aspects of the Partition have received some attention, its enormous personal and psychological costs have been mostly glossed over, particularly when it comes to the splitting of Bengal. The memory of this historical ordeal has been preserved in literary archives, and these archives are still being excavated.

This book examines neglected narratives of the Partition of India in 1947 to study the traces left by this foundational trauma on the national- and regional-cultural imaginaries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. To arrive at a more complex understanding of how Partition experiences of violence, migration, and displacement shaped postcolonial societies and subjectivities in South Asia, the author analyses, through novels and short stories, multiple cartographies of disorientation and anxiety in the post-Partition period. The book illuminates how contingencies of political geography cut across personal and collective histories, and how these intersections are variously marked and mediated by literature. Examining works composed in Bengali and other South Asian languages, this book seeks to broaden and complicate existing conceptions of what constitutes the Partition literary archive.

A valuable addition to the growing field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, gender studies, and literature.

1 Tainted liberty

Women and the Partition

During the sectarian brutalities in Noakhali in the autumn of 1946, Mahatma Gandhi advised women facing the threat of intimate violence to commit suicide in order to preserve their chastity. He suggested that women “commit suicide by poison or some other means to avoid dishonor … suffocate themselves or … bite their tongues to end their lives.”¹ Gandhi insisted that “women must learn how to die before a hair of their head could be injured.”² Speaking a year later, just over a month after Independence and Partition, he valorized pre-emptive suicide, even murder, as a sign of strength, lauding the deaths of Hindu and Sikh women:

I have heard that many women who did not want to lose their honor chose to die. Many men killed their own wives. I think that is really great, because I know that such things make India brave. After all, life and death is a transitory game. Whoever might have died are dead and gone; but at least they have gone with courage. They have not sold away their honor. Not that their life was not dear to them, but they felt it was better to die than to be forcibly converted to Islam by the Muslims and allow them to assault their bodies. And so those women died. They were not just a handful, but quite a few. When I hear all these things I dance with joy that there are such brave women in India.³

In this passage, national honor, patriarchal values, and communalized identities converge with a brutal nationalism that extols the annihilation of the individual. A proponent of non-violence, Gandhi here sanctions suicide or murder by a kinsman as patriotism. He interprets women’s chastity as a reservoir of national honor, and their death as the articulation of their free choice. Although he was not alone in his insistence on the preservation of chastity, Gandhi’s was an important voice, and his speeches had actual consequences for women’s lives.⁴

In contrast to Gandhi’s laudatory rhetoric around pre-emptive suicides, Bengali author Jyotirmoyee Devi’s⁵ short story “Epar Ganga Opar Ganga”⁶ (“The Search,” 1968) evokes the sheer terror and loneliness of a beautiful young woman contemplating suicide as a way to escape her circumstances and her husband’s intense grief when he learns of her death. When Sudam and Durga, husband and wife of the cobbler caste, attempt to cross over to India from East Pakistan, they are stopped at the border by Pakistani officials who demand money in order to let them pass. Since the couple is penniless, the officers at the train station, eyeing the beautiful Durga, suggest that she remain in the town as security while Sudam procures the money from his Calcutta-relatives. Having no alternative, Sudam reluctantly leaves Durga in the care of the elderly Muslim stationmaster’s family, promising to return in three days to get her. When ten days go by with no word from Sudam, men from the locality approach the stationmaster’s wife urging her to hand Durga over to them. Although the elderly woman pays no heed, Durga is petrified, “should she run away? But where would she go, they were everywhere. Maybe hang herself? Perhaps drown?”⁷ Sudam returns after three weeks, and upon learning of his wife’s suicide by drowning, he is devastated.

Durga’s decision to end her life stems from her dread at the very real possibility of violation. But it is not a cause for approbation, much less dancing with joy. Instead, it bespeaks Durga’s utter vulnerability. It is her choice, but that, unfortunately, is the limit of her freedom: she is only free to die. Metaphorically, her death is the failure of god. In Hindu mythology, Durga is a manifestation of Parvati, the consort of Shiva, and the worship offered to her in Bengal (Durga Puja), is storied around the married daughter’s visit to her parents (in this story, Durga’s stay with the elderly Muslim couple), and the annual religious ceremony ends with the immersion of the clay sculpture in a river or pond (in the story, Durga’s death by drowning). But whereas the divine Durga slays the demon Mahishasura, in “Epar Ganga Opar Ganga,” Durga is defenseless against the human-demons around her and destroys herself instead. Given that the rhetoric around communal riots views the orgies of violence as expressions of deep-rooted religious feelings acted out publicly in the name of God, this metaphorical death of god adds an ironic twist.

The narrative also captures Sudam’s pain at the loss of his wife. The unraveling of his life is steeped in pathos:

They are all lying to him. They just want more money, and then they’ll let her go. She’s alive. She’s here, somewhere. … [Sudam] looks for Durga in the wooded areas around town. Is that her? … Maybe not, suddenly something occurs to him. He turns around and returns to the stationmaster’s house. … “Sahib, you know where she is, please tell me. I’ll take her to Calcutta for a dip in the Ganges and purification. I’ll bring her back to the faith. She cried so much the day I left.” … He is back the next day again Ma-jaan, I’ll become Muslim. Then they’ll return her to me. Please go tell them that. A Muslim won’t keep another Muslim’s wife in his home. They’ll return her. Ma-jaan, you’re my mother. Please explain this to the sahib. She isn’t dead. She pleaded with me to return soon.” … Sudam leaves. He searches for her everywhere, day and night. Maybe she’s gone in the direction he just came from. The men took her there. He turns around and retraces his steps. There are so many people arriving at the border every day. So many people. So many women. There, that slender young woman. Fair-skinned. Feet lined with alta, sindoor in the parting, chewing paan. Yes, that one’s Durga. He yells, “Durga, hey Dugga.” He steps forward. No. Not her. Late in the night he lies down at the train station, fatigued. But before dawn, he wakes up with a start. He gets up in the dark. Perhaps today’s the day he’ll find Durga.⁸

Sudam is traumatized, a man who is slowly becoming unhinged by the loss of his wife. Because of Partition, Sudam has lost his desh (native land), and while relocating, his wife, and most recently, is losing his sanity. In other words, he has been divested of his homeland, his family, and the self (and of god). Both he and Gandhi are responding to similar situations: women’s pre-emptive suicide to avert violation, and yet, their reactions could not be more different. Unlike Gandhi, Sudam expresses no joy in Durga’s preservation of her purity. For him, there is no solace in abstractions such as honor, heroism, or patriotism. Gandhi’s somewhat indifferent attitude towards the fact of the deaths (“Whoever might have died are dead and gone”) is replaced here with Sudam’s profound sadness. His is a much more compassionate response.

My purpose in this brief examination of Jyotirmoyee Devi’s short story “Epar Ganga Opar Ganga” is twofold. First, to set it as a literary counterpoint to Gandhi’s influential stance. Second, to suggest how the author offers Sudam’s acceptance of the possibility of his wife’s violation as a model for the community to emulate: His plans to “redeem” Durga through the performance of Hindu expiatory rituals suggests that he has considered the possibility of her violation and conversion, and is prepared to handle it. (He is even prepared to convert to Islam, if that is the only way she will be restored to him.) Sudam’s willingness to reinstate her in his life diverges sharply with the experience of many women and girls who were deemed unacceptable by their kin and community because they had been abducted during the Partition riots and had often lived among Muslims until their repatriation.

The experience of the latter group of women – women who were abducted and/or violated and later restored to their families – constitutes the locus of the discussion in this chapter. While in Gandhi’s speech and elsewhere,⁹ women who committed pre-emptive suicide were celebrated as martyrs, women who survived the assault on their bodies were subject to contempt. Rajinder Singh Bedi’s short story “Lajwanti” (1951) presents the reactions of family members of abducted and missing women after some are “rescued” from Pakistan:

Why did they not die? Why did they not take poison to save their chastity? Why didn’t they jump into a well to save their honour? They were cowards who basely and desperately clung to life. Why, thousands of women had killed themselves before they could be forced to yield their honour and chastity? … One of the women, whose husband would not take her back, vacantly mumbled her own name to herself: Suhagwati, the married one…. Another, seeing her brother in the crowd, cried out: “You do not seem to recognize me Behari, but I have taken you in my lap and [played with you when you were] a child.”¹⁰

Through a reading of Jyotirmoyee Devi’s novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga¹¹ (translated as The River Churning, 1968) and Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti,” this chapter examines the difficult circumstances of survivor-women. But first, the chapter traces how in this moment of intense communal rivalries and anxiety around national honor, the presence of the violated woman is seen as devaluing the national image, necessitating her exclusion from the national community. After contextualizing the desertion of violated women within the social production of a discourse of honor and of women’s sexual purity, I analyze Epar Ganga Opar Ganga as a representative text of women’s experience of social hostility at home and in their communities following their violation and subsequent repatriation. The novel confronts directly the costs of an ideology concerning women’s chastity with which members of the community were familiar. The violated woman lost, or was at least threatened with the loss of, her personhood through the violent event and in the social death that followed. Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings measure the costs of that ideology. The chapter then proceeds to examine the condition of women whose post-repatriation experience was seemingly different, women whose family members “accepted” them. Using Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti” the discussion uncovers the complicated nature of this acceptance.

Partition’s women: “recovered” by the state, rejected in the community

Appeals to families by Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to rehabilitate victimized members,¹² state-sponsored homes for “unattached women,” and studies by feminist historians and ethnographers drawing upon oral histories and official records all testify to the prevalence of the practice of rejecting abducted and/or violated women in the years following Partition.¹³ The rejections of abducted and violated women cannot be disengaged from the social production of a discourse of honor and, especially, of women’s sexual purity. Imbricated in a program of Hindu cultural nationalism beginning in the nineteenth century, the discourse of women’s chastity was deployed to counter issues of foreign domination.¹⁴ (The ideologization of an inviolate, and inviolable, national space anchored in the purity of the “new” woman shielded masculine proto-nationalism from the narration of its failures, and simultaneously, provided proto-nationalists with the project of fashioning a new masculinity.) Confined to the private sphere elite women were considered unsullied by British colonization. Their chastity thus became a critical site of elite symbolic economies, a site of pedagogy and mobilization for an embryonic collective political identity. Here was a highly elaborate process of myth-making whereby feminine sexual purity became the transcendental signifier of national virtue. From this period of early nationalism first emerges the figure of the chaste upper-caste, upper- and middle-class Hindu woman. And in her role as Wife and Mother, the Hindu woman was destined to function as the supreme emblem of a consolidated Hindu selfhood. This did not simply grow out of some social pathology. Rather, it was embedded in the macrosociological dynamics of colonialism and culture, wherein the central struggle was for control over state apparatuses, property, and the law.

Reformist and revivalist brands of Hindu cultural nationalism did not, of course, invent the concept of chastity. The discursive production of sexual purity as part of a political ideology of gender dates back (in India) at least to the time of the Manavadharmasastra (c. 100 CE). The newness was the political privilege – the immense prestige and visibility – chastity acquired in the shift from a principle of governance to a political prerequisite for belonging. Sexual purity became the locus for a discursive contest over manhood, nationhood, and ideal citizenship, the site on which Indian identity itself was poised. It enabled the colonized Indian man, nettled by criticisms of effeteness and effeminacy from the colonizers, to recuperate in some measure his threatened masculinity.¹⁵ It was by extending a pledge of fierce protection and regulation of women’s chastity, the logic runs, that they exercised a guardianship that they had failed to perform over the country.

The Partition riots of 1946–47 and the destabilization of inter-community relations that they entailed also treated women’s bodies as a site for the performance of communal identity. According to the same patriarchal logic that resulted in the mass rape of women from the rival religious community (Muslim), for Hindu and Sikh women purity became a political prerequisite for belonging in the new nation.¹⁶ And women who “forfeited” it through intimacy with the Other, even when such acts were coerced, were punished through their kins’ refusal to reintegrate them within the family-fold, a metonymy for exclusion from the national community. The woman’s body thus functioned as a boundary protecting the nation and the community’s collaborative interests. Addressing the violence that primed the nexus between the purity-requirement and the nation, Sangeeta Ray notes that:

The raped female body encompasses the sexual economy of desire that is denied the mythologization of the purity of one’s own ethnic, religious, and national gendered subject. The inevitability of rape leaves women with the “choice” of committing suicide so that she can be accommodated within the narrative of the nation as legitimate and pure, albeit dead, citizen. Those who survive rape are refused entry into the domestic space of the new nation. … The purity of the family mirrors the purity of the nation, and the raped woman cannot be the vehicle of the familial metaphor that enables the narration of the nation.¹⁷

While the violation of women by the rival “other” during ethnic/civil/national conflicts is common, what is unusual in the case of South Asia is the rejection of women by their families and communities. For instance, in the victim-survivor testimonies Hyunah Yang has collected from Korean military comfort women, one woman says:

My tribulations remain buried deep in my heart. Now I have reported to the Korean Council and I take part in various activities. But I am anxious in case anyone recognizes me...