The Indian Partition in Literature and Films

History, Politics, and Aesthetics

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367322199
• eBook ISBN: 9781317669937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi asiatico-americani

This book presents an examination of fictional representations, in books and films, of the 1947 Partition that led to the creation of the sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan. While the process of representing the Partition experience through words and images began in the late 1940s, it is only in the last few decades that literary critics and film scholars have begun to analyse the work.

The emerging critical scholarship on the Partition and its aftermath has deepened our understanding of the relationship between historical trauma, collective memory, and cultural processes, and this book provides critical readings of literary and cinematic texts on the impact of the Partition both in the Punjab and in Bengal. The collection assembles studies on Anglophone writings with those on the largely unexplored vernacular works, and those which have rarely found a place in discussions on the Partition. It looks at representations of women's experiences of gendered violence in the Partition riots, and how literary texts have filled in the lack of the 'human dimension' in Partition histories. The book goes on to highlight how the memory of the Partition is preserved, and how the creative arts' relation to public memory and its place within the public sphere has changed through time. Collectively, the essays present a nuanced understanding of how the experience of violence, displacement, and trauma shaped postcolonial societies and subjectivities in the Indian subcontinent.

Mapping the diverse topographies of Partition-related uncertainties and covering both well-known and lesser-known texts on the Partition, this book will be a useful contribution to studies of South Asian History, Asian Literature and Asian Film.

Part I
Surviving violence

1
Quarantined

Women and the Partition¹

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

Introduction

Responding to the problem of Hindu and Sikh families’ and communities’ refusal to reintegrate women who were sexually violated during the Partition riots and later repatriated from Pakistan, Mahatma Gandhi addressed the issue at a prayer meeting on December 7, 1947:

It is being said that the families of the abducted women no longer want to receive them back. It would be a barbarian husband or a barbarian parent who would say that he would not take back his wife or daughter. I do not think the women concerned had done anything wrong. They had been subjected to violence. To put a blot on them and to say that they are no longer fit to be accepted in society is unjust.

(Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1994, 9)²

On December 26, 1947, he urged his audience again:

Even if the girl has been forced into marriage by a Muslim, even if she had been violated, I would still take her back with respect. I do not want that a single Hindu or Sikh should take up the attitude that if a girl has been abducted by a Muslim she is no longer acceptable to society. … If my daughter had been violated by a rascal and made pregnant, must I cast her and her child away? … Today we are in such an unfortunate situation that some girls say that they do not want to come back, for they know that if they return they will only face disgrace and humiliation. The parents will tell them to go away, so will the husbands.

(Gandhi 1994, 117–118)

And in January 1948, the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, also made a similar plea.³ The repeated appeals, the state-sponsored homes for “unattached women,” and feminist studies by Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, and Veena Das – drawing upon oral histories and official records – testify to the prevalence of the practice by families of rejecting women abducted and/or raped in the communal (religious community-based) riots of 1946 to 1947.⁴ Contextualizing these desertions within the social production of a discourse of honor and of women’s sexual purity, I examine the rejections through a reading of the Bengali feminist author Jyotirmoyee Devi’s (1894–1988) short story “Shei Chheleta” (“That Little Boy”) and novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (translated as The River Churning).⁵ Jyotirmoyee Devi does not raise the question: Why are women’s bodies subjected to a gendered form of communal hostility? Instead, she analyzes how women’s bodies are made the preferred sites for the operation of power diffused throughout everyday domestic life. She critiques the over-emphasis on chastity and tabooed social contacts among Hindus that led to their abandoning the women abducted and/or raped during the communal riots. In doing so, her work breaks the silence surrounding the sexually victimized women that has operated as an effective denial of their citizenship. Her writings address the representational deficiency in the social and cultural historiography of the 1947 Partition of Bengal of the large-scale gendered violence.⁶ For the most part, the locus of the trauma in research studies has been the loss of homeland, migration, dispossession, and refugee dilemmas. Unlike Bengali udbastu (refugee) fiction that deals primarily with dislocation, economic struggles, and wistfulness for a lost time and place, Jyotirmoyee Devi focuses on the society-wide repression of memory of the negotiations of national borders performed on the bodies of women. She repeatedly demands accountability for the tragic consequences of Partition, interrogates the meaning of Independence, and expresses skepticism about the gendered nature and class character of its privileges.

Jyotirmoyee Devi calls attention to the ellipses of history, and especially to women’s histories that are inextricable from the histories of nation formation but which have been, until fairly recently, only a few glosses in the margins, if not wholly omitted. After the feminist scholarship of the past three decades, the critique of the absence of gendered national histories might not seem absolutely cutting edge, but in the 1960s, at the time when Jyotirmoyee Devi’s short story and novel were published, it was radical. More radical was her embedding of these histories in the context of the national struggle at a time when the euphoria of Independence had not faded. The 1991 republication of Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings under the aegis of the Jadavpur University School of Women’s Studies, Calcutta, and the subsequent English translations from feminist presses like Kali for Women, Delhi, and Stree, Calcutta, vouch for the pivotal position of her work in contemporary feminist scholarship. It also coincides with the renewed interest in Partition since the 1980s.

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

Carrying forward the preliminary feminist research on Partition by Butalia, Das, Menon, and Bhasin, I suggest that it is possible to link the rejections of abducted and raped women with 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.⁷ Elite women confined to the private sphere were considered unsullied by British colonization, and their chastity was made a critical site of symbolic economies involving the nation, a site of pedagogy and mobilization for an embryonic collective political identity. That is to say, the nationalists engaged in a process of myth-making whereby feminine sexual purity was endowed with the status of the transcendental signifier of national virtue. (This simultaneously shielded masculine proto-nationalism from the narration of its failures.) From this period of early nationalism and high imperialism first emerges the figure of the chaste upper-caste, upper- and middle-class Hindu woman. And in her role initially as Wife, and later as Mother, it was a figure destined to function as the supreme emblem of a consolidated Hindu nationalist selfhood. This formulation of an ideal femininity did not grow out of some social pathology. Instead, 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.

The Partition riots of 1946/1947 and the destabilization of community alliances that they entailed also treated women’s bodies as a site for the performance of identity. According to the same patriarchal logic that resulted in the mass rape of women from the “other” religious community (Muslim), the “purity” of Hindu and Sikh women became a political prerequisite for their belonging in the new nation. (In the communal violence surrounding Partition, Hindu and Sikh women sometimes committed suicide or were murdered by male kin, and these acts – designed to thwart the rival (Muslim) community’s aims to dishonor the nation by violating its women – were lauded as self-sacrifice by the woman’s family.) The Hindus in India viewed Partition as the loss of territory of “ancient Bharata” (Bharata is the Sanskrit name for India). They felt that, even if the “diseased limb” of this territory could be sacrificed by the Indian National Congress leadership for the independent possession of the erstwhile colonial state apparatus, the women could not be so forfeited. And newly independent India’s “national honor” demanded the repossession of national property (Hindu and Sikh women) from Pakistan.

The events around Partition – the migrations, mass killings, and abductions – spurred the state to assume responsibility for the restoration of its citizens. To enable this, the Indian state entered into an Inter-Dominion Agreement with Pakistan in November 1947 and mounted a recovery mission in early December of that year. While the territorial claim for Pakistan was viewed by the Congress as an unfortunate practical concession, the Pakistani government’s demand for the return of the Muslim abductees was considered equally legitimate to the Congress’ own demand for the return of Hindu and Sikh women. The violence on the part of the state during the recovery mission often led to uprooting women who had settled into life in their new homes. This uprooting was normalized as benevolence, while women’s rights to self-determination regarding their future domiciles (and citizenship) were obliterated. The process of repatriation objectified the women as only bodies marked by religious affiliation, and placed these bodies under the protection of the state. In addition, the presence of abducted Muslim women in Hindu and Sikh homes challenged the state’s claims to legitimacy in the arena of international politics, and it was therefore necessary to “return” them to Pakistan. The women were important only as objects, bodies to be recovered and returned to their “owners” in the place where they “belonged,” a belonging determined by the state and which advanced the state’s claims both nationally (recovery of Hindu and Sikh women) and internationally (return of Muslim women). In this chapter, I use Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings as a basis for exploring how women who were sexually abused by the rival community in the riots of Partition, unless excluded from the nation, become representative of the fallen nation.

The accumulating histories of violence and social death (exclusion from society) in the period around Partition oblige a revision of prior periods because legislations around satidaha (widow burning) (1829), widow remarriage (1856), the Brahmo Marriage Act (1872), the Age of Consent Bill (1891), and the Sarda Bill (1929) were not discrete moments. Rather, the rejections that abducted and/or raped women experienced in the aftermath of the Partition riots seem less anomalous when viewed as the culmination of developments in the legal status of Indian women over the longue durée. South Asian gender historians have made detailed studies of the many tumultuous debates around specific colonial ordinances focusing on Hindu women. However, I urge the necessity for situating these discussions in a historical continuum. Nationalist anxiety about colonialism manifested itself in, and intensified, gender pathologies, and the discursive developments around chastity in the colonial and nationalist era clearly had concrete consequences for women, because their bodies were not simply sites for discourse but were also sites of patriarchal constraint and violence. The repudiation of abducted wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that nationalist discursive constructions of Hindu femininity held abundant scope for violence. Nor is this simply a historical issue in South Asia. The escalation of Hindu nationalist/culturalist sentiments in India urges a reassessment of this essentializing ideology for women. Reports by feminist groups on the violence in Gujarat in 2002 illustrate the transformation once again of women’s bodies and sexuality during ethno-religious conflicts into an important arena for enacting emphatically modern gender pathologies. The attacks on Muslim women, mostly of childbearing age or who will soon enter their reproductive years, and the murder of children, even fetuses, adumbrates a new and, in some respects, more awful form of ethnic cleansing and partition.

In the next section of this chapter, I analyze Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings on Partition as representative texts of women’s experience of social hostility following their violation, as well as of the suffering resulting from their rejection at home and in their communities. However, I argue that this early moment of her writings is simply a moment of breaking the silence. It does not proceed much further analytically than to produce narrative and affect around the costs of an ideology with which everyone as part of the community was familiar. The raped woman lost, or was at least threatened with the loss of, her personhood through the violent event and the subsequent social death that followed as abducted women were uniformly rejected across differentials of caste and region. Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings measure the costs of that ideology.

Unfinished histories: women in “Shei Chheleta” and Epar Ganga Opar Ganga

Born in 1894, married and widowed at an early age, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s life was largely structured by the cultural terrain of patriarchal nationalism. Although her access to economic privileges as the granddaughter of the Prime Minister to the Prince of Jaipur shielded her from the crises affecting the lives of propertyless Hindu widows and enabled her to pursue a literary career, she lived within the narrow circumference of rituals and prohibitions that ordered the social existence of women, and especially of widows. Embedded within this privileged social context, she nonetheless mustered a keen critique of the constructed nature of gender, and of the systemic oppression of women. Her memoirs, essays, short stories, novels, and poetry cover a wide range of subjects, from women’s histories, their education and gainful employment, and Hindu women’s rights, to property and divorce in the Hindu Code Bill, women in the Jaipur aristocracy, the condition of prostitutes and “untouchables,” to Partition and the war in Bangladesh. Her work combines insights gleaned from a hybrid library of Indian and European intellectual/philosophical traditions. In her individual capacity as a writer and feminist, she worked towards instituting women’s civil, political, and human rights.

Writing women’s histories of rejection

A reading of Jyotirmoyee Devi’s works suggests that the discursive developments around “ideal” womanhood in Hindu cultural nationalism, the responsibility on “the gendered and sexed female body … to bear the burden of excessive symbolization” (Ray 2000, 135) played a significant role in the responses generated towards the female victims of Partition, and that “the violence of the Partition was folded into everyday relations” and the events of Partition “came to be incorporated into the temporal structure of relationships” (Das 2000, 220).

Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings mark a negation of the patriarchal discourse of colonialism/nationalism by exposing the brutal and isolating practices that ritualized forms of purity demanded. The compelling question animating Jyotirmoyee Devi’s short story “Shei Chheleta”⁸ and novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga⁹ is not so much how state intervention affected the lives of women, but rather what happened afterwards. Both focus on the reception, or non-reception, of women in the community to which they had returned (or were returned) on the basis of the religion of their fathers/brothers/husbands. Some of the questions that resonate through both texts are as follows. Why are women who were abducted, raped, and dislocated by Partition repeatedly displaced after their “recovery” to boarding schools, or to hostels for single/working women, or forced to take to begging or prostitution? What makes their reinstatement in their original families impossible? How does the symbolic burden placed on a woman by cultural nationalism produce an immediate effect on the female body? What is the status of the individual detail, and does the specific case matter?

Charting the histories of women’s oppression acquires the semantics of a political project for Jyotirmoyee Devi. Questions of historical visibility or the denial thereof, the constitution of the political subject through history, and the deliberate evasions/perversion of history are central to her interests: the privilege of who gets to write, whose history is written, and how. That the state manipulates the process of the dissemination of histories – for instance, the state sanctions for undergraduate studies the work of historians with certain political biases while refusing patronage to others – constitutes the core of Jyotirmoyee Devi’s critique of the writing of history in the opening chapter of the novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga. (The project of history writing in the years immediately following Independence routinely focused on the overcoming of imperialism. As histories of the nationalist movement for the most part, these typically centered around a select group of ideologues from the Indian National Congress, detailing their role in the freedom struggle.) Although Jyotirmoyee Devi’s count...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I Surviving violence
• PART II Borders and belonging
• PART III History, memory, and aesthetics
• Index