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 âcommit suicide by poison or some other means to avoid dishonor ⊠suffocate themselves or ⊠bite their tongues to end their lives.â1 Gandhi insisted that âwomen must learn how to die before a hair of their head could be injured.â2 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 womenâs 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, Gandhiâs was an important voice, and his speeches had actual consequences for womenâs lives.4
In contrast to Gandhiâs laudatory rhetoric around pre-emptive suicides, Bengali author Jyotirmoyee Deviâs5 short story âEpar Ganga Opar Gangaâ6 (âThe Search,â 1968) evokes the sheer terror and loneliness of a beautiful young woman contemplating suicide as a way to escape her circumstances and her husbandâs 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 stationmasterâs 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 stationmasterâs wife urging her to hand Durga over to them. Although the elderly woman pays no heed, Durga is petrified, âshould she run away? But where would she go, they were everywhere. Maybe hang herself? Perhaps drown?â7 Sudam returns after three weeks, and upon learning of his wifeâs suicide by drowning, he is devastated.
Durgaâs 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 Durgaâs 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 daughterâs visit to her parents (in this story, Durgaâs 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, Durgaâs death by drowning). But whereas the divine Durga slays the demon Mahishasura, in âEpar Ganga Opar Ganga,â 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 Sudamâs 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 theyâll let her go. Sheâs alive. Sheâs 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 stationmasterâs house. ⊠âSahib, you know where she is, please tell me. Iâll take her to Calcutta for a dip in the Ganges and purification. Iâll bring her back to the faith. She cried so much the day I left.â ⊠He is back the next day again Ma-jaan, Iâll become Muslim. Then theyâll return her to me. Please go tell them that. A Muslim wonât keep another Muslimâs wife in his home. Theyâll return her. Ma-jaan, youâre my mother. Please explain this to the sahib. She isnât dead. She pleaded with me to return soon.â ⊠Sudam leaves. He searches for her everywhere, day and night. Maybe sheâs 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 oneâs Durga. He yells, âDurga, hey Dugga.â 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 todayâs the day heâll 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: womenâs pre-emptive suicide to avert violation, and yet, their reactions could not be more different. Unlike Gandhi, Sudam expresses no joy in Durgaâs preservation of her purity. For him, there is no solace in abstractions such as honor, heroism, or patriotism. Gandhiâs somewhat indifferent attitude towards the fact of the deaths (âWhoever might have died are dead and goneâ) is replaced here with Sudamâs profound sadness. His is a much more compassionate response.
My purpose in this brief examination of Jyotirmoyee Deviâs short story âEpar Ganga Opar Gangaâ is twofold. First, to set it as a literary counterpoint to Gandhiâs influential stance. Second, to suggest how the author offers Sudamâs acceptance of the possibility of his wifeâs violation as a model for the community to emulate: His plans to âredeemâ 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.) Sudamâs 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 â women who were abducted and/or violated and later restored to their families â constitutes the locus of the discussion in this chapter. While in Gandhiâs 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 Bediâs short story âLajwantiâ (1951) presents the reactions of family members of abducted and missing women after some are ârescuedâ from Pakistan:
Why did they not die? Why did they not take poison to save their chastity? Why didnât 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 oneâŠ. Another, seeing her brother in the crowd, cried out: âYou do not seem to recognize me Behari, but I have taken you in my lap and [played with you when you were] a child.â10
Through a reading of Jyotirmoyee Deviâs novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga11 (translated as The River Churning, 1968) and Rajinder Singh Bediâs âLajwanti,â 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 womenâs sexual purity, I analyze Epar Ganga Opar Ganga as a representative text of womenâs 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 womenâs 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 Deviâs 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 âacceptedâ them. Using Rajinder Singh Bediâs âLajwantiâ the discussion uncovers the complicated nature of this acceptance.
Partitionâs women: ârecoveredâ by the state, rejected in the community
Appeals to families by Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to rehabilitate victimized members,12 state-sponsored homes for âunattached women,â 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 womenâs sexual purity. Imbricated in a program of Hindu cultural nationalism beginning in the nineteenth century, the discourse of womenâs 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 ânewâ 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 â the immense prestige and visibility â 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 womenâs chastity, the logic runs, that they exercised a guardianship that they had failed to perform over the country.
The Partition riots of 1946â47 and the destabilization of inter-community relations that they entailed also treated womenâs 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 âforfeitedâ it through intimacy with the Other, even when such acts were coerced, were punished through their kinsâ refusal to reintegrate them within the family-fold, a metonymy for exclusion from the national community. The womanâs body thus functioned as a boundary protecting the nation and the communityâs 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 oneâs own ethnic, religious, and national gendered subject. The inevitability of rape leaves women with the âchoiceâ 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 âotherâ 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...