By Anoushka Varma

Abstract

This article discusses how violence against women came to be synonymous with the Partition while also focusing on how the recovery of women was paramount to state-building processes in India and Pakistan.

Trigger Warning: rape and other forms of sexual violence, extreme violence, marital rape, necrophilia, emotional and psychological trauma

The Independence of India and Pakistan was attained with a devastating human tragedy looming in its backdrop. Independence came at the cost of the partition of British India into two new nation-states: India and Pakistan. This Partition wasn’t just geographical but brought along with it an exodus, mass displacement, and widespread violence in all-encompassing forms; ranging from wide-scale massacres to looting. One form in which this violence translated was violence against women. Women were abducted, raped, forced to convert and marry, and their bodies were mutilated and mangled. The Partition was, hence, achieved on the back of extensive physical, emotional, and psychological trauma of women. In this article, I will be elaborating on how violence against women was central to the Partition while also focusing on how the recovery of women was central to the process of state-building in India and Pakistan. It is important to note that the large-scale atrocities against women and their recovery in both countries were fundamentally linked to each other and a common theme seems to persist in both; lack of autonomy of women over their over body and their social, political, and national identity.

Voices of women who survived the partition and the extensive atrocities committed against them continue to be marginalized in the mainstream recollection of the partition. A gendered and feminist perspective of the Partition demonstrates how the horrors of the Partition shaped the process of realignment of family and community identity and national borders; especially for women. Complex social identities that existed prior to this catastrophic event were completely upheaved as community identity reigned supreme. Religion, followed by nationality became one’s sole identity. Collective community identity in the Indian subcontinent has been imagined through gendered metaphors, symbolism, and imagery. These gendered metaphors typically invoke community and national identities among other identities, with a focus on women and the feminine body. This was central to the way women were viewed during the Partition. The notion that women were the keepers and guardians of communal identity was one of the foundations upon which violence against women was unleashed during the partition.  The body of a woman came to represent both ‘her’ religion and ‘her’ nation. This widely held idea during the Partition was not tied to any particular religion or community of people; rather, women of all ages and religions were saddled with this unwelcome and unwanted responsibility.

The honour of the community was intrinsically linked to its women and their purity. Defiling a woman was seen as an act of humiliating and maligning the ‘other’ community. The honour or the izzat of the community was enshrined with the women as they possessed the ability to reproduce and hence, could keep the community ‘pure’ and flourishing. Sexual violence against the women of a community was not seen as a way of violating and brutalizing her or her body but instead held an ulterior motive. In the patriarchal and male-dominated society, this sexual violence carried a symbolic meaning that was defined by men and for men to understand. The men of the opposing community were nearly in tacit agreement. Their assault was seen as a way to assert and reinforce their identity and subjugate the other by dishonoring ‘their’ women. This renders women nothing but mere objects of honour and their bodies sites of war laid out to exert violence and patriarchal control over and to avenge the loss of community honour. Through the brutality of women, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim men tried to subjugate and oppress the ‘other’. Often women were raped in front of the men of their families so they could view the honour of their community being ruined in front of their eyes. Women on both sides of the border had their reproductive organs mutilated, their breasts cut off and were branded with ‘triumphant slogans’ or religious symbols of the community that had brutalized them. This was all done in an attempt to transform the women of a community as ‘useless’ as without these, they couldn’t fulfil their role of the bearer and nurturer of children, especially sons. The barbarity at the hands of men had no bounds as they murdered women in large numbers after brutalizing them. This brutality is poignantly captured in Saadat Hassan Manto’s story, Thanda Gosht where a Sikh man who was so drunk on his brutality and violence that he didn’t realize that he was about to rape the dead corpse of a young Muslim girl whose family he had killed earlier. Manto very eloquently explains how central, albeit unwillingly, women were to the partition by portraying how even their dead corpses weren’t safe from the hands of men.

However, Urvashi Butalia, in her extensive works on the Partition, also introduces an adjacent vantage point that is overwhelmingly overlooked while talking about the violence that women faced; the violence that was committed against women by the members of their own family, community, and religion. Many men killed the women and children in their families in order to “protect” them. This was done out of fear that the ‘other’ would abduct and rape ‘their’ women and defile them leading to the honour of the community being tarnished. These men and in often cases women as well, believed that it was better to be dead than to compromise the community’s honour. Recalling one such incident, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in their book ‘Border and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition’ record, “Hindus threw their young daughters into wells, dug trenches and buried them alive. Some were burnt to death, some were made to touch electric wires to prevent the Muslims from touching them.” These were seen as acts of martyrdom. Many times, women were abandoned or bartered in order to protect the rest of the family. While these acts were done in order to preserve honour, women were also sexually and physically brutalized by members of their own communities and families. Khol Do by Manto reflects on the former and shows how men took advantage of the circumstances of the Partition and raped a woman of their own community until she was delirious and a shell of a woman, disrobing the instant someone merely uttered the word, “khol do”. The latter can be seen in the movie, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. While in the refugee camp, Milkha Singh watches his sister getting raped by her husband. She is later shown to be washing her face after the incident indicating how she lacked autonomy over her own body even when she was safe with her ‘protector’, i.e. her husband. Hence, it becomes extremely complex to gauge who was committing the violence on the mind and body of the women as there were several perpetrators to a single victim.

The Partition was not the only incident that brutalized women and infantilized them. The recovery of women was done in response to the violence that was unleashed on women in the process of the state-building of India and Pakistan. ‘Recovering women’ was merely an act of covering up the violence that had been undertaken; an event in which both the newly independent states were an accomplice. Many women were forcefully restored; especially women of fertile ages. Restoring ‘their’ honour by recovering them meant a restoration of the honour of the community; communities that were collapsing as they lacked the manpower to look after the household. These women, who were abducted/abandoned, brutalized (and who had often settled in their new ‘homes’) and forcefully recovered were expected to help in the formation of the private sphere of the state. However, it is important to note that recovered women, if they were pregnant (many were pregnant and had children with the ‘other’) were only accepted by their community if the ‘evidence’ of their brutalities, i.e. their born and unborn children were either left behind or aborted. These choices were more often than not decided for her. The violence was, hence, followed by them being transformed into social and bureaucratic pawns again. 

Throughout the Partition and the recovery process, women were infantilized, in the first case by men and in the second case by the State. These two paternalistic figures deprived them of having autonomy over their bodies and mind. Women were not the ones who were deciding their fate, their living, their killing, their migration, or their recovery. While the Partition affected both men and women, women were affected differently and more intensely because of the roles, identities, and responsibilities that were ascribed to them. Women and the utter brutality of their bodies by different men, and their lack of autonomy were central to the Partition. The violence of Partition positioned women as objects who were possessions of men and, hence, they were seen as tools of retribution and retaliation. The partition didn’t just scar women physically but impacted them on a much broader and wider scale. The women who had gone through the trauma of being displaced, brutalized, and recovered were left helpless as their identities (which were already being socially inscribed on them; in this case community and national identity) kept changing. “I have lost my husband and have now gone in for another. You want me to go to India where I have got nobody and, of course, you do not expect me to change husbands every day,” Urvashi Butalia’s poignant book, The Other Side of Silence emphasizes the uncertainties, utter humiliation, and physical and mental degradation women faced during the Partition. 

The stories and experiences of women during the partition have often been marginalized or overlooked in mainstream narratives. Women were subjected to unimaginable brutality and their bodies became battlegrounds for asserting community and national honour, reducing them to mere objects. Taking a gendered and feminist perspective allows us to understand the profound impact the partition had on women’s lives and the complex ways in which their identities were reshaped.

About the Author

Anoushka Varma is a third-year BA. Political Science student from JSIA. Her area of academic interest revolves around Gender and Sexuality studies, especially the intersection of gender and sexuality with other social identities.