From Patna to Detroit (A true lifelong migration)

Syed Saheb,
Very original, Meree ankhay bhar gaye ye Parr ke. Reminded me of a Sikh Woman in Panipat who came from Pakistan in 1947 and adopted a Muslim orphan of partition.

Stories like these make me wonder where Human Race is really heading.

Were you related to these folks?

Chowk Staff,

Could you not find a narrative written by ONE woman?


Sonali Jain

Cracking India: A Novel and Pinjar:

Women’s Voices from the Partition of India



his۰to۰ry n. 1 : Tale, Story 2 : a chronological record of significant events (as affecting a nation or institution) often including an explanation of their causes 3 a : events that form the subject matter of a history b : events of the past[1]



Hindu. Muslim. Sikh. These were the voices that were heard in June of 1947 when India, as if made of glass, was eternally shattered. However, the voices of more than 75,000 women that were abducted or raped during the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India were either suppressed or rendered indecipherable. The stories of these women found no prominent place in history or in government documents. Instead, one of the most pivotal events of modern history was evaluated strictly in reference to the acts of brutality and violence endured by women on both sides of the border and not in reference to the women. According to feminist scholars Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, co-authors of Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition,

the story of 1947, while being one of successful attainment of independence, is also a gendered narrative of displacement and dispossession, of large-scale and widespread communal violence, and of the realignment of family, community and national identities as a people were forced to accommodate the dramatically altered reality that now prevailed.[2]



Where historical narratives failed to give agency to the thousands of women devastated by the Partition, Partition literature and films aim to “make women a focus of enquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative.”[3] In other words, Partition literature and films allow women to be the subjects of history rather than the objects of study.

It should not be surprising that the historical narratives of women often differ from those of men; that significant turning points in history do not have the same impact for one sex as they do for the other. In fact, no account of Partition violence is complete without details of the atrocious acts of violence against women. Yet women are invisible

in these narratives because Partition histories, official records, and government reports fail to disentangle the experiences of the non-actors in the political realm (women) from those of the political actors (men). Most texts on the Partition focused on Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men as if no female identities existed. Partition fiction, however, accepts the reality that men’s voices cannot echo the pain and anguish that was felt by thousands of exploited women, and therefore provides women with voices that are able to speak for themselves. Moreover, Partition literature and films effectively capture the quality of women’s lives by documenting the experiences that traditional history would have ignored or dismissed. They depict the issues as they appeared to the actors during the background of that time, and as a result allow for the restoration of these memories and narratives to the texts of Partition. It is consequently these same memories and narratives that give Partition literature and films the feelings and emotions that make up the sense of an event and therefore provide history with fundamental elements of humanity.

The full scope of the agency afforded to women by Partition literature and film cannot be understood without analysis of the assertion of the patriarchal ideology of nationhood upon the bodies of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women, as well as how such accounts disclose the gendered nature of the experience of violence and therefore engender its telling in specific ways. According to Menon and Bhasin, during the Partition violence of 1947 the “figure of the abducted woman became symbolic of crossing borders, of violating social, cultural and political boundaries.”[4] The patriarchal notion of safeguarding the honor of the male as well as the honor of the community was located in the body of the woman and therefore upheld by monopolizing complete control over her sexuality. Because honor is constructed in terms of a woman’s sexuality, women become the surface on which men and nations can legitimize their own identity and create their own society. Rape therefore represents an ideological attack on men of the Other community as well as on the Other community itself.

Menon and Bhasin concur that a “women’s sexuality symbolizes ‘manhood’; its desecration is a matter of such shame and dishonor that it has to be avenged. Yet, with the cruel logic of all such violence, it is women ultimately who are most violently dealt with as a consequence.”[5] Women’s bodies were therefore treated as territory to be claimed, conquered, and marked by men of the Other community during the cracking of India. For that reason, Menon and Bhasin assert “in the context of Partition, it engraved the division of India into India and Pakistan on the women of both religious communities in a way that they became the respective countries, indelibly imprinted by the Other.”[6] Also, little was afforded to the men and the community of the victimized women to forget such blatant dishonor, because in addition to being raped, many of the women were branded or tattooed with slogans declaring “Pakistan, Zindabad!” or “Hindustan, Zindabad!” and/or the assailant’s name and the date of his conquest. Such nationalist rhetoric therefore stigmatizes defiled women and robs them of their agency and voice because they are forever associated with the profound shame of the violation of the honor of their community and men.

As noted above, political discourse during the Partition consciously sought to contextualize rape as a contest between two communities or two nations, thus transforming it into a morally defensible act and much needed political strategy.[7] As a

result, clear differences between the narrations of men and women emerged. Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, questions whether there is “such a thing […] as a gendered telling of Partition?”[8] Butalia claims that she learned to

recognize this in the way women located, almost immediately, this major event in the minor keys of their lives. From the women [she] learned about the minutiae of their lives, while for the most part men spoke of the relations between communities, the broad political realities. Seldom was there an occasion when a man being interviewed would speak of a child lost or killed, while for a woman there was no way in which she could omit such a reference.[9]



It is this formal, matter-of-fact narrative by men, however, that was incorporated into the master narrative of Partition. As a result, many singular female voices were assimilated into a uniformed whole that claimed to represent the reality of Partition. Women were therefore reduced to inconsequential objects in something that was so centrally about them.

The failure of historical narratives to depict women as central characters in the Partition of India can also be attributed to the fact that the spheres in which males acted and in which females were acted upon were inherently different. Whereas males dominated the socio-political, material domain of the world, females were restricted to the traditional, spiritual domain of the home. Therefore, women were seldom in positions where they had the agency to freely voice their opinions or make personal decisions because their sphere of influence still fell within the confines of male domination and oppression. Butalia confirms that the historical narrative, like the realm of the home, is meant to “keep women within their aukat, their ordained boundary […] their actions are thus re-located into the comfortably symbolic realm of sacrifice—their role within the

home anyway—for the community, victimhood and even non-violence.”[10] On the contrary, Partition fiction (literature and films) does not divest women of both violence and agency by actively remembering them solely as symbols of the honor of the family, community, and nation, as historical texts of the Partition do.

Examination of Bapsi Sidhwa’s highly acclaimed work of fiction Cracking India: A Novel, as well as subsequent analysis of the mainstream Bollywood film Pinjar, exemplifies how Partition fiction strips women of the many layers of silence that they were shrouded in as a result of the violence they faced in the aftermath of Partition.[11] Sidhwa’s narrative explores the complex roles of women in the religiously fragmented society of Partitioned India. Shanta, the Hindu Ayah of the young narrator, Lenny, is a character that is developed by Sidwha to illustrate the communal appeal of women, as well as the sexual tension that exists among women and men of the Other community. Ayah’s blatant sexuality attracts men of varying religions and occupations including Hotel Cook, the Government House gardener, the butcher, the “Chinaman”, the wrestler, the Pathan, Masseur, Sher Singh the Sikh zoo attendant, and Ice Candy Man. But it is also Ayah’s sexuality that is used against her during the violence of the Partition; once able to unify men of all religious groups, the Partition allows those same men to victimize her. Young Lenny even asserts how her awareness of religious differences was sudden, “one day everyday is themselves—and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah—she is also a token. A Hindu.”[12]



Sidhwa also utilizes a third-person narration in her novel entitled “Ranna’s Story,” in order to investigate the role of women as martyrs and self-sacrificing icons of communal and religious honor. “Ranna’s Story” alludes to the horrifying practice of female self-immolation analogous to the Hindu practice of sati (the act or custom of a Hindu widow willingly being cremated on the funeral pyre of her husband as an indication of her devotion to him).[13] Sidhwa uses the voice of another marginalized group in Partition narratives to recount the details of the horrific attack on a Muslim village by Sikhs, as well as the murder of village women at the hands of their own fathers and brothers. Ranna, a young Muslim boy, recounts

They have been over the plan often enough recently. The women and girls will gather at the chaudhry’s. Rather than face the brutality of the mob they will poor kerosene around the house and burn themselves. The canisters of kerosene are already stored in the bar at the rear of the chaudhry’s sprawling mud house. The young men will engage the Sikhs at the mosque, and at other strategic locations, for as long as they can and give the women a chance to start the fire.[14]



In spite of all this, the attempt fails and results in even greater carnage and bloodshed.

Although women are the silent victims of communal war, Sidhwa gives these women a voice and therefore a future. Hamida, Lenny’s new ayah after Shanta’s abduction by Ice Candy Man, is a resident of one of the many refugee camps established for fallen women by the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act (1947). Alleviating women such as Hamida and Shanta of the stigma attached to them by a patriarchal society, Sidhwa is slowly restoring their agency by placing the plight of these women squarely on the shoulders of vengeful men. Sidhwa locates such a refugee camp near Lenny’s home where, one night, Lenny is woken up by the incessant wailing of one woman. Hamida, comforts Lenny and sadly states, “Poor fate-smitten woman […] what can a sorrowing woman do but wail?”[15] Lenny, haunted by these cries, exclaims “My heart is wrung with pity and horror. I want to leap out of bed and soothe the wailing woman and slay her tormentors. I’ve seen Ayah carried away—and it had less to do with fate than with the will of men.”[16] It is this same will that Lenny identifies that allows Ice Candy Man to disrobe Ayah of her identity as a woman, destroy her modesty, and live off her womanhood by permitting her to be raped by butchers, drunks, and goondas.[17]

The fate of thousands of women that unfolds during the events of the Partition as seen through the eyes of Sidhwa’s young narrator thus affords readers of Partition literature an opportunity to capture the human dimension of that turmoil. Lenny’s story is not just a tale of what might have happened in a Parsee household in Lahore, it is the truth and the story of thousands of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women. Andrew Whitehead, presenter of the ‘World Today’ on BBC World Service radio, writes, “All these [Partition] novelists invented some characters and detail, but all would regard themselves as telling a larger truth, rooted in personal experience, about jealousy, betrayal, and the way communal identity blotted out their loyalties, and indeed any sense of shared humanity.”[18] Cracking India therefore succeeds in providing an audible voice for the many victims of Partition violence who saw themselves as “kut-putli, puppets, in the hands of fate.”[19]

Pinjar (Skeleton), the first mainstream Mumbai film that addresses the effects of Partition with the degree of earnestness and gravity that it warrants, states at the get go that Pinjar is “one such story [where] only the names of the protagonists […] are make believe, as for the rest, it’s the naked truth.”[20] Pinjar consciously lends a voice to

thousands of women who were raped or abducted in June of 1947 through the story of its central character Puro—for Puro’s story is the story of many others. Pinjar does not seek to marginalize the voices of women, but instead, seeks to empower women by giving their stories a prominent place in history. Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi, the director of Pinjar, points out that,

Literature has an array of remarkable stories about ordinary people caught in the inexorable vortex of events triggered by Partition. These stories deserve to be told in the form of films so that they reach a wider audience […] The Partition was a huge human tragedy, but while it has been reflected and documented in our literature, it has remained largely neglected in our cinema. Why must we seek to escape our past? Literature shows us how society should be and history tells us how it really was. Both warn us not to repeat our mistakes. But we do keep repeating our mistakes. That is why films like Pinjar are necessary.[21]



The film thus depicts people’s response to the brutality and carnage of Partition; it is the story of the division of lives as seen and experienced by one woman, Puro. Pinjar revisits the spirit of the time, not the high politics of Partition, by delving into the mental trauma of the people who lived during Partition. It especially deals with the psyche of those immediately effected by the violence of Partition—the women and their families. The film gives insight into the far reaching effects of Partition on the women’s families, refusing to be content with just peripheral analysis of the devastating pain felt by both sides. Puro’s abduction evokes very different responses in each of her family members. As far as Puro’s father and mother are concerned, she is dead to them. Puro’s father justifies his rejection of Puro by voicing his fear of ostracism by society, “How will I shoulder her responsibility for the rest of my life […] I am the father of three

daughters; fate took one from me and what about the other two […] He whose daughter is kidnapped loses all dignity and self-respect.”[22] Puro’s elder brother Trilok, however, does not understand the honor code that his father chooses to live by and thus “Cannot feel his father’s agony—cannot forget that [Puro] was his sister; [because] wherever she is, she may be, must be waiting for him but he cannot do anything for her.”[23] But Puro’s abduction and subsequent rejection also tragically mirrors the fate of thousands of women in post-Partition India and Pakistan.

Pinjar’s brutally honest portrayal of women during India’s partition also serves to restore feminine agency, for Puro is a symbol of undaunted strength and determination. Her desire to live, as well as combat the circumstances that she was forced into, makes her refuse to become a victim of her fate. Puro’s refusal to embrace her fate as one of the many nameless and invisible women of Partition is best depicted in her desperate attempt to regain her old sense of identity by furiously trying to scrub away the tattooed name on her wrist, Hamida, that was given to her by her Muslim abductor. Puro’s slow coming to terms with her new identity eventually allows her to embrace her new life and focus her efforts on empowering other women who suffer the same plight as her. Puro refuses to let other women become “just a mangle of bones […] another skeleton that the vultures have feasted on,” and instead seeks to rouse the damaged spirits of these women.[24] At the end of the film, when Puro solemnly rejects her brother’s offer to return home, she reminds her brother that by his wife, Lajo, returning home, “You think in her Puro has also come.”[25]

During the Partition, full-scale riots broke out in which millions of families were displaced overnight. But it was the thousands of innocent women who were raped and kidnapped as communal and political tensions were played out on their bodies that suffered the most. Partition literature and films, as illustrated by Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India: A Novel and Bollywood’s Pinjar, interlace the drama played out on the vast scale of history with the voices of these women. Lenny’s godmother’s voice resonates with the inherent pain and new born hope of all women who suffered the same fate as Ayah. She thus consoles all women victimized during the Partition when she comforts Ayah by saying, “That was fated, daughter. It can’t be undone. But it can be forgiven…Worse things are forgiven. Life goes on and the business of living buries the debris of our pasts. Hurt, happiness…all fade impartially to make way for fresh joy and new sorrow. That’s the way of life.”[26]

---

[1] The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1st Edition, s.v. “history.”

[2] Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 20.

[5] Ibid., p. 43.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Purshottam Agarwal, “Savarkar, Surat and Draupadi: Legitimizing Rape as a Political Weapon,” in Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, ed. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia, 29-57 (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

[8] Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices for the Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 12.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., p. 171.

[11] Ibid., p. 153.

[12] Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India: A Novel, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991), p. 101.

[13] The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1st Edition, s.v. “suttee.”

[14] Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India: A Novel, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991), p. 210.

[15] Ibid., p. 225.

[16] Ibid., p. 226.

[17] Ibid., p. 260.

[18] Andrew Whitehead, “Story as History,” The Indian Express Newspaper, 28 April 1999, (18 April 2004).

[19] Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India: A Novel, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991), p. 234.

[20] Pinjar. Dir. by Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi. 183 minutes. Lucky Star’s Entertainment. Bombay, India. 2003.

[21] “Will Pinjar Cure Bollywood’s Amensia?” The Daily Mail Newspaper, 9 October 2003, (18 April 2004).

[22] Pinjar. Dir. by Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi. 183 minutes. Lucky Star’s Entertainment. Bombay, India. 2003.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India: A Novel, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991),

This is quite an impressive write up.

Saminasha:
Good Point, but I think that you(or the author of this essay)is taking this too far under the guise of female voice. All the stories about Partition are sad wheather the victims are Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims. None of the male writers ignore the atrocities against woman.
Please do not make this sad chapter of history a mere Woman Lib Sod.

Hmm, lemme understand this...

Did not get along with Hindus, left India...did not get along with Bengalis, left East Pakistan... did not get along with Punjabis, left West Pakistan...did not fit in to the Gora land and culture, died thinking of Saudi Arabia...and the one charming person her grandkid marries is an impure Hindu called Subhash!!

Hmm, maybe I am missing something here....

Re: # 4

Where in Sonali Jain`s essay Cracking India: A Novel and Pinjar: Women’s Voices from the Partition of India, does the author show any religious bias? On the contrary, she points out that the violence against women during the Partition was the same, carried out in the same manner.

Secondly, read the piece again so that you can understand the main thesis of essay-that the gendered narratives of Partition should be told by women themselves. NOT by men who turn them into tragic victims.

This is really the limit, chowk. Extremely disappointing that you chose to post a piece that not only portrays a woman victim, but it a typical maudlin, narrow minded manner.

Re: # 6

Definitions
maudlin
adj

1. Said especially of a drunk person: foolishly sad or sentimental.

Thesaurus: mawkish, gushing, emotional, sentimental, sappy, weepy; Antonym: matter-of-fact.
Etymology: 14c: from French Madelaine, from Latin Magdalena, in reference to Mary Magdalene, the penitent woman (in Luke 7.38) who was often portrayed weeping.

sad but interesting. i am also wondering if the writer was somehow related to the story.

Re: # 6
Syed is only sharing a story with us. I am surprised at your displeasure with this innocent victim`s story.

Contrary to what you expeience in the West, Indi-Paki woman of 1940ies did not have same kind of openness and liberty. Woman of that generation are caring, nurturing mother like figures. This woman just followed along with th bread winning Males of the family.

Re: # 7
wtf

this is sad, if this story has any underlined agenda, it`s against the rhettorics of nationalism, the notions of pure and impure lands by people with various agendas. the men in this story were subjected to more violence than the protagonist, the story is only the implications of that maddening violence on their family, which include our protagonist. every incident in this story did occur, and if its maudlin, then thats how it is, im just a narrator.

and the family didn`t leave their birth place, they were pushed out through violence from bihar, then bangla. the kids marrying personalities of their choices, implies how trivial nationalities (so important for people back home) are for most people borned here, rightly or wrongly.

i can understand the nationalistic and religious rigour in gali mohallas of karachi, dhaka, bombay, gujrat. but supposedly educated and successful readers of chowk fighting over whos country is better, and the horrifying effects of partition on migrants as justified is mind boggling.

OMG...is this story really TRUE??? I wish i had known the Amma jaan before she passed away and brought her to my home for comfort as i dont live too far from Detroit, Michigan.

this story is probably typical of thousands of people. it`s called life.

and wtf is right, it represents naked truths for many that you simply can`t change, mostly because those who undergo it are either dead or in the stage of dying. don`t trivialize it with one-sided, and yes, maudlin, agendas. Did men not suffer during the many partitions? That son going off to kashmir, what was that?

interesting read.

you have mentioned the lives of only 3 of her sons. what about the eldest? and the 2 other daughters? assuming they are in pak, could she have gone to stay with them, if she felt suffocated in detroit?

Syed Sahib

This is a very good piece.

Syed Sahib

This is a very good piece.