The eerie silence of the women of Partition

Women became soft targets during the Partition as they were considered objects to be possessed, branded, and degraded in a fight for power, writes Priya Hajela

Ladies Tailor

Priya Hajela

A lot has been written in recent years about the state of women during Partition. Historians such as Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia have led the charge but Sumita Parmar, Roshni Sharma, Priyanca Mathur Velath, Anis Kidwai, Sandip Kana, Pronoma Debnath (UT Austin), Neeru Kumar, Punita Gupta, Neena Pandey, Anifa Banu, Aanchal Malhotra and many more have written about the impact of Partition on women, most several decades after the event. Most of these historians have addressed the Partition in Western India. A few have included statistics from Eastern India but the primary focus has been on the West. This is because migration in the East was not in one ugly shot as it was in the West. It transpired painfully, beginning in 1946 and continuing all the way into the 1970s, well past 1971 when Bangladesh was formed.

Women at the time of Partition and in the period immediately thereafter were considered by the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation as either ‘attached’ or ‘unattached.’

Attached women were considered the responsibility of men — husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, and uncles. Unattached women had perforce become the responsibility of the government. This group included widows, divorcees, sex workers and most important, women abducted by the ‘other’ community.

Historians who have written about the plight of women during Partition have addressed the following issues and many more.

Abductions: Most historians say that abduction, rape and mutilation of women was an assertion of one group’s identity and the humiliation of the rival, something not uncommon in wars where women become objects to be possessed, branded, and degraded in a fight for power. How communities that lived in harmony in the recent past became rivals to the extent that they spewed venomous hatred on female members of the ‘other’ community is a testament to the power of the British to divide and rule, right up to the very end. There is documentary evidence that the violence unleashed upon women during the time of Partition did not touch English women or even Anglo-Indian women. This was a brute force attack along religious lines and women on both sides were considered fair game.

Recovery: National policy related to women who had been abducted during the Partition on both sides of India began with the Inter-Dominion Conference on Dec 6, 1947, in Lahore for recovery and restoration and evolved into the Central Recovery Operation from 1948-1956. This operation focused on finding women who had been abducted during Partition and returning them to their natal homes. Ostensibly, this operation was to have run on both sides of the border, searching for and returning Muslim women to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh women to India.

As it turned out, it was the Indian government, with the burden of the woman as nurturer, the notion of Bharat Mata — the maternal figure — and possibly the guilt of not being available when the atrocities were being committed, that took on an unnecessarily overbearing patriarchal role, taking ownership of all women who had no one else to own them. In most cases, women didn’t want to return because they had settled in with their abductors, and married them in many cases. Many were forced to return. Women who did return were often not accepted by their families. If they had had children, they had to leave them behind. If they were pregnant, they were encouraged to abort the babies, many committed suicide because they were made to feel that they had been polluted by their captors.

Suicides & murders: In the initial throes of the explosion of violence that accompanied Partition, hundreds of women took their own lives. Some who attempted to but survived have given first-hand accounts to historians of the circumstances under which they were forced to jump into wells or consume poison. Some talked about consuming afim (opium) to dull the senses before they jumped but because the wells were already filled with bodies, these women didn’t drown and were rescued. Hundreds more women were killed by family members. Accounts of the time narrate stories of whole families being shot by the patriarch who then shot himself. Some families died by the sword, the killer self-immolating. In many cases however, only the women were killed, the men went on to their respective new nations and restarted their lives.

Ultimately, just like in any war, there were heroines — the survivors and the fighters. These were not the women who killed themselves to save their families from the humiliation of their abduction. These were the abducted women who stayed with their new families. These were the women who came back home and stood up to their natal families, who survived and thrived.

These were the Partition widows who found a way to get what they needed from the government that had turned its back on them when they needed its protection.

(Priya Hajela is the author of Ladies’ Tailor published recently by Harper Collins India.)