Untold Narratives of Women:

A Study of Partition Fiction by Women Writers

Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University, Jaunpur

Synopsis
Submitted for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in English

Under the supervision of Research Scholar

Dr. Vandana Dubey Smita Jaiswal
Associate Professor & Head
Department of English
T.D. College, Jaunpur

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
TILAK DHARI POSTGRADUATE COLLEGE
Jaunpur (U.P.) India
Introduction:
In a country like India where people believe that God dwells in
places where women are worshipped, there are times when women
became worst victims of human rage and revenge. Partition of India was
one such event which was a typical male construct where women were
made the site of Macabre enactment. In this hyper masculine revenge
drama of mutual humiliation, women's bodies were the territories that
were violated by men of the other community. Like Draupadi, violation of
a woman's body became an expression of triumph and intimidation of
one community over another.

Present State of Knowledge:

The haste with which the British Government finalized the terms
for transfer of power shows the lack of foresight of a plan that dealt with
the fate of India. Mr. V.P. Menon, the then Reforms Commissioner took
just four hours to prepare the draft for division of India which was
accepted by the British Cabinet in just five minutes. Overnight India was
fragmented into a truncated India and a Muslim Pakistan. This left a sad
and miserable tale of oppression and exploitation in its works, the
consequences of which still remain with us. The journeys of Hindus to
India and Muslims to Pakistan were a series of horrific mutilations
suffered by people in cities, small towns and villages, in their homes and
on their bodies. People failed to reconcile to the decision of their mother
land. In a single shattering moment they became aliens to their birth
places. The violence, cruelty, exploitation, brutal massacre, traumatic
events, destruction of homes, abduction and rape of women, etc. have
since been the major themes with the writers.
Review of Literature:
The reality of Partition in the sub continent has been expressed in
the literature of many languages from a variety of perspectives and stand
points adding multifaceted dimensions to the corpus of Partition
Literature. A large body of Partition Literature has been written by male
authors like Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Chaman Nahal’s
Azadi, Bhisham Sahani’s Tamas, Saadat Hasan Manto’s Short Stories,
Kartar Singh Duggal’s Short Stories, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s The
Refugee, and Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajawanti, Intizar Hussain’s Basti,
Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges, Shiv K. Kumar’s A River
with Three Banks, Gulzaar’s Footprints on Zero Line, Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children, etc. This event has left such a deep scar on the
psyche of the people that it could never be erased from the collective
memory ever, particularly women's.
Partition has occupied women writers as much as men. Ismat Chugtai’s
The Crooked Line, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning, Amrita
Pritam’s Pinjar, Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, Bapsi
Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man, Mehr Nigar Masroor’s Shadow of Time, Anita
Kumar’s The Night of Seven Dawns: A War Novel, Manju Kapur’s
Difficult Daughters, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers,
Mumtaj Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided, Sophia Mustafa’s Broken
Reed, have invariably enriched the corpus of Partition literature in the
sub continent with their in-depth representation of women's perspective.
Many of these writers are themselves witness to this tragedy. Thus, they
vehemently articulate woman's experience of the event which compels a
different reading of Partition.

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Need for Present Study:
The need for the present study is essential because I believe that
History of Women may not be necessarily the same as the history of men.
The impact of a cataclysmic event like Partition on women was much
more different and traumatic than men. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in
their book Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition, based
on interviews with partition victims narrate the bizarre sexual violence
suffered by women like how their bodies were mutilated and disfigured;
their breasts and genitalia tattooed and brandished “with triumphal
slogans, their wombs knifed open, foetuses killed, rampant raping” and
much more about male savagery using woman's body and as an easy
object to dishonour the other community. Men forced their women to die
by providing weapons, strangling, drowning or burning them. Abducted
women, who were later ‘recovered' and ‘rehabilitated’, went through
different kinds of trauma. But they suffered silently and endlessly.
For decades these violent realities remained buried in silence,
though the memories of brutality never faded. Urvashi Butalia's The
Other Side of Silence is the first major work to exhume the personal
trauma of women in the Partition. The silence of women represents many
untold narratives of Partition. Male writers, though sensitive to women's
vulnerability in the context of Partition violence, do not fully recognize
and fathom the intensity of the traumatic gendered experience. In the
male narratives the focus is on the graphic description of the unleashed
violence and its various nuances where as women writers visualize
Partition as a continual process where memory is used to keep the wound
raw. Therefore, what cannot be shown through reports can only be
narrativized. The absences, silences, gaps, different kinds of psychological
deaths of women find voice in the narratives of women writers.

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Relevance of the Present Study:
Official and unofficial documents of Partition see women as objects,
not as subjects. The magnitude of this human aspects (woman's
experience) cannot merely be relegated to statistics. It has to be told and
retold to the world as a warning so that history does not repeat itself. It is
only through the exercise of re-writing history in fiction, short stories,
memoirs, plays that an attempt can be made to record the hidden
histories, shaming histories so long under wraps now being narrated with
honesty and clarity and informed compassion by women writers.

Chapterization:
The major thrust of the study is the depiction of women in the
works of women writers such as Jyotirmoyee Devi, Mehr Nigar Masroor,
Attia Hosain, Bapsi Sidhwa and Shauna Singh Baldwin. Jyotirmoyee Devi
was a tireless crusader for women’s rights, who re-discovered the world
through her pen. Her novel The River Churning is one of the rare
examples of a Partition novel in Bengali written by a woman. Mehr Nigar
Masroor points out in her novel Shadow of Time that all men were
bestial. The Muslims were killed because of fanaticism; Hindus were
killed in vengenance and the Sikhs were killed equally brutally. All these
communities made women bodies the site to display their hatred. Attia
Hosain displays a unique blend of tradition and modernity in her
writings. Her novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1967) depicts the
theme of decay in the fading away of a traditional family of Lucknow. It is
an autobiographical novel by a Muslim lady on the theme of Partition.
Bapsi Sidhwa, raised in Lahore and currently living in Texas, is an author
of international repute. Crossing the boundaries of her native place, she is
an unanionmously recognized as a cosmopolitan writer. Her novel Ice-

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Candy Man is unique in establishing the girl-child’s (Lenny’s) point of
view. Shauna Singh Baldwin is a Canadian – American novelist of Indian
decent. She moves quickly through the ten years of growing Anti –
Imperialism leading up to independence. Her novel What the Body
Remembers is an attempt to interrupt the pattern of silence maintained
by women and to make women speak as principal interlocutors in history.

The chapter-plan of this thesis is as follows :

1) Introduction
2) Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning
3) Mehr Nigar Masroor’s Shadows of Time
4) Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
5) Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man
6) Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers
7) Conclusion

Conclusion :
Partition narratives by women writers are not only strategically
structured to foreground women, but also show a marked deviance from
the structures of male narratives. For women writers Partition is not an
event but a process; not merely a “rupture” but a continual trauma; not
“repair” but the “archetypal wound”.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources :
 Baldwin, Shauna Singh. What the Body Remembers. India: Harper
Collins, 1999
 Devi, Jyotirmoyee. The River Churning 1967. Trans. Enakshi
Chatterjee. New Delhi: Kali, 1995
 Hosain, Attia. Sunlight On a Broken Column. New Delhi: Arnold
Heinemann, 1987
 Masroor, Mehr Nigar. Shadow of Time. Delhi: Chankya 1987
 Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice- Candy Man : New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989.

Secondary Sources :
 Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New Delhi: Cengage
Learning, 2012. Print.
 Arora, Neena and Dhawan R.K. Partition and Indian Literature.
New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2010.
 Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the
Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1998.
 Iyengar, K.R.Srinivasa. Indian writing in English. New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers. New Delhi.
 Kaur, Iqbal. Gender and Literature. Delhi: B.R., 1992.
 Kidwai, Anis. In Freedom’s Shade 1974. Trans. Ayesha Kidwai.
India 2011.
 Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Border and Boundaries: Women
in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for women, 1998.
 Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Penguin Books,
2007.