Bodies As Battlefields: How Women And Girls Suffered In The Aftermath Of The Partition
Over 10 million people were displaced when arbitrary lines were drawn in the sand to divide the land into two new nations — India and Pakistan. August 14 will be observed as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, announced Prime Minister Narendra Modi before the 75th Independence Day. But, the question remains: Have the scars of partition even faded to be forgotten so quickly?
For researchers and historians, it has been an uphill battle to document the turmoil people experienced during the time, especially when women are even more vulnerable during such episodes.
“Women constituting 50% of the population remain at the centre of vulnerability during violence reigns, be it communal violence, refuge to other nations, plight in their own country, repatriation and even during resettlement,” write Trishanjit Kaur, Nirmal Singh and Simran Kaur, authors of ‘Collection and Preservation of Painful Memories of Refugee Women Survived during Partition’. As death, pillaging, and destruction tore apart the new borders, the bodies of women too were used as pawns in the conflict. In most cultures, women are seen as the “holders of honour” and their exploitation becomes a focal point of violence when communities clash.
Women as war fields
As documentation at the time was limited, there are no figures set in stone about how many women and girls experienced forms of sexual assault during that time. In a paper titled ‘Community, State and Gender: Some Reflections on the Partition of India’, writer Urvashi Butalia stated that between 29,000-50,000 Muslim women and 15,000-35,000 Hindu and Sikh women were abducted, raped, forced to convert, forced into marriage amongst other atrocities.
The prevalence of practices like sati (where a widowed woman is pushed into her husband’s funeral pyre and jauhar (mass self-immolation by women to avoid capture or rape) stand testament to the fact that women’s lives were less valuable than putting the community’s honour at stake. Similarly, during partition, Butalia writes that innumerable women, especially from Sikh families were killed by their kinsmen or encouraged to die by suicide to “protect” them from being converted. In Thoa Khalsa village near Rawalpindi, 96 women threw themselves into a well to avoid being converted. Butalia reminds us that in all the involved communities, the men too, were perpetrators of violence against their own women so while there were voluntary acts, one cannot look past mass murders done under the pretext of protecting “community purity”.
The atrocities committed against women were far too many to name and centered around humiliation and exploitation. Some were stripped and paraded down streets, left to face blood-thirsty crowds on their own. In a more extreme turn of events, others had their breasts cut off.
Reduced to mere objects, there were also instances recorded of incendiary messages and religious symbols of opposing religions being carved into women’s bodies. In areas like Rawalpindi, Harial, and Bamali, women were abducted and then sold from man to man, explains Butalia. “Their youth is being sold for a few thousand, and lustful men, having satisfied their lust for a while, begin to think of the monetary benefit that could come from their sale,” she writes, citing Anis Kidwai.
For women in Bengal, violence took on a different form after the partition where assault, molestation and abduction by the men from the majority became commonplace, notes author Anwesha Sengupta in ‘Looking Back at Partition and Women’. She emphasizes that for minority communities stuck ‘on the wrong side’, it became so dangerous that families would send unmarried girls over to the other side for their safety.
Despite the magnitude of violence, researchers have criticized how little efforts have been made by the government to preserve the testimonies of those who witnessed the horrors of the separation.
Our history books spew numbers at us - the number of deaths and rapes. But who accounts for the lasting trauma that lives on in the people? While collecting stories for their paper, researchers Trishanjit, Simran and Nirmal observed that many of the children and grandchildren of refugee women were completely unaware of the pain and suffering that they went through.
After the birth of these new countries, both sides realized that there was the issue of ‘recovering and rehabilitating’ women. The governments were met with heavy opposition because this meant uprooting women from homes they had long been settled into in the name of “returning them”, completely taking away their agency in the situation.
By the end of 1949, there were over 10,000 “unattached” women in India, many of whom were not accepted back into their families over claims of being tainted. The lives of women were once again left to the whims and nonsensical rules of patriarchy.
Read more: How The Definition Of Women’s Freedom Evolved Over The Years
Leaving behind a legacy of pain
Today as we celebrate a ‘free’ India, the question arises: free for whom? Women from across the nation are still subject to sexual, mental, and physical violence. Those hailing from marginalized minority communities are still at the behest of men who belong to the dominant religion and caste.
From the Godhra riots of 2002 to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, very little has changed for women and girls who get swept up in communal riots. Rape is still used as a weapon to “emasculate the enemy” and cause trauma to the survivors.
As two nations celebrate their independence from colonial powers, will we remember the lives that were put on the line in the name of religion? From the fading memories of our elders to unmarked graves, there lies a world of pain that goes unrecognized amidst the celebration surrounding the birth of a divided subcontinent.
(Edited by Amrita Ghosh)
