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Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded Re-Inventing the Metaphor: Women in the Narratives of Partition --Mithun Chakrovarty SDM College, Ujjire, (KA) I The departure of the British from India in August 1947 was accompanied by a bloody Partition in which it is estimated that one million people perished and over ten million displaced. The elation of freedom, on the one hand, and a deep sense of anguish over the Partition riots, on the other, left the consciousness of writers deeply troubled and created an ambiguous tension that provided ample opportunity to transmute the raw experience into literary art. An exhaustive body of Partition literature has been generated in the six decades following the historical event. Women were arguably the worst victims of the Partition of India in 1947 and endured displacement, violence, abduction, prostitution, mutilation, and rape. However, on reading histories of the division of India, one finds that the life-stories of women are often elided, and that there is an unwillingness to address the atrocities of 1947. 1 This reticence results partly from the desires of the Indian and Pakistani governments to portray the events as freak occurrences with no place in their modern nations. Literature can play an important role in interrupting state-managed histories and reading Partition narratives written by women writers unsettles official versions of Partition. They examine how the narratives act as a counterpoint to ‘national’ accounts of 1947 through their depiction of the gendered nature of much of the violence. The process of recognising and addressing the cultivated silence in historiography started in the year 1993 with the publication of articles by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin as project to recover women’s voices. This process of exceptional research culminated in the publication of path breaking documentary narratives like Veena Das’s Critical Events (1994); Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998) and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. These feminist studies on Partition attempted to collect and make sense of the testimonies of people who lived through these events drawing upon oral histories and official records. The entire process laid the groundwork for more extended discussions on the nature of sectarian violence, constructions of community and state identities at the time of Partition. 2 This paper focuses on the period 1980- 2000, the last two decades of the twentieth century, and attempts to understand the particular circumstances in which there was a spectacular effusion of Partition fiction by women writers during this period. The fictional output of women writers up to this point is rather meagre, despite the fact that women suffered the trauma of Partition in an intense way. This includes the first novel by a woman writer, The Heart Divided by Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, which appeared in 1957 (though it was written much earlier), 3 and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961). It is with the 1980s that we see substantial additions to the tradition of Partition fiction by women writers. The texts published during this period include Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980), Mehr Nigar Masroor’s Shadows of Time (1987), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (1988), Jyotiromoyee Devi’s original Bangla novel of the 1960s translated into English as The River Churning (1995), Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999), and Meena Arora Nayak’s About Daddy (2000). I have chosen fictional narratives in English and in translation (Bengali), both being considered for the purposes of this study as fiction written in English. The specific focus of the paper will be on Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy- Man (1989) and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning (1995), the former delineating the experience of Partition on the western borders of India and the latter as a response that fictionalises the experience of Partition along the eastern borders of the country. At the same time, the study derives some of its tools and insights from the oral testimonial project for the recovery of women’s voices seen in the documentary narratives mentioned above. These texts are framed within the tradition of Partition fiction, with Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957) and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), providing the fictional 90 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded precedents, while Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980) and Meena Arora Nayak’s About Daddy (2000) provide useful points of comparison as successor texts. This kind of analysis would help locate the chosen texts within their times and help in drawing out a female tradition of fictional writing on the Partition. There is a generational shift that is clearly evident over the decades among women writers of Partition fiction. Texts that appeared from the decades of 1947 to 1980 form the ones of first generation writers and those that appeared after the decade of 1980 till the recent present are categorised as texts of second generation writers in this paper. This kind of a division is made for the purpose of convenience in understanding the texts and the writers more comprehensively. This enables to understand the response of women writers to Partition in two different time frames, the zeitroman sensed by individual writer in different milieu. Some texts were the immediate response of writers and some others were written after thoughtful endeavour. II The first generation writers like Mumtaz Shah Nawaz (1912-1948) and Attia Hosain’s (1913-1998) novels besides focusing largely on the description of the feudalistic character of their contemporary times, do not move further than just portraying the struggle of their protagonists in emancipating themselves from the clutches of feudal and patriarchal ethos. 4 They narrate largely about the nation building process of the 1930 and 40s, the rapid deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relationships, triangle of the Congress, the League and the British. Both Shah Nawaz and Hosain do not deal with the Partition as a central theme in their novels. 5 However, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Hosain laid foundation steps to see Partition from women’s perspective through their woman protagonist narrators, Zohra and Laila respectively. Depicting the ways in which the lives of women in a feudal Muslim family were circumscribed, confined to the zenana and purdah, their protagonists are caught between the desire to break free of traditional norms and their sense of duty, as daughters, to uphold family’s honor and respect. The narrator-heroines of the novels are only passive observers of the political drama with little agency to be active. 6 7 Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning 8 is set in and around Calcutta dealing with the Hindu patriarchy, a critique from the Indian inside. It deals with the story of Sutara Dutta, a young Hindu girl who is orphaned by Partition violence and is protected by a Muslim family of the neighbourhood during the time of the pre-partition riots in a village called Bamunpara in Bengal. Though Sutara is returned to her extended family in Calcutta, her relatives shun her. This girl has not been molested, but all the same she stands condemned and abandoned as a social outcaste, is left to her own resources and placed outside all relationships. Undeterred by all the odds, she studies in a missionary school and becomes empowered. Even then the prospect of her marriage demands her to prove her past like Sita. The novel ends with a proposal from the foreign returned Promode who is ready to debate with his mother about marrying Sutara. The brief introduction as well as the sub - titles of three sections in the novel claims a kinship with the epic narratives and myths. The references to Sita, Draupadi and to other women in the epics, who were abandoned, rejected or exiled, comment on the continuity of brutality as well as on the falsity of vesting purity in a woman’s body and her moving beyond the confines of a defined space. Devi speaks vehemently about the side-lining of Stree Parva in Mahabharata focussing on women’s absent histories. She draws a parallel between the gaps in the Mahabharata regarding women’s history and the gaps in accounts of women separated from their male relatives during Partition. Interestingly, Devi names the final section of her novel as Stree Parva. 9 The conviction that no girl is ‘one of us’ as far as men are concerned is angrily expressed by Sakina’s mother, a Muslim woman sheltering a Hindu girl in the communal riots of Partition. She says to her sons: You want to partition the country, go ahead, go ahead; you want to fight over it-do it by all means. But why don’t you leave the women alone? 10 Jill Didur, a Canadian scholar on Partition wonders about the surprising gap in the narrative. Didur observes that Sutara's experiences during the riots are not represented in the novel which is so flourishingly evident in 91 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
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