Post-Structuralism: An Indian Preview - Igcollege.org

Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded
details of the atrocities that were done on women
during these riots.
In Chaman Nahal’s Azadi, Rahmatullah Khan
abducts Sunanda from the refugee camp and
rapes her in a lonely room. The entire scene is
marked by a sensuous relish. Arun finds
Sunanda:
Then he heard Sunanda weeping…. She was
lying on the ground on an improvised bed of hay
…. and he saw her legs. Between her legs and
top of her, was lying a man......The moonlight
was coming through the window in the larger
room and Arun could see clearly. She was still
weeping…. ‘Get off me now,’ she said in a tired
voice. The man did not move. Instead he started
laughing….. smugly, a high pitched, shrill
laughter…. ‘I knew I’d have you one day,’ he
said conceitedly. And he laughed again in
triumph and satisfaction. ‘You’re a beauty,’ he
was saying. 35
This rape is built up in a leisurely manner. The
cinematographic unfolding alleviates the sense
of repulsion or shock that such a scene should
create. The entire scene is suffused with an
element of eroticism and the reader’s
involvement tends to become voyeuristic.
Women writers refrain from depicting graphic
and unrestrained physicality because being
women, there is a sense of identification with the
victims. It is the violation of every woman’s
dignity and so they make use of stories as when
Ranna, in Ice-Candy-Man, listens to the stifled
wails of women in the mosque in Pir Pindo:
“Stop whimpering, you bitch, or I’ll bugger you
again!” a man said irritably…….There was
much movement. Stifled exclamations and
moans. A woman screamed and swore in
Punjabi. There was a loud cracking noise and
rattle of breath from the lungs. Then a moment
of horrible stillness. 36
Without vulgarity, the entire import of
the scene is conveyed to the readers. Thus
women writers do not present this gruesome
aspect of Partition through titillating scenes
which tend to impair the impact of the narrative.
The scenes are well placed and are integral to the
narrative. They are not superimposed. The scenes
are presented realistically without diluting or
sensationalizing the effect. The male writers
mostly restrict themselves only to the depiction
of rape, abduction and dishonour of women.
They do not look into their psychological impact
or their long term ramifications on the victim. On
the other hand, the women writers not only
portray the victimization of women but also their
mental trauma – their pain, suffering, endurance
and resilience.
Writing by women provides a critical
voice within the writing of the history of the
nation and seeks to explore the meaning of
alterity within the tradition of Partition fiction by
women writers. As patriarchy confers alterity on
the experience of women, female experience is
homogenised, marginalised, and subjected to the
norm of male experience. Literary texts, through
their recounting of torture, suffering, and grief,
rescript the essentialist narrative of a masculinist
fundamentalism that casts women symbolically
as the dependent, sexualised other in need of
protection. They also subvert the dominant
nationalist narrative or nation that regards them
as the communal other.
The tools used by the writers are that of
interrogation, introspection, or even a faithful
and clinical depiction of events of the past.
Partition experiences buried in the memories are
unleashed and treated aesthetically in art. The
archives of memory collected in literature speak
for the subaltern experience, which has been
overshadowed by official history. The different
versions of Partition question the engineered
‘forgetting’, the censoring as well as the denial
of experience. Experiences of pain seldom enter
historical records – they exist in the realms of
pain and silence, and are to be found in memory,
in fiction, in memoirs. To recover these
experiences, we shall have to turn to such
‘unconventional’ sources.
IV
The documentary narratives present
issues like the relationship between women
communities and the state; between women and
their families; and between women and their
men. It explicates the gendering of citizenship,
multiple patriarchies of community, family and
state as experienced by women in their transition
to freedom, and examines the deep complicities
between them. It interrogates not only the history
we know but also how we know it. The focus
here is on the marginalised sections including
women, children, dalits and minority groups.
The authors of the documentary narratives make
women not only visible, but also central by
looking at the memories of loss and violence.
96 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1