UNIT-4

Women and Partition

1. Essential readings:

- Urvashi Butalia (1993), “Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition”,
Economic and Political Weekly, 24 April, pp./WS12-13, 15, 17, 19-20.

- Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1993), “Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and
Abduction”, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 April, pp./WS 4 to top of WS 5, WS 7-10.

2. Important points to read around and make further notes:

a) Feminist history writing on the Partition of 1947 has shown that it is difficult to draw general
conclusions about women’s agency during this tumultuous period. Nevertheless, feminist history
writing on the Partition has contributed greatly towards taking women’s history beyond
outspoken, powerful women. Such history writing on the Partition has ‘retrieved’ women’s voices
and engaged with the question of their agency to prove the incompleteness of Partition history
writing [pay attention to the discussion in Butalia’s article on where exactly the historiographical
neglect stems from – the fear of reopening trauma associated with the violence that
accompanied Independence-cum-Partition]

b) Butalia argues that our notions of victimhood and agency of women during Partition need to
be strongly anchored in the realities of the complex role that women were playing during the
crisis. For one, it is important to note that the women were not undifferentiated and
homogeneous, and that their interests often mediated through or often intersected with the
interests of ‘their’ men, community and class.

c) With respect to women’s negotiations with the ‘honor’ of their community, Butalia points to
numerous violent actions such as mass suicides by Sikh and Hindu women in the weeks before
official Partition. The agency of women who indulged in mass suicides are closely examined
and the historian aptly refutes the general tendency of not associating such actions as those of
typical communal violence. She shows that by projecting the mass suicide at Thoa Khalsa (a
village) as a ‘heroic’ act, the intrinsic violence of the gesture is projected as a non-violent act by
women. Hence, in the community discourse of both Hindus and Muslims, the myth of women’s
non-violence persists. [Pay attention to the discussion on WS 15 on the question of women’s
agency and violence]

d) Butalia’s work also delves on the construction of the patriarchal state in the new nation state.
For this purpose she closely examines the Inter Dominion Treaty which was later enacted as an
Act of Parliament. The clauses pertaining to recovery, rehabilitation and the definition of
homeland that were reflected in the Treaty stood in marked contradiction to the Indian state’s
secular claims of citizenship. Butalia argues that “even for a self-defined secular nation (India)
the natural place/homeland for women was defined in religious, indeed communal terms…”
Thus began the painful process of bringing back women who had been taken away by the
‘other’ community and returning them to their ‘own’ community and their ‘own’ homeland.
e) The intrinsic dislocation or return of trauma that such actions of recovery triggered are
discussed in detail by Butalia on WS 17 [pay attention to the way the nationalist leadership
addressed the problems accompanying recovery of women. Also on WS 19, see the discussion
on how through the mass recoveries, the Indian state emerged as the “central patriarch” in the
process of defending the interests and agency of men who had lost access to ‘their’ women in
the wake of abnormal times]

f) Butalia clearly shows through her account of women who resisted recovery that the agency of
the state and the agency of women were at loggerheads. This is precisely why the period is
shrouded in silence.

g) The work by Butalia also looks at the agency of women social workers who were part of
recovery operations. It is important to note how these women social workers moved between
identities of ‘woman’, ‘government officer’, ‘Indian’, and ‘Hindu’. There are variations in the
approaches of the social workers although all of them express sympathy for the dilemma that
‘recovered’ women went through. [Pay attention to the discussion on Kamlaben Patel, Anis
Kidwai and Damyanti Sahgal on WS 20] More often than not, national honor burdened these
social workers and influenced their decisions.

h) Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s work is also important for its close study of debates in the
Parliament on the question of recovery and rehabilitation of abducted women. The discussion
on how to identify ‘abducted person’ is an important one that reflects engrained biases of
parliamentarians like Gopalswami Ayyangar who introduced the Bill. Note that the final Act that
was passed kept getting renewed and major process of recovery went on till 1952 [pay attention
to the summary of the Bill’s clauses and the objections raised, which are on WS 4]

i) Bhasin and Menon discuss the challenges posed by families and women who claimed to be in
a particular country out of choice. [pay attention to the discussion on WS 7]. In their work, these
scholars also highlight the sticky question of children borne by abducted women and how both
the Pakistani and Indian governments agreed to identify such children as illegitimate, creating a
huge dilemma for mothers of such children. [pay attention to some of the Tribunal cases on WS
9]