Pallavi Chakravarty Ghoshal
(Pallavi teaches history at Ambedkar University, and can be reached at pal_phd@yahoo.co.uk)
Nearly a
decade ago Gargi Chakravartty coined a new term in the historiography of
partition studies in India—the ‘Refugee woman’. Before this intervention Urvashi
Butalia, made a pioneering breakthrough in bringing out the voices of the women
who had suffered the trauma of partition and who had for long been neglected in
the study of independence and partition of the subcontinent. Partition history
had till then been a study of ‘high-politics’ alone, neglecting what is now
seen as the ‘human dimension’ of this greatest human tragedy experienced in the
Indian subcontinent. Scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin,
Gargi Chakravartty and Veena Das altered the course of partition historiography
in India by introducing a gendered analysis of this traumatic episode in the
subcontinent’s history.
This article discusses the two images perceived
of the post-partition refugee-woman in the Indian subcontinent: that of the
victim, and that of the one who survived it all. Finally, I critically assess such
perceptions regarding the refugee-woman, by raising the following questions: how
did she perceive these roles assigned to her by the exigencies of the
situation? Was she a willing participant to these roles or did she simply take
these roles upon herself based on the dictates of the family, society, and
nation?
The Refugee-woman
as the Victim:
Women
were abducted, forcibly converted to the other religion, raped, and killed by
the men of the ‘other’ community in the name of religion, as a message to the
rival community. As noted by Urvashi Butalia, such an assault upon the body of
the woman, was not an attack upon the woman alone, rather it was an attack upon
the family, community, and nation of the woman. Thus, the body of the woman did
not belong just to her, but it epitomised the trinity of family, community, and
nation.
However, the violence did not just end there,
as the erstwhile protectors of the woman, now became her tormentors as well.
The notion of honour diluted all notions of love and belonging, as now fathers,
brothers, husbands, took upon themselves the responsibility of preventing the
defiling of family honour and killed their own daughters, sisters, and wives,
to save this ‘honour’ of the family, community, and nation. It is this very
skewed notion of honour, that brought feelings of sorrow or anger instead of
joy and relief upon a family when their daughter was returned to them by the
efforts of a government-sponsored recovery and restoration project undertaken
for abducted persons (children below the age of 14 and women of all ages). It
is this very notion of honour which makes the Punjabi Hindu refugee proudly
narrate stories of how the brave women of Punjab, of their families, ‘chose’
death over abduction/rape/forcible conversion to Islam, while, despite much
prodding, they remain silent or feign ignorance about the women who survived
this torment, deep within some also felt why did these ‘shameless’ women not
die? Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti and Amrita Pritam’s Puro, in different
ways, epitomise these silent voices of the woman who were ‘restored’ and yet
not accepted within their own family and home.
In
Bengal, women were victims of not only direct violence but also subtle and
discreet forms of violence. Any memoir of the Bengali bhadramahila during these troubled times would show how the routine
violence was even more difficult to bear than the experience of direct
violence. A first-hand account of this omnipresent fear in the minds of the
Hindu women can be observed in Nalini Mitra’s statements: ‘It became
increasingly difficult for me to pass through a locality infested (sic) by
Bihari Muslims on my way to college.’ But it was only when in the workplace
too, she heard obscene remarks being directed towards her, that she realised it
was time to leave—‘At that instant I realised that it would no longer be
possible to stay in my beloved motherland. How could one live in such a filthy
environment?’[1]
The Refugee-woman
as a Survivor:
This was
the new image of the refugee woman which recent scholarship has unearthed, and
this comes from a use of non-conventional sources and a re-reading of the
conventional archive. However, it was not an altogether unexplored area as
Bengali literary works and cinema had brought this aspect to light in the
1960’s itself. At a time, when narratives of gruesome and inconceivable
violence from the west was dominating all popular memory in the works of Sadat
Hasan Manto, Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud
Capped Star), a novel by Shaktipada Rajguru, later brilliantly translated
into a cult partition movie by the same name by Ritwik Ghatak, started bringing
a change of perspective vis-a-vis partition and the refugee-women. It is this
film which set scholars to find the many lost Nitas (the protagonist in the film: a refugee-woman who becomes the
sole breadwinner of the family in post-partition Calcutta and in the process
gives up her own desires and ultimately dies in the end). Hereafter, many such
narratives of women giving up their own personal wishes, and becoming the sole
breadwinners of the family started pouring out. Manikuntala Sen, in her memoir,
notes that it was the women from East Bengal who taught the women of West
Bengal to get educated and employed.[2] A survey
conducted by the Directorate of National Employment Service, West Bengal, shows
that in the post-partition period there was an increase in the demand for
employment among women.[3]Similar
narratives of the refugee woman from West Pakistan also started coming up.
The Problem:
However,
was it always a happy story of women empowerment at the end of a traumatic
experience? Did these women ‘choose’ this life? Did it bring them the
empowerment which is often assumed in these narratives? Was partition truly
that violent break which set women upon a different path of their own? These
are some questions one wonders when talking of this refugee-woman who became
the sole earning member of the family.
Meghe
Dhaka Tara, the novel as well as the film, do not conceal the fact that
Nita had a few desires of her own—be it higher education, marriage, motherhood,
and perhaps something as basic as slippers for her feet or to visit the
mountains, however with her father getting incapacitated, brothers not earning
enough, she took upon herself to sacrifice all her wants and keep the family
alive with her earnings. But the final scene in the movie, makes us ponder
whether at all she wanted to make all such sacrifices or not—‘Dada, ami bachte chai!’ [ Dada, I want
to live][4]
Not all such narratives ended on a sad
note, Bithi Chakravarti, would be a case in point. Like Nita, she too, was the
sole breadwinner in the family and kept refusing marriage till her family had
become financially stable. Unlike Nita, her partner waited for her and
eventually they did marry.[5] But did
she go back to work after marriage? This has not been explored.
Asok
Mitra problematises this idea of the woman’s ‘choice’ i.e. her willingness to
take up the entire burden of the family upon herself, most poignantly in the
following words—‘She has nothing to look forward to, she has nothing to
plan for, except the short term arithmetic of how much to try to borrow from
which neighbour or school colleague… [brothers would waste away the money
earned by her in expensive restaurants, but she could not] for she was the leading earner in the family, and the
entire salary she meticulously hands over to her mother. Nobody cares to ask
how many saris she has…There is no question of marriage… you need a minimal
glow of health even for divertissements like
that. This Bengali girl is nobody’s desire… she has nothing to look forward to,
spinsterdom, give or take a few years, is going to set in early…’[6]
An
Annual Report of the Ministry of Rehabilitation mentions that marriage was the
ultimate means of rehabilitating the ‘unattached displaced women’. One may also
note that under the Government of India schemes, it was the family which was a
unit of rehabilitation, not the individual. And families were further divided
into those headed by the ‘able-bodied males’ those which were headed by ‘women’.
The latter came under various categories of permanent liability and were taken
care of in the permanent liability camps. If at all there was an individual
unit for rehabilitation it was that of the ‘unattached woman’. Such women were
sent to Women’s Homes, but hereto, the final solution to their rehabilitation
was considered to be marriage. Thus, the patriarchal notion of state as
protector was not betrayed even in the times of grave trauma and travail for
the refugees.
Apart
from the problem of choice and gendered notion in the scheme of rehabilitation,
let us look at the issue of victimhood. We may ask can the question of survival
be completely divorced from that of victimhood? This woman had been inflicted
by the scars of partition violence and the misery of displacement. But her
story of victimhood did not just end there as being a woman she became the most
vulnerable victim of sexual abuse even after crossing over to what was being
considered as safety in the new homeland. Beginning from the lack of private
space in the cramped tents in the refugee camps to entering the flesh trade
(willingly or being duped into it), the refugee woman became an easy prey even
in these times which should have reflected more sensitivity from the public and
the state. The workplace, too, was not free from harassment of various kinds:
going to work itself was often accompanied by derisive looks or comments from
men directed not just to these women, but also to the men of her family, who
had allowed such a role reversal to take place.
Of
course, there are narratives of those women as well who found freedom in this
whole traumatic experience of partition violence and displacement. For many, it
was the first time that they had stepped out of the home and that they were
earning for their families.
On the
other hand, there is a class question involved as well in this glorification of
‘triumph’ after ‘trauma’. Women from the rural background and lower income
groups had always been working to supplement the meagre family income. For them
this toil was not a new found enterprise, rather, it was business as usual for
them. They had even previously toiled in the farms, or worked as domestic help
in pre-partition times. Their stories go unheard and unwritten. Even Rameshwari
Nehru, the head of the Women’s Section (a special Board set up by the
Government of India to look into the matters of the refugee-women) commented
that it was easier to resettle the women from rural backgrounds or those who
were not so educated as they were easily absorbed in the agrarian work or as
domestic helps in the urban areas, it was the educated middle class women which
were difficult to rehabilitate as it was difficult to find ‘suitable’ jobs for
them.[7]
Further
marginal to this narrative of victimhood and survival are the women from the
lower castes. The story of rehabilitation of refugees is essentially that of
the middle-class and upper caste refugees. Very little research has been done
on the rehabilitation of the refugees belonging to the lower castes, and among
them much less is known about the refugee-women of this caste.
To
conclude, this article has tried to present how the category of ‘refugee-woman’
has been perceived in recent scholarship. I have also pointed out to the
strengths and weaknesses of such an analysis and suggested further areas of
research on this theme. The idea is to suggest that while research on this new
category of the refugee-woman has certainly enriched our understanding of partition,
it has also made a very significant contribution to gender studies and further
opens up a greater avenue for studying the history of the oppressed in a new
light.
[1] Nalini Mitra (Director of the Refugee Rehabilitation
Department of the West Bengal Government) interviewed by the research team,
School of Women Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in Seminar, 510, Interviews.
[2] Manikuntala Sen, In Search of
Freedom: An Unfinished Journey, Kolkata, 2001.
[3] ‘Employment
among Women in West Bengal’ Directorate of National Employment Service, West
Bengal, November 1958.
[4] Nita develops tuberculosis and is sent to the sanatorium, she is
aware that she cannot live long and it is a final outburst from her where she
expresses this desire to live.
[5] See Bithi Chakravarty interview in Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan
Dasgupta (Eds), Kolkata, 2003, pp.150-154.
[7] From Rameshwari Nehru Files, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
Delhi.
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