PERFORMANCES AS RESTORATION PROJECTS:

“Partition changed the course of many lives which would have

otherwise run in their familial channels. It was in the

bloodletting of Partition that the meaning of Independence was to

be found by many ordinary people”, Gyan Pandey, Remembering

Partition1.

The set of events we call both the

independence and partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is

arguably the most important turning point for modern south Asian

history. Though India and Pakistan were legally established as

secular states, Pakistan was born as a Muslim homeland. As a

result there were mass migrations of Muslims moving to Pakistan

and Sikhs and Hindus moving to India. There rose a gamut of

conflicting identities, ideologies and loyalties for one could

not be sure of which nation to belong to. The imperative

governing British administrators and academics demarcating

“Hindus” and “Muslims” as two essentially different communities

was given tangible form in the census operation, the reform

agendas and the politics of language. This hardened religious

identities and manifested in the form of communalism.

Independence thus came packaged in genocide, necrophilia, ethnic

cleansing, massive uprooting and the collapse of a moral

1 Partition of India and Women’s Experiences, A Study of Women as Sustainers of Their Families in Post-Partition Delhi by Anjali Bhardwaj

universe. It is possible to trace the disintegration of the

society to the period when the triumph of perverted unreason led

masses to exploit and take advantage of the all-round collapse of

norms to settle old scores often beggaring their own friends and

relatives. Perpetrators and victims after years have tried to

obliterate their memories today so that not being historically

reminded they can jettison their memories and history itself, as

a part of a package that must be amputed to restore a moral world

or reconfigure life. A variety of submerged and conscious

political motivations had come into play, leading to the

victimization of the weakest and most vulnerable. Stereotypes had

fed into communal violence, wherein the body became the

privileged site for subjecting the other to indiscriminate

violation and disfigurement. Signs and markers of personal

identity such as circumcision and the Sikh turban became crucial

determinants of one’s being while women’s bodies were often

mutilated beyond recognition. Partition came to be irrevocably

etched on the minds of a people as a watershed, which brutally

severed them from their own past. The initial response of most

was disbelief, shock and bewilderment as the symbols of a new

nation came to be suddenly inscribed on the bodies of the cities.

Signboards across shops were re-written and the old names gave

away to new ones. There was almost an over-enthusiastic attempt

to write history anew at Pakistan’s moment of arrival.

Distraught in this geo-political flux were the

displaced refugees, the pictures and images of who in kafilas,

their belongings and their bullock carts have invaded our

consciousness of the longest human migration in history. As a

corollary, communal riots flared up with disturbing regularity

and the Partition became a metaphor for fissures in the community

that could never be joined. Exile became a condition that damaged

the spirit, drained away the content of social and ritual life.

The void that remained in its place could not be filled with

sloganeering or nationalist and communalist rhetoric. For most of

these families, this holocaust manifested itself in tales that

were told and re-told about friends and relatives who continued

to live across the borders, of visits to ancestral homes, all of

which created a yearning for a largely mythical, harmonious past

where Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims lived peacefully together.

Whilst the annals of nationalist history preferred to focus on a

celebratory account of the nation’s march to modernity in this

phase, the narratives of many such individuals got subsumed in

these official versions that we have been turning to as reference

points for our nationalist imaginations. Primary amongst these

lost stories were that of the women on whom probably the maximum

violence had been inflicted. It is true that history cannot

incorporate all experiences at all moments but it is crucial to

understand that very little indeed has been heard of these women,

of their anguish of the division, their euphoria of the newly-

forming nations in the patriarchal underpinnings of the history

we have known. Their tales are presently remembered majorly in

sacrificial tones, absolving them of their heroism and violence.

Today it is essential to turn from the nation’s accounts of

Partition only and look into the narratives of these individuals,

who were suppressed by a perverse silence in a growing language

of brutality and problematise the forces that had operated on

them. Rape, abduction, forced conversion and at times

repatriation of women are key memories with which scholars have

not dealt with adequately in their narratives surrounding the

transfer of power in decolonization. As historians failed in this

re-presentation, the task fell on creative minds of authors and

filmmakers who turned to access oral histories in this lack of

written evidence. A formidable task in itself, it is essential to

look at testimonies about communal sexual violence and consequent

communal indexes. Among many, one estimate suggests that 100,000

women had been raped on each side of the India/Pakistan border.

Through these chronologies of kidnapping, rape and repatriation,

women became symbolic markers of territory, communal identity and

nationality. The carnage that happened could not possibly be

rationalized by the nation that conveniently chose to refer to it

as an aberration and madness. While the violence inflicted by the

state was legitimized in the name of an “insurgency”, that by the

masses was simplistically an unorganized explosion of insanity.

The women however were designated with the project of bearing

multiple ideals: that of the community, the state, the religion

and it was on them that the burden of maintaining a pseudo, long-

lost honour of the nation fell. All these units gradually turned

into the most stringent forms of patriarchy that delegated its

task of restoring a false pride on the women torn out of their

homes, families and lives. This paper will look into

performative texts like “Chhalia”, “Aur Kitne Tukde” and “Garam

Hawa” to problematise the site and subject of the woman during

the holocaust of the partition in an attempt to seek out buried

narratives that have found expression only in creative

manifestations and not national histories.

“Chhalia” (1960):

Directed by Manmohan Desai, the film “Chhalia”

begins with a train carrying Hindu and Sikh women from Lahore to

Delhi being repatriated to India five years after the Partition.

The train was a crucial trope for all texts dealing with

Partition for it not only was it a major marker of modernity in

India but in reality also as it passed from one warring territory

to another; the train carried not just dead bodies but horrific

tales and rumors as well. Thus the motif of the train acquired

the status of a reporter, travelling far and wide laden with

stories and news of violence, death, separations and at times

unions, as in this section of the film. The compartment was an

internal space where passengers generally faced each other with

an enhanced sense of insecurity and distrust. It came to be the

foremost site where the flux of these migrations came to be best

articulated. Visual and performance culture borrows from this

reality that was and in this film it was used to unfold its

Shanti’s (its heroine’s) pre-Partition narrative and post-

Partition anxieties. She recalls to a community of women who have

met with similar fate, her days of yore where the undivided

nation was a lush landscape for young women like her, to indulge

in mischief and amusement. Billowing scarves and tinkling anklets

fill up the juvenile, merry screen space as Shanti delves into

the stories of this life that has been : of her wedding, her

husband and then finally the outbreak of the riots. The flashback

is employed to integrate the trauma of her “other life” and as we

roll into the present we are led to another crucial visual image

of the Partition: the camp. The camp is probably the most

problematic site where the migrating women were provided with

shelter and food, surviving in the regular hope that their

families shall arrive to take them back soon. Shanti’s family

also arrives but to ensure that she knows that they have disowned

her and consider her to have been dead for all of these five

years. They make it clear that their only daughter had killed

herself for she would have not borne the indignity of abduction

on her family and community. Her mother is silenced by her father

and brother’s denials and exercises her agency only in losing

consciousness and fainting at the camp. Immediately after this,

Shanti’s husband also arrives, who has come to her out of love

and guilt for not having being able to protect her at the time of

her abduction. However on knowing that Shanti now has come back

with a child who identifies himself as a Muslim, (the

connotations laden directly in his name “Anwar”) he rejects her

too for he refuses to believe that the child is his and

essentially Hindu. The unit of the family is completely

disintegrated here as one by one, the daughter, the wife is

refused acceptance or consolation for her traumatic past by her

father, brother, mother, husband and in-laws. the other figure

who has been crucial in every Partition text was that of the male

protector-abductor that comes forth in two strands of rhetoric

here: once in the discourse of the Pathan who had provided Shanti

with shelter after her abduction and the other in that of the

vagabond of the modern city who now takes her home after her

family’s disavowal of her. This character must be problematized

to understand the logic underplaying the male conscience at this

moment of crisis. As is seen in this film , so in many other

instances have we come across stories of men who had kidnapped

young women of a rival religious sect and community, derived

pleasure out of them and after having changed many hands decided

to kill them. There were however others too who after abduction

and perhaps forcible conversion and at times marriage treated

these women with kindness and in return the women would become

their slaves and pledge their bodies and lives to these masters.

In this film, the Pathan who had once rescued Shanti comes back

to the city where now she has been given refuge by the second

protector, the vagabond. The former returns with a vengeance and

wants to now abduct the woman he sees (who only happens to be

Shanti, the one he had protected five years ago) but is obviously

stopped by the new “guardian”. On realizing that he was about to

violate the modesty of the woman he had once taken to be his

sister he undergoes a catharsis that is almost utopian. Further

the vagabond now persuades the husband to take back his wife who

like Sita (the essentially sacrificial woman in Hindu mythology)

has never deterred from her loyalty to conjugal nostalgia even in

the face of prolonged rejection and humiliation by her husband.

It is significant that the family re unites at a fairground on

the day of Dusshera (a Hindu ritual of burning an effigy of the

evil demon Ravan and celebrating the triumph of goodness and

purity) where the whole community and the disintegrated family

have arrived. As the husband is persuaded into accepting back

lone Shanti, her family too automatically forgives her and takes

her back into the sacred familial fold. The film employs a

directly melodramatic mode to narrate the plight of Shanti, the

trope of peace in a fragmented society and her reunion perhaps

because it is not possible because this narrative cannot be told

in a realist mode or will not find a legitimate place in a

nationalist bureaucratic account of the Partition and hence must

seek alternate forms of story-telling.

“GARAM HAWA”:

“Garam Hawa”, directed by M.S. Sathyu and situated

in post-Partition India, problematises the familial and social

relations shrouded in the dark and violent shadows of the South

Asian holocaust of the national divide. Also beginning with the

trope of the train this time, the image is of an aging man

bidding farewell to a section of his collapsed family, which is

leaving for Pakistan. The film centers on the economic decadence

in India, the angst of the youth in the face of unemployment and

amongst all of this, the tale of a young woman and her hopes of

re-instating a normalized social and familial life through

finding love and marriage. The wedding trousseau thus features

time and again in the film that is laden with the expectations of

her family for a semblance of stability that perhaps can be

restored only through the wedding of their juvenile daughter. The

younger lot seeks love and indulges in romance against a backdrop

of the new “secular” nation turning increasingly hostile towards

Muslims and denying them scopes of rehabilitation into its

industries. The young man thus has to leave his beloved with the

promise of return and a wedding as soon as he finds work in

Lahore. His beloved, Amina does not languish in the despair of

separation for long and quite bluntly accepts the fact that he

will not come back for her, after pinning for a short while. Her

father decides to not leave his “homeland” for better

opportunities in Lahore but soon they must leave their palatial

ancestral house for they cannot afford it any longer, what with

their factory almost turning dysfunctional. The aging

grandmother, refuses to be separated and hides herself in the

attic, pleading to her son that she be left there. Her soul and

being have been consumed by that house where she has nurtured her

family, one that resonates of her entire life. To her delusional

self the rational of rent, loans and factories are nullified for

even when forcibly shifted to the new house, the old woman cannot

survive and must return to the ancestral house to at least die.

The young woman finds love again in a persuasive suitor but the

poignant moments of their love almost speak of the impending doom

again that their affair awaits. Truly enough, this young man too

must leave with his family to find employment and again the woman

is left with the promise of a return and a wedding. However one

cannot help but acknowledge the fact that amongst the growing

concerns of the father and the brother about the factory and

their business, the daughter remains completely unscathed in the

folds of this once-affluent family and is consumed by romantic

dreams of reuniting with her lover and marrying one of them. It

is almost impractical how Amina remains in denial or unaffected

of the situation that her father is consumed by and channels all

of herself into awaiting the return of her fiancé. The fiancé

does not return but his mother comes to visit them and takes the

hopeful bride to buy new clothes and discusses arrangements for a

wedding at length. Only much later the family finds out that the

fiancé is in reality marrying another woman in Lahore for she

might be able to provide them with capital and wealth which this

family cannot. Amina is shattered. Her whole being existed in her

romance that has now dissolved because in a society steeped in

loss and despair, opportunity and wealth must be maximized while

love, affection, attachment and social, personal and familial

tenets are obviously secondary. This film casts the woman in a

binary where she epitomizes only these concerns of lesser

importance and once they fall apart, she must die. The wedding

trousseau re-appears on the frame as Amina dresses up as a bride;

her face blotched with tears and looks into her mirror. A

bridegroom appears in the background but the figure fades away

almost immediately as well. Amina slashes her wrists and bleeds

to death in her wedding finery; a scene that shocks and unsettles

a viewer by its sheer and blunt violence and also brings to him

for the first time the violent aftermath of failed relationships

that were perhaps only multiplying in the post-Partition society.

The film ends with the father who seems to have lost his resolve

and has finally given into migrating to Lahore, with his young

son but neither of them finally succeed in leaving as on their

way they chance upon a massive procession which both feel are

compelled to join and in this they finally become parts of a

whole. The mother is asked to go back home as the men join in the

slogans and the film ends. Partition uprooted and tore apart

lives in the name of a political decision but the event was

revisited in communal strifes and remained as a wound that had

silenced a traumatized self and its voice. That voice of the

women in this film hardly ever appears and if so is unnaturally

calm, manifested in illusions of a romance and nostalgia. At the

same time one must realize that in failing to conserve familial

ties the violence inflicted on the women were no less for it was

on them that the burden of preserving the remnants of honour and

pride fell. When they failed, they sought despair and finally

death for themselves. However one must question if it truly was

the woman’s failure in conserving or did the nation fail them in

providing new lives as it provided new geo-political territories

to its citizens.

“Aur Kitne Tukde”:

Kirti Jain’s “Aur Kitne Tukde” (How Many

Fragments?) also investigates existing accounts of gendered

violence that narrate the ways in which the Partition radically

altered lives of numerous women. First performed at the National

School of Drama in New Delhi on March 29, 2001 it subsequently

came to other cities Mumbai (2001), Chandigarh (2001) and Lahore

(2005). The female body is dramatized in the play in order to

problematise the violence inflicted on it in the course of the

Partition and its aftermath. It stages the trauma experienced by

four characters whose bodies were appropriated for different

political ends. The play centers on four women: Saadia (who is

abducted, raped and forcibly converted to Hinduism), Vimla

( suffers rape and mutilation before she becomes a social

worker), Zahida ( who is forcibly evicted from her new home with

Kirtar Singh and remarried to a Muslim in Pakistan) and Harnam

Kaur (who tries but fails to become a martyr). “Aur Kitne Tukde”

is not simplistically presented to speak of the violence that

overshadows the national modernity but tries to configure urgency

and an ethical relationship to the traumatic past. Inspired by

Urvashi Butalia’s collection of oral narratives, “The Other Side

Of Silence”, the text is about two oral histories of Damyanti

Sahgal and Basant Kaur, one newspaper account of Zainab and Buta

Singh and one dramatized version of Jamila Hashmi’s short story ,

‘The Exile’. The very title of the play re-enforces the

centrality of disintegration and “fragments” (“Tukde” in Hindi)

must be understood as official histories that masquerade as the

only possible ones. The formal dramatic structure also points to

the fragmentary nature of memories that are explored almost in a

project of restoration of voices to history. It is a Brechtan,

self conscious narration of the gendered massacres during

Partition. The role of artifice and theatricality is fore

grounded in the performance and play to present the voice of the

subaltern Partition survivor as pure presence. The text by Jain

shows how conceptions of selves (as victims, survivors, martyrs,

perpetrators) are performatively produced through iterative

discourses of nation, gender and ethnicity. She circumvents the

liberal humanism that structures much of Butalia’s oral histories

by staging a presence constructed through mediated narration. It

begins with a brisk Punjabi folk dance by many actors taking the

stage and transforming it by their song and dance under the

context of spring in the land of Punjab. But the dance slowly

merges with quick theatre exercises through which the four

traumatic narrations are told. Traditional realistic theatre

frames are transgressed as the play appears as a self conscious

narrative that fore grounds the artifice of its creation. Thus

“Aur Kitne Tukde” presents the affective power of the survivor’s

experience and at the same time situates “experience” in its

discursive and ideological contexts.

The dance that the play begins with

melts with games and the shrill laughter of one the players. This

is the character of Saadia, who uses the charpoy (a bed or cot)

to recreate her facile life that had been before the nation was

partitioned. As she languishes in her despair and nostalgia her

abductor enters the stage and she recoils from her thoughts to

abruptly return to her sordid present time and space of being the

terrorized and apprehensive woman of Partition. Her body travels

a space in spinning and leaping as she goes back to her former

self and then shrinks again. The conceptual distance that she

charts through her imagination is manifested in the physical

space; also as she re enacts her abduction. The play explores her

struggle with the competing inscriptions on her body as she

dwells in a non-synchronous time, inhabits multiple worlds

simultaneously, thus pointing to the limits of the project of

conversion. She is compelled to re-invest herself as a Hindu as

is seen in this section that reveals the difficulty in curtailing

one’s identity according to the categorical, bureaucratic

production of ethnic identities. Through Vimla again we see how

the discourses of kinship and nation intersect in configuring the

“woman’s honour” and its relationship to filiative bonds of

community and family. This fragment of the play about Vimla

illustrates how communal sexual violence perpetrated on female

bodies attempted to fix and inscribe them as political artifacts.

Her narrative culminates, however on a more optimistic note as

her post-rape narrative at least offers an affirmative

representation of the Partition survivor. “Aur Kitne Tukde”

dramatizes the visual force of sexual violence through which

Vimla’s body is turned into a transactional text dialogue against

the backdrop of warring men. She narrates her traumatic memory in

a solo scene where she oscillates between her position of a

violated object and the subject-position of the master-speaker of

this sexual narrative. The incident of rape actually is

transformed into a modality for her through which she enters

subjecthood. Her demonstration as the social worker accomplishes

this as her narrative does not succumb with her violation neither

does she gives into the dominant bourgeoisie ideology of marriage

but instead leads a productive and fulfilling life as a single

woman. Her violation actually and ultimately enables her to

become a social worker thus re-writing the patriarchal narrative

of the social death of raped women. The third character in the

performance is that of Zahida and this narrative was constructed

from the well known tales of the Zainab-Buta Singh tragedy, who

lived in India after Partition. This episode of Jain’s Zahida and

Kirtar Singh showcases the violence perpetrated by the patriarchy

of the state in forcibly recovering and rehabilitating women

without their consents whatsoever. This section belonging to

Zahida opens with her leaving home with her family and bidding

farewell to her lover. This scene is deliberately juxtaposed

against another one where she has her back to the audience and is

finishing her namaz prayer. Thus it is established that she has

not renounced her faith after a happy marriage to a Sikh man.

This is when an officer enters the stage to announce to her that

Zahida has been ordered to return and be recovered to her family

back in Pakistan. Vimla enters as well, now as the social worker

in the “recovery operation” who convinces Zahida and personally

vouches that she will ensure her return to India and her re-union

with Kirtar Singh. In portraying Vimla as an active social worker

recovering “abducted” women Jain highlights the ways in which the

woman many a times assumed and conformed patriarchal norms in

infantilizing the abducted woman. The final scene has Kirtar

Singh absolved of all his Sikh identities and converted into the

Muslim man Jamil, pleading to the court to allow him take back

his beloved. Two pools of light fall on the couple as Zahida

refuses to recognize him and stonily proclaims that she is but a

married woman. Jamil rushes to her and wraps a bright blue scarf

around her body that is shrouded in a black burqa this time. Jain

almost dissects the organic body into sections bearing excessive

identities that have dissolved any other possible entities in the

men and women of Partition. Harnam Kaur is presented next where

the (in) famous incident of Thoa Khalsa (a village in Punjab) is

reiterated. This particular scene begins with children playing

around a slide who suddenly decide to enact the event of the

suicides of women in Khalsa village. When it comes to Harman she

reaches the floor of the ladder but does not die. The other

children tease her and she keeps trying to die as the lights

gradually change and the universe of child-play transforms into

an adult world. Harman is still trying to jump into her death but

now she is a grown woman. However she still fails as the well is

too full of bodies of other women who had successfully died

instead of being raped or converted and shaming their community.

As Harman lies in the darkened well with less fortunate women’s

bodies she discloses that a tiny part of her was indeed relieved

that she was alive. This catharsis interrupts the dominant trope

of women’s martyrdom where they bear the duty of embracing death

to safeguard their community’s honour. A couple of scenes later,

we find Harman sitting under a secluded spotlight and her son

Jeet under another one, at a distance. The son carries with him a

lingering sense of his mother’s cowardice and betrayal and looks

at his sister’s death with a great deal of pride. He admires his

father for having killed his own daughter. In the next scenes,

Harman walks back to her spot and lays down metal tumblers that

gradually come to represent miniature, distorted versions of the

well that had refused her. The most inane domestic objects invoke

her trauma suddenly as her wounds are revisited by horrific

memories of her failure at martyrdom. Finally Saadia, Vimla,

Zahida and Harman appear in the ultimate scene, each encircled in

their own pools of light to comment on the ways in which multiple

channels of violence legitimized and normalized by the insanity

of the Partition fixed them into ethnic and gendered subjects.

“Aur Kitne Tukde” becomes a powerful performance in its

directness of violence, of misery, of shame and brutality as it

stresses on how masculinist projects attempting to gain

reproductive control over the woman to produce her ultimately as

the “violable woman”.

Performance as Mourning :

Thomas Elsaesser in his “Postmodernism As

Mourning work” ( Screen 42: 2 Summer 2001, 193-201) speaks of

trauma theory that stresses on a theory of a subject not around

desire and its constitutive lack but around memory and its

politically enforced , patriarchally inflicted gaps, absences and

traceless traces. It is a theory of victimhood and a politics of

blame in which various ethnic, gender and sexual preference

groups vie for a place in the sun of righteous indignation. It

speaks on the complexities of trauma, its traces and latencies

and most importantly on the question of how to represent the

unrepresentable and how to name the unnameable. It is crucial to

understand the trauma of historical events of the Partition as

something that remains unassimilated, an experience not

integrated into the psychic economy of a subject. For a visual

medium as a film or a performance, trauma theory puts at issue

the temporality of the traumatic event. Besides involving

repetition and iteration, the traumatic event intimately links

several temporalities, making them co exist within the same

perceptual and somatic field, so much so that the very

distinction between psychic time and chronological time appears

to be suspended. One must rethink the relation of subjectivity to

history, Elsaesser says, across the act of narration in which

witnessing and personal testimonies are in some sense both highly

problematic and crucial. Most importantly what makes trauma

different from more traditional issues of representation is the

idea that trauma also suspends the categories of true and/or

false in being performative. According trauma theory if trauma is

to be considered performative, it should however fall in the

category of “negative performative” for it affects the texture of

experience by the apparent absence of traces. Also if trauma

involves an event that precludes registration, the category of

witnessing collapses in the face of inaccessibility even to the

subject, quite apart from the problem of its non-

representability. If trauma is experienced through forgetting and

its repeated forgetting, then, paradoxically one of the signs of

the presence of it becomes the absence of it. Potentially, trauma

suspends the normal categories of story-telling, making it

necessary that we revise our traditional accounts of narrative

and narration. Examining our melodramatic, dramatized texts in

this light, it is possible to credit them with having

accomplished the task of re-telling and re-presenting stories and

finally creating witnesses and listeners to narratives that had

been missing in the nationalist accounts of this holocaust in

South Asia. In their suffering, victims often lose their voices

as they assume roles of bearers of a secret and a promise. As

they are silenced by master narratives of the nation and the

government the voice that cries out of their wounds dies a

gradual death. Hesitant to come out of their silence, victims

often believe that this will lead to a breach in a promise: one

that they had made to themselves. Subsequently they fear that

they shall have to deal with another loss this time that of

losing this secret in their narration and re-telling. However it

is crucial that their traumatic pasts be re-enacted for a

catharsis. Otherwise the wounds shall continue to be re-visited.

Bearing testimony thus becomes crucial.

At the risk of repetition, it is

important to be reminded here that the violence borne by the

women of the nation at the time of Partition was perhaps

multiplied as they stood assimilating what the community and the

state tore up in pieces. Post-Partition, the nation assured that

their narratives had no listeners, no witnesses such that the

silence enforced obliterates the shame that their narratives

bore. They were automatically assigned to this responsibility for

it is largely assumed that women remain unaffected by violence

around them: at least they shall not join in with the mobs and

the masses in fury. This leads one to rethink the roles of

Shanti, of Amina, of Saadia, Vimla, Zahida and Harman and analyze

what kind of agency their respective texts have employed for them

in narrating their tales of Partition. It is perhaps not possible

or just to allocate each figure that we have read or watched in

performance with the task of executing the agency of the victim,

the martyr or the perpetrator either. For these women seem to

have had exercised multiple ideals in each of their decisions and

their narrations. “Chhalia”, “Garam Hawa” and “Aur Kitne Tukde”

are attempts by empathetic, willing listeners who finally are

trying to recover these voices and bridge the gap. Historical

silence has been compounded by familial silence for abduction and

rape are not to be found and if at all, then only in memories, in

fiction, in memoirs as in the texts that have been dealt with in

this paper. If one must recover these experiences then alternate

methodologies like these have to be resorted to. It is perhaps

then time to at least reflect and examine modern memory and look

at how it has attempted at articulating women’s experiences and

the reconstructed, restored realities of historical catastrophes

as these. The dimensions of continuing repercussions of Partition

must not go unnoticed as it still continues to re-emerge in

instances like communal riots of contemporary times as the

consequence of an unfinished catharsis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. Gyanendra Pandey, “The Prose Of Otherness”, in David Arnold & David Hardiman, eds. Subaltern Studies viii: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha. New

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, 188-221

2. Ashish Nandy, “Days of the Hyena: A foreword”, in Debjani Sengupta,

ed. Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals

3. Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint, “Introduction”, “Translating

Partitions,” New Delhi: Katha, 2001

4. Urvashi Butalia, “Community State and Gender: Some Reflections on

the Partitions of India, “in Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, eds. The

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