“The kidnapping of young women and the treatment to which they were subjected constitute a sordid chapter in the history of human relations. Poor innocent girls, young married women, sometimes with infants in their arms, were forcibly taken away to distant places. They were molested and raped, passed on from man to man, bartered and sold like cheap chattel.”

-G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning

Mother India Under Attack

The Partition of India and Pakistan is hardly the first time in human history (nor, indeed, in the history of South Asia) that women have suffered physical and psychological trauma due to the political maneuvering of men.* Women across space and time have been subject to various repercussions of war and strife (particularly with the dawn of modern warfare, which has resulted in far heavier civilian casualties than ever before). But the kind of sexual violence found in Partition was on such a scale that cannot be so easily explained away as a mere side effect of communal riots. The specificity with which women were targeted, the incomparable violence to which they were subjected, and the shocking “choice” of many to sacrifice their lives rather than their honor were all on such a scale that they demand explanation. These occurrences, combined with the unique governmental response to recover abducted women, strongly suggest that women occupy a special place in Indian society (and thus in such enactments of violence).

To understand this special place that Indian women occupy, it is first important to acknowledge that- though they might have been exaggerated during moments of communal violence- the opinions regarding the significance and role of women were not sudden developments of 1947, but rather the prevailing notions concerning women in the years before and immediately following Partition. The sexual violence witnessed at this time is indicative of the widespread belief of the place that women’s sexuality occupies in “an all-male, patriarchal arrangement of gender relations, between and within religious or ethnic communities.”[i]

And what is this belief that somehow seems to validate the subjugation of women’s bodies and choices?

Simply put, it is the conviction that “honor” (that of one’s family, religious community and even-ultimately-the state) is located in the body of a woman. The consensus on this matter is somewhat shocking. Interviews with survivors ranging from the highly educated to the poor, and including men and women, all seem to agree-whether or not on a personal level- that in Indian society, the woman is the repository of a man’s honor. From the various Sikh men who proudly admitted to murdering (“martyring”) their women, even to social worker Kamla Patel who mentions that a violated woman is “as good as dead,” it is acknowledged that women are central to the male construction of their own “manhood,” which is essentially the measure of their honor. Thus the violation of a woman’s body by someone that is not her husband is the violation of her male relatives’ honor and demands vengeance to re-establish this lost honor, helping to explain the extraordinary, sexually violent reprisals that escalated between communities throughout Partition.

But though inflicting similar sexual violence on the women of the “Other” community may avenge a man’s dishonor, it seems that this retaliatory violence does not restore honor to the woman initially violated. In fact, one of the most tragic consequences of this sexual violence is that which follows the terrible act itself: the rejection of raped and abducted woman by their families and communities. While I was unable to find any personal memoirs of a woman thus rejected, enough social workers and other Partition survivors comment on the matter to give the practice credence. This is perhaps best captured by Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (translated into English as The River Churning). Set in 1946 Noakhali, this novel captures the terrible Partition-era experience of a young Hindu girl, Sutara. When her father is killed and her mother and sister “disappear” during an attack by neighboring Muslims (it is implied that her mother commits suicide by jumping into the river, and her sister might have been raped and abducted), Sutara is protected in secrecy by a sympathetic Muslim family. When Sutara is finally reunited with her brother and his in-laws, she finds that her woes are far from over. Her relatives find her to be “polluted” as she’s spent months with a Muslim family (reflecting the Hindu practice of untouchability) and ultimately send her off to live on her own.

So great was this fear of dishonor and ensuing familial and communal rejection that a number of Indian women took extreme measures in order to preserve their chastity and “honor.” The self-inflicted violence committed by women is arguably the most astounding feature of the gender-based violence of Partition. According to the Fact Finding Organization, as well as a number of memoirs and interviews (such as that of Ravi Chopra, below), hundreds of women and girls committed suicide by mass drowning, ingesting poison, self-immolation and even requesting their male relatives to murder them. These instances of self-sacrifice are noteworthy for many reasons. For one, the alleged “choice” of suicide over dishonor speaks volumes of the importance of retaining one’s honor.

How women came to embody community honor is a question worth study in and of itself, and one to which there are likely many overlapping answers, ranging from the cultural, religious and mythological. Only a few explanations are ventured below, but they are those that also help to explain why- and in what instances- female agency is alternately “encouraged” and then censored.

[i] Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 41.