Basant Kaur, a “tall, upright woman” who was in her seventies when interviewed, lived in Delhi following Partition. She is one of the three women who participated in the mass suicide in Thoa Khalsa, but lived to tell the tale. Her testimony provides an invaluable insight into this kind of violence and agency, and the language and silences used that allows women to be incorporated into the historical narrative.

Below is an excerpt from her interview.

Basant Kaur

 

 

Basant Kaur’s tale is invaluable, if horrifying, in its description of such numerous deaths within just one small community. Very few other women who made the decision to commit suicide in order to save their and their community’s honor lived to tell this tale, and no other survivor has- to the best of my knowledge- shared their experience. But there is much more to glean from Basant’s testimony than merely the brutal violence of honor killings. Her language and description of the events are very notable for our understanding of the place this act occupies on the spectrum of gender-based violence, as well as the way that women’s agency is allowed/censored, and either silenced or incorporated into the Partition narrative.

The first thing I noted when reading this written testimony was the way in which Basant described the death of her multiple family members. Whereas the male witnesses or perpetrators of this violence (like Maghal Singh or Bir Bahadur Singh) quite consistently call the murder of females of their community “”martyring,” Basant does not ever qualify it as such. For example, when mentioning the murder of her own daughter, she says: “My jeth killed his mother, his sister, his wife, his daughter, and his uncle. My daughter was also killed.” While one has to be careful of the subtle differences between what “killing” might mean in English as opposed to Hindi (the language she likely recounted this experience in), the interviewer who translated this text has a fluency in both tongues and probably accounted for any subtleties of language. Given that she (the interviewer) was also the one to translate the testimony of Manghal Singh, Bir Bahadur Singh and Gurmeet Singh, and all these male testimonies specifically refer to this type of murder as “martyring,” we can quite safely assume that Basant Kaur was-whether or not consciously- making a distinction between “killing” and “martyring.”

However, while she qualifies these honor killings as indeed “killing,” she does not ever question the decision of the men in her community and family to kill their own people. She seems to silently accept it as something inevitable and even comprehensible given the circumstances. I would argue that there exists a certain detachment in Basant’s testimony, a separation of her emotions regarding this memory from the actual telling of the story that stirs such emotions. She mentions twice that her own daughter was killed, but only the second time do we learn that it was her husband who killed their daughter. She expresses no remorse over her death, however we can only assume that this is perhaps too painful to explicitly state, in the same way that she can say no more concerning her parent’s death than that they were “burnt alive.” Basant does not inculpate anyone in particular, but she also does not describe her male relatives in the same terms that these relatives describe themselves. She never valorizes her husband’s or anyone else’s choice to “conserve community honor” by murdering all the women and children, but she also does not disagree with their decision to do so. The presumed silence here is one of dissent, a common silence amongst women who would rather not risk the repercussions of questioning male conceptions of their honor and the morally questionable acts they deem necessary to maintain it.

Arguably even more noteworthy than her observations-and silences- on the killing of her female and younger relatives during this period of communal strife is Basant’s thoughts on her and 89 other women’s decision to commit suicide by jumping into a well in the midst of a Muslim mob attack. Several points in this part of her narrative merit particular attention:

• The leadership presented by one elder woman by the name of Lajjawanti in choosing to commit mass suicide.

According to Basant’s memory recall, Lajjwanti (who is also mentioned by Bir Bahadur Singh) was the wife of the sardar of the village, and it was she who gathered the women and some younger men and children in her home and led the choice to jump in the well; they had apparently discussed it and decided that they would rather die than become “Mussalmaan.” Basant mentions Lajjwanti’s leadership role several times, and notes that Mata Lajjwanti herself was the first to jump into the well.

This is an important issue to remember when writing a feminist history. It is tempting to paint women as innocent, passive victims of a patriarchal system. But women were not (and are not) exempt from believing and actively promoting the same patriarchal and “archaic” principles as men; to ignore this in the writing of a feminist history is to ignore a major component of women’s history. Just because it is a woman touting patriarchal notions of honor does not devoid these notions of this quality. The constrictive patriarchy is still upheld if the woman is in a place of hierarchical superiority (as was the elder woman Lajjwanti) and is enforcing patriarchal principles of honor in the absence of men.

 

• That Basant never once claims that she chose to join the other women and girls in the mass drowning.

In fact, Basant never mentions her own personal thoughts on committing suicide at all. She constantly speaks as part of a unit: “We all talked…we don’t want to become Musalmaan, we would rather die…all of us jumped into that…all of us…we could not drown… we were frightened…”

Given the overwhelming communal spirit at this time, this trend is not entirely surprising, but it is certainly worth noting as it suggests more of a group agency than an individual level of agency on the part of specific women. There were obvious pressures from men and even other women that seem to have created a “groupthink” effect to this violent choice-making. This pressure unquestionably blurs the line between choice and coercion. And it is crucial to remember that “to acquiesce is not to consent, and to submit is not necessarily to agree.” But if women’s agency within honor killings is so difficult to clearly prove or ascertain, why is it that male testimonies concerning honor killings clearly and consistently claim agency on the part of the women they martyred or saw commit suicide? Why this need to claim female agency when this is not claimed in most any other act of violence?

• Basant’s emphasis on the environment of fear and desperation that dominated this village during the nine-day assault in which the vast majority of this kind of violence occurred.

This aspect of Basant’s testimony is not noteworthy in that it is at all surprising or unexpected. It is, of course, acceptable to assume that the mass drowning and honor killings that occurred during Partition generally occurred in a context of desperate fear. But it is noteworthy that she would refer to her fear when discussing her and her peers’ decision to commit suicide. The choice she and the other women made thus becomes more complicated than merely a matter of honor. It is a choice between two evils, two fears: to die quickly and at one’s own volition, or to be raped and either killed or converted, but surely violated for a far longer stretch of time.

The choice to commit suicide is then still a display of agency, but not the kind that males’ testimonies portray it to be. It is important to recognize that a decision made out of fear is still a decision. But it is equally important to examine the different types of agencies shown in women’s testimonies, as opposed to male testimonies, and why the latter’s version has been included in the historical narrative.