“It is the icons that have been transmitted through tradition that will have to be transferred into the icons of our nation.”

If one concludes that “manhood” is measured by a man’s object belongings, then it stands to reason that insulting another’s manhood involves a desecration of his belongings. Partition violence might be seen as this practice, in extreme. Each one of the violent acts committed against women has symbolic meaning, and all reiterate women’s status as possessions of their male relatives and communities. These acts treat women’s bodies as objects and territory to be “conquered, claimed or marked.”[iii] The fact that this was often committed in public places, or even in front of the female victim’s own family members, is a particularly aggressive assertion of the aggressor’s own identity, at the cost of the dishonor of the witnesses/victims. Tattooing and branding, for example, (with various forms of “Hindustan Zindabad!” or “Pakistan Zindabad!”) not only marked the woman for her life, it simultaneously made her dishonor permanent and never allowed her or her male relatives to ever forget the humiliation. Marking the breast and genitalia with religious symbols (such as the trident or crescent moon) “makes permanent their sexual appropriation.” Amputating the breast (which, according to the doctor interviewed by Khosla, was usually fatal) desexualizes a woman, robbing her of the characteristics for which she is valued by her society: a sexual partner and mother. Other such amputations and mutilations renders the woman as an inauspicious character devoid of value to her men. Like a cow that cannot milk, or a house with an irreparable leak, such women faced abandonment and eternal solitude- their value as objects had been erased.

Perhaps even more disturbing than these violently bloody acts themselves is the metaphorical and symbolic similarities they hold with the partitioning of the British Indian empire. The literal carving up of women’s body parts calls to mind the carving up of a once united land, the human equivalent to the dismemberment of the Punjab and Bengal. And it can hardly be a coincidental correlation.

The magnification of nation and sexuality (in terms of the female body) is not a uniquely South Asian phenomenon. Indeed countries are often referred to with feminine pronouns that propose that the nation-state is like a mother that must safeguard her children (the citizens of that state). This ideal of the nation as “mother” bears deeper significance than merely the flowery language of patriotism. Woman as the icon of the nation veils the reality that the nation is an abstract and intangible idea, not an implicit fact of the world. Only within recent human history has the global community organized itself in such a manner, and the idea that an arbitrarily drawn boundary between states could define the populace of this state is contentious. But by putting a concrete face to the nation (that of a woman and mother), the state is legitimized. However, it also provides an avenue through which to inflict insult and damage.