{"id":307,"date":"2014-08-02T16:12:32","date_gmt":"2014-08-02T16:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/?page_id=307"},"modified":"2014-08-04T20:19:18","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T20:19:18","slug":"general-violence","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/blood-communal-violence\/victims-people-behind-the-numbers-2\/general-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"General Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A scene from <a title=\"Pinjar (2003)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0347779\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><em>Pinjar <\/em>(2003)<\/strong><\/a> captures the violence that erupted between communities. One scene in particular (a Muslim man murdering a young, unarmed girl) represents the inhumanity that seems to define this period of communal riots.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dACeSS5cXmU#t=2m55s<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: right\">Dr. Hameeda Hossain<\/h3>\n<p>Dr. Hameeda Hossain, a Muslim female doctor who now lives in present day Pakistan, was witness to Partition. Though she and her family did not have to relocate (they are Muslims who were already living in the newly designated Pakistan), Hameeda witnessed the significant repercussions of the period. Whilst helping her innovative grandmother in a make-shift hospital, Hameeda witnessed an injured Muslim woman arriving from India. The woman was a bride, but had already lost her new husband; they had been attacked by an Indian mob on their wedding day. Though there is no account from this woman herself, Hameeda&#8217;s observation provides us with an idea of what women were subjected to. Hameeda attests to the bride being &#8220;mentally disturbed&#8221; and &#8220;crying at night.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Dr. Hameeda Hossain lived in Hyderabad, Sindh, during 1947\" width=\"625\" height=\"469\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/atnunRcF-do?start=464&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>An important element to remember in the wide scope of violence is that of loss. In a matter of months, hundreds of thousands of women were made into widows. Left without a male protector, these women were subject to the traditional social stigmas that widowhood engendered. Although the Indian state came to take care of many of these widows (discussed more in <a title=\"Rescue and Rehabilitation\" href=\"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/rescue-and-rehabilitation-2\/\"><strong>Rescue and Rehabilitation<\/strong><\/a>), housing them in communitarian homes such as the Kamila Mahila Ashram and encouraging their development of marketable skills, the majority of these women never remarried. Their partition-time loss defined the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: right\">Gyan Deyi<\/h3>\n<p>Gyan Deyi, a Hindu, is one such young woman who lost her husband at a very young age. When she was interviewed by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in 1997, she had been living in the Kamila Mahila Ashram for several decades. After living with her brothers for several years after partition (when they were all uprooted from their home in West Punjab), Gyan decided to move into the ashram; she did not like feeling like &#8220;a burden&#8221; to her male relatives. Though fifty years had passed when Gyan related her memories to Menon and Bhasin, she remembers the tumultuous year of partition. Part of the interview is below (for the original source: <a title=\"Resources\" href=\"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/resources\/\"><em>Borders and Boundaries<\/em><\/a> by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin).<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;I have been in this Ashram for 32 years. In those days Miss Makhan Singh was here. I spent one year in the sewing section, I also learnt embroidery. I did that work for ten-twelve years. Then my eyes became weak so I had to stop. After that I started sewing- <strong>I had to do something, I couldn&#8217;t survive without working<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;After Partition for four-five years I lived with my brothers. When they moved I moved with them. Now I&#8217;ve been here 32 years&#8230; I remember it&#8217;s 32 years because that&#8217;s the year my niece got married. I learnt sewing in Panipat for six months. I could have earned some money making clothes for others by my brothers didn&#8217;t allow that. They said, <strong>it doesn&#8217;t look nice your doing that.<\/strong> They were earning, I was living with them&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;I remember from when I was ten or eleven. My father had wholesale shops, four shops where my bua&#8217;s sons worked. They bought and sold gur and sugar. It was a big market&#8230; Muslim labour worked for us&#8230; Muslims did the work, my father supervised&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;&#8230;In our village how many were Hindus and how many were Muslims, that I don&#8217;t know, but there was no difference between Hindus and Muslims. We had very good relations. At marriages we exchanged gifts&#8230;Muslims got sweets made by Hindu cooks and sent them to Hindu homes. Only well-off families did this, not everyone&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;&#8230;It was our own labour, people who worked on our land, they attacked us. <strong>Our own people did this<\/strong>&#8230;They attacked my brother-I remember everything so clearly. I was sixteen or seventeen.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;I was living with my parents- I had come from Lyallpur to visit them. Those days girls would come for six months, eight months, to their parents&#8230;and I was still a child. I came here with my two brothers and their families. We took some jewellery, the rest we buried in our home thinking, not today, but tomorrow, in a few days we will definitely return. We never thought we would never go back&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;&#8230;<strong>I was the last to leave, I was so scared. I locked the house from the inside waiting for some of the men to come and take me&#8230; I was so afraid the trucks would leave without me. People may not know I wasn&#8217;t there-there was so much confusion, and there were so many people leaving. I was full of fear. After all I was still quite young and it was a frightening time even for older people.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Our younger brother located us through announcements. Much later, after three or four years, our village was allotted land near Karnal and Panipat. We got only a little land, not much. One of my brothers started farming again. My younger brother was educated, he had a B.A., so he got a job. I had always lived with my younger brother, so here also I stayed with him. <strong>They were all struggling so hard, they had to marry off several daughters, their income was not too much. They had just about enough, so I came away to the Ashram.<\/strong> <strong>We experienced real hardship-not enough to eat, not enough clothes to eat- but what is the point of talking about all that now? <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;We had no news about my husband, in-laws. After about five-six years like this, I head my husband had died. Somebody told me. My in-laws didn&#8217;t try to reach me. They were not poor people. They were quite well-off, but they had small hearts. They had shops and orchards, houses. We didn&#8217;t know them, my marriage was arranged by the village gosain (priest) who knew them.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;It was the talk of the town, my dowry. The wedding party stayed two nights-people couldn&#8217;t believe it. But everything went to my in-laws. What else? The clothes given to me were full-size-even those went to them. I was so young, how could I control anything? <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;We all lived so peacefully, god knows how the differences (between Hindus and Muslims) came. Now look at the problems between Hindus and Sikhs-we all practiced Sikhism although we were Hindu. It was all one&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;&#8230; I have just blurted out everything to you today, everything that was boiling inside has just to come out. Well, we got what was our kismat. We must not have done goods deeds in the past. But I thank god every day, I say, &#8220;Many, many thanks to you for giving me food to eat, clothes to wear.&#8221;<strong> Most of my life is over, the remaining few days will pass&#8230;<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>&#8220;But sometimes when I&#8217;m sick or unwell, I miss children, someone of my own. Of course I feel lonely. I feel it but who shall I say it to? Before whom should I cry? Will anyone solve my problem? No one can. I have to deal with it myself, I have to work on myself on my mind and on my heart. Whatever to go through, I will. I have to.&#8221;<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n<p>In keeping with Indian custom, Gyan Deyi never remarried after she was widowed as a young woman. Even as her nieces were married off, it seems implicit that Gyan could not remarry, that she must remain loyal in spirit to a man she barely knew- despite the fact that her in-laws displayed no such loyalty on their part. Partition had violently disrupted the course of her life, setting her on a far more arduous path that involved not only economic self-reliance, but decades of loneliness and isolation. She-as so many others- had to live not only through the hunger and exile of partition itself, but she also had to live with the repercussions of that time far into the future, as a woman without her own family and as a burden to others.<\/p>\n<p>This kind of violence is not as &#8220;obvious&#8221; or dramatic as that of bloodshed, but it has no less of an impact on the psyche. It is an emotional violence, a plunge into a new and generally unwelcome life that leaves its victims scrambling to survive in the unexpected circumstances in which they find themselves. For women who practiced purdah, or otherwise remained in the domestic sphere (as did the overwhelming majority of mid-century South Asian women), the sudden shift to self-reliance was brutal. Partition&#8217;s social and economic upheaval may have provided women with new economic opportunities and a sometimes welcomed independence, but it often came at great personal and emotional cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A scene from Pinjar (2003) captures the violence that erupted between communities. One scene in particular (a Muslim man murdering a young, unarmed girl) represents the inhumanity that seems to define this period of communal riots. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dACeSS5cXmU#t=2m55s Dr. Hameeda Hossain Dr. Hameeda Hossain, a Muslim female doctor who now lives in present day Pakistan, was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"parent":251,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-307","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/307\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/golz-2014-women-partition-india-pakistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}