Biopolitical nature of Partition violence in Sidwa’sCrackingIndiaand Saadat Hasan Manto’s Partition Stories
Date
2013
Authors
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Publisher
Central Department of English
Abstract
In the mass exodus of India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, thousands of women died
of repeated rapes, tens of thousands were forced into marriage, many converted, some
were forced into prostitution or sold as slaves. Partition violence has been seen as a trope
for reconstructing Hindu-Muslim conflict but those women whose lives were uprooted by
the hurricane of maelstrom are either ignored or surreptiously overlooked. The
dissertation reinterogates Partition violence, the exchange of population during Partition
and exchange of women after Partition, and reveals how those women were
characteristically victimized by men of other communities, men of their communities and
even by their own states. Using Giorgio Agamben's concepts of bare life andMuselmann,
the dissertation presents these physically assaulted and mentally scarred women, often in
complicity of their states, left to the state of bare life. These victims with bare life are
found in Bapsi Sidhwa'sCrackingIndia, particularly Ayah and Hamida and the female
characters in Saadat Hasan Manto's Partition stories (for example Khol Do). The analysis
of these narratives along the lines of bare life brings to the fore the biopolitics associated
with the gendered violence.
Description
Keywords
Violence, Gendered