Biopolitical nature of Partition violence in Sidwa’sCrackingIndiaand Saadat Hasan Manto’s Partition Stories

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.