Biopolitics of Gendered Violence in Selected Short Stories on Partition

Abstract

Saadat Hasan Manto and Rajinder Singh Bedi, in their Partition stories, explore the gendered violence during the horrendous event of the Partition of India. By foregrounding the plight and predicament of abducted, displaced and raped women caused by the biopolitical violence, the violence in which human bodies and lives are targets and focal points of politics and war, they attempt to show the most horrible picture of the Partition and its consequences. Due to the patriarchy - unleashed violence perpetrated on women they are ultimately reduced into homo sacer and muselmann as conceptualized by Agamben. Muselmann is a specific form of life which is alive but dead, and dead but alive. All female characters who suffer from brutal rape, abduction and mutilation in the stories are nothing but the abject objects which speak the vastness of trauma without speaking. In other words, the victimized women characters and their somatic testimonies verge on the authenticity of their traumas. While dramatizing the pervasive effects of gender violence during the precarious time of the Partition of India by keeping the falsity of religious and political rhetoric of the Partition violence at bay, these writers project the testimonies of the traumatic events of the Partition without perpetuating the cycle of revenge and recrimination. They do not see the perpetrators as Muslims or non-Muslims, Indians or Pakistanis; rather they just see and depict them as human beings with all their wilderness and barbarity. By executing the unmediated testimony of the Partition violence, and combining evil and suffering within it, they also capture the specificity of the Partition violence without being provocative in any way. In doing so, they bring in the humanitarian and moral perspective on the Partition holocaust which helps evoke the therapeutic effect of the trauma of the Partition— and that effect is the hallmark of the aesthetic of the literature of violence or trauma.