Womanist Revision of The History of 1947 Through Oral Narratives
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This dissertation concentrates on Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin‘s Border and
Boundaries: Women in India‟s Partition; Urvashi Butalia‘s The Other Side of Silence: Voices
from the Partition of India; and Meenakshi Verma‘s Aftermath: An Oral History of Violence that
present a radically alternative understanding of partition violence through the personal narratives
of female partition victims and survivors. They posit the women -- the gendered subaltern -- in
the subject position letting them to speak for themselves and keeping them at the centre. Women
were the innocent victims of the cataclysmic partition violence in 1947 as the men of one
community physically exploited the women of other community in order to breach the manhood
of the latter. Women were victimized in multiple ways—in abduction, rape, suicide, conversion,
rehabilitation, abortion, migration and alienation. Their bodies were a site for the game of
revenge and retaliation of men. In fact, women, their victimization and their death were the
pretensions to hide the effeminated manhood of patriarchy. Notwithstanding, the national history
silences the voices and representation of women‘s pain and experience as it only glorifies the
birth of two independent states. However, the personal narratives that Menon and Bhasin, Butalia
and Verma have chronicled, work through subalternist feminist subjectivity to recall the acts of
violence against individuals and ethnic groups and to restore women's pain to history with a
sense of human compassion. In other words, the oral narratives read against the grain of national
history that glorified community and nationhood and present the history through feminist
subalternity with the retrieval of the muted voices of women directing the reconstruction and
representation. In the oral narratives, the boundaries of national history are redrawn to restructure
the patriarchal social structure, thereby give space, voice and empowerment to the gendered
subaltern women.