Writing Gender, Writing Nation

Women's Fiction in Post-Independence India

Bharti Arora

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000094275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the gendered contexts of the Indian nation through a rigorous analysis of selected women's fiction ranging from diverse linguistic, geographical, caste, class, and regional contexts.

Indian women's writing across languages, texts, and contexts constitutes a unique narrative of the post-independence nation. This volume highlights the ways in which women writers negotiate the patriarchal biases embedded in the epistemological and institutional structures of the post-independence nation-state. It discusses works of famous Indian authors like Amrita Pritam, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Mannu Bhandari, Mahasweta Devi, Mridula Garg, Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Goswami, and Alka Saraogi, to name a few, and facilitates a pan-Indian understanding of the concerns taken up by these women writers. In doing so, it shows how ideas travel across regions and contribute towards building a thematic critique of the oppressive structures that breed the unequal relations between the margins and the centre.

The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women's studies, South Asian literature, political sociology, and political studies.

1
Women as ‘Citizens’

Gendered violence in Partition narratives by women

The very first challenge that India as a newly born sovereign state had to confront was the challenge of Partition and its outcomes. The transfer of power from colonial rule to national rule took place amidst resettled geographies and violent displacements, which sealed the fate of millions of people who lost their identity, homes, relations, and property in the collateral damage. It is no point listing out the colossal human tragedy wrecked in the form of exodus of millions of refugees, murders of thousands of innocents, rape, abduction, and atrocity.¹ Jason Francisco terms the mass violence of 1947 as no less than “‘fratricide,’ a word that concisely evokes both the intimacy of the Partition’s horrors, the killing of neighbour by neighbour, and the immense, epic scale of its tragedy” (as quoted in Greenberg 2008, 258). Interestingly, however, the official inscriptions of the incident have been selective, forgetful and at many instances, apathetic. According to Gyanendra Pandey (1994), “The analytical move in Indian historiography was to assimilate the Partition as an event in the intersecting histories of the British Empire and Indian nation, which left little place for recounting the experience of the event for ordinary people” (205). This makes it all the more important to write an alternative narrative of Partition, which would assess its implications for the everyday lives of people and by extension their negotiations with the independent nation-state.

Several notable critics and sociologists have explored this aspect in their writings. For instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty (1996, 2002) highlights in his works the narrative of memory and trauma, which performs a seminal role in theorising notions of homelessness located at the root of people’s experiences of Partition. He asserts, “A traumatised memory has a narrative structure which works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative” (1996, 2143). Moreover, the act of remembering/forgetting selectively has an embedded structure of politics which, unlike the historical narrative, does not engage with an objective listing of causes of Partition but, as Chakrabarty further suggests, “the life suddenly terminated there, the communities abruptly fractured, the villages/desh abandoned in an inexplicable hurry – all that the history of Partition cannot explain otherwise” (1996, 2144). Such an engagement facilitates in reconstructing the notions of home and/or homelessness, which have otherwise been relegated to the marginalia by the dominant rhetoric of the independent nation-state.

Similarly, Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj (2000) engages with the tensions of remembrance, forgetting, and ignorance among the three generations of families in Delhi. She examines “how inter-generational differences structure narratives of displacement and outline the refugee families’ strategies for forging a cultural identity that has changed as a result of the way different generations remember partition” (Sarhadi Raj 2000, 30). Sarhadi Raj offers an interesting insight in this regard by representing how “the refugee experience at first conflicted and now coalesces with the collective memory of the nation-state” (2000, 30).

Vazira Fazila-Yocoobali Zamindar (2008) engages with the “bureaucratic violence of drawing political boundaries and nationalizing identities” (2). Moving between memory and record, Zamindar illustrates it was through “the making of refugees as a governmental category, through refugee habilitation as a tool of planning, that new nations and the borders between them were made, and people, including families, were divided” (3).

Devika Chawla’s (2014) book is based on interviews conducted with first, second, and third generation Partition victims, exploring the myriad ways in which they have constructed the meaning of home for themselves. She also dwells upon the role women played in etching out their lives in the newly found home, as Partition “permitted a stepping out and away from the confines of feminine domesticity” (Chawla 2014, 32). She further exposes how sometimes, women’s contributions were deliberately sidelined and/or erased by their respective families in their anxiety to participate in the newly forged identity of a citizen of the new nation.

The moment of independence was marked by a sense of betrayal, particularly for women. Their bodies and sexualities were rendered vulnerable to the divisions between communities and nations in the context of the Partition. They were reduced to being symbols of male honour, which circumscribed women’s identities within what Menon and Bhasin (1998) call the “shame-fear-dishonour syndrome” (59). By undertaking a close reading of Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (1950) and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning (1967), the present chapter attempts to explore how post-independence women’s narratives inscribe the nation, offering a strong narrative of resistance to the social/sexual contract concluded between the multiple patriarchies of the family, community, and nation-state.

Life and works in perspective: Amrita Pritam and Jyotirmoyee Devi

Amrita Pritam was born into an Arora-Khatri Sikh family in Gujranwala, present day Pakistan, on 31 August 1919. Her father Kartar Singh Hitkari was a school-teacher. Her mother died when she was 11. After this, she moved to Lahore with her father and remained there till she had to migrate to India in 1947 due to the Partition of the country. She lived through the tumultuous years of the nationalist struggle, witnessing a gradual decline of Lahore from being a place of composite ethos to a hot furnace of divisive trends. After migrating to India, she worked in the Punjabi service of All India Radio as an announcer for some time. She continued writing till very late in her old age. Pritam invokes the pain of the Partition in her poem “Ajj akhaan Waris Shah nu” (I ask Waris Shah Today), which poignantly records the horrors of the gendered violence and general massacre in the wake of the division of the country. Some of her notable works include poetry collections like Sanjh de laali (Twilight’s Aura 1943) and Lok Peera (The People’s Anguish 1944). The latter speaks of the war-torn economy of Bengal and its consequences on common masses, whose lives were destroyed due to the Great Bengal famine of 1943. Sunehare (Messages 1955), for which she won the Sahitya Akademi Award, deals with the twin themes of nature and romance.

Some of Amrita Pritam’s well-known novels include Doctor Dev (1949), Pinjar (TheSkeleton 1950) , Dharti Sagar aur Seepian (The Earth, Sea and Oysters 1965), Jilavatan (The Exiled 1968), and Unchas Din (49 Days 1979). They are sensitive portrayals of how women and men are circumscribed by patriarchal institutions and social conventions. She has also published autobiographies titled Kala Gulab (Black Rose 1968), Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp 1976), and Aksharon kay Saayee (Shadows of Words 2004).

Jyotirmoyee Devi was born in Jaipur in the year 1894. Her father, Abhinash Chandra Sen, had migrated to Jaipur as a schoolteacher but was soon appointed the Diwan in the royal court of Maharaja of Jaipur. Devi received little formal education in her natal home and was married off to Kiran Chandra Sen at the young age of ten. Her husband was a lawyer by profession. However, he soon died, leaving Jyotirmoyee with six children at the young age of 25. Devi had been an avid reader from the very beginning. Though she was victimised by stringent rules and orthodox rituals associated with widowhood, she managed to revive her love of reading. She soon returned to her natal family, where she had access to her grandfather’s library. She read works like J. S. Mill’s On the Subjection of Women (1869) and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which greatly influenced her literary writings. She has written both fiction and non-fiction, taking up the rights of women and Dalits. Devi’s Sona Rupa Noy (Neither Gold nor Silver), a collection of short stories, won the Rabindra Purskar in 1973. She mentions in “Amar Lekhar Gorar Katha” (“The Development of my Writing”) how some of her earlier poems were published in magazines like Bharatvarsh, Bangavani, and Satsangi. Interestingly, she often exchanged letters with Kantichandra Ghosh (translator of FitzGerald’s edition (1859) of Omar Khayaam’s Rubaiyat), who was her uncle’s friend, which led to the formation of an intellectual bond for life. Ghosh would suggest ways to improve her writings and offer her all the necessary support to study and write. He would send her essays, plays, and books so that Devi could improve her knowledge and writing skills. Apart from that, her uncles and brothers would get the plays of Bernard Shaw (Candida 1898, Man and Superman 1903), Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Shakespeare’s poems, plays, so on and so forth.

These reading exercises honed Devi’s skills as a writer, motivating her to interrogate the patriarchal society’s strictures on women’s lives and mobility. For instance, her essay “Narir Katha” (“A Woman’s Words”) published in Bharati in 1921 is a bold statement of protest against the way patriarchal strictures and regulations objectify women. Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings like “Shei Chheleta” (“That Little Boy” 1961) and Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning 1967) further critique the assumed ‘frailty’ and ‘impurity’ of women, endorsed by uppercaste Hindus even after the Partition. Mookerjea-Leonard (2004) aptly states, Devi’s works “demand accountability for the tragic consequences of the Partition, interrogate the meaning of independence and express scepticism about the gendered nature and class character of its privileges” (33).

Set against the grand silhouette of Partition, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning expose how the shadow of women’s ‘abducted/polluted bodies’ in the wake of the Partition looms large over their legitimate demands to claim equal rights to the nation. By so doing, they underscore the hollowness inherent in words like ‘honour’ and ‘rescue,’ propagated by the state in order to demarcate women’s identity and existence. The authors specifically critique the unholy trinity of family, community and the nation that manipulated women, their bodies and sexualities to serve its own interests. For instance, the state’s decision to restore women to their ‘original’ families and communities not only established its role as the parens-patriae but also froze kinship relations and communal/national boundaries in the process. This curtailed women’s rights to gender equality, rendering them as ‘objects of exchange’ in the inter-communal and patriarchal epistemology. As Menon and Bhasin assert, “In its articulation of gender identity and public policy, the state underlined the primacy of religious identity and implicitly and explicitly, departed from its neutrality in assigning value to the ‘legitimate family and community honour’” (1998, 125).

Both Pritam and Jyotirmoyee Devi bring out these aspects cogently in their novels, registering resistance against the dominant structures of patriarchy, state, and the epistemological institutions that systemically muffle the voices of women. Through the analysis of their novels, Pinjar and The River Churning, the present chapter aims to explore women’s alternative reading of the role played by the nation-state in the post-Partition scenario, decode its grand rhetorics, and expose its covert patriarchal biases. Of the many tropes through which Partition narratives expose the gender biases of the nation-state, such as the silence around stories of women’s heroism in resettling in the new location, the redefinition of the idea of home, the physical violence suffered by women as symbols of communal and national honour, etc., this chapter focusses on one, that is, the figure of the abducted woman. It attempts to expose, through a close reading of the two novels, how the sexual contract among heads of communal families based on their women’s abduction and exchange became a means of legitimising the social contract of the state. It gave an opportunity to the newly independent state to establish its role of parens patriae vis-à-vis the women who were abducted. As Menon and Bhasin state, “It was obliged as the ‘responsible and civilised’ government of a ‘civilised’ country to rightfully claim its citizen-subjects, as it was morally bound to relocate and restore these same objects within their families, communities and countries” (1998, 107). To this effect, women writers construct a powerful critique of aggressive communal assertions and identity politics as the birth of the new nation-state is inscribed on the battered and bruised bodies of women.

The choice of the novels in the chapter is also governed by a consideration of the locations and contexts of the two writers, one who speaks of the Partition as experienced in Punjab, the other who engages with the experience in the context of Bengal.²

Patriarchal nation-state and women in the Partition

The crisis of Partition once again exposed the patriarchal rhetoric that underwrites the notion of nation-state upheld by nationalist sentiments. The violence and the miseries unleashed in the wake of the event were charged with gender biases that had marked the patriarchal societies on both sides of the border. Conflicts at all levels, communal, political, and cultural inscribed themselves on women and their bodies. Even though women writers like Amrita Pritam, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Qurratulain Hyder (River of Fire 1959), Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day 1980), Bapsi Sidhwa (Cracking India 1991), and others have written vocally about it, this gendered aspect of Partition was for long ignored by Partition historiographers until feminist critics and sociologists like Veena Das (Critical Events 1995), Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (Borders and Boundaries 1998), and Urvashi Butalia (The Other Side of Silence 1998) etc. drew attention to it. They began to problematise the figure of the abducted woman, notions of shame on the one hand and family and community honour on the other, intersections of community and state and their links to gender violence, so on and so forth.

In Pinjar, Pritam compares the anguish of an abducted woman to the erosion of syncretic culture of Punjab caused by Partition, so that “it became a festered wound in the bosom of history” (as quoted in Datta 2008, 10). The author delineates her disenchantment with the nascent nation-state as it bore within its birth the terror of communalism. She compares its destiny to the unwanted child that grows in the belly of the abducted woman, becoming a symbolic reminder of her trauma: “Puro would hate each and every part of her body. How she wished to throw away the worm infesting her body, to not have anything to do with it, as if one extracts a thorn stuck in the body by pressing it between the nails” (Pritam 2003, 7).³ Thus, Pritam locates Pinjar within this context of a ‘storm of hatred’ that swept through north India, especially Punjab after the horrific riots of March–April 1947 in Lahore.

The novel opens in 1935 amidst Puro’s reminiscences of her family, her ‘blissful’ life before she was abducted by one of the Muslim villagers Rashid. Pritam tenuously locates this abduction within the emergent divisive trends that had begun to assail the political and social topography of Punjab in the 1930s. For instance, the Communal Award of 1930–32 granted the provision of separate electorates to Muslims, Sikhs, and untouchables. This led to the construction of new categories of “religious identification and enumeration” (Datta 2008, 3), homogenising them in the process. The colonial directive had severe implications for the rural landscape of Punjab. As Nonica Datta (2008) suggests, the pluralist tradition of Punjab, notably, “the fluid identities, multiple vocabularies, landscapes and inter-community solidarities were overshadowed by monolithic religious blocs” (3).

Pritam deftly inscribes the deteriorating social and communal relations, which eventually led to the Muslim demand for separate electorate. For instance, the readers learn that Rashid has abducted Puro to aven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Women as “citizens”: gendered violence in Partition narratives by women
• 2 Feminist negotiation of autarchy: going beyond victimhood
• 3 Negotiating structural inequalities: marriage, domesticity, divorce, and widowhood in post-independence India
• 4 Economic liberalisation, cultural Ghettoisation, and their impact on the gendered contexts
• 5 Writings from the margins: Dalit and Muslim women’s narratives
• Conclusion
• Appendix