“Honourable Resolutions”: Gendered Violence, Ethnicity, and the Nation

Abstract

Khushwant Singh's 1956 novel Train to Pakistan features crucial moment in which Hukum Ghand, the magistrate sent to maintain law and order in the village of Mano Majra in 1947, reflects critically on the dominant image that emblematized Indian independence internationally: What were the people in Delhi doing? Making fine speeches in the assembly! Loud-speakers magnifying their egos; lovely-looking foreign women in the visitors' galleries in breathless admiration: is great man, this Mr. Nehru of yours. I do think is the greatest man in the world today. And how handsome! Wasn't that wonderful thing to say? Long ago we tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure but very substantially. He then goes on to remember the contemporaneous experiences of three Sikh acquaintances: colleague Prem Singh who is murdered in Lahore by a dozen heads with fez caps and Pathan turbans; recently married Sundari, the daughter of his orderly, who was raped by Muslim mob and handed the penis of her castrated husband; Sunder Singh, whom Hukum Chand recruited for the army and who shot his family to relieve them of hunger and thirst during their migration. In ruminating upon how Prem Singh made his tryst at Falletti's hotel, how Sundari had her tryst with destiny on the road to Gujranwala, and how Sunder Singh came to his tryst by train, along with his wife and three children such that he did not redeem the pledge. Only his family did, Hukum Chand indexes his cynical distance from the prevailing nationalist rhetoric about independence. (1) This narrative moment offers number of useful starting points for thinking about Indian national modernity. First, it links the Indian state and its official public events with the experiences of its citizens. Chand recounts Nehru's momentous words only to test them against the local experiences of individual members of the new national polity. Second, this scene addresses the invisibility of the suffering, mass violence, and death that accompanied Partition in the celebratory official and international discourse on Indian independence and decolonization. Thus, it situates the story of national emergence in relation to the twin axes of an international global community and Partition's violence and mass migration. The cynicism toward the barely incipient nation-state manifests itself through rejection of Nehru and his momentous speech that invokes race as well as sexuality--by describing his words and appearance as objects of white women's admiration and desire. Moreover, Chand's description of ethnic and sexual violence suggests not only the absence of ordinary peoples' experiences of violence in dominant accounts of 1947, but also the failure of the nationalist elite to usher in peaceful transfer of power. Finally, this scene raises questions about the representation of the Indian nation and history. As describes the rape of newly married Sundari by mob of Muslim men who first castrate her husband, it is clear that for Chand this sexual violence marks the failure of patriarchal nation-state to protect both its male citizens and the honor of its women. Thus, in this bureaucrat's cynical ruminations, national politics betrays the nation's patriarchal family. This article takes up the questions about gender, nationalism, and violence articulated above through contemporary postcolonial writing by diasporic South Asian writer published internationally--Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India (2)--to examine how it revisits and remembers this history of decolonization, partition, and independence. In the last decade, the Partition of 1947 has reemerged in public discourse and as an object of inquiry in South Asian studies, particularly in the disciplines of anthropology and history. These studies have often focused on the gathering of individual testimony and remembrance to apprehend the experience of the subcontinent's Partition. …