The Silence of the Subaltern in the Partition of India: Bengali Gendered Trauma Narratives in Shobha Rao’s “The Lost Ribbon” and Ramapada Chaudhuri’s “Embrace”

Dolors Ortega Arévalo

doi:10.5565/rev/indialogs.185

Abstract

The Partition of India was one of the crucial moments marking the transition between the colonial and postcolonial era. Partition has become ever since a long-term process that continues to elicit political, cultural and emotional contexts in South Asia. The creation of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asian Muslims involved the division of Bengal and Punjab along religious lines and while the celebratory narratives of decolonization and nationhood marked the official historiographies of 1947, trauma, loss and displacement were not part of the narrative. The following article focuses on the experience of abducted women in Bengal in the communal riots during the Partition of India. This analysis stems from a brief overview of the silence that has permeated the partition of Bengal within historiography and the scarce literary response that has articulated those silences. It moves on to the analysis of the violence that abducted women suffered in this context. Finally, it deals with two short stories, “The Lost Ribbon” and “Embrace,” which situate gender trauma narratives by showing two radically different responses to the event of becoming a mother of an abductor’s child on the other side of the border and the effect that displacement and forced repatriation has upon female bodies.

Highlights

The Partition of India was one of the crucial moments marking the transition between the colonial and postcolonial era
The aim of the following article is to analyse, from the lens of trauma narrative in a context of gender-based violence, the experience of silenced bodies that have been doubly excluded from collective narratives; in particular, the experience of abducted women in Bengal in the communal riots during the Partition of India
In order to do so, this article will move from a very brief overview of the silence that has permeated the partition of Bengal within historiography and the literary response that has articulated those silences, to move on to the analysis of the violence that abducted women suffered in this context

Summary

THE SILENCE OF THE SUBALTERN IN THE PARTITION OF INDIA

Her hands listless at her side Her glance dead, her looks far away Remembering each slaughtered head Each torn breast, each splintered babe. (...). The aim of the following article is to analyse, from the lens of trauma narrative in a context of gender-based violence, the experience of silenced bodies that have been doubly excluded from collective narratives; in particular, the experience of abducted women in Bengal in the communal riots during the Partition of India. Sabita’s presence works in a paradoxical manner as the instigator of a whole community’s loss; a community that was confronted with this loss when those abducted women were returned with their marked bodies and their illegitimate children Their own communities and families would repudiate the women because they would destabilise a whole system of values that had signified female purity as a religious and national requirement for the consolidation of the community. While Sabita’s mother’s holding and cuddling of the child is forced, problematic and contradictory, her brother and sister seem to be ready to embrace their sister’s traumatic past as a way to understand their future.

Intergenerational textual dialogues

WORKS CITED