The spectacle of violence in Partition fiction: Women, voyeurs and witnesses

Abstract

Fictional texts about the Partition of India (1947) written in the 1960s and 1970s attempt to “write” ethnic conflict in terms of a sexual rivalry over the possession of women by Hindu and Muslim men, with “rape” emerging as the master‐trope. This paper examines how female sexuality and the body become a fetish in the course of the demonizing of Muslim men in two novels by male Hindu authors: Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964) and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (1975). This fetishization circulates in these texts to enable an exploration of critical ideologies about nationalism premised upon the moral and sexual purity of Hindu and Sikh women citizens, whilst articulating an anxiety about the blurring of ethnic boundaries in the case of rape. In its representation of a crisis of witnessing – of the symbolic rape of the feminized nation and the actual rape of Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim men – the Partition novel indulges in what can be termed, in an adaptation of Alok Rai’s use of the phrase, a “pornography of violence”.