Unmasking Nation/Rewriting Home: Gendered Narratives of the Partition and its Aftermath

Abstract

Thisessayexaminespersonalnarrativesandgender-sensitivefictionalrepresentationsofthe Partition between India and Pakistan to contribute to a counterhistory that takes centrally into account the ways in which nation formation was written on the bodies of women. The juxtapositionofmymother’sstories,theoralhistoriesgatheredbyfeministhistoriographers, andcriticalanalysesofPartition-relatedfiction,allowsustoseethelimitationsandpotential of each. While dominant ideologies are seen to seep into the narratives, each in its own way also goes beyond the dominant version of Partition history to lay the ground for new ways of understanding and imagining the pain that women experienced and the responses they made to circumstances not of their own making. doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01122.x In this essay, I examine gendered narratives of a crucial historical moment in the history of the South Asian subcontinent, the Partition between India and Pakistan, in an attempt to clear further space for interpretations of this momentous event that splinter dominant understandings; by using a combination of personal narratives, oral histories gathered by South Asian feminists, and already existing analysis of fictional narratives, I build on others to continue to piece together a counterhistory. The carving out of new spaces of enunciation is particularly important when women become implicated in large-scale upheavals definitional of national and community boundaries, and when their bodies become instruments in the defining of boundaries. As Mankekar (1999, p. 8) points out, borrowing from Chakravarti (1989), Sangari and Vaid (1989), and Mani (1989), ‘‘Representations of Indian Womanhood were a major site of contention in colonial and anticolonial discourses, in which women were often represented as icons and ‘carriers’ of tradition.’’ While the figure of the victimized woman was deployed by the British in the context of the attempted abolition of sati (Mani, 1989; Spivak, 1987), the ‘‘woman question’’