Author: househuntersinternational

I’ve been taking a short break from thesis readings to take in some literature loosely related to my topic. Besides the 1947 dissolution of the Raj, I’m also interested in partitions across South Asia more generally, so I read Seam (2014) by Tarfia Faizullah. Her poetry collection focuses on the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, a conflict that saw Bengali nationalists fight against East Pakistani forces to establish the independent nation of Bangladesh. There are so many parallels between 1971 and 1947, especially within the way women are enshrined in literature as a form of collective remembering of mass rapes otherwise absent from the historical archives.

In my second blog post, I briefly touched upon how a word for “rape” does not exist in Urdu:

“In the context of my own research, there is no equivalent word for rape in Urdu; works translated from Urdu into English (an attempt to translate the subaltern) are forced to use figurative language or visual representations of silence—things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak’s question in the context of women and Partition narratives, the subaltern definitely cannot speak on sexual violence if a word for rape does not exist.”

This same phenomenon is true for Bangla. With this absence of language to describe the rupture of the self due to sexual violence, literature becomes a tool to express the complicated issue of creating a historical record of women’s experiences: in this sense, fiction becomes a method for remembering the events of 1947 and 1971. To pay attention to the use of figurative language, em dashes, and ellipses in these narratives is to listen to a historical truth that has previously gone unrecorded. Faizullah highlights this phenomenon of the inadequacy of language to describe sexual violence as a historical truth in the poem “Interview with a Birangona” (note: birangona is a Bangla term created by the Bangladeshi government to describe women who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Pakistani army; it roughly translates to “war heroine” and is part of a larger effort to reintegrate these survivors into society and reduce stigma). Not once in this poem is the word “rape” explicitly mentioned. Faizullah interviews a survivor of rape who describes her unborn daughter: “She grew whole inside me/ like a lychee, my belly a hard shell” (Faizullah, lines 9-10). This simile comparing her stomach to the shell of a lychee is highly illustrative of the nature of her pregnancy carrying a war baby. To eat a lychee, there is an inherent act of violence that must be committed in forcibly ripping through the rough—but thin—peel of the fruit. Without explicitly mentioning rape, she communicates the sexual violence that conceived her daughter and the violence of childbirth. The gap or silence left by the untranslatable experience of sexual assault is filled by a culturally-specific simile. The woman’s comparison links her womb to a product of the land meant to be torn open to reach the fruit: here, the children born from the creation of an independent state. Furthermore, the newborn daughter is inferred to be the fleshy, edible fruit of the lychee. Whereas her mother is meant to be torn through and discarded, this war baby is meant to consumed by the men of the state. In this regard, women become objects during these two conflicts, a position that directly correlates their bodies to the state.

Works Cited
Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

Though I have a series of focal texts on my reading list—and all tie back to the central issue of Partition—I don’t think I’ve ever taken a moment to look at the primary evidence that announced the division of the British Raj.

I’ve chosen a brief article from The Times titled “Broadcast by Viceroy.” It’s simply a printing of Lord Mountbatten’s radio broadcast made the day before announcing the plans for Partition (the broadcast aired on June 3rd, 1947 and the speech was reprinted on June 4th, 1947). This is likely one of the first times this announcement appeared in print, so I’m counting it as a primary source. Lord Mountbatten, Viceroy of India, planned the Partition of India and Pakistan; in this speech, he explains the original plans, the final decision, and how he hopes the Indian people will react to the news of the transfer of power.

It is this final section, here subtitled “Indian States,” that is of particular interest to me. Lord Mountbatten consistently stresses the need for this transfer of power to occur “in a peaceful and orderly manner,” and he states that “every single one of us must bend all his efforts to the task;” these choices of wording suggest that the responsibility for the prevention of violence is a communal task passed onto the now-citizens of the newborn nation. Though Mountbatten is attempting to generate a sense of responsibility, it comes off as a transfer of blame.

In the rest of the speech, his tone is extremely patronizing: “This is no time for bickering, much less for the continuation in any shape or form of the disorders and lawlessness of the past few months” (“Broadcast by Viceroy”). “Bickering” carries connotations of petulant schoolchildren, and his references to “the disorders and lawlessness of the past few months” carefully covers up British complicity in inciting said lawlessness.

It’s the last three lines that feels especially condescending: “Do not forget what a narrow margin of food we are all working on. We cannot afford any toleration of violence. All of us are agreed on that” (“Broadcast by Viceroy”). Lord Mountbatten, from his position of food security, likely refers to the Bengal Famine of 1943. It’s essential to note that famines are engineered—it’s not the absence of available food, it’s a withholding of available food.

If anything, looking into colonial documents makes me question tone and word choice—it’s also important to note that these declarations are first broadcast in English, a language only accessible to the colonial elite and a South Asian ruling class with an Anglophone education. These are the kinds of official documents women writers are responding to, and this inherently accusatory tone fits with the same kinds of “victim-blaming” enacted upon fictional women by the men in their lives.

Works Cited

Mountbatten, Lord Louis. “Broadcast by Viceroy.” The Times, London, 4 June 1947, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/indian-independence/mountbatten-radio-broadcast/.

Secondary and Theoretical Works

• Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba (2015)
• • More specifically: “Defining The Terms: Colonialism, Imperialism, Neo-Colonialism, Postcolonialism,” “Colonialism and Literature,” “Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Discourse”
  • Also from Loomba: South Asian Feminisms
• Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind C. Morris (2010)
  • More specifically: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, Jayita Sengupta (2012)
  • Request if the library can buy a copy
  • More specifically: “Introduction,” “Living the Dream: Narrating a Landscape Lost and a Land Left Behind,” “The Emblematic Body: Women and Nationalism in Partition Narratives”
• Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, Jill Didur (2006)
  • More specifically: “Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India’s Partition,” “Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” “At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition Narratives”
• Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998)
• “The Translator’s Task,” Walter Benjamin (1923, translated 1997)
• Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Academic Journals

• Verge: Studies in Global Asias
• Journal of Postcolonial Studies
• Literature in History
• Genre (for content on approaching historical fiction)

Key Terms

• Postcoloniality
• World Literature
• Partition
• Subaltern

Primary Texts

• Pinjar (The Skeleton), Amrita Pritam (1950, translated 2009)
• Ice-Candy Man (also titled Cracking India), Bapsi Sidhwa (1988)
• The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia (1998)
• A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, Krishna Sobti
• Tomb of Sand, Gitanjali Shree

In conversation with Professor Kersh, Professor Sider Jost, Professor Seiler, Professor Haque, and Zana Mody (one of my tutors from studying abroad), I have created a broad reading list; it includes some new titles and some works to revisit more specifically under the lens of this project.

In terms of theory and secondary works, I am motivated by what it means to even access these primary texts; this involves consciously thinking about this genre as historical fiction. What does it mean for these women-authored novels to function as works of historical fiction that answer a lack of actual women’s voices in the real-life historical archives of Partition? What does it mean for these works to either be published or translated to English relatively recently, regardless of when they were written? In short, not only am I searching for secondary texts that define postcoloniality and the oral history project of the Partition archives, but I’m also looking for theory that can help answer precisely why it’s so difficult to locate these texts in an English-speaking sphere (both for purchase and for academia). For context, my hunt for physical copies of these primary texts was a quest triangulated across the United States, the United Kingdom, and India—what does it mean to “discover” (for lack of a better word) female-authored novels on the female experience of Partition?

On the level of content, I am captivated by a larger trend of microcosmic representations (be it clothing, language, even names) of macrocosmic violence (here, the struggle between India and Pakistan) within domestic spaces and women’s lives. What does this pattern mean? Why are there smaller representations of communal conflict in women’s day-to-day lives against the backdrop of postcolonial state formation (especially considering that women themselves are often read as an extension of the state, like in the case of Bharat Mata)? I want to move away from the traditional reading of physical women’s bodies in Partition literature and move towards a study of their inner lives. So many narratives chart the effects of dismemberment, rape, and abduction on the physical female body, but what happens to women mentally?

Update:

My main goal with my updated reading list was to whittle down the mass of texts I previously listed into something more manageable. This involved shifting certain titles into different sections and breaking down larger readings into specific chapters that are most helpful to this project. My secondary and theoretical works have not shifted drastically, though I’ve broken most of them down in more bite-sized pieces; personally, this more in-depth listing makes the project feel more approachable. I’ve cut Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature byGilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature by Rebecca L. Walkowitz for now, though certain ideas from these texts might become more relevant if I shift more of my focus to translation; for now, Benjamin’s “The Translator’s Task” seems to be a suitable enough look into the politics of translation. At the stage of research I’m currently in, it’s been fruitful to focus my energies on theoretical texts that explicitly focus on the juncture of literature and Partition.

In terms of academic journals, I surveyed The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies for useful articles related to Partition and narrowed the results down to two articles: “The invisible holocaust and the journey as an exodus: the poisoned village and the stranger city” by Ashis Nandy and “Partition’s other avatars” by Roy Parama. The latter article proposed a new book (Violent Belongings by Kavita Daiya) potentially worth looking at in the context of Partition literature and the state of the physical landscape, though I’m not sure I want to tackle chapters from this book until I’ve read my selections from the Didur and the Sengupta. I greatly narrowed down the list of journals I had after doing a preliminary search into what each publication had on Partition specifically. I still need to peruse Verge: Studies in Global Asias, but the refinement of my keywords is helping this process. I included “Partition” as an updated key term.

When it comes to my primary texts, I realized that I would never be able to do justice to a book so large in scope as Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, so I struck the 1000-page tome from my reading list. Given just how vast of a narrative the novel is, it feels as though including it in my thesis would be too broad for the scope and space limitations of the project. I also tentatively cut Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There from my original reading list. I’ve read the novel once before, and it didn’t necessarily speak to me in the same way as Pinjar or Ice-Candy Man. If it seems relevant as I continue my research, I can always revisit the text. I moved The Other Side of Silence (1998) by Urvashi Butalia from Secondary Works to Primary Texts for now since the bulk of my historical background comes from this nonfiction feminist oral history. I’m almost solidly set on Pinjar (1950) and Ice-Candy Man (1988) as the focus texts for my thesis. The temporal gap between the two also provides a place for analysis in the larger context of Partition literature as answering a gap in the historical archives. Both texts are authored by female writers who directly experienced Partition violence. Pinjar was originally published in Punjabi and then translated into English in 2009; the novel tracks the kidnapping and forced marriage of Puro, a young Hindu girl, to a Muslim man shortly before Partition. Ice-Candy Man centers on Lenny, a young Parsi girl living with polio in Lahore, as she witnesses brutal violence enacted on those around her.

For the better part of the last year, I’ve spent my time reading every Partition novel focused on the female experience that I could get my hands on. Some context: Partition refers to the division of the British Raj into modern-day India and Pakistan. Overnight, people suddenly had to decide if they were Indian or Pakistani—a choice defined by religion. This single decision to reformulate borders (may I add, borders drawn by a British civil servant who had never set foot on the subcontinent) triggered brutal communal violence and the mass migration of around 14 million people (and that’s the lower end of the estimate). Women were especially targeted in the violent aftermath of August 14th-15th, subjected to abduction, rape, torture, forced suicide, and dismemberment. With my senior thesis project, I want to interrogate the presence of women in Partition fiction against the absence of women from the historical archives.

There are numerous binaries inherent to this subject, some of which include:

woman v man
written history v oral history
voice v voiceless
independence v colony
India v Pakistan
Hindu v Muslim
izzat (honor) v shame
rape v consent
macrocosm v microcosm

It’s this last binary that particularly interests me. It features over and over again in my reading towards my thesis.

Amrita Pritam’s novel Pinjar (1950) chronicles the life of Pooro, a young Hindu girl abducted and forced to marry her captor shortly before the Partition of India; she is involuntarily converted to Islam by her husband, forcibly renamed Hamida, and bears his children. Originally published in Punjabi, Pritam’s work is exceptional for its exploration of violence against women in both the time leading up to Partition and the immediate aftermath. Pinjar (The Skeleton) conveys the experience of gendered violence during Partition through binaries—Pritam explores the sharp distinctions between Hindu and Muslim, consumption and nourishment, and shame and honor through the overarching tension between Pooro and her newly named self, Hamida. Ultimately, Pritam’s dichotomies of the split individual emphasize the nature of female survival during Partition as one of self-martyrdom; for the women of Pinjar, choosing a distinct communal side becomes necessary to continue living in a moment of post-colonial state formation.

Within the last few scenes of the novel, Pooro and Rashida—Pooro’s husband—devise and carry out a plan to return an abducted Hindu girl named Lajo back to her family. Upon reuniting Lajo with her family, Pooro is given the option to join the band of Hindu refugees and flee to India. She rejects their offer, declaring instead that: “When Lajo is welcomed back in her home, then you can take it that Pooro has also returned to you. My home is now in Pakistan” (Pritam 127). Pooro accepts Pakistan as her new homeland, surrendering her past self. Lajo becomes a completion of Pooro’s homegoing arc, leaving Hamida behind to embrace Pakistan. The microcosmic tension between these two identities are mirrored in the larger macrocosmic conflict of India versus Pakistan. This is an instance where a binary is broken; Writing Analytically talks about binaries as “not so separate and opposed after all” but “parts of one complex phenomenon” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 60). Here, the “complex phenomenon” is the process of decolonization. One binary (Hamida/Pooro) complicates another binary (Pakistani/Indian) in the service of yet another binary (macrocosm/microcosm). All these identities merge in the restoration of a “whole” self. Pritam writes this restoration as remedying of the split female self as achieved through picking a distinct nation-state; to survive and move beyond the split self, it is necessary for Pooro to accept her new homeland. In this regard, Pritam’s narrative is a literary project that works to rationalize new borders as a resolution to the dichotomies of communal violence. Pooro’s acceptance of Pakistan is her acceptance of her fragmented self. This constitutes a sort of self-martyrdom:

“Whether one is a Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whoever reaches her
destination, she carries along my soul also,” Pooro said to herself and
made a last vow by closing her eyes” (Pritam 127).

Here, Pooro effectively dies—she establishes that “her soul” follows any woman who successfully returns to her family, and these are her last words. Her decision to remain in Pakistan and to live as Hamida signals a death for Pooro, and Pooro becomes an omnipresent figure guiding young women to safety. She sacrifices her Hindu self to survive in her new surroundings. In reuniting Lajo with her family, Pooro finally exercises her autonomy and acts according to her own wishes; she is not bound to the demands of her husband, her son, or the newly independent state. Her personal choice to act blurs the divides between Hindu and Muslim. In the wake of gender-based violence during Partition, female autonomy is a revolutionary act that works to mend the fragmented dichotomies of self.

Pritam, Amrita. Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories. Tara, New Delhi, 2015

In prepping to write a thesis on postcolonial literature, I keep encountering the word “subaltern.” Writing Analytically and “The Method” tell us to pay attention to repetition, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a solid definition of the term, so this is as good a keyword as any to begin.

Culler credits keywords to Raymond Williams, a scholar I first encountered in Professor Seiler’s course “The Generational.” This is coincidentally also the class that inspired this thesis project (I’ve been a bit of a Williams fangirl ever since). As part of the final project, we were tasked with assembling a generational anthology; I chose to try and chronicle “the Partitioned generation” in novels. When it comes to the historical record of Partition, and specifically that of chronicling violence, women’s’ voices are largely absent from the archives. Fiction seems to play a significant role in bridging this gap, leading one to ask where real-life women fit into the narrative. This is where the subaltern fits in.

In A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism by Robert J. C. Young, Young reiterates the views of Gayatri Spivak in regard to the subaltern, stating that “particularly in the case of women, especially working-class women or women of color, they are just absent: we do not find their voice because they were never able to be in a position to speak” (Young 24). The subaltern refers to those pushed to the margins of society because they do not have a platform or the ability to speak in the colonizer’s language. This explanation of “the subaltern” by Young echoes Culler’s description of keywords. According to Culler, Williams “sought to recover and explore a popular working-class culture that had been lost sight of as culture was identified with high literature” (Culler 45). Working class culture was lost in the creation of a literary canon, just as women’s voices were lost in the creation of a historical canon.

In the context of my own research, there is no equivalent word for rape in Urdu; works translated from Urdu into English (an attempt to translate the subaltern) are forced to use figurative language or visual representations of silence—things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak’s question in the context of women and Partition narratives, the subaltern definitely cannot speak on sexual violence if a word for rape does not exist.

Works Cited
Young, Robert J. C. A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism. Oxford University Press, 2020.

While watching Rear Window, I was constantly distracted by Jefferies’ handling of the wooden backscratcher—plainly, it felt annoying to watch. It is perhaps most prevalent during his second conversation with Tom Doyle, in which the detective details his preliminary investigation into the Thorwalds’ affairs. Specifically, Jefferies fiddles with this backscratcher as he laments the fact that he was asleep for the alleged last sighting of Mrs. Thorwald (56:46). He continues to tap the stick against his cast, gesturing wildly with it as he implores Doyle to grill the superintendent further and to treat the case with gravity. It was more than a nervous tic or a distracted moment—this little wooden stick becomes a sort of conductor’s baton, directing Doyle to key facts of the case that he is overlooking. The tool doesn’t leave Jefferies’ hand even once during the scene, closing out with the man leaning as far as he can with the backscratcher and still failing to reach his big toe.

At the risk of sounding corny, Jefferies is literally itching to solve the case of Mrs. Thorwald’s disappearance. He has all the tools of a brilliant investigative journalist—the camera lenses, the observant nature, the patience—but his broken leg keeps him confined to his room. All this is perfectly summarized in his futile attempt to scratch his leg. He has the tools—his trusty backscratcher—but still lacks the ability (or rather, mobility) to properly satisfy this itch. Furthermore, this moment of frustration comes directly after Doyle says that he cannot search Thorwald’s apartment without due process. Ultimately, he needs help from his friends to scratch the itch and to solve the case; he cannot do it alone. With Doyle, he is so close to achieving his goal, yet it evades his grasp. The backscratcher, and specifically its presence at these crucial scenes of tension in the case, represents Jefferies’ larger inability to solve the mystery independently in his injured state.