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Rupture and recovery No Woman’s Land: Ed. Ritu Menon. Women Unlimited, New Delhi. Pages 202. Rs 300.
In the words of Joan Kelly, women’s history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore our history to women. Since the historical archive has so little to offer in terms of women’s experience, a greater emphasis on gender is undeniably a great asset. Menon’s purpose in this book is to examine memories of Partition from the perspective of women from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, their trauma and dislocation, particularly the way it affects their functioning today. She has put together women’s narratives from these three nations to explore the holocaust of 1947 as well as their subsequent lives. In the past few years, women have tried to explore the political dimension of their personal lives and bridged the gap between the two. Anything that women might do is thus validated as political. Appropriate examples are available in Sara Suleri’s essay Excellent Things in Women, an excerpt from Meatless Days, in which the political events of Pakistan keep breathless pace with Suleri’s family saga. The persona of Suleri’s Dadi exists beyond the nation-in-the-making as, being the female head of the household, she overrides the patrocentric formation of Pakistan with her sheer grit and indifference. While those like Dadi saw through unseeing eyes, the conscience of writers and poets led them to write like never before. Josh, Sardar Jafri, Majaz and Majrooh protested as the land was split into two. In an impassioned defense of Sadat Hassan Manto, Ismat Chugtai proclaims that communal literature is not time-bound, but enduring in its quality. The early pieces about the experience of Partition in Pakistan set the pace for the stories of Basanti and Sumati, who narrate the trauma of the Partition of Bengal in Two Women, One Family, Divided Nations. Meghna Guhathakurta recounts the violence after 1947 when her grandmother’s family, fearing for their lives, was vivisected when some of them went to live in Calcutta. Sumati’s son and daughter-in-law, Basanti, remained in Dhaka, where her son was eventually killed for being an "Indian agent" in 1971. On Basanti’s interrogation of the cause of his death, the hospital authorities declared that he had died of pneumonia: "This was the first indication that our history was being systematically erased. I felt that if we left, the truth would never come out." Bengal was spared the enormity and dread of the violence of Punjab. I remember the stories narrated by my own mother, who, along with her sisters and brother, left her home and parents behind in Lahore to hazardously reach Amritsar in August 1947. Every summer when the family would get together, there would be a reopening of wounds, which had left an everlasting stamp on them. That they would never return to their ancestral home was a fact they could never reconcile with. "They figured they would soon be back" is the sentiment echoed by Ritu Menon, as she shifts focus from Pakistan and Bangladesh to the partitioned Punjab in Border Crossings: Travelling Without a Destination. While recounting the border crossing of her own family, Menon evokes a sense of frontiers not traversed because of being emotionally connected with the land left behind: "We had to remind ourselves that we ‘belonged’ to two different countries now." Yet the two nations and their statesmen constantly remind the public that they are separate, distinct, opposed. The ritual enactment of guards at the Wagah crossing is "designed to communicate maximum hostility". The way in which they march, which is virtually a kicking action, and stamp and stride, is nothing short of a simulated war, intended to be a constant reminder of aggression. Despite the strict observance of this ceremony vaunting high nationalism, it is public opinion that has transcended historical animosity as exhibited in the friendship and brotherhood of the recent months. Nowhere is it more evident than in the spirit of Punjabiat demonstrated in the last few days in Mohali and Chandigarh, which exemplifies a true sense of border crossing. Political dialogue has
finally yielded to amicable action. Indeed, the collection of essays, in
its own way, irrefutably reaffirms the commitment to hope and
transformation. Discourses of difference and otherness stand subsumed
into a new reciprocity that has brought to an end oppositional stances.
Let us hope this bonhomie is not a flash in the pan and the two nations
can finally break out of the stranglehold of history. |
The last decade has
brought us face to face with our hitherto hidden history with the many
books on Partition: the two volumes of Pangs of Partition by S.
Settar and Indira Baptista Gupta, Translating Partition by
Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint, Inventing Boundaries by Mushirul
Hasan and The Partitions of Memory by Suvir Kaul. In an earlier
joint venture, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon state in Borders and
Boundaries that there has been no feminist historiography of the
Partition of India.