Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  Meanwhile, Buta Singh pleaded his case wherever possible — but to no avail. He tried to go to Pakistan, but this wasn’t easy at the time. One day he received a letter from Pakistan — ostensibly from one of Zainab’s neighbours, although no one quite knows — which asked him to go there as soon as possible. Zainab’s family, it seemed, was pressing her to marry. Buta Singh sold off his land and put together some money, but he had not bargained for the difficulties of travel between the two countries. He needed a passport and a visa — for which he travelled to Delhi. Here, he first took the step of converting to Islam, thinking perhaps that it would be easier to get to Pakistan as a Muslim. Buta Singh now became Jamil Ahmed.

  And he applied for a passport, and a nationality: Pakistani. If that was what would get him to Zainab, that was what he would do. But acquiring a new country, especially in a situation of the kind that obtained at the time, was not easy. The High Commission of Pakistan accepted Buta Singh’s application for Pakistani nationality, and fed it into the machinery. The question was not a simple one of changing nationality — if such questions can ever be simple. The two countries were virtually at war; deep rooted suspicion of each other’s motives was the order of the day; people could no longer move freely across borders — how then could the appeal of a man in love for nationality of the ‘other’ be accepted at face value? After many months, the application was rejected. (Interestingly, around the same time, according to newspaper accounts, a high profile actress, Meena, wished to become a Pakistani citizen and applied for citizenship, which was immediately granted and her ‘defection’ made much of in the press.)

  Buta Singh did not, however, give up that easily. He applied for a short-term visa, and because people in the Pakistan High Commission were familiar with him by now, he was granted this. Now Buta Singh, alias Jamil Ahmed, made his way to Pakistan. And arrived to find that Zainab had already been married to her cousin. This could well have been the end of the world for him but by a strange quirk of circumstance, Buta Singh was given another chance to fight for Zainab. In his rush to find out about Zainab, he had forgotten to report his arrival to the police — to this day, Indians and Pakistanis are required to report their arrival in the other’s country within twenty four hours of actually reaching the place. For this oversight Buta Singh was asked to appear before a magistrate, and apparently he told the magistrate that he had been very distracted because of the history with Zainab, which is why he had omitted to report his arrival. The magistrate then ordered Zainab to be produced before the court, where she was asked to give a statement. It was at this point that all Buta Singh’s hopes were dashed. Closely guarded by a ring of relatives, Zainab rejected him, saying: ‘I am a married woman. Now I have nothing to do with this man. He can take his second child whom I have brought from his house ...’

  The next day Buta Singh put himself under a train and committed suicide. A suicide note in his pocket asked that he be buried in Zainab’s village. This wish, however, was to remain unfulfilled. When Buta Singh’s body was brought to Lahore for an autopsy, it is said that large crowds gathered outside; some people wept; a film maker announced he would make a film on the story. Later, a police party took his body to Zainab’s village but was stopped from burying it there by people of her community. They did not want a permanent reminder of this incident, and Buta Singh or Jamil Ahmed was brought back to Lahore and buried there.1

  In death Buta Singh became a hero. The subject of a legend, fittingly situated in the land of other star-crossed lovers: Heer and Ranjha, Sohni and Mahiwal. Zainab, meanwhile, continued to ‘live’, her silence surrounding her. Unable to grieve and mourn her lover, and, in all likelihood, unable to talk. She was one among thousands of such women.

  Zainab and Buta Singh’s story stayed with me: it was a moving story, but more, I kept returning to it out of a nagging, persistent sense of dissatisfaction. As it was told, this was the story of a hero and a ‘victim’. We learnt something about the hero: his impulsive nature, his honesty and steadfastness, his willingness to give up everything for the woman he loved, the strength of his love. But nothing about the victim. Try as I might, I could not recover her voice. What had Zainab felt? Had she really cared for Buta Singh or was she indifferent to both the men in her life? How had the experience of abduction, almost certainly of rape, marked her? It was said that Zainab and Buta Singh were happy, that they were even in love. Yet, the man had actually bought her, purchased her like chattel: how then could she have loved him? I realized I had to go back to talking — if any women were still alive, this was perhaps the one way in which I could learn about their experiences, their feelings.

  The decision wasn’t an easy one. There is a point at which research becomes an end in itself. The human subject you are researching becomes simply a provider of information, the ‘informant’, devoid of feelings of her own, but important for your work. I did not want to be in this kind of violative — and exploitative — position. I decided, as I had done with Ranamama, that I would impose my own silences on this search. I knew by now that the history of Partition was a history of deep violation — physical and mental — for women. I would then talk to only those who wanted to talk about it. And would continue to explore other sources to help me recover the histories of women. Providentially — or so it seemed at the time, for I realize now that once there is an involvement in something, you begin to take notice of things that relate to that — the next step offered itself.

  In 1988, a women’s journal, Manushi, published a review of a Gujarati book, Mool Suta Ukhde (Torn from the Roots). The book was a sort of memoir and documentary account by a woman called Kamlaben Patel, of her work with abducted and raped women at Partition. The story Kamlaben told was shattering. Nearly 75,000 women, she recounted, had been raped and abducted on both sides of the border at Partition. This figure would probably have been higher if Kashmir had been taken into account — perhaps close to 100,000. Apart from the rapes, other, specific kinds of violence had been visited on women. Many were paraded naked in the streets, several had their breasts cut off, their bodies were tattooed with marks of the ‘other’ religion; in a bid to defile the so-called ‘purity’ of the race, women were forced to have sex with men of the other religion, many were impregnated. They bore children, often only to have them taken away forcibly. Sometimes families traded in their women, in exchange for freedom, at other times the women simply disappeared, abducted from camps, or as caravans of people marched across the border on foot. But that hundreds, indeed thousands, of women had been subjected to rape, and abduction, was now clear.

  Kamlaben had worked with other women to recover and rescue many of the abducted women she talked about in her book. But it had taken her several decades to write about her work and how she had felt about it. Why, I wondered? Why had she chosen the path of silence? And what was it that finally decided her to make things public? I went in search of her — and found her, a small, upright woman, living alone but for a sort of companion- helper-adopted daughter, in Bombay. ‘You want to know why I didn’t write about this?’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you.’

  The reason I did not write my book earlier was because I could not accept what I saw during that time. I found it difficult to believe that human beings could be like this. It was as if the demons had come down on earth ... it is when the demon gets into Shivji that he dances the tandav nritya, the dance of death and destruction ... it was as if this spirit had got into everyone, men and women. Partition was like a tandav nritya ... I have seen such abnormal things, I kept asking myself, what is there to write, why should I write it ...

  Kamlaben’s silence was one thing. But what about the many families I had spoken to? Why had they made no mention of the rape and abduction of women? Were these deliberate erasures or could it be that I had asked the wrong questions? Or simply not listened to the nuance, the half-said things? I thought, perhaps I had missed out something, perhaps people had talked about this. So I went back over my interviews. And, sudde
nly, there it was, in the odd silence, the ambiguous phrase. Two brothers in Delhi, survivors from the Rawalpindi riots, whom I had spoken to, had said, of their family:

  At home we were my grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, three brothers, three sisters [one of the sisters lived in East Punjab]. Our aunt lived in Delhi, she was with us with her daughter, they were killed there. She had come to see us. In fact, all our family were killed. We two brothers were the only two who survived.

  ... some were killed in the gurudwara and some elsewhere. Our grandmother and grandfather were killed in the house, they were killed by Pathans. The others ... my mother, and younger brother were killed in the gurudwara. Our father managed to escape but was killed somewhere along the way ... we were only a few left, and only some survived.

  Among those who were killed, then, were several family members. But they’d made no direct mention of their sisters, two of them, who had ‘disappeared’ at the time. Everyone around them knew this story, they’d been part of the same community, the same village, and they spoke about it, in whispers. ‘Speak to them,’ a neighbour told me, ‘two of their sisters disappeared at the time.’ The way he said it, it sounded as if this was something to be ashamed of. So I didn’t ask. But it was when I went back over our conversation that it struck me that that awkward silence, that hesitant phrase was perhaps where the disappearance of the two sisters lay hidden: in a small crack, covered over by silence. I realized then that in this silence lay the many hidden histories of Partition, the histories that have always hovered at the edges of those that have been told, the histories that describe the dark side of freedom. As I began to search, slowly, inexorably, this history revealed itself.

  Some months after I met Kamlaben, Sudesh and I came across a book in a second-hand bookstore, a great big tome which proved to be a listing of thousands of women, Hindu and Sikh, who had been abducted, or were reported missing by their families after Partition. The book made up 1414 pages in a large size. It carried a district by district listing of women and children who had been reported missing, some 21,809 names. Clearly an incomplete list, but a horrifying one nonetheless. The two missing sisters were in there, as were countless others ... young girls, older women, children. Often, they were picked up by people from their own village: one of the myths that historians of communal conflict have held dear, and that victims of such conflict often help to perpetrate, is that the aggressors are always ‘outsiders’. This list, to me, was conclusive proof of the opposite: so many women had been picked up by men of the same village. So many older women had been abducted — women in their fifties and sixties. According to social workers, this wasn’t uncommon: because abductors often knew the circumstances of the women they were picking up, they would take away older women, widows, or those whose husbands had been killed, for their property. They would then ask to become their ‘sons’ — a short-cut to quick acquisition of property. Here is a sample from this list:

  DISTRICT GUJRAT

  Published by A.J. Fletcher (Commissioner, Ambala and Jalandhar Divisions and High Powered Officer for Recovery of Abducted Women and Children, India), the book, entitled List of Non Muslim Abducted Women and Children in Pakistan and Pakistan Side of the Cease-Fire Line in Jammu & Kashmir State, was not released to the public ‘out of deference’ for the feelings of those whose relatives were listed there. In the Preface Fletcher says:

  This volume is an up-to-date compilation, in alphabetical order, of the names and other particulars of Hindu and Sikh women and children abducted in West Punjab (Pakistan) during the disturbances of 1947. This information was transmitted, from time to time, to the Government of Pakistan through Basic and Supplementary List[s]. The record of these Lists has now grown so bulky and scattered that references to particular entries are not only tedious and difficult but, at time[s], confusing. The names have now been grouped according to the districts in which they are reported to be living at present. For purposes of verification, it may be necessary to make enquiries both at the original home of the abducted person and the place of alleged abduction.

  2. The publication of this volume was not undertaken earlier out of deference to the feelings of the victims and their relations. The time has, however, come when the speedy recovery and restoration to relations of these unfortunate persons should be the paramount consideration and, whatever may be the feelings of abducted persons or their relations about the publication of the particulars contained in this volume, it is essential, for the early completion of this humanitarian work, that the necessary particulars of persons yet to be recovered should be readily available to the Governments of both countries. These particulars were reported by refugees from West Punjab, to the authorities in India, at the points of entry into this country or, subsequently, at the places where they temporarily settled.

  Families had reported their women missing. They had filed complaints with the police. Once the scale of the problem became clear, the State had to step in and take some action. The first thing to do was to prepare lists of missing women. These would then form the basis of their search. This, however, was not easy: often, three or four members from the same family, scattered in different places, would register the name of a woman. There was no system, at the time, of sharing and collating this information, so no list could be totally relied upon. The task of preparing such lists was assigned to Edwina Mountbatten’s United Council for Relief and Welfare, who collated and sent names on to the local police in specific areas.

  Nonetheless, the alarming growth in the size of the lists compelled both governments to act. As early as September 1947 the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan met at Lahore and took a decision on the question of the recovery of abducted women. It was at this meeting that they issued a joint declaration that specified that: ‘Both the Central Governments and the Governments of East and West Punjab wish to make it clear that forced conversions and marriages will not be recognised. Further, that women and girls who have been abducted must be restored to their families, and every effort must be made by the Governments and their officers concerned to trace and recover such women and girls.’2 The assumption was that all those abducted would be forcibly converted to the other religion and, because they were forced, such conversions were not acceptable. Later, on December 6 in the same year, when the division of pens and pencils and tables and other assets had barely been concluded, and when several thorny issues still remained to be sorted out, this initial agreement was given executive strength through an Inter Dominion Treaty. Interestingly, neither government denied that abductions had taken place — presumably they knew their men well — and both agreed to set up a machinery to rescue abducted women from each other’s territories. They agreed too that women living with men of the other religion had to be brought back, if necessary by force, to their ‘own’ homes — in other words, the place of their religion. It was a curious paradox — at least for the Indian State. India’s reluctance (although recent history has questioned this) to accept Partition was based on its self perception as a secular, rational nation, not one whose identity was defined by religion. Yet women, theoretically equal citizens of this nation, could only be defined in terms of their religious identity. Thus, the ‘proper’ home for Hindu and Sikh women who were presumed to have been abducted, was India, home of the Hindu and Sikh religion, and for Muslim women it was Pakistan, home of the Muslim religion, not the home that these women might actually have chosen to be in. Theoretically, at Partition, every citizen had a choice in the nation he/she wished to belong to. If a woman had had the misfortune of being abducted, however, she did not have such a choice.

  The machinery that was set up to recover women was to be made up of police officers, and women — social workers or those, usually from well off families, who were willing to give their time to this work. Among such women were Mridula Sarabhai, Premvati Thapar, Kamlaben Patel and Damyanti Sahgal. In the long excerpt below Damyanti Sahgal describes how she came to be involved in such work.


  DAMYANTI SAHGAL

  My masi Premvati Thapar became a widow three months after her marriage. She had been taken out of school to be married, three months later her husband died and she went back into the school (the convent) as Miss Thapar. He was a mathematician, Devi Dayal. So there she did her FA, her BA, MA, double MA. Then she did her Tripos in Economics from Cambridge.

  One day Mahatma Hans Raj, a well known Arya Samaji of Lahore came to meet my nana and said Thapar Sahib, we have come to ask you a major question. You know Arya Samajis never go anywhere without matlab and we have come to ask you for something. Whatever we ask for, you have to promise that you will give us. So Thapar Sahib asked, but at least give me some idea of what it is you’re asking for. They said, no but you must promise us that you will give it, what we have come for we will take with us. You know Arya Samajis are very persistent people. My nana said well, think carefully and ask so that what you ask for is something that can be given. They said, well your daughter who has just returned, we would like you to give her life to us. There is a DAV college for girls here but there is no school and we want to put her in charge of a school, and she will have to work in an honorary capacity. My bhaiji said what are you talking about? I have spent so much on her education and she has had so many offers (suddenly there had been several job offers) and you’re asking that I give her away, honorary you say. What will she live off? Where will she eat from? They laughed and said, Rai Sahib, don’t speak like a child. You have three sons don’t you? If you had had a fourth what would you have done, thrown him away? Think of her as your son, give her her share of the property and she will live off that. My nana ... he wasn’t willing, so much I have spent he thought and now, to just give her away ... but Auntie Premi came out herself and said I have decided, I will do this, I will work for them. He kept saying Premi, don’t, try to understand, but she was adamant. After that, masi, she used to work for a rupee a month ... we all worked under her ... a rupee a month ...