Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  You see she was such a fine person, such a personality, she had been doing social work all her life and so many people had worked under her in Lahore. So later, when she went to Mrs Nehru and asked if there was any work, Mrs Nehru said well, Jawaharlal is working on something. An agreement is being made between the two governments, you know all those women of ours who have been abducted, they are really miserable. We have to rescue them from the hands of those villains. And here the Sikhs have done the same thing, so we plan to open a recovery organization and I want to give you some work there. Masi said now I don’t even have money, and I want very little ... I need accommodation, a car and a chaprasi. Please get me this.

  One day masi said to me, Danti, it’s getting on for winter, and we have no money, no clothes, ... you know, Auntie Premi loved clothes and things and she liked good clean living, she enjoyed life, and our almirahs in Lahore were full of our things and we even knew which families had taken our houses. Those days convoys used to go to Lahore and so we decided to go. Masi said Danti, let’s go, we’ll go to the DAV college camp in Lahore—from there we’ll take government jeeps and go to our old homes and I’ll collect some dhotis and a shawl. So we went. And we reached DAV college from where we got an escort jeep and went to masi’s house. They welcomed us, the begums came out, we knew them, masi said I have come with a purpose, I left my almirahs locked here and I am freezing. I have come to collect some shawls and clothes. They said, what are you talking about? All that has gone in zait-ul-maniat, unclaimed property, and there’s nothing left. Masi and I were shocked. They said, have tea, but we couldn’t. They kept saying none of your things is here ...

  We came back to the camp and ate there. You see the camps would collect refugees and when there was a sizeable number, the convoys would leave and take them across the border. So we ate, dal and rotis, there used to be huge containers. And Mridula Sarabhai jumped on us. Masi used to know her, I didn’t. I had heard stories about her. She said Miss Thapar, you are here. Masi said, yes, we came to get our clothes but were unable to get anything. She, Mridula Sarabhai, said but you know about this organization that is being started [the Central Recovery Organization to recover abducted women], they have decided that they’re going to choose you as a director. And who is this, she asked, pointing to me. My niece, said my masi. Oh good, she’ll come in handy for my work, she’s just what I want. You see, Premi, when this organization starts, you will be the director there, and she will be the director here. I was sort of shy and of course the whole day I would do nothing but say my prayers and count my beads and roam about alone. I couldn’t understand what was going on and I said, no, no, leave me out of this. But she said, no, I’ll make her chief liaison officer and she said to my masi, don’t take her back with you, she’ll stay here and I’ll soon get her an appointment letter. I asked what was going on and she said I’ll make you director. I said director of what, she said recovery. I didn’t know what recovery was or what director was. I couldn’t put two and two together. She said no, no, it’s done, it’s done. I said I have no clothes ... she said the jeep is going, it will bring your clothes. I didn’t know what was happening ... suddenly, masi had gone, I had no clothes ... so then, you see I have this habit, when I have a problem I speak to my god, my thakur. I don’t know anything, I’m just an instrument of his will. So I said to him what is this game you’re playing? Here I have become a director and I have a letter in my hand, even my father and grandfather did not become directors, so now it’s up to you to keep my pride.

  Soon afterwards a message came that there was a young girl who had been abducted and she had been traced to somewhere close by, so what with one thing and another, we managed to rescue her. Refugees used to come there in huge numbers, they would collect there and once there was a large number the convoys would start off.

  Part II

  HISTORY IS A WOMAN’S BODY

  Seized of the problem of the large numbers of abducted women, the Indian and Pakistani governments arrived at an agreement, the Inter-Dominion Treaty of December 6, 1947, to recover as many abducted women as could be found. The operation came to be known as the Central Recovery Operation, and one woman in particular, Mridula Sarabhai, is said to have campaigned for it. Sarabhai wielded considerable influence with Gandhi and Nehru — she came from a powerful industrial family of Ahmedabad — and had been closely involved with Congress politics. She had submitted a fourteen-page note to Nehru outlining the necessity of recovering abducted women and used her influence to get the government to agree to mounting a recovery operation. At the 1947 Inter-Dominion conference where this was agreed, the Indian government returned the responsibility for the recovery of women to Sarabhai, appointing her chief social worker. She was to be assisted by a team, mainly made up of the police.

  Within a short while, the initial agreement arrived at between the two governments was given legislative sanction: The Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Ordinance was transformed first into a Bill and later, in 1949, into an Act.3 By the terms of this Act, the government of India set up an implementation machinery and, importantly, arrived at a working definition of what was meant by the term ‘abducted person’.

  This was essential because the affair was a complicated one: how to decide who had been abducted and who had not? What if a woman had gone of her own free will? These were things that took thought, that needed consideration. Much simpler, for an impersonal agency such as the State, to set times, dates, figures to decide these thorny problems. So a date was fixed. The violence in Punjab had begun early in March 1947. Thus any woman who was seen to be living with, in the company of, or in a relationship with a man of the other religion, after March 1, 1947 would be presumed to have been abducted, taken by force. After this date, all marriages or conversions that had taken place would be seen as forced, and would not be recognized by either of the two governments. No matter what the woman said, how much she protested, no matter that there was the odd ‘real’ relationship, the women had no choice in the matter. Many things were left unresolved by the fixing of this date: women who had children from mixed unions after the cut-off date — were they also to be considered abducted women? Or did the date relate to only those children who were conceived after March 1? The Act remained unclear on these issues.

  In the work of rescue the chief social worker was to be assisted by a unit made up mostly of the police. The total unit comprised one Assistant Inspector General (ASI), two Deputy Sub-Inspectors of Police (DSPs), fifteen inspectors, ten sub-inspectors, and six Assistant Sub-Inspectors (ASIs). Together with women social workers, this force of police was empowered, in both countries, to travel into the other country in search of particular women, and then to carry out the ‘rescue’ or ‘recovery’ operation as best they saw fit. Social workers on both sides had to resort to all kinds of subterfuges to find abducted women. Often, the local police, meant to be accompanying and helping in the tracking down of women, would send ahead a warning and the women would be hidden away. Imaginative social workers countered this in a variety of ways: adopted disguises, used false names, acted secretly and on their own, or just stormed their way into homes where they suspected abducted women were being held. Here are two such accounts:

  In the mornings we used to go to find girls from the rural area. In the evenings we used to come to the head office, to the camp and those women who had been rounded up from the area, they used to be brought to the camp where we would receive them. Then they used to be changed inter-dominion [i.e. between the two countries]. The only difference was that those workers were daring — they would go out and find women ...

  We’d go selling eggs. We’d go into the villages, and we’d ask people for lassi, saying amma, amma, we have come from very far, please give us some lassi. So we’d sell eggs and ask for lassi. Then we’d tell stories, we’d say we have come from Hindustan and you know, my younger brother, these bastard Sikhs have taken his young wife away, they’ve abducted her. He is bereft, and lonely. D
o you know of any daughter of kafirs in this area — if there is any such girl do tell us, maybe we can buy her and the poor man, at least he can set up home again. And the old women would know and they would often tell us there’s a girl in such and such place ... So there was all this about selling eggs and asking, amma, give us some lassi.

  Or amma, I am hungry, give me something, and we would try to win their confidence and then we would ask them, or tell them we wanted to buy a girl ... and we’d ask whether the people who had the girl would part with her, and then gently ask for the address ... that was our way of getting information.4

  Among the refugees who were leaving [from Delhi] there was a young man who had been married only a year and a half and whose young wife and two-month old child had been lost. One day, someone told him that they had heard that she was in the custody of a Jat in Bhogal [an area in Delhi]. It was an old chamarin who gave the news. She had felt sorry for the girl and had promised that she would take her message across to her husband. The young man told me that his wife had even asked for his photo which he had sent her ... the chamarin said she remembered him very much and Mithan, her abductor, made her work in the fields.

  One day Sushila Nayyar had come to the camp. She said, come on, I’ll come with you, where are these fields? Night was falling as we reached Okhla. But Sushila was fearless and unhesitatingly, she walked some twenty steps ahead of me, pushing her way through the bushes and fields. We met many other women but not the one we were seeking. Sushila walked into the house without a trace of fear and I followed her. Ausaf, the husband, was calling out his wife’s name, Jaan bi, Jaan bi, all the time. But there was no answer. And Sushila was giving the people a talking to: if the girl is with you, give her to us immediately. Tell me, where is she? At the moment, only I have come and I will take the girl away, no harm will come to you. But if the police come you will be taken away to jail and punished. But there was no sign of the girl ... and at nine at night we came back, dejected and unsuccessful.5

  Later, it turned out that all the while Sushila Nayyar and Anis Kidwai were searching for Jaan bi, she had been bound and gagged and locked up in the hay loft of the house she was in. Fearing that he would be found out, her abductor now took her with him and ran away to UP. On the way, however, Jaan bi managed to escape: she ran to some Muslims reading the namaz, and told them her story. She was then restored to her husband, although she had lost her child. Not all tales ended so happily and there were thousands of women who were successfully spirited away, never to be found.

  The fixing of dates and the enacting of legislation, however, did not do away with the many imponderables that had to be dealt with. Many women protested. They refused to go back. Impossible as it may seem, there were women who, like Zainab, had formed relationships with their abductors or with the men who had bought them for a price. At first, I found this difficult to believe: but there is a kind of twisted truth in it. One might almost say that for the majority of Indian women, marriage is like an abduction anyway, a violation, an assault, usually by an unknown man. Why then should this assault be any different? Simply because the man belonged to a different religion? ‘Why should I return,’ said an abducted woman, ‘Why are you particular to take me to India? What is left in me now of religion or chastity?’ And another said: ‘I have lost my husband and have now gone in for another. You want me to go to India where I have got nobody and of course, you do not expect me to change husbands every day.’6

  Mridula Sarabhai was instrumental in bringing many middle class women into social work. Most of these women worked with Hindu and Sikh abducted women. In Delhi, at the two Muslim camps in Purana Qila and Humayun’s tomb, there was another woman who took to social work on her own, and whose efforts related to Muslim women abducted by Hindus and Sikhs. Anis Kidwai’s husband, Shafi Ahmed Kidwai, was killed during the Partition riots in Mussoorie where he was working. Despite Kidwai’s entreaties, he had refused to leave his office and his employees (he was a government servant) saying he could not abandon them, or his job. His death devastated Kidwai and she went to see Gandhi, in search of some sort of solace. Gandhi advised her to stop mourning and to involve herself in something, and Kidwai turned to social work with Muslim refugees. In course of this work she had occasion to come across several cases of abducted Muslim women, and she writes movingly about their dilemmas. I quote from her at some length:

  In all of this sometimes a girl would be killed or she would be wounded. The ‘good stuff’ would be shared among the police and army, the ‘second rate stuff’ would go to everyone else. And then these girls would go from one hand to another and then another and after several would turn up in hotels to grace their decor, or they would be handed over to police officers, in some places to please them.

  And every single one of these girls, because she had been the victim of a trick, she would begin to look upon her ‘rescuer’ perforce as an angel of mercy who had, in this time of loot and killing, rescued her, fought for her, and brought her away. And when this man would cover her naked body — whose clothes had become the loot of another thief — with his own loincloth or banyan, when he would put these on her, at that moment she would forget her mother’s slit throat, her father’s bloody body, her husband’s trembling corpse. She would forget all this and instead, thank the man who had saved her. And why should she not do this? Rescuing her from the horror, this good man has brought her to his home. He is giving her respect, he offers to marry her. How can she not become his slave for life?

  And it is only much later that the realization dawns that among the looters this man alone could not have been the innocent, among the police just he could not have been the gentleman. But all were tarred with the same brush. Each one had played with life and death to save the honour of some young woman, and thousands of mothers and sisters must be cursing these supposedly ‘brave men’ who had abducted their daughters.

  But by the time this realization came, it was too late. Now there was nowhere for her to go: by this time she is about to become a mother, or she has passed through several hands. After seeing so many men’s faces, this daughter of Hindustan, how will she ever look at the faces of her parents, her husband?7

  Kidwai’s feelings for abducted women — ‘the reader will not understand how I, as a woman, felt on hearing these things,’ she says — mirrored those of many of the other social workers who took on the task of recovering abducted women. Acting as dutiful servants of the State, they nonetheless responded to the women as women, and often helped to subvert the State’s agenda, although much of the time they were also helpless and hampered by the fact that they had little choice but to carry out their assigned tasks. Kidwai describes her own feelings movingly:

  ... there were some women who had been born into poor homes and had not seen anything other than poverty. A half full stomach and rags on your body. And now they had fallen into the hands of men who bought them silken salwars and net dupattas, who taught them the pleasures of cold ice cream and hot coffee, who took them to the cinema. Why should they leave such men and go back to covering their bodies with rags and slaving in the hot sun in the fields? If she leaves this smart, uniformed man, she will probably end up with a peasant in rags, in the filth, with a danda on his shoulder. And so they are happy to forget the frightening past, or the equally uncertain and fearful future, and live only for the present.

  They also had another fear. The people who wanted to take them away, whether they were friend or foe, how did they know that they would not sell them to others? After all, she has been sold many times, how many more times would it happen? The same police uniforms, it was these that had, time and again, taken her from here to there. What was there to reassure her that she could believe in the authority of the turban, that the person who wore it came from her relatives, and was not someone who had come yet again to buy and sell her. The stigma did not go away until she was dragged away and made to live with her relatives for a few days.

  There remained reli
gion, and what did these girls know about that after all? Men can at least read the namaz, the alvida, they can go to the mosque to read the namaz at id, and listen to the mullah. But the mullah has never allowed women to even stand there. The moment they see young women the blood rises in their eyes. Be off with you, go away, what work do you have here? As if they were dogs to be pushed out of every place. The culprit is within them, but it is the women who are made to go away. If they come to the masjid everyone’s namaz is ruined. If they come to listen to the sermon, everyone’s attention is distracted. If they go to the dargah they will get pushed around by men, and if they participate in a qawwali mehfil the sufi’s attention will be on worldly things rather than on God ...

  And friend, the God of this religion has never kept her very comfortably. But the new man with whom she is is like God. Let everyone talk, she will never leave this man who has filled her world with colour.

  Despite the women’s reluctance (and not all women were thus reluctant, many were happy to be recovered and restored to their families) to leave, considerable pressure, sometimes even force, was brought to bear on them to ‘convince’ them to do so.

  DAMYANTI SAHGAL

  Two young men reported to me that their sister, Satya, whose marriage they had been preparing, had been abducted. They suspected Pathans had picked her up and they said somehow you must find her. I had heard that — I’ve forgotten which chak it was — that badmash Pathans had captured the daughter of deen dars and had taught her to ride a horse and that she now carried a rifle ...