In a similar vein we are told by one writer that:
Tens of thousands of our pious mothers and sisters who would faint at the sight of blood were kidnapped and sold for so many rupees, annas, pies. I have seen some of them recovered from that holy land. Their foreheads bore tatoo marks declaring them ‘Mohammad ki joru’, ‘Mian Ahmed ki joru’, ‘Haji Hussain ki joru’, etc., etc ...
Their [that of refugees in general] early and effective absorption in the economy and society of the regions of their adoption is the primary duty of every national of Hindustan. The task is not easy. It bristles with difficulties. That is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that the problem is a challenge to our manhood, no less than to our nationalism.8 (my italics)
This easy equation of manhood and nationalism was not unusual — it needed men to protect the honour of the motherland. For many writers of the Organiser, then, during this period it became important to establish the purity of Mother India, the motherland which gave birth to the Hindu race and which was home to the Hindu religion. The country, whether referred to as Bharat, or Hindustan, was imaged in feminine terms, as the mother, and Partition was seen as a violation of its body. One issue of the Organiser (August 14, 1947) had a front page illustration of Mother India, the map of the country, with a woman lying on it, one limb cut off and severed with Nehru holding the bloody knife responsible for doing the severing. Of Bharat Mata it is said elsewhere that ‘it is this steadfast faith in her religion that has saved Hindustan from extinction through countless centuries ... she has run the gauntlet of conquest and bondage, she has been wrought upon by fear, persuasion and temptation to sign away her old faith and choose another, but she refused to part with her religion which is her soul.’9
In this homily there was a lesson too for those abducted women who had so easily fallen prey to, or chosen to accept the religion of the ‘other’. If to be a good Hindu woman was equal to being a ‘good’ mother, the very real fact of their cohabitation — enforced, perhaps even voluntary — with Muslim men represented a real threat to this ideal and therefore had to be dealt with. The responsibility fell on their husbands and brothers, to fight for them, to go to war, even ‘to burn themselves to ashes’ if need be, and to bring them back into the fold despite their ‘pollution’. As ‘Kamal’ (a pseudonym for a regular writer) put it, ‘Not only is Bharatvarsh our mother and we its children, she was the Deity and we her devotees. She was sacred. To go out was to go to foreign, impure, barbaric lands and so a purification on return was necessary.’10 Another article quotes Ram as saying to his brother: ‘O Lakshman, this golden Lanka doth not please my heart. The Mother, the country of our birth, is sweeter than the joys of heaven itself.’11
In sharp contrast to the image of the Hindu mother was that of the Muslim woman. Although she appeared only infrequently in the pages of the Organiser, readers were nonetheless warned of the dangers she carried. In an article entitled ‘Life in Sind’, Hoondraj Kripalani bewailed the fact that Hindus were being abused and insulted at every step. ‘Even in your own house you are not safe. Muslim women would enter your house on the pretext of enquiring whether you have anything to sell. And after a few minutes they will tell you that they have come to stay. You cannot drive them out, for you dare neither touch them nor get them removed by anyone else ...’ He goes on to add an ingenious warning to his Hindu brothers: ‘You may persist for two or three days in living with them, but then, of course, there is the real danger of these Muslim women crying aloud at night. And then where do you stand?’12 Clearly, then, there was no way in which Hindu men could be anything but helpless in the presence of aggressive Muslim women who insisted on inserting themselves into their lives.
Mass scale migration, death, destruction, loss — no matter how inevitable Partition seemed, no one could have forseen the scale and ferocity of bloodshed and enmity it unleashed. ‘We had thought,’ said Faryad, a carpenter from Delhi, ‘that once independence came, the streets of Delhi would be paved with gold, awash with milk. Instead, all we saw was rivers of blood.’ Still less could anyone have forseen that women would become so significant, so central, and indeed so problematic. However inadequate they may be, there are some steps that the State can take to help people rendered homeless, or to compensate those who have lost properties. But how do you respond when there has been mass rape of women, abductions on such a major scale and when the problem is further compounded by the fact that many of the abducted women say they actually wish to remain with their abductors?
Independent India in 1947 was a fledgling State — embattled, deeply contested, even fragile — thrown immediately into dealing with problems of enormous complexity. No matter how much people found to approve or disapprove of in the actions of the State, there was almost nothing at the policy level that could be acceptable to everyone. Most dissatisfactions, however, had to do with material things: how much compensation, the recovery of property, etc. Where women were concerned, the debate entered another realm altogether — that of the honour of the nation, and of its men.
Partition itself — the loss of a part of itself to another — was just such a loss. Although Partition had also brought independence, there was a deep sense of shame, almost of inadequacy, that India had allowed a part of itself, a part of its body, to be lost to the other nation. Throughout the nationalist movement one of the most powerful symbols for mobilizing both women and men had been the image of India as the mother, Bharatmata. Now, Partition represented an actual violation of this mother, a violation of her (female) body. The picture carried by the Organiser, with the woman’s body mapping the territory of India, and Nehru cutting off one arm which represented Pakistan, is a powerful and graphic reminder of this.
If the severing of the body of the country recalled the violation of the body of the nation-as-mother, the abduction and rape of its women, their forcible removal from the fold of their families, communities and country, represented a violation of their bodies as real — not metaphorical — mothers. Each woman who had been taken away was actually, or potentially, a mother. Within the givens of motherhood, her sexuality could be contained, accepted and legitimized. But as a raped or abducted mother, and further as an abducted mother who actually expressed a desire to stay on with her abductor, this sexuality was no longer comprehensible, or acceptable. How could motherhood be thus defiled? The fact that this had actually happened could be put down to the chaos of the time. But allowing it to continue: how could families, the community, the nation — indeed, how could men allow this state of affairs to continue? The women had to be brought back, they had to be ‘purified’ (and this meant that they had to be separated from their children, the ‘illegitimate’ products of their ‘illegitimate’ unions), and they had to be relocated into the family and the community. Only then would moral order be restored and the nation made whole again, and only then, as the Organiser points out again and again, would the emasculated, weakened manhood of the Hindu male be vindicated. If Partition was a loss of itself to the ‘other’, a metaphorical violation and rape of the body of the motherland, the recovery of women was its opposite, the regaining of the ‘pure’ (and this purity had to be constantly re-emphasized) body of the woman, essential, indeed crucial for the State’s — and the community’s — self legitimation.
Extensive as it was, then, the detailed discussion in the Assembly on the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act had very little to do with the women who were its subject. This of course is nothing new for even today discussions that are said to be about women, often have little or nothing to do with them, but provide an opportunity to rehearse other agendas. Similarly, the debate in the Assembly was an exercise in restoring or reaffirming the self image of India.
Perhaps the most stark question that faces us is: why did it become so important for the Indian State to go to such inordinate lengths to recover abducted women? Why, equally, did the Act that empowered the government to do so, need to be quite so sweeping in its powers? I
n the early days, the State could hardly have acted differently, given the considerable pressure families brought to bear on it. But as time went on, and the conditions of recovery became more and more difficult — it was clear, for example, that many women did not want to leave because they had children — why did the State continue the recovery operation?
And if the question of women’s recovery became so important for the State, we might well pose an additional question: why then did it become equally important for the kind of discourse we have seen in the Organiser? In both instances, the woman as a person did not count, her wishes were of little consequence, she had no right to resist, defy nor even to appeal, for the Act denied even that basic freedom. Not only was she to be forcibly recovered, but if she disputed her recovery, she was (after 1954) allowed to put her case before a tribunal, but beyond that — if the tribunal’s findings were seen as unjust — she had no recourse. There is no escaping the question, then, that if women were so inconsequential in something that was so centrally of concern to them, what was it that lay at the heart of the recovery operation?
National honour: the honour that was staked on the body of Mother India, and therefore, by extension, on the bodies of all Hindu and Sikh women, mothers and would-be mothers. The loss of these women, to men of the ‘other’ religion, was also a loss to their ‘original’ families. These, and not the new families which the women may now be in, were the legitimate families, and it was to these that the women needed to be restored. If this meant disrupting the relationships that they may now be in, that they had ‘accepted’ for whatever reason, this had to be done. The assumption was that even if asked for their opinion, women would not be able to voice an independent one because they were in situations of oppression. And there was some truth in this. But the obverse was also true: that even in their ‘own’ families women are seldom in situations where they can freely voice their opinions or make a choice. Nonetheless, these were the families which were held up as legitimate; women therefore had to be removed from those ‘other’ non-acceptable families and relocated into the ‘real’ ones. This, for the State, was the honourable thing to do.
If colonialism provided Indian men the rationale for constructing and reconstructing the identity of the Hindu woman as a ‘bhadramahila’, the good, middle class, Hindu wife and mother, supporter of her men, Independence, and its dark ‘other’, Partition, provided the rationale for making women into symbols of the nation’s honour.
This was not surprising. If independence in 1947 represented ‘the triumph of anti-colonial nationalism’, then Partitition, equally, represented the ‘triumph of communalism’,13 something which has had far reaching consequences for the India of today. Communalism came to be associated mainly with Pakistan, India could take upon itself the mantle of its opposite: thus Pakistan came to be represented as the communal, abductor country, refusing to return Hindu and Sikh women, while India was the reasonable, and civilized non-communal country, fulfilling its moral obligations.
Part II
A TRADITION OF MARTYRDOM
The violence that women faced in the aftermath of Partition is shrouded in many layers of silence. If we hear little about the rape and abduction of women in historical accounts, what we do know about violence in general relates only to men of the ‘other’ community. There is seldom, if ever, any acknowledgment (except perhaps in fiction) that Hindu and Sikh women could have become the targets of Hindu and Sikh men. Yet in the upheaval and the disruption of everyday life, Hindu men could hardly have become miraculously innocent. One of the myths that survivors increasingly — and tenaciously — hold on to is how communities and families held together in this time of crisis: how then can they admit such disruption from the inside, and by their own members?
It was in 1986 that I first came across stories of family and community violence. At the time, I had no idea of its scale and it was only gradually that I learnt exactly how widespread it had been. Mangal Singh was one of the first people I spoke to when I began to collect stories about Partition. In Amritsar bazar where he lived, Mangal Singh was considered something of a legend. The last surviving brother of three, he had made his way over to Amritsar in August 1947 with nothing but the ‘three clothes on my back’. Once over the border, Mangal Singh occupied a piece of vacant land, left behind by Muslims who had moved to Pakistan. ‘My heart was heavy,’ he said, ‘and this space was open, large, empty. I thought let me stay here, this emptiness is good for me, this emptiness and clear space.’ Here, he set up home and began the painful process of scratching together a living and starting life again. With small amounts of money borrowed from relatives and friends (‘if you needed a few hundreds or even thousands of rupees for anything, you were able to get them because people helped out’), he started a shop that sold fans and electrical spare parts. In time, he married and started a family. When I met him, Mangal Singh was in his seventies, a grandfather, surrounded by his large, extended family. His sons ran the business while he spent most of his time with his grandchildren.
Many people had urged me to talk to Mangal Singh, and I was curious about him. His legendary status in his neighbourhood came from the fact that, at Partition, he and his two brothers were said to have killed the women and children of their family, seventeen of them, before setting off across the border. I found this story difficult to believe: how could you kill your own children, your own family? And why? At first Mangal Singh was reluctant to speak to me: ‘What is the use of raking all this up again?’ he asked. But then, after talking to his family, he changed his mind — they had, apparently, urged him to speak. They felt he had carried this particular burden for too long. I asked him about the family that was gone. He described them thus: ‘We were people of substance. In those days people had a lot of children — so we had many women and they had many children ... there were children, there were girls ... nephews and others. What a wonderful family it was, whole and happy.’
Why, then, had he and his brothers thought fit to kill them? Mangal Singh refused to accept the seventeen women and children had been killed. Instead, he used the word ‘martyred’:
After leaving home we had to cross the surrounding boundary of water. And we were many family members, several women and children who would not have been able to cross the water, to survive the flight. So we killed — they became martyrs — seventeen of our family members, seventeen lives ... our hearts were heavy with grief for them, grief and sorrow, their grief, our own grief. So we travelled, laden with sorrow, not a paisa to call our own, not a bite of food to eat ... but we had to leave. Had we not done so, we would have been killed, the times were such ...
But why kill the women and children, I asked him. Did they not deserve a chance to live? Could they not have got away? He insisted that the women and children had ‘offered’ themselves up for death because death was preferable to what would almost certainly have happened: conversion and rape. But could they really have offered themselves? Did they not feel any fear, I asked him. He said, angrily:
Fear? Let me tell you one thing. You know this race of Sikhs? There’s no fear in them, no fear in the face of adversity. Those people [the ones who had been killed] had no fear. They came down the stairs into the big courtyard of our house that day and they all sat down and they said, you can make martyrs of — we are willing to become martyrs, and they did. Small children too ... what was there to fear? The real fear was one of dishonour. If they had been caught by the Muslims, our honour, their honour would have been sacrificed, lost. It’s a question of one’s honour ... if you have pride you do not fear. (my italics)
But who had the pride, and who the fear? This is a question Mangal Singh was unwilling to address. If accounts such as his were to be believed, the greatest danger that families, and indeed entire communities, perceived was the loss of honour through conversion to the other religion. Violence could be countered, but conversion was somehow seen as different. In many ways their concern was not unfounded: mass and forci
ble conversions had taken place on both sides. Among the Sikhs particularly, the men felt they could protect themselves but they were convinced that the women would be unable to do so. Their logic was that men could fight, die if necessary, escape by using their wits and their strength, but the women had no such strength to hand. They were therefore particularly vulnerable to conversion. More, women could be raped, impregnated with the seed of the other religion, and in this way, not only would they be rendered impure individually, but through them, the entire community could be polluted for they would give birth to ‘impure’ children. While the men could thus save themselves, it was imperative that the women — and through them, the entire race — be ‘saved’ by them.
A few years after I had spoken to Mangal Singh I began to look at newspaper reports on Partition, searching for similar accounts of family violence. On the April 15, 1947 The Statesman, an English daily newspaper, had carried the following story:
The story of 90 women of the little village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district ... who drowned themselves by jumping into a well during the recent disturbances has stirred the imagination of the people of the Punjab. They revived the Rajput tradition of self-immolation when their menfolk were no longer able to defend them. They also followed Mr Gandhi’s advice to Indian women that in certain circumstances, even suicide was morally preferable to submission.
Other Side Of Silence Page 17