Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  Later, Bir Bahadur Singh also witnessed the incident in which women jumped into a well to take their own lives, rather than let their ‘honour’ be put to test. This incident has today acquired almost an iconic significance by being fixed in a television film, Tamas, where numbers of tall, upright Punjabi women stride determinedly and proudly towards the well which is to receive their sacrifice for the sake of their religion. The reality must have been rather different. Descriptions from survivors (most of whom are male), however, tend to re-emphasize the ‘heroic’ and ‘valorous’ aspects of these tragic deaths. In Bir Bahadur’s words:

  ... at the well Sardarni Gulab Kaur ... in my presence she said sachche badshah, let us be able to save our girls ... this incident of the twenty-five girls of our household had already taken place ... so she knew that Sant Raja Singh had killed his daughters and other women of his household ... those that are left we should not risk their lives and allow them to be taken away. So, at the well, after having talked among themselves and decided, they said, we are thirsty, we need water, so the Musalmaans took them to the well ... I was sitting with my mother, this incident of the twenty-five women had taken place ... so sitting at the well, Mata Lajjawanti, who was also called Sardarni Gulab Kaur, she said two words, she jumped into the well and some eighty women followed her ... they also jumped in. The well filled up completely; one woman whose name is Basant Kaur, six children born of her womb died in that well, but she survived. She jumped in four times, but the well had filled up ... she would jump in, then come out, then jump in again ... she would look at her children, at herself ... till today, she is alive.

  Some negotiations had clearly taken place between the attackers and the victims in most of the villages. Kulwant Singh, another survivor, this time from Thamali, remembers a meeting at which an understanding was reached (between the two communities) that ‘we would be let off’. According to Kulwant Singh, the amount negotiated was between sixteen and thirty thousand rupees and the laying down of all weapons. Having done this, ‘at night they started fires and some of our sisters, daughters and others, in order to save their honour, their relatives, our veers, they martyred them and in this way at that time some of our women and children were killed. In the gurudwara there were piles of bodies.’ There is no record of the numbers of women and children who were killed by the men of their own families, their own communities. Unlike in the case of abducted women, here families did not report the deaths of their women, for they themselves were responsible for them. But while abducted women then entered the realm of silence, women who were killed by families, or who took their own lives, entered the realm of martyrdom.

  Stories of this kind of mass suicide, or of women being killed by their own families, are legion. Today, half a century later, these and other stories still survive, and are held up, not only as examples of the bravery and manliness of the Sikh race (although it is the women who died, nonetheless, the decision to sacrifice their lives — attributed, in this instance, to the men — is seen as the defining act of bravery, for it also ‘saves’ them from a fate worse than death), but also as examples of the heroism of the Sikh women who ‘gave up’ their lives ‘willingly’ for the sake of their religion. In the remembrance rituals that take place in gurudwaras these incidents are recounted again and again each year to an audience of men, women and children and the women are exhorted to remember the sacrifice and bravery of their sisters and to cast themselves in the same mould. Should the quam, the race or the dharam, the religion, ever be in danger, they are told, your duty is clear. The ‘sacrifice’ of the many women who died such deaths during Partition, is compared, as in the Statesman article, to the extreme ‘sacrifice’ of Rajput women who undertook mass immolation when they lost their husbands in war. It is not unusual to draw a direct and almost linear link between that sacrifice and this. Talk of the martyrdom of women is almost always accompanied by talk of those women whose lives were saved, at the cost of those which were lost, and although there may not be any direct condemnation, it is clear that those who got away, are in some ways seen as being inferior to those who ‘offered’ themselves up to death to save their religion. In response to a question about whether there were any women left in Thoa Khalsa after the mass ‘suicide’ of ninety women, Bir Bahadur Singh said:

  Yes, many women were still left in our village. Mostly our family women died, and then the ones who jumped into the well. But the others were saved. Because the Musalmaans saw that they were killing themselves. The ones who sacrificed ... if the women of our family had not been killed, and those who jumped into the well had not taken their own lives, the ones who were left alive, would not have been alive today.

  ‘The ones who were left alive would not have been alive today.’ Clearly, for Bir Bahadur Singh, as for many men, the words ‘being alive’ (inasmuch as they related to women) had little to do with their literal meaning. What would have happened to women if the others had not ‘given up’ their lives? In all likelihood, they would have been raped, perhaps abducted and further violated, almost certainly converted. All of these were tantamount to death. But the sacrifice of some women saved the lives of the others — women and men. The implication all along is that the power of such a supreme sacrifice worked to frighten away the aggressors, that once they saw how strong the women were, how determined to preserve the honour of the community, they backed off in the face of such power. And through such a supreme sacrifice the women merely lost their lives — or exchanged them for an eternal life of martyrdom — while the community managed to retain its honour. Implied in these accounts was the assumption that the honour of the community lay in not allowing its women to be violated. In normal times, men can be the guardians of such honour through their responsibility of guarding the woman’s sexuality. But at abnormal times men need to fight to retaliate in attacks and the best way of guarding their honour is to not allow the women to be violated.

  As Bir Bahadur said: ‘My father took the first step, and then the rest of the work was done by Sardarni Lajjawanti ... Mata Lajjawanti ... saved all the other Sikhs by sacrificing her life ... this made around one hundred girls.’

  And yet, things were not always so clear cut, for when it came to saying themselves, all sorts of other arguments were brought in. In each case, however, the common factor was the dispensability of women. In many villages where negotiations had taken place, often women were traded in for freedom. In Thoa Khalsa too, as survivors tell it, there was one particular woman who was said to be involved with a Muslim. Before the attacks actually began, the attackers asked that she be given to them as the price of freedom for the entire village. As Bir Bahadur said:

  It was like this, when all the fighting started, then there were also attempts at settlements. After all, a fight means a settlement. So the Musalmaans came to make a settlement. They said they would allow us to stay on in our homes if we gave them that girl. There was one Musalmaan, he was quite strong. He was a kind of loafer, he used to work the land, but he wanted this girl. He had some kind of relationship with her. They kept asking for this girl, saying if you give her to us, we’ll send the Musalmaans away. And people were discussing this, saying she is a bad girl anyway, she has a relationship with him, what’s the use of keeping her? You see, when it comes to saving your life, nothing counts. (my italics) So a sort of decision was taken to give her away ... At the time, there was no question of what she wanted. It was a question of the honour of the village.

  In the end, the woman was not given away, and the negotiations failed. Later, the Muslims came and took her away from a transit camp where the survivors of Thoa Khalsa were housed. From all accounts, she went willingly, and was married into a Muslim family. Throughout his account Bir Bahadur continued to reiterate the sacrifice made by the men and women of his particular family. He, his family, other surivors of Thoa Khalsa, all feel they owe their lives to those who died:

  All around us there were fires. What can a person do? I think really all honour to th
ose people who killed their own children, who jumped into wells. And they saved us ... you take any household of martyrs and you will find it will take root and grow. Blood is such a thing, that as you water a plant, a tree, so also the tree grows, so does the martyr’s household.

  Recalling the time he said: ‘Even today when I remember it ... I cry, it helps to lighten my heart. A father who kills his daughter, how much of a victim, how helpless he must be ...’

  It is not my contention that the women who died thus in family and community violence, were all victims, forced into taking their own lives, or murdered by their kinsmen. Or that they were mere victims of a ‘patriarchal consensus’ arrived at by their men and the elders of the community. But how can we ever arrive at the ‘truth’ of these incidents? As with abducted women, there is no way in which we can easily recover the voices of women themselves. With the exception of Basant Kaur, all the accounts I have quoted from above are by men, and clearly, we cannot unproblematically take their voices to reflect what the women felt. I think the lines between choice and coercion must have been more blurred than these accounts reflect. For example, when Bir Bahadur Singh spoke of a few women who jumped into the well several times and who survived, he made no mention that one of them was actually his mother, Basant Kaur. So that, when she described the incident with herself as the protagonist, we did not, at first, believe her. Later, when it was confirmed that she was indeed the same woman, I could only conclude that Bir Bahadur had not mentioned that she was his mother because in having escaped death, she could not be classed with the women who had, in fact, died. Much easier, then, to speak of the sister who died an ‘honourable’ death, than the mother who survived.

  In Thoa Khalsa, and its surrounding areas, the attacks had continued for some eight days, and it was on the last day that the mass drowning took place. For these few days virtually everyone in the village was aware of the many discussions that went on. As the survivors tell it, although the men led the discussions, some women were involved in them. Key among these, in Thoa, was Sardarni Gulab Kaur, otherwise known as Mata Lajawanti, a fairly important figure in the village, as her husband, Gulab Singh, had been. As survivors tell it, not only did she take the decision, but she also ‘fearlessly’ led the women to the well, upholding the tradition of the strong, upright, courageous Punjabi woman. If the women were aware of the discussions, perhaps even involved in them, can we, then surmise that in taking their own lives they were acting upon a perceived (or rather, misperceived) notion of the good of their community? Did their deaths corroborate the ideology — and were they a part of this ideology? —- that the honour of the community lay in ‘protecting’ its women from the patriarchal violence of an alien community? The natural protectors by this reckoning are the men, who at this particular moment, are unable to offer such protection. Because the women knew this, can one then suggest that they could well have consented to their own deaths, in order to preserve the honour of the community? Were they then, consenting victims/agents of the patriarchal consensus I have spoken of above? Where, in their ‘decision’ did ‘choice’ begin and ‘coercion’ end? What, in other words, does their silence hide?

  Is there any satisfactory way of arriving at the truth of these things? Choice, after all, is not simple to reconstruct, and it might well be said that my reading of its conflicted existence back into this incident is dictated more by my involvement in the contemporary discourse of feminism, than by the incident itself. Yet, for me, this incident, and the many others like it, are important for they shed light on much more than the question of choice or coercion, of whether the women were victims or agents of their fate. I am struck by the fact that nowhere in the different discourses on Partition, do such incidents count as violent incidents, that somehow when we speak of the violence of Partition, we do not touch upon the violence within ourselves, within families, within communities. Instead, such acts are represented, in so much of what we say and do, as valorous acts, shorn of the violence, and indeed coercion, that must have sent so many women to their deaths. Nor do we ever consider the ramifications, in terms of the further violence they can and do lead to, of such acts; or indeed the symbolic significance they come to acquire over the years, and the use they are put to to instigate further violence.

  One of the myths about violence of the sort we have seen in Partition is that it is largely male: that women, in times of sectarian strife, are the victims of violence, not its perpetrators, not its agents. Much of this is, however, predicated on how we understand violence: I believe that our notions of violence are so patriarchal that we find it difficult to think in terms of women, those custodians of the domestic sphere, as violent beings. Yet, whether the women who died in Thoa Khalsa actually offered themselves up for death or not, the manner in which they ‘chose’ to die was no less violent, though certainly different, from what one might cynically term the routine, and visible, violence of Partition. And further, as long as violence can be located somewhere outside, a distance away from the boundaries of the family and the community, it can be contained. It is for this reason, I feel, that during Partition, and in so much of the recall of Partition, violence is seen as relating only to the ‘other’. This obscures the very important fact that many women of Hindu and Sikh communities must have seen the men of their own communities as being perpetrators of violence against them — for just as there were ‘voluntary’ suicides, there were also mass murders.

  Women faced violence both from their own families and their own communities. I would like to end this account of family and community violence with a story of a woman, Prakashvanti, whom I met in the Gandhi Vanita Ashram at Jalandhar. One of the three remaining Partition survivors in the ashram, Prakashvanti’s story went as follows: she and her husband and small child lived in Sheikupura. In 1947, she was some twenty years old. When Partition began to seem like a reality, Hindus from her village gathered together in the local rice mill for safety. Shortly afterwards, the mill came under attack, and the attackers began to loot the place. Prakashvanti’s husband came to her and suggested he kill her, else, he told her, ‘they will dishonour you’. She remembers little after that, except that she was hit by her husband, and she lost consciousness. The attackers clearly left her for dead and, later, when she recovered, she and two girls hid behind some sacks, waiting for the attackers to leave. Later, Prakashvanti found the body of her husband, and her child lying with many others. Did she not feel anger at him, I asked her. She said: ‘what could he do? He was alone.’ She did not defend her husband, but she did attempt to explain what she saw as the ‘logic’ of his action. I have often wondered whether that was what the women whose, deaths I have spoken of above, told themselves. But for those who recount these stories today as stories of heroism and valour, of sacrifice and honour, there is another, more realistic agenda.

  As we can see in the remembrance rituals for the Thoa Khalsa incident, for men, the potential for violence on the part of their own women, or their agency in this respect, had to be contained and circumscribed. The women could not, therefore be named as violent beings. This is why their actions are narrated and sanctified by the tones of heroic, even otherworldly, valour. Such narratives are meant to keep women within their aukat, their ordained boundary, which is one that defines them as non-violent. Their actions are thus re-located into the comfortably symbolic realm of sacrifice — their role within the home anyway — for the community, victimhood and even non-violence. To actively remember these women as symbols of the honour of the family, community and nation is then also to divest them of both violence and agency.

  Part III

  BIR BAHADUR SINGH

  ‘You take any household of martyrs and you will find it will take root and grow ...’

  The reader will by now be familiar with Bir Bahadur, whose words I have quoted extensively above. I have, nonetheless, chosen to include the full text of his interview here, because there are many other things Bir Bahadur spoke about, and which struck me as im
portant and significant, which I have not referred to above. This interview was carried out in 1990 in Delhi. At the time, Bir Bahadur was in his sixties. As with many people, I met Bir Bahadur quite by accident. For some months, Sudesh and I had been talking to people, survivors of the Rawalpindi riots that had taken place in March of 1947 — in Bhogal and Jangpura. As often happens when you are talking to people of a community, one person leads you to another, and that contact to another and so on. At first someone directed us to Bir Bahadur’s mother, Basant Kaur. She lived in a newish house in Bhogal. And it was during one of our interviews with Basant Kaur that we met Bir Bahadur. A tall, striking man with a flowing white beard, Bir Bahadur ran a small, but successful general merchant shop in Delhi. Of all the people we spoke to, Bir Bahadur was the one most directly involved in politics. Apart from being a member of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), he had been active in helping Sikh families in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in Delhi. As well, he seemed to be in regular contact with a number of Sikh politicians and to be closely connected with them. Because of the suspicion that came to attach to many Sikhs after 1984, Bir Bahadur was arrested and jailed on grounds of being a terrorist. He describes the incident in detail in this interview, and brings out, starkly, and poignantly, the sense of betrayal that he and many other Sikhs felt after 1984. Bir Bahadur and his family suffered considerable material losses in 1984 and, in this interview, his sense of betrayal comes from two things: the fact that none of the guilty had, till the time of writing, been punished and the fact that the government chose to ignore and do nothing for ‘those people whose blood was spilled to make this country independent.’ By this he means the Sikhs who came across at Partition, and who both fought the ‘other’ as well as sacrificed their own families. Sikhs like his father, who is mentioned in the interview as a victim, someone burdened with the knowledge of having killed his own kin for the honour of the community and country. And equally, Sikhs like his sister Maan Kaur, who ‘became a martyr’ in the cause of the Sikh religion at the hands of his father.