The Marked Body
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Politics and Activism

The Marked Body

"Vultures in waiting, as men women and children breath their last." -Khuswant Singh

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The Marked Body
Margaret Bourke-White from "Train to Pakistan" by Khuswant Singh

The Partition of India and Pakistan was a treacherous time, wherein many lives were lost and many others displaced. In 1947, India and Pakistan split, each becoming separate nation-states, adding to the trauma of the transition from colonial to post-colonial governance. Millions of people went from India to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India. On this movement and this event, an article in The New Yorker says, “…Partition displaced fifteen million people and killed more than a million…” One particular word that appears in every other generic description of the partition is seen here: people. With the façade of gender-neutrality the word ‘people’ often allows us to forget, and not even acknowledge the very gendered violence that was always present. This violence existed in the intersection of many identities—many pre-existing conflicts took to a traumatic form—both during and after partition.

I am willing to distinguish between two kind of displacements—also being gendered; there are people that had to move from one side of the border to the other, and, there are women that were abducted. After the partition, “…the governments of India and Pakistan were swamped with complaints by relatives of ‘missing’ women…” (pg.67). It is also important here to note that many of these complaints were filed by the same men who pressured them to either kill themselves by pushing poison into their hands or were more than willing to kill them on request. A singular instance of such an incident:

Many Hindu families including ours, gathered in a large haveli… we were [soon] overpowered [by the Muslims] and had to surrender… My three sisters swallowed the poison—the hospital compounder distributed poison to anyone who wanted it— my bua [paternal aunt] gave the signal to the other women to jump by jumping off the bridge first. No one tried to stop them, not even my father. We tried to persuade, Veeran, a young cousin, to take opium, but she refused. (pg.51)

One of the many other outcomes of this situation is that the women could have been abducted by the Muslim camps (the situation happened the other way around as well, where Muslims were kidnapped by Hindu camps). This created a call for the ‘recovery’ of these abducted women, a lot of whom were completely content with their new lives with their abductors. The movie, "Silent Waters," illustrates a completely content life of a woman who was Sikh before partition. She escaped death by the hands of her kinsmen only to be abducted by a Muslim group. She was soon married to one of the men from that group and had a child with him as well. Her brother tries to recover her to say goodbye to their dying father. She refuses, as she felt no sympathy for the men who nearly put her to death.

This movie captures the case of many women for whom the Partition brought out several of their own identities clashing with others; Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Indian, Pakistani, etc. Nevertheless, the Indian Government on their quest for general assumption was “…that all abducted women were captive victims and wanted nothing more than to be restored to their original families as soon as possible…” (pg.104). The discourse that went behind this seemingly simple and straightforward statement was one where the bodies of the Partition women were marked: “…In the classic transposition, the woman’s body became the body of the motherland (Women-as- nation) violated by the marauding foreigner…” (pg.109). The mass abductions of women’s bodies marked their bodies as a sign of ‘sexual chaos’ and the only way such a thing could be reversed is by bringing them back to (and I speak here of my own nation) India.

When the women were brought back to India, a lot of them were not accepted into their own communities and countries. Our Prime Minister at the time made a statement about this very incident, within which he said, “…This is the most objectionable and wrong attitude to take and any social custom that supports this attitude must be condemned…” (pg.75) This didn’t really change much; the women that ‘went back’ to the Hindu and the Sikh communities were “…more easily accepted if she was alone….” (pg.161) On the other hand, if they had children, it was a completely different story. The children would serve as a “…constant reminder of the violation of the women, of the fact that she had sex with a man of another religion…” (pg.161). This is just one way that these women were marked; another exists within the government itself. In the discourse, the laws, the welfare-centred moves that were meant for the best, all of it – this marking was present everywhere.

The discourse that led to this action was key in establishing the India-Pakistan dichotomy wherein India privileged its secularism. The presupposition to a privilege is that it has to be put up against something else, which proved to the ‘single-minded’ Muslim nation called Pakistan. There were three ways that India set itself apart from Pakistan: secular, democratic, and socialist. Whereas Pakistan was “avowedly Islamic (‘theocratic’ to many), still feudal, suspiciously ‘un-modern’.” (pg.110) For India, this led to a picture where Pakistan was the abductor-country and India as the parent-protector.

To conclude: Bodies marked with conflict and identities; a production of national difference; ‘recovery’ and abduction; and a broad term that encompasses all—violence.

Bharath-mata ki jai, indeed. [Long Live Mother India, indeed]

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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