BRAINWARE

UNIVERSITY

TOP
IC Women's bodies as sites for
contestation of honour during the
Partition of 1947

Stu. LALIT SHARMA

Name : BWU/BEN/20/010
Stu. BELS604A
Code : PARTITION
 The Partition of India in 1947 was the division
of British India into two independent
dominion states, the Union of India and the
Dominion of Pakistan. Today the Dominion of
India is the Republic of India, while the
Dominion of Pakistan is today the Islamic
Polarized by Republic
religion, of
friends
Pakistan.
and neighbors turned on
each other. Hundreds of
thousands were killed and
millions displaced. The
atrocities were horrific —
pregnant women and infants
India witnessed its worstwere
communal riots in 1948 after
not spared.
the partition. Noakhali in Bengal and several villages of
Bihar were the worst hit. The first major riots between
Hindus and Muslims after the bloodshed of partition in
BACKGRO
 India's
Impact on Women
Partition 01 02
• The year 1947 marked the beginning of a
period of dramatic change for India. In August Killed for Abducted as
of that year, India was granted independence
from Britain after decades of formal colonial
Honour by Victory over
rule and over three centuries of British family/others enemy
presence in the country.
• Just one day after independence, India
underwent “Partition”: it was carved into two,
with the northwest border shifting to create 03 04
the new nation of Pakistan.
• The population of India was divided along
Raped and Neglected
religious lines, with Muslims mandated to Prostitution Victims of
move to Pakistan and Sikhs and Hindus to as object Partition
newly-redefined India.
• Over the course of mere months, up to fifteen
million people crossed this border.
• This period was marked by fear and
uncertainty, and up to one million people
 • As per INDIAN basic social structure, women are
directly related and beholder of honour, dignity and
respect of whole family and community. They are
called as "Ghar ki Laxmi, Ghar ki Izzat".
• Study has examined how honour killing, as a form of
engendered violence during Partition, is revealed to
be committed against women not by men of the
enemy community but by those of their own faith and
community and, in many cases, killed by their own
male family members.
• Menon and Bhasin have identified this particular

KILLED brand of engendered violence against women during

Partition as ‘permissible’ violence carried out by men

FOR on their own womenfolk as a means of safeguarding

the honour of family, community and religion.

HONOUR
• Bhasin, Menon, and Butalia (among other scholars)
argue that the primary motive behind violence
against women was familial, national, and religious
honour.
• Violence was inflicted on women by the men of their
family in the form of suicides they were coerced into
or murdered in the name of honour.
• Another kind of violence that the women faced was inflicted
by the State just after the violence during partition. Many
families had reported their women relatives as missing or
abducted. The immense scale of such type of reports
compelled the governments on both the sides to act and the
task was carried out by the United Council for Relief and
Welfare under Edwina Mountbatten.
• The children born to abducted women remain yet another
tragic aspect of history. Both India and Pakistan were not
interested in addressing the issues of children born in
troubled times.
• According to the Bill (Recovery of Abducted Women and ABDUCTE
D AS
Children) of recovery of women and children abducted at the
time of partition, a child born to a woman after 1 March 1947

VICTORY
was considered as born out of ‘wrong’ sexual unions and
thus illegitimate.
• The abducted women were forced to become domestic
servants and sex slaves, and many were forced into
prostitution. OVER
• At the time of Partition, this traumatic violence meted out to
many women demolished all sense of self – social or
existential – granted to them by the established patriarchal
ENEMY
 • Systematic violence against women started in March 1947 in
Rawalpindi district where Sikh women were targeted by
Muslim mobs. Numerous Hindu and Sikh villages were wiped
out. Huge numbers of Hindus and Sikhs were killed, forcibly
converted, children were kidnapped and women were
abducted and raped publicly.
• Partition violence positioned women as objects of possession
and vehicles of communication of belligerence and reprisal
between opposed groups of men.

RAPED AND
• On both sides of the border while villages are plundered and
burnt, women are mutilated and sexually tortured, and trains
of migrants crossing in opposite directions arrive full of

PROSTITUTI dismembered bodies and gory sacks containing female

sexual organs.

ON AS • The desire to shame and corrupt “rival” religious

communities via sexualized violence, including rape and

OBJECT
mutilation, is now being laid bare in the collection of
testimonies published by historians and feminist scholars.
• In Borders and Boundaries by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin,
the authors detail cases in which women’s bodies were
tattooed with symbols of their attackers’ religions. Several
attacks included men carving political slogans, such as
• The lives of women who were homeless or rejected have not
been included in these estimates. Nor do these numbers tell
the stories such as police participation with abductors to
prevent the recovery of women.
• The oral history projects (of Butalia, Bhasin, Menon and
others) demonstrate how the ‘recovery’ operation was
framed by both India and Pakistan and how through this,
women suffered a second trauma inflicted by their ‘own’
state, community and family.
• Thousands of partition victim women who were unacceptable
in their own families. Many of the recovered women across
the borders had to face humiliation and trauma all over
again. The children borne by these women were not NEGLECTE
recognised as legitimate, and many were separated from
their children. D VICTIMS
OF
• Pregnant women either had to give their children up for
adoption or get abortions. Consequently, thousands of

PARTITION
destitute children were separated from their mothers and
adopted by the two new states. Many children were adopted
by people simply for the purpose of domestic labour.
• Feminist historians have highlighted that after sometime
neither state nor families were interested in restoring these
 FOR HONOUR
Killed and Praised to commit suicide for
safeguard of communal and family honour.
Women were also killed by their own

CONTESTAT
husband and family in the name of honour
and brave step to protect dignity or
OVER FEMALE BODIES
ION
selfhood.
RAPES &
PROSTITUTION
After abduction of women from other
communities, Men used to rape, humiliate
and torture them to show his domination
over other communities. Many women were
left raped and forced to prostitution as
object of possession.
CONCLUSION
• The partition was bureaucratically imagined and executed
with very little consideration for the impact on the lives and
livelihoods of ordinary men and women on either side of the
new borders. The brutality happened over female bodies were
similar like a battleground or to say ''female bodies became
Battleground in the deadly divide''.
• The partition forced women to become victims of the riot
situation. They felt dislocation and lost their respect and
dignity because of abduction and sexual abuse. The abuse
these women experienced during the period of partition
demonstrated that they were property and that they
belonged to their family and were not considered human
beings as well.
• Women were tied down by cultural obstacles within their
respective communities through patriarchal system. Even
during recovery period, women suffered from their bad
experiences in the past. Men come back heroes from the war
while, after the riots and the war, women’s existence seem to
hold no meaning at all and they remain in the calamity all the