FEMALE BODY AS HIEROGLYPHICS OF PARTITION VIOLENCE: READING LALITHAMBIKA ANTHARJANAM'S "A LEAF IN THE STORM" (original) (raw)

2013, Pune Research: An International Journal in English

The two new states of India and Pakistan came into being as a result of a division on the basis of religion and were demarcated by arbitrary borders1 a division which was accompanied by unprecedented mass migration, violent deaths, sexual assaults, and prolonged trauma and was legitimatized through the idea of revenge fraught with the trauma of gender and sexuality. It was a revenge that discriminated along the lines of religion and ethnicity while the atrocities were committed especially against women and their bodies. Women were not only objects but also witness to violence. Their bodies became contested sites of violence upon which external identities ascribed their meanings and yet most of the written histories on Partition lack any close female perspective. The need of the hour is, as Joan Kelly advocates, to restore women to history and to restore our history to women with the aim to "make women a focus of enquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative"; in other words, to construct women as a historical subject and through this construction. The impetus provided by the recent researchers like Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, and Veena Das, who documented oral histories and official records of Hindu and Sikh families' and communities' refusal to accept women subjected to sexual violence in the riots. Contextualizing the feminist historiography and narrativizing history, provided by these researchers, of the Partition, this paper examines the situation of the recovered women through a reading of Lalithambika Antharjanam’s short story “A Leaf in the Storm”.