A gendered telling of Partition
The Radcliff Line demarcating the border between the newly independent nations of Pakistan and India was announced on 17 August, 77 years ago. Large scale violence and displacement on both sides of the border in Punjab and Bengal followed. Seven recent novels by women that look at the cataclysmic event
Thousands of lives were lost during the Partition of India. Those who survived displacement had to rebuild their material reality in the midst of immense suffering. The intergenerational impact of the event lingers on and it continues to be one of the major themes in literature from the Indian subcontinent. Unsurprisingly, women bore the brunt of the violence.
“Is there such a thing, then, as a gendered telling of Partition?” asks Urvashi Butalia in her pioneering work, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998). In it, she notes that after conducting several interviews she realised the difference between the “speech of men and of women”. Each gender’s priorities were different. While men focused on “broad political realities”, women brought up a “child lost or killed”. There was a world of difference and that difference remains even when Partition narratives are retold by women today.
Centralised on “the small, the individual voice” in the annals of history, Butalia also quotes from James E Young’s Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (1988): “Whatever ‘fictions’ emerge from the survivors’ accounts are not deviations from the ‘truth’ but are part of the truth in any particular version. The fictiveness in testimony does not involve disputes about facts, but the inevitable variance in perceiving and representing these facts, witness by witness, language by language, culture by culture.”
Interestingly, this sits as adequately for fiction as it does for oral history, for there’s an undeniable kernel of truth in fiction. For the most part, fiction reveals a hitherto inaccessible history. Here’s a list of literary works by women writers that look at the Partition.
Rosarita by Anita Desai
Desai creates a universe with a few words. In Rosarita, her latest novel in two decades, she introduces the Partition of India in a dialogic manner when Bonita — an Indian student in Mexico — meets a flamboyantly-dressed stranger, Victoria (aka Vicky), who recognises her as her friend Rosarita’s daughter. While Bonita’s intergenerational memory of the Partition is invoked and alluded to through a variety of means, the impact of the Mexican revolution of the 1910s and the violence that followed is reflected in Vicky’s voice. The ghost of the past intervenes in the present. An interesting mix of conversations and remembrances makes Rosarita a riveting read.
Kashmir: Book 3 of the Partition Trilogy by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar
Sodhi Someshwar’s Partition Trilogy, which includes Lahore: Book 1, Hyderabad: Book 2, and Kashmir: Book 3, not only tells the story of the Partition of India but also informs readers about the drama that unfolded during the accession of an array of states to India. This concluding part of the trilogy offers concrete historical facts about a variety of actors such as Maharaja Hari Singh, Karan Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The complex ethnic demography of Kashmir, the conflicting interests of major stakeholders, the beauty of the Valley, and the cost of male-centric, myopic decision-making can all be witnessed in abundance in this novel.
A Lost People’s Archive by Rimli Sengupta
Sengupta notes that this, her debut novel, was “sparked by a found notebook” and “is based on the true story of a woman and a man”. The woman is the author’s grandmother, Dida, who this man — Ramesh Chandra Chatterji (aka Shishu) — used to call Noni-di. In their early youth, books bound them together. But there’s a hint of something more than that: an innocent love that lingers between the two. However, fate has other ideas. Shishu murders a police inspector as part of Indian revolutionaries’ attempt to attain freedom and Noni-di is married off at 16. They last saw each other in 1927 but meet again in 1991 when Shishu comes looking for Noni-di after all these years. She has lived a life populated with children and grandchildren while he has remained a bachelor. During their last meeting, Shishu hands over his notebook to his “friend and lifelong muse”. It’s this notebook that Sengupta leverages for this work of fiction.
The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra
“His nose woke up first,” thus begins this multigenerational saga centred not only around the Partition of India but also on perfumery, referring to a subliminal link between memory and the role a fragrance in recollections of the past. Divided into five parts and spread across several continents and decades, The Book of Everlasting Things is imbued with both cinematic appeal and the shared culture of post-Partition India and Pakistan. The richness of the romance between Samir Vij and Firdaus Khan comes from the years Malhotra has invested in researching the impact of the Partition of India in her non fiction.
Ladies’ Tailor by Priya Hajela
What distinguishes Hajela’s debut novel from other books on the Partition is the fact that it’s centred on the spirit of rebuilding. As in reality, here too, refugees from either side of the Punjab border negotiate everyday material reality without addressing the traumatic effects of the Partition and eventually, created an identity for themselves. With her rich imagination and a few real-life elements thrown in, Hajela, centralises the story of Gurudev to present the enterprising spirit of a people who have dealt with immeasurable loss.
Moth by Melody Razak
In the Brighton-based British-Iranian novelist’s Moth, Ma and Bappu are teachers at the University of Delhi. While they raise their daughters — Alma and Roop — with a feminist bent of mind, the grandmother in the story fears the worst, given the times they live in. Set in Delhi in 1946, Moth is an exceptional literary work that shows the cracks in a society where it is becoming increasingly dangerous for anyone considered gullible and vulnerable — Muslims, girls, women, the underprivileged and historically marginalised people. The voices of children are also heard in this novel, which serves to give the women characters greater agency.
Victory Colony, 1950 by Bhaswati Ghosh
The canon of Partition literature — at least in the English language — is overwhelmed by stories from Punjab. Ghosh’s debut novel directs readers’ attention to the Partition of Bengal. As the title suggests, this is a narrative of refugees’ resilience and organising spirit during a trying time. With its evocative and nimble prose, Victory Colony is the story, not just of its protagonist Amala, but also of myriad communist leaders, feminists and everyday people who direct their energies towards the rebuilding process in the aftermath of tragedy.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.