The Depiction of Women, Partition and Trauma: Evidences from Literature

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to revisit women’s history through stories written around the time when partition of India was unfolding. The paper taking cognizant of various streams of thought within partition literature makes use of two short stories. Ban Baas (Banishment) by Jamila Hashmi and A Farewell to The Bride by Khadija Mastoor, both originally written in Urdu. The paper argues that the trauma of abductions, suicide, rape and forceful conversions has literally been obliterated from history of partition. Nationalist accounts of history in both India and Pakistan are dominated by elite politics. There is however enough on women’s plight in the fiction of those times especially short stories. These stories act as testimonial accounts of the women who had to suffer the violence. Borrowing from the concept of ‘trauma’ as laid out by Cathy Caruth and that of subalternity by Ranajit Guha, this paper further argues that the trauma of partition was deeply felt by women and the general amnesia about gendered violence from nationalist histories must now be revisited.