Rape And Reconciliation

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Gendering Partition; Daughters Of India Looking For A Nation; Rape And Reconciliation; The Other Face Of Freedom. (A term paper for 20th Century Indian Writing) “Everyone is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of women’s breast!” Shouts The Ice-Candy-Man. -The Cranking, A Novel by Bapsi Sidhwa When British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan in 1947, the violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs was enacted upon the bodies of the women of all three communities. Official numbers of abducted women during Partition are 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan. The multiple forms of sexual violence included inscribing tattoos on their bodies, parading them naked in sacred spaces like Temples, Mosques, Gurudwaras and cutting their breasts off. Sometimes families traded their women in exchange of freedom, at other times women were urged to take their own lives in order to protect communal 'honour.' Many women simply disappeared. The symbolic elevation of ‘woman’ as the embodiment of the sanctified, inner recesses of culture and tradition ironically positioned real women as targets of violent assertions of family, community and nation. The tearing apart of the social and emotional fabric that took place with the Partition of India in 1947 is still far from repaired. Each new outbreak of anger recalls the bitter and troublesome destruction of social relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Official and historical accounts of Partition see it as the unfortunate outcome of religious and separatist politics and as a tragic catch to the promise of freedom. To recreate the broken reality of the time through common histories and try to link an experience of Partition through women who were deprived in one way or the other by the events is a very hard job.

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