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Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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The spectacle of violence in Partition fiction: Women, voyeurs and witnesses

Shumona Dasgupta
a

St. Cloud State University, USA Version of record first published: 06 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Shumona Dasgupta (2011): The spectacle of violence in Partition fiction: Women, voyeurs and witnesses, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:1, 30-41 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.533952

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 47, No. 1, February 2011, 3041

The spectacle of violence in Partition fiction: Women, voyeurs and witnesses

Shumona Dasgupta*
St. Cloud State University, USA
Journal 10.1080/17449855.2011.533952 RJPW_A_533952.sgm 1744-9855 Original Taylor 2010 0 1 47 sdasgupta@stcloudstate.edu ShumonaDasgupta 00000February & and of Article Francis Postcolonial (print)/1744-9863 Francis 2010 Writing (online)

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Fictional texts about the Partition of India (1947) written in the 1960s and 1970s attempt to write ethnic conflict in terms of a sexual rivalry over the possession of women by Hindu and Muslim men, with rape emerging as the master-trope. This paper examines how female sexuality and the body become a fetish in the course of the demonizing of Muslim men in two novels by male Hindu authors: Manohar Malgonkars A Bend in the Ganges (1964) and Chaman Nahals Azadi (1975). This fetishization circulates in these texts to enable an exploration of critical ideologies about nationalism premised upon the moral and sexual purity of Hindu and Sikh women citizens, whilst articulating an anxiety about the blurring of ethnic boundaries in the case of rape. In its representation of a crisis of witnessing of the symbolic rape of the feminized nation and the actual rape of Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim men the Partition novel indulges in what can be termed, in an adaptation of Alok Rais use of the phrase, a pornography of violence. Keywords: violence; representation; crisis of witnessing; Partition; rape; India

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan with formal decolonization in 1947 triggered the single largest mass migration in history, with 11.5 million people crossing the border between the two newly created nations.1 The Partition was accompanied by the eruption of genocidal violence between all the major ethnic communities in the subcontinent with a death toll ranging from 0.5 to 2 million, according to various sources. Over 75,000 Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women were abducted during Partition. Thousands of women, some of the worst sufferers of this historical crisis, were subjected to brutal forms of sexual violence. Many also committed suicide, or were killed by their families in a fundamentalist bid to preserve the purity of familial, communal and religious collectives. The two fictions about the Partition discussed in this article attempt to write ethnic conflict in terms of a sexual rivalry between Hindu and Muslim men over the possession of women, with rape emerging as the master trope. This is enabled through their repeated voyeuristic staging of sexual violence as erotic spectacle. This article focuses on how some Partition fiction produced by male Indian/Hindu authors in the 1960s and 1970s draws parallels between the actual rape of Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim men and what the authors construe collectively as the symbolic rape of the nation, and it will analyse Malgonkars A Bend in the Ganges (1964) and Chaman Nahals Azadi [Freedom] (1975). Violence in these novels is always firmly Othered, that is, perpetuated by Muslim men on the Other side of the communal divide, despite historical evidence that Hindu men subjected women from their own communities and families to sexual and other forms of violence.
*Email: sdasgupta@stcloudstate.edu
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2011.533952 http://www.informaworld.com

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The narratives of rape under discussion expose the technologies of gender which underpin post-Partition Indian identity (Paxton 7).2 In this paper, I engage with the particular discursive construction of rape in what I term crisis fiction, a category of discourses generated around moments of crisis in the authority of the state, and consequently in the national imaginary. I have chosen to yoke together A Bend in the River and Azadi because, unlike the more abundant proliferation of novels about the Partition in vernacular languages like Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, very few Partition novels were written in English before the 1980s. In fact, after three important early novels, Malgonkars and Nahals are the only two in the genre until Anita Desais Clear Light of Day (1980).3 The decade that separates the two texts was extremely politically turbulent, and marked a historical nadir in Indo-Pakistani relations with the outbreak of two wars in 1967 and 1971 between the neighbouring countries. The internal similarities between the two texts also enable a comparative analysis: the metaphorization of rape and the voyeuristic representation of sexual violence as erotic spectacle feature in these and other narratives in the genre. These and other texts are consistently structured around instances of Hindu men witnessing the sexual violation of Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim males. The construction of rape depicts Hindu and Sikh women as mortally affected, as survival would signify the potential threat of pollution across ethnic and national boundaries and a blurring of borders within which their purity is contained. Women who experience rape either die or are banished from the textual imaginary. In addition, those men from the Other community who allegedly perpetrate the crime cannot speak for themselves. Hence, these instances of sexual violence are unverifiable, and seen as something that can never be known. The narrative point of view, which is solely that of the Hindu male witness, means that the literary text itself stands as a witness to the crime, to compensate for this obvious lack of substantive evidence. Irrespective of whether or not the author was an actual witness to such scenes of sexual violence, the text can be perceived as a type of testimonial, authenticating itself by demolishing the divide between fact and fiction, collapsing these categories so that they seem indistinguishable. My study will analyse both the representation of violence and the violence of representation, in a methodology analogous to that used by Mary Favret in her essay Flogging: The Anti-slavery Movement Writes Pornography. Favret argues that the rhetoric of abolition in 18th- and 19th-century England writes pornography: that is, the trope of flogging, popular in tracts denouncing slavery as well as in the pornographic literature of the time, aligns the campaign against slavery with the consumption of violent pornography. Repetitive representations in abolitionist writing of the figure of the female slave being flogged by white, English male authors can be interpreted as sexualizing, and thereby reproducing, the tortured figure of the female slave as an erotic spectacle. According to Favret,
these accounts of violence were presented as evidence, a survey of collected facts, the very scrutiny given to the slaves body, especially when that body was naked and nubile, involved a sexualized looking that spliced legislative surveillance with the often unconscious desires of voyeurism. (27)

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Liberal white English men are positioned as the primary spectators of these scenes of racial and sexual violence against slave women in this literature. The act of witnessing itself enables the forging of their liberal subjectivity as abolitionists as they articulate sympathy for the suffering of the brutalized slave and opposition to the institution of slavery which accompanies the witnessing (21). The representation of sexual violence reproduced as erotic spectacle in the Partition novels I have identified reveals that they too derive their narrative impetus through similar graphic displays of female bodies being violated and mutilated during the actual event.

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Female sexuality and the body are fetishized in these narratives in ways that enable the exploration of critical ideologies about nationalism premised upon the moral and sexual purity of its female citizens. Descriptions of sexual violence, while eroticizing the spectacle of violence, offer an opportunity to satisfy the voyeuristic desires of an ideal Hindu male audience which this literature also interpellates. The crisis of witnessing narrated by Malgonkar and Nahal, therefore, generates a voyeuristic eroticization of rape, enabling a pornography of violence.4 The gender politics of male-authored Hindu Partition fiction of the 1960s and 1970s can be traced in the light of recent feminist criticism on Partition historiography and gendered violence by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Veena Das, Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, and Kavita Daiya. I also draw upon Sangeeta Rays critique of the masculinist, heterosexual economy of the postcolonial nation, and the deep ambivalence that underlines the reproduction of the nation under the sign of woman and the mobilization of woman under the sign of nation (23). Critical attention directed to the role ascribed to women in crisis fiction reveals that the Partition was written upon the bodies of women. The female gendered body then functions literally as a body of evidence which testifies to the barbarism of the ethnic Other and furnishes an alibi for the violence committed by the Hindu majority upon Muslims during the Partition, to which some novels allude. In both novels under discussion, the transgressive inter-ethnic love plot fails, while a normative Hindu national and ethnic community is consolidated by a symbolic exchange of women between Muslim and Hindu men. The figure of the Muslim woman is used to signal the moral and cultural superiority of Hindu domestic space; once having fulfilled her ideological function, she is written out of the parameters of textual discourse. As such, the Partition text itself becomes the site where the violent process of Othering takes place. As Kavita Daiya has argued in Postcolonial Masculinity: 1947, Partition Violence and Nationalism in the Indian Public Sphere, masculinity and the male body have played a significant role in the discursive articulation of nationalism in the Indian public sphere (pars 12). According to Daiya, in the literature of the 1947 Partition, men as gendered subjects become symbolic national icons; through their suffering masculinities, they index the violence of both colonialism and elite nationalism (par. 3). While analysing the cultural revisionism in the aftermath of crisis in the texts under consideration, in order to focus upon the staging of Hindu and Sikh masculinity after the Partition, I draw upon Daiyas work on masculinity, which she defines as a critical site for the symbolization of national belonging. The re-telling and re-memorying of historical instances of sexual violence against Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim men during the Partition through the significant trope of witnessing also constructs a particular kind of Hindu male identity: muscular, militant, and premised upon violence against the Muslim minority and all women. The model of hegemonic masculinity endorsed in these texts indexes the desires of Hindu men to shore up patriarchal privilege and preserve a political and economic advantage over Muslim men in the public sphere, as well as a sexual advantage over all women in the private sphere. The gender politics of Partition fiction relates to particular framings of Hindu masculinity and to the emergence of a new patriarchy in post-independence India.5 Manohar Malgonkars A Bend in the Ganges (1964) is structured around several intersecting and interconnected revenge plots, and located within a specifically Hindu world. The male Hindu protagonists are portrayed as foils to each other: Gian Talwar, a poor scholarship boy (9), is from a rural, agricultural background, while the urbane and westernized Debi Dayal is the son of a wealthy industrialist. Both profess nationalist sentiments. Gian is inspired by the Gandhian creed of non-violence, whereas Debi is a terrorist. Gians life moves from the peripheries of a rigidly hierarchized society to prominence at its very

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centre, and the possibility of forging a new family with Sundari, Debis sister. Debi, on the other hand, moves from being the much-indulged focus of an adoring circle of friends and family to a life on the social margins. His involvement in the anti-colonial terrorist movement leads to his arrest and permanent estrangement from his family after he is betrayed by Shafi, a Muslim compatriot. Debis relationship with Mumtaz, a Muslim prostitute, ends when he is caught and murdered while attempting to cross the border. The novel commences in the 1920s at the height of the Gandhian Satyagraha movement and ends in 1947 with the Partition.6 Both the nationalist Satyagraha movement and the anti-colonial terrorist organization exclude women. On the one hand, A Bend occasionally confers visibility upon female action and labour in the interest of the male subject of history, or in the service of mobilizing the national collective. On the other hand, it also obfuscates the violence inherent in many culturally legitimated ways of controlling women, while eroticizing scenes depicting sexual violence. A Bend includes graphic, sexualized descriptions of the female characters, all of whom are objectified through the male gaze, although in the male citizens material and social rehabilitation, affluent, high-caste Hindu women like Sundari are also ascribed a positive transformative capability. Gians descriptions of Sundari are sexualized; he emphasizes her sensuous bare arm touching his [ ] soft as the petals of a champak flower (10) as he desires only to smother (10) her with kisses. Shafi describes Mumtaz as bending over him, her breasts straining against the white cups of her choli. Her upper lip was beaded with sweat [ ] her hands were smeared to the wrists in oil (284). Marking the very limits of the bourgeois imaginary of the text, erotically charged fantasies of the tribal Jaora women going about in total nudity, gold and brown and shining (156) are obsessive fixtures in Gians imaginative life when he is imprisoned on the Andaman Islands. Gians imaginary encounters with these women always culminate in a strong man seizing any woman he fancied and possessing her on the spot (156). Radha, Debis mother, is often graphically described by her husband Tekchand in several stages of undress. The scene in which she is attacked in her home by a colonial soldier is witnessed by Debi and described from his point of view:
In the bright moonlight he saw the enormous dark figure of the soldier leaning over the woman who stood rigid and silent against the wall. The woman was his mother. He had stared, numb with shock and fear, and saw the soldier fumble at the knot of her choli and her two white breasts leap out in their nakedness. And then the man had given a vicious tug at the waist band of her sari, and there stood his mother, against the wall, her body bathed in moonlight, rigid and silent as though paralyzed, and then he saw the man bend down to thrust his loutish whitenecked head into her chest. (63)

The voyeuristic presentation and staging of a potential interracial rape as erotic spectacle is interrupted through the intervention of the adolescent Debi, and the focus is now on male horror and the insult that the rape of women constitutes to male honour. Radha is described as a passive figure without any agency. She stands rigid and silent (63) without even the ability to cry out for help, like in a dream (64). The language used to describe the encounter troublingly echoes the language used by her husband, Tekchand, to describe graphically her body, and by the omniscient third-person narrator to describe their lovemaking. The colonial encounter, like the Partition, is metaphorized as the sexual violation of a feminized body politic. Partition fiction constructs its world within the dichotomy of the home and the world, a dichotomy which Partha Chatterjee has identified as one of the key components of Indian nationalist ideology during the late colonial period. As a survival strategy for besieged colonized cultures, according to Chatterjee, third world nationalisms in Asia and

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Africa insisted upon the institution of a modern regime of power in the outer/political sphere, premised upon eradicating signs of colonial difference, while instituting a new inner/private sphere marked by cultural difference (59).7 While A Bend in the Ganges acknowledges the superiority of the West in the political arena, it establishes the superiority of Hindu culture to Muslim cultural mores through the strategic deployment of female characters. Most Partition novels depict dangerously seductive Muslim women actively seeking out relationships with Hindu men, and Malgonkars novel is no exception.8 All the Muslim women in this novel are prostitutes; the brothel also remains the only representation of a non-Hindu domestic space in the novel, and is one in which Muslim women are inscribed as sexually accessible bodies. The prostitute, who is, according to Aamir Mufti, a stock figure in the Indian national imaginary, contrasts to the chaste figure of the mother who is used to construct the Hindu male as the ideal national subject within an economy of filial love. In sharp contrast to nationalisms mobilization of motherhood as a metaphor, the figure of the prostitute becomes a means of signifying the inassimilable distinctiveness of a Muslim presence within the space of the nation (Mufti 45). Mumtaz is positioned within a Mughal brothel, a terrain which displays a veneer of domestic respectability, although in reality it is the corrupt opposite. The brothel is depicted as a labyrinthine and enclosed space of an abnormal anti-family consisting solely of women; it is full of pigeonhole windows (281), silk screens behind which clients sit to look at the girls (288), equipped with eyeholes (295), and doors with peepholes through which the business of the house is conducted. The female inmates are subjected to a regime of constant surveillance. Mumtaz lives in continual fear of Akkajis (the Madams) sharp hearing, and is forced to entertain anyone she is told to. One of the crucial markers of the power differential lies in the novels construction of Muslim women as passive objects of the gaze, whose lives revolve around the ritual of displaying themselves to prospective clients every evening dressed in voluminous gauze pyjamas and silk scarves covering their breasts (293). Akkaji negotiates their price, while Hindu women like Sundari are active subjects, capable of manipulating and controlling the patriarchal gaze. A Bend in the Ganges underlines Muslim womens desire for inclusion within the boundaries of Hindu domesticity, as the concubines of ageing though prosperous bania men (Hindu men from a merchant class), a desire which establishes the cultural and moral superiority of Hindu domestic space. Mumtaz is ultimately abducted by a Muslim mob at the IndianPakistani border. Doubly marginalized on account of her ethnic and social identity as a young, orphaned sex worker, Mumtaz signals a semantic failure within the text. She is unable to function as a metaphor of the rape of the nation, or even rape; only chaste women can experience the trauma of rape in the text, therefore Mumtaz (as a former sex worker) cannot be raped. Hence, the body of the Other is written as a semiotic blank space, located at the interstices of discourses about national, class and ethnic identity, literally and metaphorically written out of the text; in its absence attention shifts to the body of the transgressive male. Debi is castrated and then murdered by the same frenzied mob, punished when his actions jeopardize the desired homogeneous purity of the national imaginary. According to Daiya, Partition novels written soon after the event, such as Khuswant Singhs celebrated A Train to Pakistan (1956), constructed the male peasant as the secular hero and suffering citizen in the new nation (par. 13). In sharp contrast to Singhs celebrated Partition narrative, here it is the body of the high-caste, urban Hindu male that bears the symbolic burden of the Partitioned body politic. However, unlike the willed sacrifice of the virile Sikh male which figures both as the apotheosis of heterosexual inter-ethnic

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love and a triumph of secularism in Daiyas reading of Singhs text, violence in A Bend in the Ganges is not prefigured as an act of will but enacted as collective punishment upon a male body as a sexed subject. This is much closer to the way in which the female body becomes the site upon which the violent script of this traumatic history is generally inscribed, because it occurs specifically in a context where the womans social identity as a sex worker prevents her from experiencing rape and underlines the complex gendering of nationalism, with both masculinity and femininity bearing its symbolic burden. Violence is marked upon the body of the Hindu woman, which functions as a body of evidence. The violated female body symbolizes the mutilated face of the nation, the corruption and invasion of Hindu domestic space which is then used to justify the communalization of Hindu men like Basu in A Bend in the Ganges. Basu, the former nationalist, becomes a Hindu fundamentalist after his wife is attacked. Significantly, no such alibi is furnished for the parallel communalization of Muslim men like Hafiz and Shafi. Basu drags his protesting wife Dipali out of the kitchen to display her grotesque disfigurement to Debi. He pull[s ] the sari away [ ] exposing her face and then lets her go with an expression of disgust (277). Later, he stares at her as though at a stranger who had interrupted their talk (279). Dipalis once beautiful face is irrevocably scarred by an acid bomb thrown by some Moslem buck with an urge to seduce her (277) during a communal riot, symbolic of the mutilated face of the feminized nation made explicit through Basus sarcastic comment, She is Mother India (280). The attack takes place while Dipali is at home, leaning out of the window. The absence of the patriarchal figure makes the Hindu domestic space subject to corruption and invasion, and this is imagined as an attack upon the chaste Hindu wife. Basus comment also stitches together erotic desire and the desire to commit violence, and his attribution of the attack to a Moslem buck cannot be verified. The scarred figure of the woman embodies a dual failure: the Indian/Hindu mans political failure to protect national integrity, as exemplified by the Partition, and his personal failure to protect his woman. The relationship between the male nationalist and the nation-state is imagined simultaneously as being filial and sexual. In parallel with A Bend in the Ganges, Chaman Nahals Azadi [Freedom], written in 1975, stages the plight during the Partition of Lala Kanshi Ram, a prosperous grain merchant in Sialkot, his wife Prabha Rani and son Arun. The novel is divided into three parts; the first section details the routine peaceful life of this Hindu family in a large sprawling house inhabited by several Hindu and Sikh tenants, replete with symbolic overtones in a novel that demonizes the figure of the Muslim. Attention then shifts to the experiences of Arun, Kanshi Rams son, in the second part of the novel, which depicts the familys arduous trek across the border into India after the escalation of communal violence in their hometown. The final section traces the trials of this dispossessed family in various refugee camps both in India and Pakistan, and their growing sense of disillusionment with the utopian dream of freedom in post-independence India, as they are unable to bring to fruition the tenuous desires of homecoming. Azadi ascribes visibility to women only as objects who mark the different phases of Aruns psychological, moral, sexual and intellectual development. It therefore constructs female identity in accordance with the needs of the male unconscious, or the ideological demands of crisis fiction. Aruns elder sister Madhu had first presented him as a potential suitor to her friends, and her death pushes him towards the threshold of adult life (188). His aborted relationship with Nur figures as a youthful romantic dalliance which serves to underline his naivety, and his relationship with Chandni marks his sexual and political awakening. All the women in the novel Nur, Chandni, and Aruns neighbour Sunanda are described in hyper-sexualized terms as passive objects of the patriarchal gaze.

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Descriptions of Nur, a Muslim with whom Arun is romantically involved, for example, allow a male narrator to address an imagined community of ideal male readers, inviting them to look. Nur is circumscribed by the gaze of her lover, Arun, as well as being the focus of surveillance by Muslim students at the university who disapprove of this interethnic relationship and constantly subject the couple to scrutiny. Arun also defines his relationship to Nur in terms of the pleasures of the gaze, saying he could have died at the pleasure of seeing her, that he ardently wishes to be invisible and be near her and watch her unobserved all the while (93). The gendered gaze has been most explicitly theorized within film studies through Laura Mulveys classic essay on the subject, which argues that the representation of women in mainstream cinema is structured at the intersection of three kinds of male gaze: the gaze of the camera which is inherently voyeuristic and epitomizes the point of view of the male director, the gaze of the men within the film which objectifies women in the film, and the gaze of the male spectator that imitates, or is in the same position as, the first two gazes (39). It is this nexus of the male author, male protagonist/witness, and ideal male spectator that I want to focus upon in analysing Nahals text. In keeping with the demands of crisis fiction, this taboo relationship between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman fails. Arun, who had previously expressed a willingness to embrace Islam for Nurs sake, now reneges on his promise. Arun then pursues Chandni, a young servant girl travelling to India as a part of the familys entourage. In its aim to unravel the mystery (209) of Aruns sexual awakening, the narrative attempts to gloss over Chandnis initial rejection of his overtures, a critical reading of which makes visible the particular discursive construction of rape in the text. Chandni recoils and shrinks away from the violation, the intrusion, and attempt[s ] to withdraw her hand (20809) from Aruns grasp. Even after she commences a surreptitious relationship with Arun, she refuses to comply with his desire to consummate their relationship. She is abducted during a raid upon the refugee camp, and is never heard of again. Azadi is one of the few historical novels about the Partition which includes a detailed description of the male body in pain. The rape of women traditionally functions as a device which diverts the attention of the reader away from the tortured and vulnerable male body. In Azadi, Niranjan Singh, a Sikh, refuses to cut his hair (as Sikhs were enjoined to do in order to escape detection by Muslim mobs and increase their chances of a safe passage to India), and immolates himself in protest. This action is recuperated as a heroic deed, a martyrdom which invests the voluntary subject of pain with agency. Singh remains lucidly articulate, elucidating the significance of this individual act of self-violence. He shouts, I belong to Waheguru [ ]. Life Ill gladly lose, my Sikh dharma I wont (262). The event is re-claimed within the public domain of communal memory; the site itself is enshrined as a smadhi, a place of religious veneration (263). The event has a profound effect upon the onlookers and encourages collective resistance from the refugee community which is prepared to court violence to prevent Pakistani authorities from investigating the incident. This staging of the individual male body in pain can be juxtaposed with another moment of extreme violence in Nahals text. A horrific spectacle of ritual humiliation, it involves a protracted description of a parade of abducted Hindu women during the height of the Partition frenzy in the town of Nanowal in Pakistan:
They were all stark naked. Their heads were completely shaven; so were their armpits. So were their pubic regions. Shorn of their body hair and clothes, they looked like baby girls, or like the bald embryos one sees preserved in methylated spirit. Only the breasts and the hips gave away

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the age. The women walked awkwardly, looking only at the ground. They were all crying, though their eyes shed no tears. Their faces were formed into grimaces and they were sobbing. Their arms were free, but so badly had they been used, so wholly their spirits crushed, their morale shattered, none of them made any attempt to cover themselves with their hands. They swung their arms clumsily, often out of coordination with their legs. The bruises on their bodies showed they had been beaten and manhandled. Their masters walked besides them and if any of the women sagged or hung behind, they prodded her along with the whips they carried. (29697)

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Agency is ascribed only to their masters who walk in close proximity with whips in their hands, prodding the women to walk faster and in line, to the male drummer at the head of the procession thumping a drum enthusiastically, and to the all-male crowd of onlookers who jeer, insult and abuse them. The women themselves are depicted as being beyond the threshold of pain.9 It is the old Hakim (medicine man) who sees the proceedings with a look of infinite pain on his face (298), seeking Gods forgiveness for the barbarity of his co-religionists, and Arun who turns away from it in horror. This exhibition of the female body in pain leads to a scrupulous description of the body of the bruised and violated women, followed by an imagined cataloguing of rapes and mutilations perpetrated upon it. The meta-narrative perpetrates a further violation by repeatedly enlisting the imaginative participation of a gendered audience, enjoining them to fill in the details of the collective rape while tracing the trajectory of the gaze of the male onlookers present at the scene for the benefit of an ideal male reader. The working-class Muslim men who are the spectators are described as being unclean and vulgar (295), while the charms and amulets that they wear conspicuously signal their lack of education and their superstitions.10 This contrasts to the college-going, tennis-playing, English-speaking Arun. According to the omniscient narrator:
what unified the crowd and soldered them into a single mass was the look on their faces. It was the look of extreme sensuality. And it was the look of hate. And furthermore, as an additional sign of their oneness, all eyes were turned east; the side from which the procession was to come. (296)

However, the common status as spectator and witness also links the Hindu protagonist with the Muslim Others. The reality of the atrocities perpetrated by Muslim men is concretized through this discursive strategy of witnessing by Hindu men in Partition narratives, and is envisaged as a compensation for the lack of historical records about the victims themselves. Emphasis upon the absolute authority of the male witness serves as a tool for authorial selfauthentication. The narrative repeatedly testifies that no women were present at the scene as onlookers, apart from the inarticulate victims themselves, none of whom can survive their traumatic experiences given the ideological demands of crisis fiction, which are that in order to ensure national ethnic purity no woman should survive rape. The procession of Muslim women which takes place in Amritsar (India) is enacted off-stage and belongs to the realm of gossip, along with other reports about the massacre of train-loads of Muslims bound for Pakistan. The dim acceptance of such reciprocal enactments of violence occurs in the half-perceived and fleeting vision of huddled white bundles that might be dead bodies in an unnamed railway station in India while Kanshi Rams family is on its way to Delhi. Gayatri Spivaks work on subalternity and silence, articulated in her claim that the subaltern cannot speak (104), is a useful reference point for thinking about the problematic issues of voice, agency and silence surrounding representations of sexual violence. In the specific context of the Partition, this representational void underlines a larger fabric of

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culturally imposed silences: a canny silence about the intimate violence experienced by women within the sanctified parameters of the home at the hands of the men in their own families. A Hindu-centric textual imaginary maintains a silence about the abduction and rape of Muslim women by Hindu and Sikh men. The violent consumption of womens bodies inherent in the staging of sexual violence as spectacle produces the subalternity of the sexed subject as woman, and implies that womens voices cannot be recuperated within the parameters of a patriarchal modernity which constructs narratives like Azadi. Later, while crossing the border into India, the narrative shifts to a lonely and abandoned farm after a surprise attack on the Hindu refugee camp in which Arun resides. A womans faint voice emerges from within; the door is locked as Arun peeps inside, his location voyeuristically paralleling that of the reader as he quietly enters through the window. He witnesses Sunanda, one of the women from the camp, being raped, and then murders her ravisher, in a moment of acceptable violence which is endorsed and accommodated within the textual economy. The narrative remains complicit in a patriarchal evaluation of female worth in terms of sexual purity, and ensures that a relationship between Arun and Sunanda cannot be realized because of the corruption and contamination of her body by the Muslim Other. In A Bend in the Ganges, British imperialism, and the Mughal conquest of India combined with the Gandhian politics of non-violence, are seen as being responsible for emasculating the nation (152). Cowardice, inadequacy, and effeminacy mark male identity in such crisis fiction.11 This repeated enslavement is seen to have bred an entire generation of soft unmanly men whose actions precipitate the symbolic rape of the feminized body politic. The novel is peopled by absent or inadequate father figures. Debis father, Tekchand, never evolves into a hyper-masculine virile patriarch and the novel stages his complete physical and psychological collapse; he dies on the arduous trek across the border to reach India. In addition, both Gians and Shafis fathers die when the two are children. Only Patrick Mulligan, the Irish Superintendent of the British prison in the Andaman Islands, survives Partition violence and reaches India. The sole efficacious symbolic father in the text, his appearance in the novels final page testifies to the enduring colonial influences underlying postcolonial psychic space. Hindu masculinity, formulated within the traumatic sphere of colonialism, constitutes a trope of anxiety which can only be recuperated through the compensatory staging of a virile, muscular, aggressive maleness. This forms a backdrop to the staging of male identity in A Bend in the Ganges, and leads to a condoning of violent anti-colonial protest and the terrorist movement as an ethical alternative because it was honest and manly (342). The text begins with a depiction of legitimate anti-colonial violence, undertaken by the terrorist organization to free Mother India from the British, and it ends with the illegitimate violence of the Partition, perpetrated by the same characters with the figure of the woman mobilized to accommodate both kinds of violence. It is interesting that all the hypermasculine members of the terrorist group participate in ethnic violence before, during, and after the announcement of the Partition plan. The birth of the violent self in the crucible of anti-colonial politics leads to violent deeds during the Partition, much of it sexualized and directed against women belonging to the Other side. Debi buys Mumtaz, the woman whom Shafi desires, and the violence of this encounter is elided and encoded as love (304). Shafi Usman retaliates by attempting to rape Sundari, Debis sister. Basu participates in the violent communal politics of the local Hindu Mahasabha, and brags about his credit at various brothels, all of which are inhabited by Muslim women (276). The terrorist movement led by Shafi Usman, a Muslim, is initially described as a brotherhood, and includes members from the three dominant religious groups in colonial

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India Hindu, Muslim and Sikh and functions as a metaphor for the utopian, composite space of the pre-Partition body politic. Shafi is a figure of adulation and emulation for Debi, a hyper-masculine mentor who initiates Debi within the cult of terrorism. Such an assertion of a shared identity, itself premised upon shared violence, becomes insidiously subversive and necessitates a skilful management of the textual economy. Shafis fall from grace is accompanied by the loss of his hyper-masculine, virile aura with the circulation of rumours that he was a homosexual, and his rejection by Mumtaz, who insists that he pay for her services. Shafi is ultimately killed by Sundari, after a failed attempt at rape. Hence it is violent heteronormativity and ethnicity which ultimately define hegemonic masculinity in the novel. Similarly, Hindus and their language Hindi are described in Azadi as being soft [ ] weak [ ] impotent (22). Hindu men in positions of power, like the Deputy Commissioner of Sialkot, are described as belonging to that senile race of Hindus which had been enslaved and ruled over by the Muslims for centuries (83). He is eventually murdered by his own bodyguards. In Nahals text, Hindu men can only aspire towards hegemonic masculinity by perpetrating violence towards Muslim men and all women. The birth of the violent self is explicitly staged as a recuperative tactic against the degenerative effects of a few centuries of Muslim political dominance, and the emasculating Gandhian philosophy of non-violence. So pervasive are the pernicious effects of these two historical influences upon the Hindu psyche that the protagonist Arun remains defined as a figure of lack, unable to protect either his women or his land in the concluding sections of Azadi. Corrupt and bad Muslim men like Rahmat Ullah Khan are depicted as being virile and powerful, while good Muslims like Barkat Ali, Nurs father, are similarly unmanned. He is a faint echo of his once powerful self, for Mahatma Gandhi and non-violence had made a lamb out of him and he went around in home spun cotton shirts and loose pyjamas, his head bowed in humility (185). However, both novels reserve a surreptitious admiration for the British for their manly domination of India. Both articulate a willingness to forgive the colonial regime for the violence of the encounter as long as an ideological suturing between British/Indian/Hindu identities can be accomplished. The Partition is both event and metaphor (Amin 3). As an event, it refers to specific incidents fixed in time and place, while as a metaphor it gathers significance outside its particular timeframe, with meaning slowly accreting around the event (Amin 56). Since 1947, the readily available script of the Partition has been obsessively rehearsed and commodified in fiction and other forms of popular discourse in the service of contemporary politics. The Partition has formed the refractive prism through which relations with Pakistan are still distilled, used and abused by the Hindu right in the aid of a belligerent cultural nationalism, and it has influenced the forging of communal and communalized identities and subjectivities in contemporary India. In the absence of an archive which records the experiences of survivors, including survivors of sexual violence, fiction has assigned a compensatory role to itself. Partition fiction also plays a part in the production, consumption and circulation of historical memory about the Partition in contemporary India. This article has tried to demonstrate how two narratives about violent events often create a textual space for violence. Written at the cusp of colonial discourses and the revisionist demands of Indian nationalism in the 20th century, crisis fiction remains complicit with colonial and neo-colonial systems of knowledge.

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Notes
1. I have used statistical evidence cited in Urvashi Butalias The Other Side of Silence. Sukeshi

Kamra places the number of displaced much higher at about 16 million.

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tion in the work of theorists such as Teresa de Laurentis, among others. I derive my use of the phrase from Nancy Paxtons work on gender and disciplinary regimes in the context of the British Empire. Khuswant Singhs Train to Pakistan (1956), Bhalachandra Rajans The Dark Dancer (1959), and Attia Hossains Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) precede Malgonkars novel. I derive my usage of this wonderfully apt phrase from Alok Rais analysis of progressive Hindi literature in the 1940s anthologized in Inventing Boundaries (365). For an extensive analysis of the new patriarchy in post-independence India, see Tharu and Lalitas introduction. Liddle and Joshi connect the rise of the middle class to the increasing privatization of women and their disappearance from public life in post-Partition India (6). Satyagraha is composed of the words satya or truth, and agraha or firmness. This was Gandhis name for his technique of passive, political resistance. This discussion occurs in the context of Chatterjees response to the alleged derivativeness of postcolonial modernity. Veena Das in Critical Events has analysed the representation of Muslim women in Indian discourses in the aftermath of the Partition. The continued presence of Muslim women in post-Partition India was attributed to temporary lapses on the part of Hindu and Sikh men which, however, contributed to immorality in the country. Hindu and Sikh men who were responsible for abducting and raping Muslim women were enjoined to return the women to their proper country Pakistan. Doing so would enable these Indian men to regain their lost purity (70). This marks an interesting reversal within discourses of purity and pollution. Sexual transgressions or violations are normally constructed as contaminating the sexual purity of women. Sunder Rajans emphasis upon the need to claim the material reality of physical pain and theorization of the body as the ground for human subjectivity forms the basis of my invocation of women as objects and subjects of pain. A picture of squalor, misery and filth, the newly created nation of Pakistan is imagined as being diseased from its very inception and, therefore, inexorably set up for failure in Azadi. The twoway movement of refugees across the border is clearly distinguished along class lines, with prosperous and educated Hindu families moving out of Pakistan, and poor, illiterate workingclass Muslims taking their place. Hence, the differential between India and Pakistan is imagined not merely in terms of religious and ethnic identity but also in terms of class positioning. According to John Rothfolk, Debis patriotic hatred of the British arises from an affront to his masculinity, and a fear of interracial, homosexual rape.

2. The Foucauldian concept of a technology of discipline has been given a particular feminist inflec-

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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8.

9. 10.

11.

Notes on contributor Shumona Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota and is writing a book on the representations in contemporary South Asian fiction and film of the 1947 Partition of India.

Works cited
Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 19221992. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995. Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Daiya, Kavita. Postcolonial Masculinity: 1947, Partition Violence and Nationalism in the Indian Public Sphere. Genders 43 (Spring 2006). 9 Oct. 2010 <http://www.genders.org/g43/ g43_daiya.html>. Das, Veena. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. India: Oxford UP, 1995. Favret, Mary. Flogging: The Anti-slavery Movement Writes Pornography. Essays and Studies 51 (1998): 1943.

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Kamra, Sukeshi. Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2002. Liddle, Joanna, and Rama Joshi. Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986. Manohar, Malgonkar. A Bend in the Ganges. New York: Viking, 1964. Menon, Ritu, and Bhasin Kamala. Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indias Partition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Mufti, Aamir. A Greater Story-Writer than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India. Community, Gender and Violence: Subaltern Studies XI. Ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 136. Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Feminism and Fiction. Ed. Ann E. Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 3447. Nahal, Chaman. Azadi. Boston: Houghton, 1975. Paxton, Nancy. Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination 18301947. London and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999. Rai, Alok. The Trauma of Independence: Some Aspects of Progressive Hindi Literature 19457. Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India. Ed. Mushirul Hassan. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2000. 35171. Ray, Sangeeta. Engendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Rothfolk, John. Gandhi and Non-violence in Manohar Malgonkars A Bend in the Ganges. Chandrabhaga: A Magazine of World Writing 12 (Winter 1984): 4170. Spivak, Gayatri. Can the Subaltern Speak? Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Williams Patrick and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 66111. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London and New York: Rutgers UP, 1991. Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993.