Literature has largely ignored the stories of women abducted during the Partition

AS this is still the centenary year of Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth, let me start with him. In a recent essay (“Manto Ko Na Parhne Kai Naye Tariquai”, 2012), my dear friend Asif Farrukhi has rightly reminded us how Manto was not merely a writer of Partition. Although he may have written some pivotal stories on the subject (“Khol Do”, “Mozelle”, “Toba Tek Singh”), this should not be considered the entirety of his oeuvre. Asif’s essay also nudges us to take seriously Manto’s non-fiction writings that help us understand the post-Partition social, cultural and political milieu in which he was producing his work. He wrote newspaper columns (some were later collected in the

volume Ganjay Farishtay) for a few rupees so that he could pay his bills and quench his thirst and there were other writings that need not have been published at all. But there remain many texts that continue to demand our attention. One such essay written in the early 1950s is “Mahbus Aurtain”.

In this piece, Manto takes up the issue of women who were abducted during the Partition violence. Where the Partition of British India resulted in the creation of two sovereign nation states and promised new beginnings for millions on both sides of the border, there the carnage, killing and rape also remind us of the extreme violence and destruction humans are capable of. The female body, irrespective of its religious affiliation, became the primary site where communities fought horrific battles to safeguard their ‘honour’. Manto, in this provocative and troubling essay, rhetorically speaks about how, after Partition, we need to retrieve our divided civilisation and culture, our remaining creative energies and recoup all that is left in our wounded and dismembered national body. But the most important task before us as a nation, he argues, is to recover from both sides of the border those women — daughters, sisters, mothers, wives — who due to our own weakness and sexual aggression (and those of our opponents) continue to satisfy the lust of their abductors.

These are strong words and display Manto’s humanism. He understands that abductions, rapes and killings were carried out equally by both sides. He suggests that extreme sensitivity and moral generosity is needed to reintegrate the retrieved women, and the children who were born in the process, into families, communities and the nation. He understands that those who are recovered could be treated differently in their newly found “free” life. In following this argument, he condemns the newspapers of the time for publishing photos of these women as it brought them undue attention. The task of reintegrating these women, for Manto, needs to be done with sensitivity, seriousness and a degree of silence. Toward the end of the essay he holds humanity in general responsible for the crimes against women. And for Manto, humanity’s sin needs to be accepted by all humans. Redemption for these sins, he argues, can take place only if everyone in both countries takes on the responsibility of rehabilitating these unfortunate women and children.

Post-Manto, there has been little written on this issue in Pakistan. After decades, it is only recently that feminist writer Zaheda Hina in her essay, “Pakistani Aurtain, Azma’ish ki Nisf Sadi” (2004), has reminded us of the neglect and ill treatment of women who were “recovered” in 1947-1948 under an agreement with India. In India, some feminists scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Veena Das, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (among others) collected life histories and published major works about women abducted during the turmoil of 1947 (much of this research was undertaken after 1984 Delhi riots, when memories of Partition disturbances became alive again). Where our social scientists have not given much attention to this phenomena (nor to similar crimes by our security forces in East Pakistan), there fiction has in many ways provided us a glimpse of the history excised from nationalist renderings. One story that stands out in this regard is “Ban Baas” (1969) by the eminent Urdu fiction writer, Jamilah Hashmi. Hashmi’s story about an abducted woman reminds us how such histories have been erased from our memories, as if their voicing may open up unhealed wounds and expose us to truths that we may not be capable of handling.

The story’s protagonist is a woman who (in the early1950s perhaps) lives in a home where she was brought as an abducted woman. We just know her as Bibi, as that is what she recalls her brother calling her when she was little (she remains without a proper name like thousands like her). Through her narrative voice we get to know that she belongs to a middle class Muslim family of the region. After her parents are killed and older sister carried away during the Partition violence, she ends up in Gurpal’s house where he lives with his elderly mother. Through Bibi’s thoughts and utterances, Hashmi forces us to hear and see the sufferings of those who remain inaudible in national historical projects. While we have memoirs of women who were part of the

recovery effort on both sides of the border (Kamlabehn Patel, Mridula Sarabai, Begum Anis Kidwai), we seldom hear the voices of the abductees themselves, whose stories are always narrated through the rational and calm voices of these elite women. Fiction like “Ban Baas” allows us a window into the lives of those who were the victims of violence and enables us to feel their anguish and hear the unruly and untamed descriptions in their own words.

In Hashmi’s deft hands, the story’s protagonist stands in for numerous others who never returned “home”. She is symbolised through the title of the story as Sita, who waits for Rama to rescue her from Ban Baas. In this story, Bibi hopes for her brother, who may reside on the other side of the border, to come and free her from her life with Ravan (Gurpal), the mythical figure who had abducted Sitaji. (It is always a male patriarchal figure, either in the shape of the husband (Lord Rama) or in this case, the brother, who will come to rescue.) Yet, when the authorities come to look for Bibi some years after Partition, she hides and refuses to return. Perhaps she wanted her brother to come and did not want to go back with strangers. But she tells the reader that she now has children, especially Munni, whom she does not want to leave behind.

We should remember that soon after independence, an Inter-Dominion Agreement was signed between India and Pakistan to recover abducted women and children from both sides of the border. The task went on into the 1950s and many women were brought back to their natal homes. However, many were never found and still many more refused to return. Scholars like Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das (among others) show us that the refusals had complex iterations and genealogies (Sabiha Sumar’s film, Khamosh Pani, although a

fictionalised account, is an important addition to this genre of work from the Pakistani side of the border). According to these authors, some women refused as under the gaze of their new “families” they did not have the power to say yes. Others perhaps had been “sold” so many times that they had no trust in a new set of strangers wanting to take them away. Many who were previously destitute found shelter and safety in their new abodes. And some may have felt abandoned by their male kin who had left the women to fend for themselves while they had escaped.

Abducted women and their desire to return home was also complicated with the fundamental question of what awaited them upon their return. Many, when they made it “back” with their young children had their babies given away to orphanages by the authorities or families seeking to erase the proof of shame. Further, to safeguard the honour of the communities, women in early stages of pregnancy were taken to hospitals, Veena Das and others report, “for medical treatment”.

Bodh Prakash (Writing Partition: Aesthetics and Ideology in Hindi and Urdu Literature, 2008) argues that many women did not want to return as by 1952-53 some had settled into new lives and had children conceived through rape. They understood the reception they and their children would have to endure. He also discusses two specific novels, Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (Ganges on this Bank, Ganges on the other Bank) by Jyotirmoyee Debi (Bangla 1968) and Pinjar by Amrita Pritam (Punjabi 1950) on this topic. Although they have very different endings, both novels have main characters who are abducted and who, upon their return, are rejected and socially ostracized by their families for being “polluted”. Cleary the traditional norms around women’s honour, equally applicable on both sides of the border, were known to the victims of violence.

Such histories, although widely known, have been buried deep into our psyches, unuttered in public and held on to as family secrets. It is a sensitive and empathetic work of fiction, like Hashmi’s, that helps us remember what we have chosen to forget (see Talash by Shaheen Akhtar (Bangla 2006) for the stories of victims of sexual violence during Bangladesh’s war of independence or Noor by Sorraya Khan (2003) about the same period). Some of us are of the generation that may recall the shadowy figure of a female household member, the unwed aunt, sister or cousin who always remained in the background, conducting her menial tasks silently. We were never able to understand why she was not married or why she was periodically ill-treated or wept when she thought no one was looking? Looking back one wonders, was she one of the “recovered”, condemned to the life of the living dead?

Concluding where I began, Manto’s call for empathy and relative silence shows that he understood how “recovered” (as if they were goods) women would be received in our communities. Yet with all his sensitivity as a writer, in his essay Manto does not mention refusals. Perhaps the trauma of the events was still too close for him and others to really grasp the phenomena in all its complexity. Yet many women did refuse to go back or were never “recovered”. Veena Das, in an essay on the subject (“National Honor and Practical Kinship: Unwanted Women and Children”, 1994) describes a scene narrated by Kamlabehn Patel about the recovery and transfer of Muslim women from camps in India to Pakistan in the late 1940s. She says Sikh men would come sobbing and crying, asking for the return of “their” women and following the convoy to Wagah border, while women themselves, in some cases, tried to run away from being transported to Pakistan and sought to join those who were following them. It is perhaps difficult to understand but possible that in due course many women created affective bonds with those who had abducted them and who had in many cases fathered their child(ren). There may also have been the certainty of a known life which these women were now being forced by the state sponsored recovery programme to leave for the unknown uncertainties of a new country. Bibi, the protagonist of Jamilah Hashmi’s brilliant story, clearly did not have an affective bond with Gurpal, yet she chose to remain with Ravan. Despite suffering Gurpal’s presence — and constantly longing for her past — she felt duty bound as a mother, perhaps hoping that Munni’s story would turn out differently.