How to Speak of the Unspeakable?

Narratives of ViolenceAgainst Women in Hindi Novels about Partition

Abstract

To date generations of people from South Asia grapple with traumatic experiences of havoc and violence prior to, during and in the aftermath of the Partition of British India. Writings in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and English, i.e. in languages spoken in the regions mostly affected by the turmoil of 1947, reflect the painful process of coming to terms with these experiences and of possible reconciliation with consequences of “the long shadow of partition” (Bhutalia 2015). Violence against women, often gruesome and unspeakable, was a facet of the Partition that occurred repeatedly but whose testimony and records were either censored and/or silenced by survivors and newly established states for diverse individual, communal and “nation-building” reasons (Bhutalia 1998). In my paper I would like to examine how Hindi novels dating from the end of the 1950s to 2016 narrate instances of partition violence against women. With focus on Yashpal’s Jhūṭ hā sac of 1958, Bhishm Sahni’s Tamas of 1974 and Krishna Sobti’s Gujrāt pākistān se gujrāt hindustān tak of 2016 I scrutinize various