Gendered Violence during India's Partition: A Study of Saadat Hasan Manto's “Thanda Gosht” and “Khol Do” and Krishan Chander's “Aik Tawaif ka Khat Pandit Nehru aur Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah ke Naam”

Partition is an event in the history of India and Pakistan that leaves us with gut-wrenching narratives and makes us ponder in silence the atrocities committed in the name of religion. These indelible scars have scathed the mindset to such an extent that the pain and agony of Partition is still alive in our collective consciousness. Thousands of people just carried on with their lives in traumatized silence, especially women whose inner voices screamed from the depths of their souls. These silent screams have continued forever in the hearts of the brutalized women of the Partition. Most certainly, these wounds can never be healed, and these memories can never be erased till the present day. The mute twilight world of women during and after Partition created a hollow space with many untold stories which continued to be buried in the recesses of their very being. Some writers took it upon themselves to uncover these hidden stories, bringing to the fore the unspoken suffering of women. After much research and study, Urvashi Butalia, an Indian feminist and publisher, in her book The Other Side of Silence, states:

Twelve million people were displaced as a result of Partition. Nearly one million died. Some 75, 000 women were raped, kidnapped, abducted, forcibly impregnated by men of the ‘other ’religion, thousands of families were split apart, homes burnt down and destroyed, villages abandoned (35).

In a highly patriarchal social set-up, women became symbols of the family, community and nation and as Isabella Bruschi puts it, “ …women, whose bodies, assumed as signifiers of communal and national values and boundaries were used as a means to strike the enemy and retaliate against him” (introduction xvi). My interest lies in exploring the silent screams of women through the Partition narratives, especially through the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto's “Khol Do” and “Thanda Gosht” and Krishan Chander's “A Courtesan's Letter to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah”.