Cognoscenti, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, a Grub Street Novel Incubator Scholarship, and she was the Desai fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She holds an MA in English from New York Universityand an MFA in creative writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize.
At Lit Hub Suneja tagged five books to help with our "understanding of [the Indian] Partition [of 1947]—as a trauma narrative, and as a living thing regenerating itself over and over with each generation." One title on the list:
Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s PartitionRead about the other entries on the list.
Because the history of men is not the same as the history of women, and because men are almost always asked first and tend to speak first, this book is essentialreading to understand the gendered nature of Partition violence. Caught in between the borders and boundaries of religion, community, and nation, tasked with upholding family honor, the women tell a decidedly different story.
From bearing “permissible violence”—drowned and killed by their own fathers and brothers to save family honor, or even asked to commit suicide to save that honor—to forced violence—rape, mutilation, abduction, conversion at the hands of “enemy” men, forced restoration by the hands of the state, women’s bodies become the very sites of contestation where entire nations define their ideas of identity, honor, selfhood, sovereignty.
Out of the array of incredulous violence inflicted upon women, the most incredulous is probably that by the state, in the form of the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Bill. Passed in the parliaments of both India and Pakistan, the bill gave the governments carte blanche to extract with the help of police force all those persons reported abducted or missing by their families.
As a result, thousands of women were handcuffed and yanked away from their new families (who may or may not have inflicted sexual violence upon them), yanked away from the children they birthed in those unions, and force-rehabilitated into their families of origin, that more often than not, did not want them back. These “restored” women had no legal recourse, no choice in the matter of where they could live, which border they wanted to belong.
Also see Anjali Enjeti's seven books about the Partition of India & Pakistan.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
