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Neha Saini
Tribune News Service
Amritsar, November 17
Memories of the Partition do not go away easily and neither do the stories. Sharing three of such intriguing stories of pain and longing was Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publisher, and now director of Zubaan. She is also author of the award-winning, path-breaking study of Partition — The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India — which won the Oral History Book Association award and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture. She addressed the session on border crossings at the opening day of Syal festival at Majha House.
Butalia, who is considered an authority on the accounts of women exploitation during Partition, narrated stories related to crossing borders of language, nation and social bindings. “My stories are basically accounts of history of mass rapes and abduction of women that happened during Partition. During the time, the Indian government had passed a legislation called the Abducted Persons Recovery and Registration Act that allowed the police to search for missing or abducted women and gather information. A lot of women were violated of their rights, the right to choose where they wanted to live and who they wanted to marry,” she said.
Her stories reflected upon the theme of border crossings. “In 1952, in Faridkot, a man named Ajiab Singh was suspected of having in possession of three young women, including a 13-year-old Muslim girl, who was later found and arrested only to be sent to Pakistan. When Ajaib Singh filed a petition against the move to send her to Pakistan, the Supreme Court took notice and the government had to repeal the Act. Similarly, on one of my visits to Karachi, I met an 84-year old woman Shahnaaz, who was Gurbachan Kaur at the time of Partition. She was abducted and, later, married to a man with whom she had five children. In later years, she visited her family in Amritsar along with her Muslim husband and kids. She wasn’t allowed to return with them to Pakistan and forcibly married off to another man in India. It was only after 40 years, when her stepson found out her story that she could come to Pakistan and meet her kids, who had grown up by then. She was living with them at the time I met her, once again changing her name to Shahnaaz,” shared Urvashi in her account.
“My question really after hearing all these stories was that who do these stories belong to? Borders are real and it’s foolish of us to think that they will go away. But no matter how divisive they are, we can begin the process of making them porous, hospitable through dialogue,” she said.
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