The Skeletons of Silenced Voices: Partition and Gendered Violence in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13683826

The Skeletons of Silenced Voices: Partition and Gendered Violence in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13683826

Author(s): Ishita Prasher

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13683826

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Volume 15 | Issue 4 | August 2024

Pages: 51-59

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-IV, August 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
The Skeletons of Silenced Voices: Partition and Gendered Violence in
Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar
Ishita Prasher
Post Graduate Student,
Miranda House,
University of Delhi.
Article History: Submitted-27/06/2024, Revised-13/08/2024, Accepted-24/08/2024, Published-31/08/2024.
Abstract:
The 1947 partition of the Indian Sub-continent is archived predominantly as the
culmination of a series of political negotiations and as the transfer of Hindu, Sikh, and
Muslim populations across the cartographic lines drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. The empowered
historiography of the Partition, skewed in favor of agreements, laws, and facts, obfuscates
the gendered experience of this catastrophe, reducing the suffering of women to numbers
and statistics. One way to holistically understand the Partition, its impact on people, and the
subsequent post-colonial identity formation is to foreground the myriad marginalized
experiences. It is in this context of centering the margins that literary representations of the
Partition gain significance.
To this end, Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novel Pinjar offers interesting and valuable
insights. This paper aims to argue that the novel, through its secular narration and the inter-
religious female solidarity of its characters, demonstrates how gendered experiences fissure
the empowered narratives of communalism. It will also focus on the themes of violence
against the female body, psychological trauma, identity crisis, and female solidarity as
explored in the novel.
Keywords: Body, Female Solidarity, Partition, Recovery, Violence.
Her thighs still smell of milk
and her bosom, of blood….
Now when she has seeped down
the stony cracks of my story
with a limp map half-flying
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https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13683826

The Skeletons of Silenced Voices: Partition and Gendered Violence in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
from a shock-stiffened hand,
waiting for the last ceremonial rite
my memory can afford.
For when they killed her at the border
a child was still tugging at her nipple (Kanungo).
This is how Nabanita Kanungo, whose family migrated to Shillong from Sylhet to
escape the 1947 Partition violence, addresses the impact of violence inflicted upon women
during political and communal conflicts in her 2014 poem, Her thighs still smell of milk. Sixty-
four years before her, on the Western front of the sub-continent, Amrita Pritam narrates the
realities of Partition as follows:
“One day Hamida saw a band of a dozen or more goondas pushing a young girl
before them. She had not a stitch of clothing on her person. The goondas beat drums
and danced about the naked girl… It was a sin to be alive in a world so full of evil,
thought Hamida. It was a crime to be born a girl” (Pritam, 87).
What Kanungo and Pritam achieve here is the creation of a fissure- a chink through
which the margins can be centred. The predominant historiography of the 1947 Partition of the
Indian Sub-continent as the transfer of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim populations across the
cartographic lines drawn by Cyril Radcliffe obfuscates the gendered experience of the
catastrophe. One way to understand the Partition and its impact on people is to foreground the
margins. The failure of official documentation to explain the communalization of syncretic
cultures and acts of bestiality accentuates the importance of literary representation of Partition,
as undertaken by Pritam and Kanungo. Thus, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar offers interesting and
useful inroads, as the male voice-over of the novel’s cinematic rendition proclaims:
“इस कहानी के िसफर् िकरदारों के नाम सच्चे नहीं, बाकì पूरी कोरी सच्चाई है।“ (Pinjar)
[“Only the names of the story’ characters are untrue; everything else is
absolutely true”.]
Pinjar tells the story of Pooro, a 15-year-old girl from Chatto village in Punjab, who is
betrothed to Ram Chand and is kidnapped by Rashid. The kidnapping is a result of an ancestral
feud between Pooro and Rashid’s family, the Sahukars and the Shaikhs. Rashid, who is
attracted to Pooro, did not want to kidnap her but was forced to do so for the ‘honour of his
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family.’ After managing to escape from Rashid’s home, Pooro is turned away by her parents
to protect their lives and their family ‘honour’. Death too eludes her when she is found by
Rashid. Forced by her gender in a patriarchal society, Pooro becomes Hamida, and Rashid
becomes her husband and the father of her son. Through Pooro’s story, Pritam explores the
themes of honour, its concomitant violences, and most importantly, survival through solidarity.

Women, Honour, and Violence
The particular violence enacted against women during Partition seems to tie
intrinsically to the discourse of nationalism and communalism. Denied participation as active
political agents in the nationalist imaginings, which increasingly took communal tones and
turns, women were predominantly aligned with tradition and relegated to the domestic sphere
by the 19th-century nationalists. The association of the feminine with tradition also made an apt
case for imagining the nation as an “essentially feminine entity” (Bargohain and Punekar),
evidenced best in the much-popularised idea of ‘Bharatmata’. This made the woman’s body
the site on which the nation and the community’s ‘honour’ was inscribed and violent struggles
enacted.
Furthermore, as Susan Brownmiller puts it, “when killing is viewed as not only
permissible but heroic behaviour sanctioned by one’s … cause, … rape becomes an unfortunate
but inevitable by-product of the necessary game called war. Women, by its reasoning, are
simply regrettable victims – incidental, unavoidable casualties – … lumped together with
children, homes, personal belongings, a church, a dike, a water buffalo, or next year’s crop.”
In Pinjar, Pooro’s body becomes the object- much like Rashid’s grand-aunt before her- on
which the strife of the Sahukars and the Shaikhs is enacted. Pritam, by highlighting Rashid’s
reluctance and subsequent regret at abducting Pooro and the inter-generational transfer of
vengeance, shows that the particular violence against Pooro is, in fact, a continuum of the larger
communal war machinery at work- one that exploited existing fault lines to its advantage.
Thus, the abduction of women becomes a common way of settling and gaining scores
in the communal clashes of Partition. The act of abduction came to signify an assertion of
identity and honour by a community against its perceived ‘other’- the created enemy. As
Rachna Mehra puts it “a corollary to abduction was forcible conversion and marriage, which
was perceived as an outrage to the family, community honour and a grave setback to the
religious sentiments.” This effectively excludes the woman from the conversation, treating her
as a relic to be fought over and then placed in her ‘rightful’ place- at the margins of the
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The Skeletons of Silenced Voices: Partition and Gendered Violence in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar
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household as much at the margins of her own life. Pooro’s abduction seems to have a mythic
resonance with the Hindu Epic, Ramayana’s episode of sitaharan [abduction of Sita]. Both are
crimes committed to supposedly salvage the ‘honour’ of the family, defiled by the rape and
mutilation of Rashid’s grand-aunt and Shurpankha, respectively. The two abductions share
another commonality in the rejection of Pooro and Sita by their own families on account of the
constructed ideal of ‘honour’. The cinematic rendition of Pinjar makes this resonance rather
explicit when the film’s poetic, secular and almost saintly, Ram Chand, sings of the sufferings
of Sita. However, for all the ambiguities of the song, one of its couplets points to the conniving
and convenience-based ideals of patriarchy, which will simultaneously apotheosize a woman
and slut-shame her to perpetuate its control:
सीता को देखे सारा गाँव
आग पे कैसे धरेगी पाँव ,
बच जाए तो देवी मान
है जल जाए तो पापन ।
The whole village watches Sita
how will she put her feet on fire
If she survives consider her goddess
If she burns, she is a sinner. (Wadhkar)
Additionally, Pooro’s rejection by her family, due to her being considered ‘defiled’, can
be located within the matrix of sexual purity and family honour, which are the most potent
tools of patriarchal control in heteronormative societies. Pooro’s rejection also seems to
corroborate Susan Brownmiller’s argument that even the threat of rape and shame can be used
as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”
(Brownmiller). Her rejection from the space and people she considered ‘home’ forced her into
a perpetual state of homelessness for the rest of her life. When Rashid decides to shift from
Chatto to Sakkar, the narrator says of Pooro: “After her parents had turned her away from their
door, leaving the ancestral village did not seem so momentous… what difference does it make?
All villages were alike” (Pritam, 24).
However, it is perhaps Pritam’s inclusion of and treatment of both physical and
psychological trauma suffered by women during the 1947 Partition that makes Pinjar a chilling
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narrative. In the novel’s best-dealt scene, Pooro’s hand is inscribed with her new name,
Hamida. Anisha Ghosh points out that “naming is indeed a strategy through which the ‘other’
is appropriated within the consciousness of self and Pooro’s new name locates her within the
performative milieu of a new identity and leads to a permanent partition of her female psyche”
(Ghosh, 136). The corporal violence seeps into the subconscious, as the tattooed hand leads to
a conflicted psyche. Pritam succinctly points out how Pooro’s self has become bifurcated in
her consciousness: her dreams are populated by two versions of herself – the Pooro of her
parent’s home and Hamida of today. She has been forced into “a double life: Hamida by day,
Pooro by night. In reality, she was neither the one nor the other. She was just a skeleton without
a shape or a name” (Pritam, 25). This conflicted and troubled psyche is also mapped on
Pooro/Hamida’s relationship with her child, Javed. At one end of the spectrum, Javed
represents nostalgia, “a toy made of her own blood”, a sustaining reminder and connection to
her parents (Pritam, 35). On the other, he fosters repulsion and frustration within Pooro/Hamida
at having lost everything to his abductor. She muses: “This boy… this boy’s father… all
mankind… all men… men who gnaw a woman’s body like a dog gnawing a bone” (Pritam, 35).
Strength in Solidarity
The novel moves out of narrating the individual sufferings of Pooro/Hamida by
introducing other female victims of patriarchy and Partition: Kammo, an orphan girl living
with a troublesome aunt; Taro, a wife forced into prostitution by her husband; and a ‘mad’
woman driven ‘insane’ in her marriage, abandoned and later raped; an unnamed girl who
escaped a refugee camp where she was raped for nine consecutive nights; Lajjo, Pooro’s
sister-in-law, who was abducted and forced into being a mistress in her own house.
Throughout the novel, empathetic interactions with these women nudge Pooro towards
accepting Rashid and the new life thrust upon her. Thus, the homeless Pooro/Hamida seems
to be steered back home – or at least towards a sense of belonging- by the other marginalized
women of the novel, who having been stripped of flesh and life, are merely, pinjars
[skeleton].
Kammo, the first bond Pooro forms in Sakkar, is an orphaned Hindu girl living with
a dreadful aunt. In Kammo, Pooro seeks to find bridges to her own amputated past, but this
attempt is forcefully obstructed by the social codes that assume the power to dictate the
separation between Hindus and Muslims. Such instances of empathetic alliances forged
between women across perceived religious divides also help to dispel the flawed two-nation
theory, which is premised on an artificially created intra-community homogeneity and inter-
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community antagonism. Pritam further explores the idea that women, as victims of
patriarchy, can forge sustaining solidarity across communal divides by introducing the
character of a ‘mad woman’.
Pooro one day finds the corpse of a woman – called the ‘mad woman’ by the villagers-
in a field lying next to a boy she just birthed. Pooro takes the child to her home and nurtures
him asher own for six months, until the Hindus of the village realize that the ‘mad’ woman
was a Hindu and consequently assign the child’s religious identity to Hinduism. They decide
that Muslim Hamida should not raise the Hindu child, and they take the child away and gave
it to a Hindu woman only to later return him to Hamida because of his deteriorating health.
This “reveals how patriarchal and religious interests regulate private emotions … of who
should love whom and how” (Ghosh, 139). Such an attempt to regulate the nurturing care of
motherhood within the confines of communal considerations also implodes and contradicts
the conception of the nation as a mother- giving sustenance to all and sundry.
Another marginalized woman in the text is Taro, who raises jarring questions about
the institution of marriage and the discrimination it imposes on women. She is married to a
man who was already married before her marriage and has forced Taro into prostitution. Her
natal family refuses to intervene because “when parents give away a daughter in marriage,
they put a noose around her neck and hand the other end of the rope to the man of their
choice.” And “it is up to her husband to treat her as he likes. It’s a man’s privilege” (Pritam,
44). Pritam uses Taro’s marital situation to serve two important purposes in the novel. Firstly,
it helps nudge Pooro towards accepting her reality, as she realises that although her marriage
was not consensual, it seems preferable compared to the consensual marriage Taro was
forced into. Secondly, it shatters the fantastical and Manichean juxtaposition of an idyllic
marriage arranged by parents and reluctantly consented to by the daughter, and a marriage
forced by abduction. This, however, does not in any way justify the coercion implicit in the
latter but merely exposes the farce of the former. Taro’s marriage thus bares the reality of the
foreign land that Pooro’s mother talks of in the song:

I have got out my spinning
wheel I have my wads of cotton
I’ll weaves blankets of dreams

To sons are given homes and
palaces Daughters are exiled to
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foreign lands
Why do you give birth to a daughter (Pritam, 11)

Pooro then rescues Lajjo, who was abducted during Partition violence. Unlike Pooro,
however, Lajjo was not displaced spatially. She is held captive and raped in her own home.
Lajjo’s tale splinters the idea of the home as a safe haven or refuge, revealing it instead to be a
site of abuse. Lajjo’s narrative of abuse at the hands of an outsider abuser, coupled with the
abuse Taro and Kammo suffer from familial abusers, raises more profound questions about the
very possibility of a safe space for women in a patriarchal society, especially one infested with
violence. With Rashid’s help, Pooro manages to free and reunite Lajjo with her husband and
brother. Since Lajjo was abducted during a time when many women were similarly abducted,
her reunion with her family socially more acceptable. In an emotional denouement, Pooro’s
brother urges her to return to their ‘home’ like Lajjo, but Pooro chooses to remain as Hamida
with Rashid. It is by reuniting Lajjo with her family that Pooro finally achieves the “satisfaction
of returning home” (Ghosh,140). Thus, Pritam seems to illustrate how ‘homes’ for women are
built in the nooks and crannies of their lives- through solidarities with other women, through
compromises with abductors, through small yet potent acts of resistance against discourses of
communalism. In doing so, Pritam does not romanticize the violence suffered by Pooro but
shows how women live and survive life after the violent rupture[s] that alters the course of their
life and self.
The instinct to survive and continue with life is best illustrated by the responses of
multiple women who were abducted during the Partition violence and forced into marriages
with their captors. Forced by circumstances, these women, like Pooro, attempted to forge a
semblance of peace and stability through fragile relationships with their new environment.
However, the fledgling peace is disrupted again through the efforts of the governments of India
and Pakistan carrying out the ‘Recovery of Abducted Women’. ‘The Recovery of Abducted
Persons Ordinance’ promulgated on 31 January 1949 in India described an “abducted person”
as “a male child under the age of sixteen years or a female of whatever age who is, or
immediately before the first day of March 1947, was, a Hindu or a Sikh and who, on or after
that day, and before the first day of January 1949 has become separated from his or her family
and is found to be living with or under the control of a Muslim individual or family.” Thus,
according to the ordinance, while men are considered adults at the age of 16, women are
perpetually regarded as infants, incapable of making decisions about their own lives. A clause
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in the Bill stated that all marriages carried out post-1947, which took place after conversion,
stood null and void. This clause did not account for marriages that had taken place with the
‘consent’ of the woman. The absolute rejection of the idea of consent highlights: A) a theoretical
view of the law which does not take into consideration survival instincts; and B) a refusal to
recognise women as individuals with the capacity to consent. Urvashi Butalia’s response in an
interview sums up the critique of this clause well: “There can’t be a cut-off date where
relationships become coercive. Even when terrible things are happening between countries,
people can still fall in love, can still have relationships across religions. Law is black-and-
white- it can not take [into account] life’s ambiguities and nuances”.

Conclusion
The ambiguities and nuances of life that Urvashi Butalia refers to are perhaps
illustarted in the boy of the Hindu woman sucking at the breasts of Muslim Hamida; or
perhaps in the emotional solidarities of the many victims of Partition; or perhaps in the odes
written to Waris Shah on train rides from a home to the new nation; or perhaps in the pinjars
[skeletons] that man created in 1947 and never since revisited. Pinjar is, thus, an important
literary documentation of the nuances that contoured the lived experience of the Partition of
the Indian subcontinent. It brings to the center the marginalized experience of women while
highlighting the healing power of empathetic emotional female solidarity.

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