Women’s experience of the Partition is marked by large scale rape, abduction and forced marriage. It has received special attention of several scholars over the last few years, particularly since the 1990s. They have tried to understand the women’s experience of the Partition in terms of gender and patriarchy. Patriarchy constructs women in a peculiar way—her respectability is confirmed to the degree to which she is able to retain her sexual purity, her sexuality is a threat to her; her body is not her own, and it is not only the question of her own honour, but also that of her family and community. She is the repository of her community’s honour. Therefore, in a situation of conflict rape becomes a symbolic form of dishonouring the community. And it was so at the time of Partition too. It is interesting that both the rival communities shared the same patriarchal conception of rape. The honour paradigm of the rape culture was no less harmful to the women than the actual physical violence. Rapes were accompanied with large scale abduction and forced marriage. It was on the bodies of women that the new national border was marked out; the edifices of the two nation states in South Asia were constructed.
In 1993, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urbashi Butalia and Karuna Channa initiated a new kind of research on Partition experience from the perspective of gender. Their focus was primarily on the sufferings of the Punjabi women in the aftermath of Partition.1 Later Urbashi Butalia rightly pointed out a serious gap in the historiography of Partition – the omission of the experiences in Bengal and East Pakistan (Bangladesh), which, in her opinion, required detailed attention in their own right.2 Thereafter, initiatives were taken to reconstruct the Partition experience of the Bengali women, particularly the Bengali Hindu women.3
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