ABSTRACT

Partition of colonial India in 1947 – forming two nation-states, India and Pakistan, at the time of its independence from almost two centuries of British rule – was a deeply violent and gendered experience. Although there were many signifi cant differences in partition in the eastern region and the western,1 they share one compelling similarity. In both regions, women of all ages became specifi c targets of communal violence. As Urvashi Butalia writes, “About 750,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religion different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion)” (1998: 3). Clearly, we have to attend to and make sense of this incredible scale of gender violence as the fi rst critical response to the violence of partition. However, this is not the only way gender as an analytical category becomes critical and illuminating in understanding partition. Partition played upon gendered relationships that constitute women’s relationships to their families, to their communities, to the nation and to the state. Grappling with these aspects is necessary to have any understanding of partition. Conversely, partition also allows us a critical insight into the nature and structures of gender relationships that hold normal, everyday life together. It is, then, an instructive historical juncture for feminist analysis.