LangLit

ISSN 2349-5189

An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal

FACING FUNDAMENTALISM OF PARTITION AND POST-
PARTITION TIMES: THE NARRATION OF TRAUMA BY WOMEN
WRITERS - AMRITA PRITAM AND TASLIMA NASREEN

DR. BHAGYASHREE S. VARMA

Associate Professor
University of Mumbai
Maharashtra
ABSTRACT
The literature of Modern and Post-modern women writers
investigates profoundly and outrageously into the happenings
of history, encounters of ethics, crossroads of culture, pulls and
pressures of Politics in language and gender, along with the
dynamics of subjectivity, class-conflicts, caste-collapses,
centre versus margin and so on. Historically, Women writers
have ever been identified through male gaze, the settled creed
and convictions of patriarchy and religion, in India like most of
the nations on the planet. The prime areas of women writers’
evaluation are their mobility and displacement, the ideological
and emotional scrutiny, the contradictory and conflicting
reflections of their minds. Both Amrita Pritam and Taslima
Nasreen not lamented on the helplessness of women in the
upheavals of history but they have piercingly looked through
the microscopic layers of history and tried to understand the
social pressures on man along with the masculine weight on
society. They have projected the position of a trapped woman
in the times of Partition and post partition facing
fundamentalist violence. The major difference in the two
writers is their tone of narration along with the radical shades
of protest in Taslima and the extreme spiritualized human
inclinations in Amrita.

The literature of Modern and Post-modern women writers investigates profoundly and
outrageously into the happenings of history, encounters of ethics, crossroads of culture, pulls
and pressures of Politics in language and gender, along with the dynamics of subjectivity,
class-conflicts, caste-collapses, centre versus margin and so on. Historically, Women writers
have ever been identified through male gaze, the settled creed and convictions of patriarchy
and religion, in India like most of the nations on the planet. The prime areas of women
writers‟ evaluation are their mobility and displacement, the ideological and emotional
scrutiny, the contradictory and conflicting reflections of their minds.

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A woman has no religion and she belongs to no region. She has no language of her own. She
is either a daughter of a Muslim or a wife of a Hindu. The language she speaks is in fact the
language of the „man‟ who possesses her. The region she moves in is neither native nor
foreign to her and she acclimatizes herself in the region she is located in as per the need and
creed of the man who claims her as his possession. The statement that is intended by this
paper is that facing fundamentalism of Partition and Post-Partition times, women had not
only been traumatized physically and psychologically but they had to be in the very
existentialist crisis positioned as an isolated „outsider‟, the „other‟ individual, the „invisible‟
victim and the marginalized loser at all cost in their lives. The meaning of the intended
statement in simple terms is, the discrimination via gender overpowers the other
discrimination areas like religion and region, nationality and nativism, class and caste,
language and culture and so on.

The Partition of India hangs on the map of history like a chapter past the course of time, a
diary of events with a partial vision of facts, uncertain data and the unavailable or half-
narrated stories of individual experiences by seniors who were actual spectators to the painful
trauma with the tragic force affecting the lives of people. No Sikh or Hindu remained in the
native village after the March 1947 riots, and there are the reports of innumerable incidents of
honor killing of women, many women jumping into a well to take their own lives as the only
option in self-defense, even the unknown details of women who were killed by their family
members, men most of the times, to save their grace and protect the social repute of the
family.

Amrita Pritam is an unparalleled name in the historical fiction and poetry by Indian women.
Her novel Pinjar records the history of the times in its actualized fictional details and Puro the
protagonist of the novel is only a prototype of all such women who were on the verge of
vanishing between the two religions they kept shuttling from or to. The woman who is torn
inexorably between the socio-political compels via religion and culture, endures to witness
the similar women who are continuously haunted by their past religions and regions as the
victims of external fanatic elements. She restructures the character of Puro as a strong woman
in place of the victim like other women around her. Puro is made capable of battling with the
outer forces of rigid culture, ritualistic society and blind nationalism. The title Pinjar is infact
the condition of Puro who is left living without her original identity as human but manages to
survive like a skeleton that endures all storms around. It is the optimistic retrospective motif
of the creative mind like Amrita to make the story of Puro a saga of quest for harmony and
love overpowering hatred and violence. However, her central concern is always with the
essence of womanhood, the suffocated love of daughter or sister, the sacrifice of beloved or
wife and the suffering of mother.

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The representation of a misplaced woman, a subdued daughter, an abandoned beloved and a
powerless wife, an anguished mother seems to be the destined conflict for women,
originating from the partition riots of the nation, resulting ultimately in the partition of mind.
In the world of cruelty and chaos, violence and destitution, what was never destroyed
completely, as Amrita finds – was Love and Compassion. Apparently it is a tragic tale of
clashing fidelities but essentially it reruns a trailer of the national, political, religious, and
cultural forces chronicled in their shocking shape. Metaphorically it is the skeleton of the
great historical crisis during Indo-Pak partition. Puro as a daughter of a Hindu family forced
into living the life of a Muslim wife, left in the end like a skeleton of Love that has no
religious identity. In the form of the skeleton, however, she replicates compassion rather than
horror. Her revulsion for her Muslim husband, Rashida, gradually turns into the concern she
feels for all the misled individuals around her. On the other hand, her actions prove a strong
answer to the dictates of rigid and fanatic religion, to the questions of freedom of individuals
in a gender-based society. Pinjar, in this sense is a form of fiction with the content of history,
a novel evolved out of a chronicle.

The characters as the partition-victims and the human agents of individuality get defeated in
the mass pressure of religion and culture. They emerge above the political or religious
boundaries and prove their individualistic human qualities. The novel is a significant
documentation of the Partition crisis, more emphatically it embodies the philosophical vision
of the writer. It narrates the compassionate events of woman‟s life while it also renders the
power of true love in both, man and woman‟s life. Ramchand, the fiancé of Puro, who
becomes a refugee later on, losing everything, plays the role of a noble agent reviving the life
of displaced women, by helping them reach their destiny. Lajo, the sister of Ramchand ,
married to Puro‟s brother, Trilok, is another victim of the Hindu-Muslim war of ideas and is
saved by Puro from the riot-born crisis. Trilok, the brother of Puro is an angry young man
who disagrees with parents and burns in rage at his sister‟s displacement. He proves a soft-
hearted brother and a noble husband. While dealing with the community consciousness,
personal anguish, affirmative goodness, and ambiguous convictions, Pritam combines her
strong sense of history with the current dynamics of human feelings. Rashida who kidnaps
Puro at the bidding of his brothers and uncles, for the sake of revenge, is civilized by the love
he feels for Puro. He nurses Puro, in her sickness, affectionately and wins her heart through
his continued sacrifice.

Puro becomes Hamida after her Nikah with Rashida is performed. Love is greater than
religion as it is proved in her life. Initially she stays with him like an imprisoned labourer,
waiting for the last day punishment. It is motherhood that extinguishes her fire of hatred
towards her robber. She feels overwhelmed gazing at the new-born child in “whose veins
mingled the blood of her parents – the parents who had cast her aside. Out of a conflict of
hate and love, a conflict of loyalties, a conflict of religious and emotional bondages, were

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born Hamida the mother, her son, and her love for Rashida. Puro‟s hatred for Rashida, the
person who was responsible for uprooting her family-life, died in her new-born hate for the
communal obligations imposed upon parents, who prefer helplessness to revolution. They
choose social prestige and security against the daughter‟s happiness. “People say when a
person‟s mother dies; even a real father becomes a stepfather. It was Hamida‟s ill-luck that
her father had become a stepfather before becoming a widower and her real mother, without
being a widow, had become like a step-mother.” In her attempts to help the dislocated girls of
the village, Puro observes how women were being exploited in both-Hindu and Muslim
families, by men and also by women in the name of customs, religion and relationships. The
most tragic example of this she found in the madwoman roaming in the village and seduced
by someone without her knowledge. The villagers pity her or laugh at her while women grind
their teeth in anger. “What sort of man could have done this to her?” they think when they see
her carrying. She hated Rashida when he married her forcefully and now the same fellow
becomes lovable, on the comparative grounds of other men‟s cruelty. The villagers try to
make an issue of Puro‟s adoption to the Hindu baby since she was, to them, a Muslim
woman, Hamida. They call a meeting and snatch away the infant. After much discussion,
they employ a woman to look after the baby. The baby falls sick and is on the verge of death,
they bring it back to Puro, stating“ Take him, If you can save him he is yours !”

Everything that happens in Puro‟s life is caused by her divided identity as a woman with
Hindu origin and Muslim set-up of life. She socializes with both the communities as easily as
people without emotional crisis in their lives. The heat to religious fanaticism flames again
and there is a wave of Hindu-Muslim riots once again after the declaration of independence
in 1947. Puro burns in rage when she hears of the abduction of Hindu girls by Muslims and
of Muslim girls by Hindus. Most of the women are either murdered and thrown out or forced
into unwanted marriages and enslaved for the whole life. In her socializing Puro meets
Ramchand and knows about the displacement of her family-members. She artfully locates
Lajo, the sister of Ramchand and the wife of her brother, with the help of Rashida and frees
her from the clutches of the same destiny that she had faced. They hear about the government
proclamation ordering people to hand over all abducted persons to their original families.
Parents being exhorted to receive back their abducted daughters, find now no hurdles of
socio-religious attacks on their prestige. While the same event occurred in Puro‟s life, neither
her parents nor religious authorities nor national societies were willing to accept her and now
the same religion had become “so accommodating!” The times of riots and mass-conflict
make the moral rigidity and religious fanaticism seem insignificant and ignorable. The novel
ends pathetically by raising the questions of identity, love, loss of family, security and
prestige and compassion unanswered. It is unrealistic ending in the conditions that positively
move towards the solutions of traditionally generated socio-cultural and religious issues. The
last and the first opportunity of return come to Puro, proving the efforts of the novelist
working so hard on the noble idealism of integrating the opposite streams of creed.

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Puro‟s preference to Rashida, and rejection of her brother‟s request to return to the family,
proves a reply to her parents who did not accept her back in the house when she had once
sought refuge in them. Her acceptance of the imposed religion and relation finally comes as
her self-chosen mode of existence. She proves that she would not change her path of
compassion now like the changing codes of society and religion. She prefers compassion to
love and wins the battle by her own virtue, the profound nobility of motherhood, forgiving
the wrong-doers instead of seeking vengeance or offering verdicts of punishment. The story
fills the gap between Hindu and Muslim consciousness of creed in such a delicate thread
work of relationships, that the self-trapped in love and compassion reflects only a genuine
place of human feelings that are supreme to the fanatical ways of religious or cultural forces.
Like all the other stories of Pritam, Pinjar too, was a part of her lived experience. It is
autobiographical not only in the traumatic experiences of Partition but the conflicting
emotions that the writer herself faced in her life. The aesthetic and impressionistic narration
that is so overshadowing in Pritam‟s works becomes a fine combination of Personal vs social,
human vs religious and feminine vs. universal values juxtaposed and reflecting the actual
human realities. In every sense, the novel is more a chronicle than a novel and yet ideals
treated so carefully in it, make it novel forever. Love conquers all and compassion rules love
despite the dictates of fate, religion, society or culture. What is of perennial value is the
devotion, truth, conviction and sacredness of the individual self.

Banned by Bangladesh government in 1992, the capsule of controversy, Taslima Nasreen‟s

novel Lajja is dedicated to “the people of Indian Subcontinent. It is mentioned in the page of
copyright that the book is a “work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
either the product of the author‟s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.” Such a note of
declaration in the initial page of the novel is in fact a mark or pressure, a kind of socio-ethical
consciousness of public-response and a need felt by the author to pre-explain her viewpoint
in order to avoid any further chaos in the readers‟ mind.

The novel Lajja has a hitting title –Shame – a feeling of disgrace and remorse brought upon
an individual, a family through external forces around. It raises a basic question of identity of
an individual and family, significance of nativity, religion and nationality in formation of that
identity. The story proves how there is no space where class creed and cultural ideology
cannot be the norm for human interaction. In the preface of the book the writer makes it clear,
“I detest fundamentalism and communalism. This was the reason I wrote Lajja soon after the
demolition of the Babree Masjid in Ayodhya on 6th December 1992.” The narrative deals
with persecution of Hindus, a religious minority in post-partition Bangladesh. The Babree
Masjid demolition saga caused a strong religious socio-political upheaval of responses and
reactions. In her interview, Taslima stated, “The sacrifice of martyrs of freedom will be
betrayed if we allow ourselves to be ruled by religious extremism.” And further, “…the

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disease of religious fundamentalism is not restricted to Bangladesh alone.” The life-
experience of Taslima is sprinkled in her poems, essays and stories so translucently that one
can only understand her plight as a woman in the world of man. She is a freethinker, with
satanic daring to rebel against the Male-god in domestic heavens: I don‟t believe in God /
Caught at arms by the social politics “Every house is full of religious devotees / who create
classes, secretly, distinguish woman and man / Divide human existence…( TNKK, 30)
Gandhi‟s proclamation of Non-violence has ever been the compulsion for and the fate of
women since the earlier times and the glorification of feminine virtues like patience,
devotion, sacrifice, surrender and chastity has ever been the share of a woman‟s personality.
Irony an anger of Kamala Das echoes in Taslima‟s confessional tones while she writes:
Remember well that you are a girl
People will glance at you when you cross the doors,
They will follow you when you move in lanes,
They will whistle and shout at you
When you reach the main roads…… (TNKK,13)

Taslima‟s experience of incomplete existence is rooted in her haunting ideas of the old
womanhood, so that she feels divided, distanced from man on account of the socio-cultural
inequality:
I too am divided : I am forced to lose
My human rights…..The politicians enjoy relish abuse
The divisions of class, race and gender,
I know very well……This complete world is shaded
By the eighteen fingers of religion
Who can break their bones alone?
Who can deconstruct this great network trapping inequality? (TNKK, 31)

A delicate and vulnerable creative mind emerges like a flame of burning questions asked in
the face of millions of fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, who claim to be the protecting
gods for their women. She outrageously writes:
Do you want a girl? Woman is an object of use and abuse
If you want, get her; hold her in chains, if you don‟t,
Just say Talaaque! (TN‟s Poems)

Trapped in the two divergent waves of the old and new womanhood, the position of woman
in today‟s world is like a wanderer, who has lost the old home and has yet not found the new
one. Dangling between the two worlds of tradition and modernity, today‟s woman finds
herself a puppet in the hands of man-made culture, wherein all the forces like society,
religion, nation and class or caste, seem to be ambivalent and diabolic in their operations. The

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poetry of Taslima Nasreen seeks the articulation of opposition to religious and cultural
orthodoxy, socio-psychological ideas and values of male-centred ethical system in patriarchy:
All have been witnessing, this discrimination
Nobody to protest, our tongues are cut off
Our lips are stitched our hands tied
And feet chained! (TN‟s Poems)

She stands firmly in the centre with her pen pointed against the collective hypocrisy and
gender-discrimination. The protest in Taslima‟s voice is neither mild as that of Alice Walker,
nor confined to feminine ways like Viginia Woolf. She is as blunt as Kamala Das, as
dignified as Amrita Pritam and as modest as Jean Rhys. She crosses the expectations of
sobriety and decorum especially on the part of a woman writer. The hybridity experienced is
not just philosophical, it also local and existential. (J.Jain, 21)
In a poem „Give and Take‟ Taslima states:
You have given me poison, and I?
I have poured the waters of love
Upon you. (TNKK, 20)

She is willing to speak out with an uncompromising honesty even the most intimate and
implicit feelings of feminine experience ranging from love to anger, from search to outrage
and from desire to detestation. Knowing the male is not so straight for a woman like Taslima
with all her sense of involvement and commitment, and she finds herself disillusioned:
The whole life is spent with a man, days and nights,
How far one can know a man? The more I think the more I realize
Man whom you think you know is a stranger He is not a human
as much as you know - Half man, half beast. (TNKK, 15)

Taslima‟s sense of protest is equally strong as her sense of longing for fulfillment. Marriage
as an institution appears to promise woman a sense of security and fulfillment. Taslima has
no illusions and hopes even when she thinks of marriage, on the other hand she feels than
man has invented a socially accepted way of dictating woman‟s life. In her poem „shubh
vivah‟ she mentions:
The whole life is taken like a river,
A dam by a wild man
Who claims to be the master…(TNKK, 16)

There is a relation she has pointed out between the protest of victimized women and ethical
values society. Her revolutionary vision of life is divided in two interrelated forces – male-
dominated social system and sense of belonging that once again depends upon bridging the
gap in two diverse forces, society and law. Taslima, like many is branded as a feminist and a

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refugee. Her poetry longs for the expression of her feelings as an expatriate, an agonized
woman away from her mother and motherland. The projection of one‟s native culture in alien
lands results in wandering between the worlds of nostalgia, contemporary state of existence
and experiences of estrangement. The same feeling of loneliness shadows her expression in a
kind of feminine helplessness, while she narrates:
In the emptiness of a vacant room Suffocated
I cry in despair in an alien nation! (Muze Mukti Do) These marginal voices explore the
internalized forms of conflict faced by the travelers seeking support and shelter in the foreign
lands. Taslima‟s sense of loss and loneliness springs in the painful confessions in her poems:
All have water, fruits and roots,
Only mine is nothing in this life
Save a voyage without any mate! (Muze Mukti Do)
A poet in Taslima feels the plight while a thinker in her finds the courage to face such a crisis
boldly, even with a masculine courage rarely shown by a woman: Nobody knows nobody
waves behind
Nobody to swear by the head and say “Come Back, Dear”
Nobody turns to look back dissolving like the leaves of
Birch, Left alone in the darker shell, I have stayed,
Who is here to lit the lamps,
And say you must live! (Muze Mukti Do) Taslima‟s voice reaches out a specific aesthetics
faced with two centers - the external modernist need for protest and the internal need for
identity. The stronger desire to speak out the personal truth and exercise the freedom of
expression leads a woman from protected life of family to the isolation and exile. From a
ritualistic patterning of religion and ideology, man has moved to scientific and technological
uplift wherein woman‟s position has only changed from an exploited puppet to a helpless
dependent. She captures this shift of woman from the home of slavery to alien land of
freedom, kind of metaphorical shift from the old to the new womanhood: This inevitable
journey, an endless voyage
From where to where? No answer.
I know life had been a land of river
Once overflown now desert

In the season of spring! (Muze Mukti Do) Not much away from the destiny of Kamala
Das, Taslima has to face a harsh criticism on social plane on account of her boldness in
exploding the myth of male superiority. In Taslima‟s case her feminist modes of expression
seem to be the basis of her exploration of society and nation on the one hand, and that of a
displaced individual, an uprooted psyche and a dislocated refugee on the other. In a distinct
way by pointing out the obligations of a wanderer, suffering of a homeless, struggle of a
traveller, pains of an alienated artist, she has created the relevance between the protest of two
victimized sections of society - that of women, and a community of the wanderers, refugees

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those who are driven away or displaced from their origins. Her poetry longs for the
expression of her feelings as an agonized woman away from her mother and motherland. The
position of women dangling between the past origin and the present locations in one‟s own
nation creates a sense of stronger disappointment. Taslima has a child‟s question for the
mother land answered by herself as if for calming a child: I was a traveller in my country
I am a traveler abroad, where is my country?
Happy and blessed country, I know, my country knows

Home is where my heart is! (MmD) She finds herself embittered by the double standards of
male authority in socio-ethical environment, wherein man does not need any justification or
explanation for his unruly conduct but a woman is questioned and held responsible for
everything that happens to her:
Men are gentlemen, No certificate

Of devotion is needed for men! (TN‟s Poems) The socio-historical conditions always
managed to subvert the fictional and theatrical world of reflection where women rendered
their protest in the form of imaginary characters. Ellen E. Jordan makes a point when he
states that the English feminists endowed the New woman with “her hostility to men, her
questioning of marriage, her determination to escape from the restriction of home life and her
belief that education could make a woman capable of leading a financially self-sufficient,
single and yet fulfilling life”. It takes a long time for a woman to know how she has left
behind a home and man when she moves ahead and finds herself alone on the progressive
ways of freedom, “Moving out of home, I am unable to see the sky!”(TN‟s Poems) Women
poets are constantly watched and disapproved for articulating their protest; the society always
expected women to write the poems of submission and solitude like those of Dickinson,
Sarojini Naidu and Phillis Wheatley. The poetry of Taslima Nasreen is a staunch product of
her protest exploding the myth of man as master, mentor or moderator of woman‟s life. Her
poetry exhibits a consciousness that is not simply autobiographical and confessional,
protesting and feminist, but also a representation of the post-modern, post-colonial and
deconstructionist mode of textualizing the context. Woman exported, to east west north south
Woman exported indoor & outdoor, Woman of black
or golden hair, of brown Or blue eyes, exported by religion
and by absence of religion, believer or skeptic, beautiful or not,
Chaste or not, Lame, blind or deaf, healthy or sick,
Literate or illiterate, young, teenager, adult or old,
Covered or denuded she is to be exported, Talkative or dumb,
coward or candid, Woman is to be exported!

Trapped in the two divergent waves of the old and new womanhood, the position of woman
in today‟s world is like a wanderer, who has lost the old home and has yet not found the new

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one. Dangling between two worlds of tradition and modernity, today‟s woman finds herself a
puppet in the hands of man-made culture; the forces like society, religion, nation and class or
caste, seem to be ambivalent and diabolic in their operations. The poetry of Taslima seeks the
articulation of opposition to religious and cultural orthodoxy, socio-psychological ideas and
values of male-centred ethical system in patriarchy: All have been witnessing, this
discrimination
Nobody to protest, our tongues are cut off
Our lips are stitched our hands tied

And feet chained! (TN‟s Poems) She stands firmly in the centre with her pen pointed against
the collective hypocrisy and gender-discrimination. The protest in Taslima‟s voice is neither
mild as that of Alice Walker, nor confined to feminine ways like Viginia Woolf. Taslima
Nasreen‟s vision of a woman‟s existence thus initiates from the feminist context, continues
through the diasporic consciousness, only to reach finally at the womanist finding of
sisterhood implicit and implied as the only fit resource for solving and settling the woman-
question.

However proudly we talk of women as half population of the world and of their important
role in shaping the society, women were subjected to the highest upper limit of disgrace and
persecution. No steps of comprehension or reform were taken by the Government to alleviate
the sufferings of the abducted women until 6th December, 1947, when the agreement was
made between Governments of India and Pakistan regarding a formal recovery of abducted
women. The agreement did mention that the conversion by persons abducted after 1st March,
1947, will not be recognized, and all such persons must be restored to their respective
Dominions. When recovered, the statements of the recovered women and girls were recorded
and they were returned to their abductors by the District Authorities as it was said that they
did not wish to leave their abductors. So far, there had been no special legislation for the
recovery of abducted women. An ordinance called Abducted Persons Recovery and
Restoration Ordinance was promulgated on January 31, 1949, and was subsequently replaced
by the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act 1949. One of the principal features
of this Act was that it adopted a more comprehensive definition of the term "Abducted" than
the one already provided in the Indian Penal Code.16 Another important aspect of this
legislation was the provision for setting up of an Indo-Pak Tribunal to decide the disputed
cases of abducted women. Camps for the stay of the recovered persons were to be
established. This Act applied only to the 'affected areas', viz., U.P., East Punjab, Delhi,
Patiala and East Punjah States Union, and the United States of Rajasthan.

Both Amrita Pritam and Taslima Nasreen not lamented on the helplessness of women in the
upheavals of history but they have piercingly looked through the microscopic layers of
history and tried to understand the social pressures on man along with the masculine weight

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on society. They have projected the position of a trapped woman in the times of Partition and
post partition facing fundamentalist violence. The major difference in the two writers is their
tone of narration along with the radical shades of protest in Taslima and the extreme
spiritualized human inclinations in Amrita. The turbulent times of history have also been
reflected in the writings of Qurratulain Hyder, Attia Housain, Bapsi Sidwa, Mehr Masroor,
Anita Kumar, Manju Kapoor, Urvashi Butalia and Shauna Singh Baldwin. The gendered
perspective on literary writings during and post partition times throws light on the very
intimate interrelationship between socio-cultural religious fundamentalist ideas of society and
gender oriented mind-set of individuals as well as masses. Partition may be described as the
chaotic outburst of fundamentalist yet masculine obsession for power via religion and in the
hyper male revenge drama of the mutual humiliation the vulnerable territories most violated
were women‟s bodies. Not only the partition violence positioned women into easy victims of
the volcanic passion but the crazed mass killing licensed by the fundamentalist religious
savagery, when the „good women‟ preferred death to dishonour were women not anything
more than a symbol of male honour, masculine power or community rule?

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