Shalini Guha Roy

MA English. SEM 4.
Roll No. 10
Tentative Title: Re-Negotiating Trauma: Abducted Women Victims of Partition in Pinjar and
A Promised Land
Abstract:
The paper focuses on the representation of the trauma that abducted women had to undergo in
the context of the Partition of India in 1947. As the abduction of women was used as a vital
tool of communal violence, women often spent their lives in silence longing for their ties yet
refusing to inhabit them after forceful or compulsive marriages. However. they often refused
to return to their ancestral roots or their previous ties even when provided an opportunity to
do so. This is because the social stigma of abduction that was attached to them caused them
to struggle with shame and trauma. Therefore, women occupied a liminal position as
‘objects’ of honor or property and as victims of sexual violence.
Moreover, contrary to the popular belief that only women of the ‘other’ communities were
abducted as Puro in Amrita Pritam’s novel Pinjar (1950), there were also certain intra-
community abductions that have often been inconspicuous as in the case of Sajidah in
Khadija Mastur’s A Promised Land (1987).
In this case, it would be interesting to note that even though these women spent their lives in
psychological turmoil to inhabit a space that they never felt as their own and looking forward
to an uncertain future when contact was remade, many women still retained a sense of agency
and resilience. This became an attempt to recuperate from their trauma as they took control of
their own lives and lead a life on their own terms. As they adapted themselves to new
families, kinship structures, and social systems it was an attempt to recover from the trauma
of loss.
Thereby, the paper aims to explore the various factors that led to the trauma of abducted
women and how this trauma led women to develop a language of resilience. In this case, the
paper will specifically focus on the two novels by Amrita Pritam and Khadija Mastur as both
these female writers, writing in different time periods, offer gendered outlooks on the specific
experiences of abducted women victims of Partition, that are distinct and different from one
another.
Key words: trauma; abduction; liminal; women; agency; language; Puro; Sajidah; recover