The Oxford and Cambridge Society of India in collaboration with the Partition Museum, Amritsar organised a virtual event via Zoom on “Women Voices from The Partition” last weekend.
The event was preceded over by Ganeev Dhillon, Curator (Exhibitions) at The Partition Museum, who took the attendees through the archives and unseen accounts of women from the partition era. Dhillon explained the role of Lady Kishwer Desai in setting up the museum.
Speaking to Asian Voice, Dhillon talked about access to education for women during the time of partition. She said, “Many of the women after they came across, did go in for education.”
She read out an excerpt from the book Borders and Boundaries by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin to substantiate her answer and said, “The January 1949 issue of rehabilitation review records the fact that as many as 100 girls were enrolled in the Mehrauli residential school for girls and 225 in the Bal Niketan and Gram Sevika Shiksha Kendra, 8 primary schools with the strength of 1000 children, half of them were girls.”
“The last chapter in this book tells how women came out to study further and move beyond the family,” she added.
In early 2015, a small dedicated group of people came together with the resolve to fill this lacuna. Led by the Chairperson, Lady Kishwar Desai, a Trust (The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust) was registered in New Delhi, India, with the primary goal of setting up the world’s first museum and memorial on the Partition.
The Partition of India was one of the most defining events in the history of the subcontinent. It remains till date the largest mass migration in human history.
About 18 million people were affected by the partition and approximately one million died. What’s missing or is less talked about when we talk about partition, is the role of women and what they went through. Dhillon recommended books like The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia and Borders and Boundaries - Women in India’s Partition by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin.
These books and Dhillon’s presentation at the event included women’s accounts that went undocumented because many of them felt that they weren’t important enough to have an opinion and also because most women were locked inside houses and ordained by their husbands or men of the house.
Women feared rape, abduction, genital mutilation, loneliness and honour killing and many of them who may have not felt the brunt of the trauma, still carry scars. Guneev explained how women would commit suicide by jumping from the top floors of the house, or jumping in the well, setting themselves on fire or drinking poison to save themselves from the atrocities of partition, while trying to protect themselves from muslim men, becaus they feared them.
Some women who were displaced during the partition, were remarried to the men in the country they landed in, lost touch with their actual kids and families, carried essential items like sewing machines and cooking utensils, and also helped each other in securing food items during the mutiny.
Women embodied the honour of the society and in the uprising, many muslim women used the purdah system to their advantage and started working outisde homes, only to bear the brunt of their independence by later becoming the sole bread earners of the family.
Many films like Khaild Mohammed’s Mammo, Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Pinjar and Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara have documented these accounts of women during the partition.
