An extraordinary oral history of a horrendous human tragedy. Butalia’s account of the partition of India, when 12 million people moved across the new national boundaries and as many as 2 million died, lays bare the passions of fear and hatred that too often drive the India-Pakistan relationship. She details the demographic and ethnic developments that affected partition and recounts the traumas that women in particular experienced, including her own family. The raw horror of it all is mitigated by the author’s skillful prose, which draws the reader into the Indian story. The frequent necessity of using the glossary only makes more vivid the unique social context of the tragedy. Butalia’s hope is that by putting the unspeakable into words, she will help heal the trauma and thereby help repair the India-Pakistan relationship. Butalia’s book, “The Other Side of Silence”, is an important work of humanistic history that rises above the limitations and obfuscations of nationalist political history where the facts often act as an inconvenient contradiction of the dictates of ideology. So where one version of history blames violence on women on the “other”, Butalia uncovers many horrific instances of mass killings of women by the men of the same community in a bid to protect that community’s “honour”. While a similar story in nationalist history might salute the men and women for upholding honour over life, Butalia’s compassionate narrative lays out the human tragedy. Another major topic of her work is the move by both countries to “recover” their women from the other country, despite those women being seen as impure by their previous communities and consequently rejected, and regardless of whether or not they had settled into their new lives. The point of her work is to critically challenge the notion that women are the repository of the honour of men; it is an indictment of history’s propensity to view women as beings without agency who are representative of something other than individual self. Because of this conception of women, the story of Partition, even when it concerns women, is told from the perspective of men. As a result we lose the critical insight, and the grief and trauma faced by women goes unnoticed or disregarded. When revisiting Partition, the untold stories and muffled voices should be developed to achieve a better understanding of that multifaceted catastrophe and a better, more compassionate appraisal of our tortured past. The voices of minorities, women, ethnicities or politically dissident groups find no place in national memory. So the version of partition we are familiar with uses the truth but does so selectively, especially when it comes to the tragedies suffered by thousands of women who were abducted, raped and forcibly converted. Noted Indian feminist Urvashi Butalia, who has a long running project to uncover the veil from these muffled voices, recently spoke in Lahore about this critical but overlooked aspect of South Asian history and her struggles to document this with accuracy.
pk.shafaqna.com
