India s 1947 Partition Through the Eyes of Women: Gender, Politics, and Nationalism. A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College

Transcription

1 India s 1947 Partition Through the Eyes of Women: Gender, Politics, and Nationalism A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Political Science by Reiya Bhat May 2018

2 2 This thesis is dedicated to my Grandma and to my Dadi: my two grandmothers, both born in They both crossed borders in their own ways before settling in India. I owe it all to them for being fierce, loving, brave, and raising families through numerous hardships and challenges.

3 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements....4 Chapter One: Introduction. 6 Chapter Two: Methods. 15 Chapter Three: A Brief Overview of Colonial and Partition History...31 Chapter Four: Hindu Nationalism in Contemporary Indian Politics...38 Chapter Five: Oral Histories of Partition Survivors Chapter Six: Themes from Oral Histories Resilience, Interpersonal Kindness, and Education...67 Chapter Seven: Conclusion References. 77

4 4 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Jennifer Fredette. I could not have asked for a better thesis advisor. Her enthusiasm, encouragement, and academic insights have made this project a true joy for me. I would not have been able to complete this thesis project without her edits, input, and support and I am forever grateful for the academic experience and personal growth I have gained with her guidance. My heartfelt thanks also go to Dr. Julie White, whose support, kindness, and knowledge of political theory and feminist epistemology have all made me a better and more compassionate writer and scholar. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Devika Chawla, who inspired me and gave me direction for this project with her written work on India s Partition, oral histories, and family. Next, I would like to thank my entire family, but especially my parents, Shiv Bhat and Christine Suniti Bhat. They have nurtured me and encouraged me to always pursue my passions, which is what led me to this project. My father taught me to look to my family for inspiration, to learn from history, and to always find ways to learn more about the world in which we live. My mother is my true role model and she taught me to be compassionate, to be a resilient and hard-working woman, and to always seek opportunities for growth. The two of them have been so enthusiastic about this project, suggesting interviewees, the types of questions I could ask during my interviews, and giving me information and insights on what it was like to grow up in postcolonial India. In addition, my mother accompanied me during my interviews in India, making the interview process feel more comfortable for both my interviewees and me. I am so grateful to both my parents for being invested in the work I do and always inspiring me to

5 5 work as hard as I can. I am also thankful to my older brother, Rohan Bhat, for always uplifting me, giving me new perspectives, and being my earliest friend in life. Through this project, he has listened to my ideas, given me emotional support, and helped me feel like I can accomplish anything. Lastly, I would like to thank the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College for all their support through this thesis endeavor. With their help, I have learned to truly appreciate the learning process and to be the best scholar I can be. Through a grant from the Dean s Research and Travel fund, I was able to fund my research trip to India for this thesis. I am immensely thankful for all the learning opportunities I have had through the Honors Tutorial College.

6 6 Chapter One: Introduction The year 1947 marked the beginning of a period of dramatic change for India. In August of that year, India was granted independence from Britain after decades of formal colonial rule and over three centuries of British presence in the country. Just one day after independence, India underwent Partition : it was carved into two, with the northwest border shifting to create the new nation of Pakistan. The population of India was divided along religious lines, with Muslims mandated to move to Pakistan and Sikhs and Hindus to newly-redefined India. Over the course of mere months, up to fifteen million people crossed this border. This period was marked by fear and uncertainty, and up to one million people were killed in rioting and sectarian violence. India s Partition is one of the largest and deadliest forced mass migrations in human history (Dalrymple, 2016). There is a vast body of Partition literature. However, this literature is often limited in two major ways. First, the literature tends to focus on the political leaders involved in Partition, all of whom were men. These men include Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress party, Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, who later became the first leader of Pakistan, and Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy to India. All political actions related to Partition were carried out by those in elected positions or those appointed by British political leaders. These narratives, with their narrow focus on male political leaders, create a limited definition of the political world. They also neglect to address women s engagement in the political world. Because Partition narratives are often centered on male political leadership, the lived experiences of those who lived through Partition frequently become abstract and removed from reality.

7 7 By looking at the lived experiences of women who experienced Partition firsthand, however, researchers are given a greater chance to empathize with women s narratives and an additional tool to better understand the depth of the trauma experienced by everyday people whose lives were forever changed by Partition. This more emotional side of Partition can also help researchers understand how Indian Hindu nationalism is rooted in Partition, which is central to my own thesis. Contemporary Indian nationalism has its roots in colonialism, when British political leaders would instigate tensions between different communities in order to benefit themselves (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 106). Prior to Indian independence and Partition, Indian national identity was not based in being Hindu. However, in India today, there is a strong nationalist movement that suggests the only true Indians are those who are Hindu. The second major limitation of Partition literature is that it tends to focus on statistics and political institutions. As a consequence, the human cost of Partition is downplayed in traditional historical narratives. Statistics cannot represent emotional trauma or the feelings of loss experienced by families that were separated, sometimes forever. Statistics tell us the numbers of people who became refugees, but they cannot tell us about the deeply emotional effects Partition had on real people. 1 Examining oral histories and lived experiences helps expand the otherwise limited scholarly view of Partition that has been created by relying primarily on institutional actors and statistics. Millions of Indians were displaced and affected by Partition, so it is critical to acknowledge these stories. 1 There is even a limit to how much statistics can tell us about quantifiable Partition facts: due to the chaotic nature of Partition, scholars have been unable to produce a definitive account of how many people were displaced and killed.

8 8 Within the oral histories of Partition that do exist, there is a tendency to look at the experiences of men as the default. Women s gendered experiences are rarely at the center of Partition narratives. When women are discussed at all, it is often in terms of gendered violence. It is true that many women were raped, kidnapped, murdered, and sexually assaulted during and after Partition. However, it is limiting to only discuss women as victims of sexual violence. This narrative strips women of their personal autonomy and it also suggests that public life, political participation, and selfdetermination are exclusive to men. Women deserve to be discussed as more than victims of gendered violence. During and after Partition, women in India have participated in politics, joined the workforce, taken care of their families and communities, and worked hard to resist oppressive structures of the colonially-imposed rules of the state. Examining women s experiences and contributions during Partition is critical to achieving a broader understanding of Partition. Truillot (1995) writes Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators. The inherent ambivalence of the word history in many modern languages, including English, suggests this dual participation. In vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both what happened and that which is said to have happened. The first meaning places the emphasis on the sociopolitical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process (p. 2). Oral histories fit into providing knowledge of the process of history. By analyzing only the what happened aspect of the story, we neglect the information that is accessible through oral histories. Partition is certainly a tragedy of the twentieth century,

9 9 but typical historical narratives of this time period place a bigger emphasis on World War II and the Holocaust. One of my interviewees, a longtime politician and diplomat, suggested that this might be because the western world sees Partition as a localized instance of violence and a restructuring of borders, rather than an international humanitarian crisis. As this project demonstrates, Partition and the mainstream narratives about it have restructured the ethnic and religious make up of India. In addition, Partition has altered Indian identity in the long-term, paving the way for the virulent nationalism of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Individuals and families who were displaced by Partition carry the memories of violence and an unjustly lost homeland with them to this day and oral histories of a life shared between groups are one of the few ways to preserve these memories, as well as challenge the dominant Hindu nationalist rhetoric in Indian politics today. When women are discussed during Partition, most of the literature focuses on their mistreatment. Mookerjea-Leonard (2005) writes that rape was a tool for humiliation and dominance during the violence that surrounded Partition. During Partition, up to 75,000 women were kidnapped. In their own communities, Hindu women kidnapped by Muslim men were treated as untouchable because of the characterizations of Muslim men as violent and dirty. Nehru and Gandhi encouraged groups of Hindu women to travel to Pakistan, find women who had potentially been kidnapped by Muslim men, and bring these kidnapped women to their Hindu communities in India. The women who were involved in this cause were still framed as protecting the honor of community and of women (p. 149). Butalia (2000) expands on this cause and explains that it became known as the Central Recovery Operation. However, the women who were subsequently rescued

10 10 by the Indian government in this operation were not consulted as to whether they wanted to leave their communities or not. As a way to unify the search process, the government decided that any woman living with a man of another religious background after March 1947 would be presumed to have been kidnapped and the government would then take that woman and bring her to India. This date was chosen because it was when violence related to Partition began in Punjab. However, this decision was problematic because there was no nuance in deciding if a woman had truly been kidnapped or not and forced relocations became another way to strip women of their own agency. In these scenarios, women were often taken away from their families and children (Butalia, 2000, p. 114). I chose to interview women who lived through Partition for this project for two major reasons. First, I strongly believe in the necessity of oral histories to share and preserve memories and experiences. India has a strong culture and tradition of using oral histories as a way to build a sense of belonging and community. Many people who lived through Partition are far more likely to verbally share their experiences with their family members, rather than to write them down. For many people, discussions of Partition still feel raw and painful. In 2013, Google India released a video advertisement called Reunion, which quickly went viral. The commercial showed two elderly men, one Hindu and one Muslim, who had been friends as boys but had not seen each other in the many decades after Partition had separated them. The granddaughter of the Hindu man pieces together his stories and memories to contact the grandson of his Muslim friend so they can work together to reunite their grandfathers in time to celebrate the Hindu man s birthday. The

11 11 emotional advertisement touched a nerve among South Asians around the world, and it has since been viewed more than 14 million times on YouTube as of It is difficult to collect stories about Partition because of the strong emotions and deep sorrow many people have associated with Partition memories. Chawla (2014) writes that when she originally asked Partition refugees how they understand Partition, many responded that they hate thinking about it because it is too sad (p. 206). Oral histories from those who survived Partition provide a complex and emotional narrative of Partition that is unavailable through more traditional historical narratives. Furthermore, mainstream narratives of Partition that are promoted today tend to naturalize the division between Hindus and Muslims. Nationalist and conservative political parties and groups in India promote an us versus them mentality in their political rhetoric. However, it was not natural to rip apart religious communities when Partition happened. Prior to Partition, people from different religious backgrounds belonged to the same communities and viewed one another as friends. Chawla (2014) wrote that she was surprised when her father and a fellow Partition refugee she interviewed both mentioned they would eat in the homes of Muslims before Partition. She had expected this would not be the case because Muslims ate beef in their homes. However, her father and her other interviewee said they did not see them [Muslims] as any different [from us] (p. 210). The oftenviolent separations of diverse communities in India s Partition often contributes to a narrative that different religious groups do not belong to the same communities, but ordinary people who lived through these experiences do not appear to necessarily feel the same way.

12 12 My research findings demonstrate that those who lived through Partition express the belief that the political circumstances were far outside of their control and they had little choice in leaving their homes behind and building a life elsewhere. Oral histories convey experiences and identities that can become lost in more traditional political narratives that focus on objective, highly generalizable data and institutional structures. The second reason I chose to interview women is that I wanted to create a space where women could narrate their own stories and to be heard as an authority of both Partition and gender. Historically, women in India have not been treated as an authority of either topic. I do not want to present my work as granting women something they do not already have, as an outsider. Instead, I hoped to create a space of mutual respect and the freedom to share their own objective truths, without any interruptions. My mother sat through almost all of these interviews with me, which fundamentally altered the interview process. My own status as somewhat of an outsider to Partition experiences and even Indian identity complicates how my interviewees interacted with me. Chawla (2014) similarly acknowledges how her father s presence helped her negotiate her outsider status with her Partition refugee interviewees (p. 209). She describes him as her interlocutor and acknowledges that especially her older interviewees felt much more at ease with her father s presence and that her father knew how to help her phrase questions in a way that made her interviewees more comfortable addressing certain themes. When one of my interviewees broke down in tears remembering the violence she witnessed as a young woman during Partition, it was my mother s openly emotional response of empathy that helped her feel heard and understood. It was more appropriate for my mother to be there and to comfort my

13 13 interviewee than it was for me to do the same. My interviewee turned to my mother and drew strength from her response of shared emotion. My mother s presence granted me more of an insider status and helped build trust between the interviewees and me. As a cultural interlocutor, my mother helped bring out stories and emotions that may have remained obscured without her presence. The experience of interviewing female Partition refugees sheds light on stories of women and their engagement with Indian politics. The women I interviewed were all young girls, teenagers, and young women when Partition happened. They remembered feelings of fear, loss, and uncertainty. They shared that they lost everything when they left their homes and the vast majority of them carried a few clothes and little else with them. Their families suffered and they faced various economic hardships. Yet, their stories of loss and sacrifice have contributed significantly to their worldviews. They do not vilify the other side. They shared memories of the kindness of strangers and how people they did not even know gave them resources to help them survive. These stories are in contrast to the rhetoric of contemporary Hindu nationalists, who claim that Muslims should be vilified. My interviewees spoke about receiving support from people outside their immediate religious communities. The most striking theme I pulled from my interviews was resilience. The resilience of my interviewees allowed them to face adversity and navigate their struggles with determination. They expressed feelings of mutual solidarity and community with the people they had known prior to Partition and once they had resettled in India. This sense of community contributed both to resilience and future personal success. The women I interviewed went on to become doctors, politicians, mothers, and pillars of community

14 14 leadership. To be clear, not all women in India had these opportunities to experience political, economic, and social success in the early postcolonial and post-partition period. However, the women I chose to interview have lived lives of outward engagement with the political and social world of India. The stories of bravery and resilience surrounding Partition create something positive out of a tragic political event, but it is important to recognize that Partition was a colonial act of violence. Britain s years of economic exploitation and colonial rule continue to influence the politics of India into the twenty-first century. Uplifting the oral histories of those who survived Partition will not rectify the tragedies of this time period, but it does offer a way to consider the human impact of Partition and to preserve the voices of those who lived through one of the most significant periods of change in Indian history. Through oral histories and personal stories, we are able to question contemporary mainstream political narratives about how we should look at the past and how we should consider identity.

15 15 Chapter Two: Methods This study was designed in order to record and interpret the perspectives of women who directly experienced India s Partition. The oral histories collected in this study contribute to a broader body of knowledge on the political, social, and cultural effects of Partition. Scholars typically have not looked to Indian women as authorities on Partition. This study aims to uplift the stories of women who lived through Partition. It also seeks to affirm their authority as narrators of Partition. This section discusses the methodological approaches to data analysis for the project, including participant selection, data collection, data analysis methods, and ethical considerations. Following Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, I began to reach out to family networks in India to ask for help in finding research participants. I asked family members to consider friends and acquaintances who had directly experienced Partition. Once I reached India, I began to individually contact suggested research participants via telephone and . I explained the research project to them, sent them the consent forms, and scheduled interview times. I met with the majority of my research participants in their homes, where they graciously allowed me to interview them for approximately one hour each. My strategies for my interviews were based in knowledge of postcolonial feminism, feminist epistemology, and ethnographic techniques, as well as my commitment to the value of oral histories. I left my questions relatively broad, but narrowed certain topics that were more relevant to specific research participants. Some of the questions I asked included: How do you view and understand Partition?

16 16 Is there a particular place you describe as home? How did Partition affect you personally? Do you believe you did things academically or politically you may not have done had the Partition not happened? Where did you and your family live prior to Partition? Where did you and your family live after Partition? Please describe this event as it affected you and your family. How did your community change following Partition? How did Partition affect the jobs of your parents and immediate family members? How did Partition affect your socio-economic status? Did Partition change the way you personally viewed women in political power? My research questions and methods were intended to give voice to those who are not always visible. India is a vast and diverse country, and it is unrealistic to attempt to capture a full section of the population and make broad claims about lived experiences. The interviews in this research project are simply intended to broaden understanding of how Partition affected individuals, rather than to make specific claims about the broader population. I acknowledge the limitations of my research and that the small interview sample size means that I cannot make broad generalizations about women who lived through Partition. However, the methodology and interviews in this study could be replicated through different population segments in different parts of India. This research project is not attempting to tell the story of all Indian women who lived through Partition, but it can still offer information that enriches knowledge of Partition. My hope is that future researchers would be able to use the methodology I have used to inform their own

17 17 research with women across urban and rural areas, through different religious communities, and with different castes and socioeconomic classes. My interviews and representations of Indian women in this thesis are not all explicitly feminist, although my some of my interviews can be strategically read as feminist. Deepti Misri (2014) writes that she emphasizes the gendered locations of authors in her own Partition work, not under the assumption that women will inevitably produce more sensitive critiques of gendered violence, but in order to foreground the different locations and investments of male and female authors, and also to warn against taking women s accounts as feminist accounts (p. 11). Understanding the specific experiences of women based in context and location allows more intimate access to gendered Partition experiences and simultaneously creates the understanding that gender differences are structured by social relations. Partition histories are often limited to traditional state and nationalist narratives of India. By broadening that understanding to contextualized social relations and gender, women are incorporated into a broader Partition narrative that usually leaves out marginalized populations. Urvashi Butalia (2000) emphasizes the importance of oral histories in a twenty-first understanding of Partition: the oral narrative offers a different way of looking at history, a different perspective. For, because such narratives often flow into each other in terms of temporal time, they blur the somewhat rigid timeframes within which history situates itself. Because people locate their memories by different dates, or different timeframes, then the events that mark the beginning and end of histories, their narratives flow above, below, through the disciplinary narratives of history. They

18 18 offer us a way of turning the historical lens at a somewhat different angle, and to look at what this perspective offers (p 13). Oral histories are deeply subjective, as they incorporate personal experiences and social relations, and they are often connected to other memories. With major historical events of great political importance such as Partition, there is a tendency in scholarship to value the objective fact above all else. Historians and politicians often wish to make claims based on specific statistics and dates in order to analyze the event. However, the subjectivity offered by oral narratives does not make discussions of the event less true or valid. It is simply a different form of narration and a different framing of the event. Objective facts provide important information in the same way that subjective oral narratives offer perspectives of the humanitarian costs and social outcomes of Partition. Some authors even claim that oral histories allow an accessibility to Partition in the classroom, where students usually only learn about Partition from historical texts and statistics. Jayagopalan (2016) writes about how students offering family narratives during classroom discussions of Partition allowed fellow students to understand how Partition affected everyday families and to increase feelings of empathy. He reflects on a student sharing that her grandmother s family migrated from Lahore to Delhi during Partition. Expecting Partition to be a temporary arrangement, her family buried the majority of their valuables in their backyard because they knew transporting valuable items would be challenging and potentially dangerous. The student s grandmother managed to keep a few gold coins with her and knead them into dough that she carried. She then convinced border officials that she had to carry the dough with her to feed her younger siblings in case they became hungry along the way. Jayagopalan reflects that the sharing of these

19 19 narratives in the classroom made other students more conscious and engaged in examining other Partition narratives that they then read about in class (p. 48). Because Indian women born prior to India s independence faced marginalization from both Indian patriarchal structures and British colonial structures that enforced other standards of patriarchy, feminist epistemology was a central method of inquiry for this project. Feminist epistemology is understanding that gender influences concepts of knowledge and practices of inquiry (Alcoff, 1993, p. 2). In my case, it became critical to situate myself in the narrative of my interviews and narrating my own subjectivity. I do not want to claim total objectivity in my interview work because that is not an accurate reflection of the personal stake I have in this project. In addition, my identity influences how I approach this project. In my own identity as an immigrant of Indian origin, I consider the concepts of crossing and returning through borders. While my own displacements have been by personal and family choice, my immigrant identity shapes how I consider other forms of moving across borders and dislocations, even though my research participants were displaced by state-mandated policies that were not their own choices. In collecting the oral histories of my research participants, I sought to ensure that they had full control of their narratives and what they wanted to share with me. I did this in order to emphasize the oral narrative part of my project as collaborative. In addition, Indian culture has a rich history of storytelling and verbal communication as methods to pass on and share information inter-generationally. I felt confident that in-person discussions would illuminate personal Partition histories that would not come through clearly in writing. Furthermore, the people of India are not monolithic, and I felt it was

20 20 important to allow research participants to broadly discuss their individual religious and cultural backgrounds. This sharing of information seemed that it would be much more complete if done verbally. I completed the majority of my interviews face-to-face and in person, although I completed two interviews via telephone after returning home to the United States. I obtained informed consent from each participant to record our interviews and then did audio recordings of each interview. I later transcribed the data and coded it to find emergent themes. I had a broad set of requirements for the profiles of my interviewees. These were: 1. They must have been alive during India s 1947 Partition. 2. They must have been born in present-day Pakistan or India and raised within South Asia. 3. They must be women. 4. They must have personal memories of Partition or have family oral histories related to Partition. Locating Myself Within the Narrative My own relationship to India has influenced my desire to explore the themes of Partition. Both of my parents were born in India and lived there until they emigrated from India to Australia in My paternal grandmother was born in what is today Pakistan in She moved to India prior to Partition to marry, but the rest of her family came to India in 1947 when mandated by the state. Never having met my paternal grandparents and never having learned about Partition in my American schooling, I knew little of this family history until I was a teenager. As a seventeen-year-old, living away from home for

21 21 the first time in Istanbul, Turkey, I found myself missing my family often. When Google India released an emotional advertisement about two adults who used Google to reunite their elderly grandfathers who had been Partition refugees, I sent the video to my parents. I had long conversations via with my father about Partition, religion, and the politics of state boundaries. At this point, I began to do cursory internet searches of Partition and I was horrified to learn just how many people had been displaced and how many had experienced or participated in violence stemming from this pivotal moment in Indian political history. I had known of stories shared by my father s aunt about Partition, but I was unaware of the scope of how many people had been affected. I began to consider the unique challenges faced by individuals and families who were essentially forced to start their lives over in an unfamiliar place, forever losing their homelands and their roots. My personal identity as a first-generation immigrant whose grandmother s family lived through Partition grants me an intimate type of access to a community of people who lived through Partition. However, I am able to listen to Partition narratives with a critical distance as a relative outsider. Discussions of Partition have historically been read and narrated by the experiences of men. For women, the independence of India was associated with Partition. As both events occurred, women often had to leave behind familial channels and support systems (Bhardwaj, 2004, p. 70-3). Women have been largely excluded from discussions of Partition. If women are included, the discussions are usually framed in the context of women as victims of sexual violence (Sidwha, 2000, p. 18). This not only restricts women s agency, but it also contributes to the idea that the sexual purity of women should be their most important trait. In my work in dealing with gendered oral histories of

22 22 Partition, I wish to discuss the experiences of real women who lived through Partition and to have the focus be on the women themselves and not on political leaders or men. While I want to convey the stories I learned as honestly as possible, I want to make it clear that I have a stake in sharing these stories. My family history and the crosscultural border-crossing I have experienced shape how I see the world. In addition, the experiences of my parents and grandparents before me makes me feel that I must honor the stories I have learned. I believe that the themes of displacement and familiarity are critical aspects of Partition narratives. I have my own experiences with these themes, but under entirely different contexts and circumstances of choice. My family roots are entirely in India, but I was born in Australia. When I was a young child, my family and I immigrated to the United States from Australia. I have respective claims on origin, birth, and national identity on each of these nations. However, I do not feel that I can claim any of them as home or entirely as my own. These countries are all home and are all familiar in some sense, yet I am displaced in all of them. I can empathize with what it feels like to be displaced, but I do not bear the burden of having no choice in my movements and rebuilding my life as a refugee. I seek to learn about displacement as a result of tragedy, while my own displacements have been by product of personal choices. I explain this not to center this narrative on myself, but to locate myself within the narrative. My relationship to my location matters as I consider how to discuss the politics of location with my research participants because location shapes how we understand displacement and identity. Oral histories are culturally significant in Partition narratives because family narratives, recipes, personal histories, and more are typically shared in oral form rather

23 23 than written form in India. Oral histories are able to capture personal experiences and emotions in a way that is not readily visible in quantitative data analysis. In addition, oral histories are able to uplift the voices of ordinary people who are not always able to share their experiences otherwise. Oral histories are a critical part of my Partition ethnography. I interviewed women who lived during Partition, as well as women who have family histories of Partition stories. Through the process of listening and remembering together, I hoped to give women a space to be an authority on their own narratives, since Partition literature has been historically exclusionary to women. I hoped that this space would allow women to be an authority on both their gender and Partition, when they are rarely treated as authorities on either subject. While oral histories are culturally relevant in the context of India, I also believe that oral histories are especially important in Partition narratives. Anecdotally, those who have lived through Partition often express that they felt they were not truly included in this significant political moment. Many express the belief that Partition was out of the control of ordinary people and only politicians had real influence over the events that unfolded. When interviewing her father, who was a Partition refugee as a child, Chawla (2014) writes that he reflected on Partition, It was a sad thing. It should not have happened. It was and is the fanaticism of the politicians. People did not want it (p. 217). I believe that oral histories give interview participants a space to share what Partition meant for them personally in a way that is not easily visible in many historical and political accounts of Partition. Oral histories can specifically convey a narrative of displacement and what it meant to develop new homes, lives, and political affiliations in a context that was reconstructed as home.

24 24 Because of the lack of authority women are granted in discussions of gender and Partition, feminist standpoint theory is critical in how I frame my narrative and how I construct my questions and interviews. Feminist epistemology takes my gender and the gender of my interviewees into consideration and inform my practices of inquiry. While the political experiences of men influence my discussion of Partition, it is not the priority in the narrative I will be sharing. Knowledge is subject to position and the power and location of those who have the knowledge. Therefore, the women I interview offer unique insights on the gendered dynamics of Partition. In order to successfully utilize feminist epistemology in the practices of my inquiry, I believe it is important to locate myself clearly within the narrative and to reaffirm my relationship to my location frequently. While I am focusing on gender as key aspect of identity and my oral history participants and I are all women, the intersection of gender and location means different things to my interviewees and to me. As someone who was raised and has spent her life predominantly in the western world, I acknowledge that I will have different experiences and worldviews from my participants who have predominantly lived in South Asia. I aim to honestly convey the stories of my oral history participants, but it is important for me to ensure that I do not make broad generalizations about what it means to be a woman who survived Partition and lives in India. I expect to discuss gendered experiences with politics and how state policies can unfairly target women. This is part of state-based oppression. However, I want to avoid the tendency to address all women s issues as example of gender-based oppression. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, the assumption of women s issues as being a coherent group leads to a homogenous perception of women s oppression and the average third world woman

25 25 (Mohanty, 1984, p. 56). I do not seek to make broad claims on women s experiences and oppressions in India. Instead, I hope to highlight how state policies shape the experiences of individual women. When discussing Partition, framing the narratives of those who lived through this significant moment in India s political history is a challenge. Partition is a tragedy of the twentieth century with the millions of people displaced and one million or more killed in communal violence and rioting as Partition resettlement occurred. India s Partition exemplifies the failures of colonial rule, violence from fear of persecution, and violence caused from uncertainty. In her collection of oral histories on those who have lived through Partition, Chawla (2014) notes that assigning terminology for people who experienced Partition is challenging (p. 56). Many do not choose to self-identify as refugees because their homes before and after Partition were once part of the same nation. Chawla ultimately chooses to identify her participants as refugees, feeling it is the most honest way to convey the stories of her interviewees. I do not entirely reject the label of refugee. It is not inaccurate, as Partition was state-mandated and people were forced to relocate to the other side of a new border. However, I do not want my interview participants to feel as though I am choosing a label for them. Colonial politics, Partition, and subsequent policies of the Indian government have limited and controlled women s agency in a variety of ways. I do not want to contribute that by assigning a label that my participants reject on a personal level. I asked how my participants self-describe their lived experiences of Partition. Some chose the word refugee, while others described their experiences as Hindus or non-muslims who were forced to relocate. I realize this means that I do not have a uniform and

26 26 contextual way to describe all of my research participants. However, I am willing to risk a lack of uniformity in terminology if it means I am learning and ultimately conveying their experiences honestly. For now, I choose to use the term those who lived through Partition. Other sources, such as the organization The 1947 Partition Archives, use witness when referring to people who experienced Partition. (1947 Partition Archive, 2017). Perhaps part of the challenge in discussing and framing Partition is that there is no uniform way to describe its significance. As I have stated before, I do believe that Partition was a tragedy because it resulted in millions of displacements and deaths. I think the subsequent military tension between India and Pakistan have also contributed to challenges in reconciling what it now means to be Indian, versus prior to Partition. Even without the millions of deaths from sectarian violence, Partition would still be a tragedy because mass displacement is an atrocity in and of itself. Those who lived through Partition ultimately lost their homes and roots in a violent way because of a statemandated decision. The nature of loss caused by Partition makes it difficult or impossible to revisit and identify with one s roots. In addition, the organization The 1947 Partition Archive claims that there is widespread public amnesia regarding Partition. The historical impact of colonialism is widely recognized and discussed in India, but Partition is often excluded from the colonial narrative, even though colonial power and rule played a key role in Partition. Part of the public amnesia of Partition may be based in the struggle to openly recognize it as a tragedy. Because there is no shared public consensus about how to treat Partition, or whether the events of 1947 should be remembered with a sense of mourning, it is difficult to address the lasting impacts of Partition. Partition can be seen

27 27 as a final act of colonial control and violence. Discussions of Partition in English potentially contribute to failure to recognize it as a tragedy. In her book work, Chawla explains that Partition seems like a neutral word, but the Hindi word Batwara conveys more emotion (2014, p. 3). In a conversation with a male relative who left present-day Pakistan due to Partition as a three-year-old, I learned anecdotes that widely match other forms of narratives from other Partition oral histories, including my own interviews and other literature in the field. He informed me that once his family reached Delhi, they lived in an abandoned home that had once been occupied by Muslims who had left Delhi for Pakistan during Partition. To my relative s knowledge, the same thing likely happened with his family s former home on the other side of the border. Knowing that people were only able to take what they could carry and had to leave behind most of their possessions, I am fascinated and saddened by this idea of millions of families living in the shells of the lives of other families who had to abandon their homes. From this family member and from other anecdotal evidence I have gathered from other family members through the years, many people did not expect Partition to be permanent. They expected to temporarily leave their homes and to ultimately return home and resume life as it had been before Partition. As we know now, this is not what occurred. The theme of home and what home means is critical in narratives of Partition. In her book, Chawla (2014) situates and locates herself in her narrative. She explains that she left India as a graduate student, so her relationship with India is of home and also not home. In her oral history narrative, she expresses the idea that home can be both strange and familiar; it is not a fixed place (p. 27). Upon returning to India to conduct her

28 28 field work, Chawla reflects I am no longer from here; my movement to America has remade me (p. 37). In my own narrative, I wish to convey my own relationship to familiarity and home in India. India and Pakistan both contain my familial roots. However, my relationship with my ethnic homeland was disrupted before I was even born, by my parents move to Australia in I am able to celebrate my roots and find a sense of cultural familiarity in India, but India is not mine to claim for myself. Whenever I am interacting with people I do not know in public places in India, they quickly ask me Where are you from? knowing that India cannot be the complete or correct answer for me. For me, what is most significant about the idea of home is that it is often represented as a yearning for security in the narratives of Partition. To reiterate, my experiences of dislocation and struggling to find familiarity are not comparable to those of a Partition refugee because of the differences we have in circumstances of choice and sociopolitical context. However, I believe that seeking home for security and permanence are common threads in my own narrative, as well as the narratives shared by my interviewees. The insecurity that comes with displacement becomes an aberration. Security is framed as normal and the expectation. This connection suggests that home reflects the security of permanence and comfort with one s location. My respective relationships with India, Australia, and the United States are ethnic origin, birth, and current national identity. However, for myself, and I suspect some of my interviewees, national identity becomes a fluid concept. For me, it is because I have not established permanent roots in any particular place yet and I do not have any roots in the United

29 29 States, as a first generation immigrant. For my interviewees, this fluidity is because the state reconstituted the boundaries of their homeland without their permission. For people who lived through Partition and especially those who are old enough to remember life prior to India s independence and Partition, I imagine that defining national identity and that relationship to colonial legacies presents unique and difficult challenges. British colonialism affected every aspect of Indian society through language, religion, government, and reifying class structures. While the British formally left India in 1947, they left behind various structures and institutional practices that have caused conflict in India over the last seventy-one years. For people born and raised in India following independence, the relationship between an independent state and a culture which colonialism had infiltrated was complex. My parents, both born in the decades immediately following Partition, have shared with me what it was like to be young in this era for them. Born to an Air Force family, my father grew up speaking English and Hindi at home. He attended British boarding schools in the foothills of the Himalayas and spent his summer holidays with his family in hill stations around the northern part of the country. My mother was born and raised in south India. Her family was strictly Anglican and she attended private Christian schools her whole life. Her father worked for the state government and her family spoke only English at home. While my parents were raised in different contexts, they both grew up in families that held the ideal that one s proximity to British-ness proved professionalism, intelligence, and success. Chawla explores the dichotomy of celebrating India, yet embodying British culture in her work. She writes that British youth were supposed to reject Britain, but simultaneously embody British speech and mannerisms (p.

30 30 15). In her interviewees, she noted symptoms of colonial nostalgia, such as consuming tea and toast every afternoon and pride in good English that did not have a strong Indian accent (p. 101). There is no simple way to convey the lived experiences of people as a result of the tragedies of Partition. In my work, I combine feminist epistemology, gender, colonialism, and theories of displacement. My methods of examining these stories is not intended as a better or revised history or as a truth-seeking project, but to use my project as a form of emancipatory research. There will be limits with my oral histories, but I acknowledge that I am not working to create a complete history of Partition. Through my work, I hope to use oral histories and ethnographic research to convey a part of history that is not easily visible solely through conventional political texts.

31 31 Chapter Three: A Brief Overview of Colonial and Partition History British colonial presence defined Indian politics for centuries. The British first entered India in 1600 with the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I. At this time, the Mughal Empire in India was at its height and Mughal emperors welcomed the British into India to minimize the dominance of the Portuguese and Dutch (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 45). The British imported millions of pounds worth of textiles from India by the eighteenth century. An agreement Mughal Emperor Jahangir and Sir Thomas Roe, James I s ambassador to the Mughal court, allowed the British to establish factories at key Mughal ports. However, by the 1660s, the Mughal empire s strength began to falter and the British turned to a policy of armed defense to protect their factories and manufacturing sites from other foreign powers. This armed defense policy began to lead to conflict between the Mughals and the British (p. 47). In various provinces, the East India Company increased its political and economic reach through trade agreements. In three major provinces in 1765, the Company secured revenue collecting rights in return for an annual fee. This agreement effectively made the Company the emperor s deputy for nearly a century (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 53). The strategic agreements between Mughal emperors and the East India Company contrasts the widespread narrative that India was a declining state ripe for conquest by a progressive Europe. Instead the trade agreements suggest that Britain chose to enter India precisely because of its flourishing economy (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 55). The increased economic dominance of the East India Company eventually led to British political rule of India. The appointment of Warren Hastings as India s first governor-general of the Company s Indian territories contributed to a consolidation of