Nationalism’s Brandings: Women’s Bodies and Narratives of the Partition

Abstract

As the official Partition of India in 1947 was negotiated by ‘nationalist’ leaders on all sides, large segments of the population underwent violent dislocations across what was to become the Indo-Pakistani border. These journeys of Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan left in their wake a series of horrific mutilations suffered by people in cities, small towns and villages, in their homes and on their bodies. Women’s bodies often became the markers on which the painful scripts of contending nationalisms (Hindu, Muslim or Sikh) were inscribed. In response to the mass rapes and abductions on both sides of the border, and in order to legislate a ‘fair’ exchange of abducted women across borders, the governments of India and Pakistan signed the Inter-Dominion Treaty in 1947 (later to become the Abducted Persons Act in 1949) ‘among the first agreements between the otherwise hostile nations’.¹