1 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 98, Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958-1994, p. 9. Henceforth the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi will be referred to as CWMG. On December 26, 1947, he urged his audience again with “Even if the girl has been forced into marriage by a Muslim, even if she had been violated, I would still take her back with respect. I do not want that a single Hindu or Sikh should take up the attitude that if a girl has been abducted by a Muslim she is no longer acceptable to society.... If my daughter had been violated by a rascal and made pregnant, must I cast her and her child away?... Today we are in such an unfortunate situation that some girls say that they do not want to come back, for they know that if they return they will only face disgrace and humiliation. The parents will tell them to go away, so will the husbands.” CWMG, 98, pp. 117-8.

2 Jawaharlal Nehru, Hindustan Times, January 17, 1948, cited in Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998, p. 99.

3 Rajinder Singh Bedi, “Lajwanti”, translated by the author in Mushirul Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, Delhi: OUP, 1995, p. 183.

4 Ramapada Chaudhuri, Galpa Samagra (“Angapali”, pp. 146-50 and “Karunkanya”, pp. 242-55), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1964. All translations are mine.

5 Gandhi, CWMG, 98, pp. 117-8.

6 It is difficult to draw a clear distinction between the reformist and conservative nationalists since the categories are by no means mutually exclusive.

7 Subject of much colonial repugnance and criticism, the Manavadharmashastra was upheld as the authoritative text on Hindu jurisprudence and social and personal codes of life. It decreed the policing of women’s sexuality, suggesting ways of containing it within a patriarchal society.

8 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

9 Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal, Delhi: OUP, 1998. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: OUP, 1983. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1995.

10 Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.

11 Gandhi, “Speech at a Prayer Meeting”, CWMG, 98, p. 202.

12 Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities mentions the “willingness to die” as foundational to the nation-state. “These deaths,” Anderson adds, “bring us face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: The Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso, 1991, p. 7.

13 At a prayer meeting on November 26, 1947, Gandhi remarked, “It is my belief that any woman who has the purity of Sita cannot be touched by anyone. But where can we find women like Sita these days? And not all women can be like Sita” (CWMG, 98: p. 362). Together with the exaltation of her chastity and suffering, Gandhi invested her with a “strength of virtue”, and encouraged women to imitate “Sita’s virtues, Sita’s humility, Sita’s simplicity, and Sita’s bravery” (CWMG, 35: pp. 38-9).

Interestingly, for Gandhi, Sita was not only a chaste wife, passive and silently suffering, but also acquired a political consciousness, and became a symbol of the future economic independence of the country through her putative practice of swadeshi. Addressing a women’s meeting in Sukkur in 1929, Gandhi said “If you want to establish swaraj in India, which for you and me can only mean Ramrajya, you must become pure in mind and body like Sita, for then alone you will become mothers of heroes. And as a first step towards attaining bodily purity you must wear pure, homespun khadi just as Sita did.” CWMG, 39, p. 447.

14 Urvashi Butalia, “Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women: Communal Stereotypes and the Partition of India”, in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995, ed. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia, p. 72.

15 Urvashi Butalia writes, “The ministry of relief and rehabilitation is said to have issued a pamphlet which quoted Manu to establish that a woman who had sexual involvement with someone other than her husband, became purified after three menstrual cycles, and hence her family could accept her back. Similarly, we were told in one of our interviews that stories were published which openly accepted that Sita had had sexual congress with Ravana, despite which she remained pure, “Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition”, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 April 1993, p. WS-18.

16 Chaudhuri is no less ironic in his use of myths. In “Karunkanya”, the central character is named Arundhati after another mythical Arundhati, the chaste wife of Bashishtha. But whose devoted wife is Chaudhuri’s Arundhati? That of the man who raped her? Is it to maintain the tradition embodied in her name that she returns to him?

Divided Homelands,Hostile Homes: Partition,Women and Homelessness

Abstract