The 1947 partition of the South Asian subcontinent into India and Pakistan led to the world’s largest mass migration. Populations from both sides of newly formed demarcations suffered in heinous riots. Women in particular were subjected to extreme violence. Yet, the severity of gendered crime during Partition wasn’t caused by an arbitrary upsurge of madness. Systemic patriarchy in South Asia had long reduced women to male-owned property. They were objectified to such an extent that a woman’s sexual “purity” became a metonym of her husband’s and kinsmen’s honor (izzat). In other words, male respectability was gauged by how successfully women’s bodies were regulated. With Partition, this dynamic became a forum for contesting powers and prestige at the communal and national levels.
To assert manhood and symbolize triumphal power over the enemy, rivaling sides opted for sexually charged violence, grotesquely marking, mutilating, and branding the bodies of women. According to historian
“[T]housands of women on both sides of the newly formed borders,” writes historian Urvashi Butalia,
were abducted, raped, forced to convert, forced into marriage, forced back into what the two states defined as “their proper homes,” torn apart from their families once during Partition by those who abducted them, and again, after Partition, by the state which tried to “recover” and “rehabilitate” them.
In the guise of celebrating independence from British rule, official narratives of nationalism largely omitted female experiences of such violence during the divisive convulsions of 1947. Among the earliest Partition texts that documented gory details which would have otherwise slithered into oblivion is Pinjar (which can translate to both “Skeleton” and “Cage”), a novella by Amrita Pritam that captures the cataclysmic years of Partition via a series of abductions.
A writer celebrated for both powerful poetry and prose, Amrita Pritam (1919–2005) is a well-known figure in South Asian literature. Inspired by real life, much of her work serves as testimony. Pritam witnessed firsthand the horrors of Partition—communal riots forced her to migrate to India from Pakistan in 1947 with nothing but her two small children and a red shawl. She never returned home.
Pritam’s Partition writings offer incisive critiques of the barbarity that became life with borders but also contest notions of belonging from a feminist perspective. They demonstrate fiction’s ability to include and articulate marginalized voices and make room for the complexities of, and differences within, their experiences. Featuring women at the intersections of gender, age, disability, and disease, Pinjar is a nuanced illustration of this. One of Pritam’s earliest works, it was published in 1950, before Partition literature became a critical subset of South Asian literature more generally. Originally published in Panjabi and read in India, the book made its way over to Pakistan eventually, resonating just as deeply there. Owing to its appeal and acclaim, Pinjar was translated into eight other Indian and foreign languages, including English. A part of many Indian university syllabi, the novella has been adapted for film, television, and radio.
A bittersweet celebration of female friendships, madness, and motherhood, Pinjar begins in the years preceding the subcontinent’s tumultuous rupture. The crisp novella follows fifteen-year-old Pooro, the first-born girl of a Hindu family. Just before her marriage to Ram Chand, she is abducted by Rashida, a Muslim boy who holds her hostage. Rashida tells Pooro of a longstanding rivalry between their families—his aunt was similarly held captive by Pooro’s uncle. The duty to settle honor scores was forced upon Rashida by his elders. Pooro manages to escape and finds her way home to her parents, who disown her for having spent a fortnight with a Muslim. This, they contend, will bring them ill-repute.
Abandoned by her family, Pooro lets Rashida marry her, take her to another village, and change her name to Hamida. At some point along the way, she becomes pregnant, though the text doesn’t reveal the circumstances of conception. (Pinjar, from this point, switches between Pooro and Hamida, using both names to identify the protagonist depending on context. For the purposes of clarity here, she will be Hamida here.) The novella unspools Hamida’s subsequent encounters with other disadvantaged women. It’s in these encounters that Hamida fosters a sense of belonging for herself. Together, these women find respite from, and at times refute, perennial patriarchal powers.
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Hamida’s first such meeting is with a twelve-year-old Hindu girl named Kammo, whose father abandoned her after the death of her mother. Now she lives with an aunt who doesn’t want her. Frail, undernourished, lacking sufficient clothing, and shoeless, Kammo is overburdened by chores and in constant fear of chastisement. Hamida gives Kammo food, material necessities, and, perhaps most critically, affection. Kammo draws out Hamida’s maternal instinct in a way that even her son, Javed, does not. After giving birth to him, she’s overwhelmed by irreconcilably conflicting emotions—Javed is at once her own flesh, and an embodiment of his father’s actions.
Kammo and Hamida are close friends who share a mother–daughter bond. But communal norms have no room for the unique nature of their relationship; having learned of the friendship, Kammo’s aunt forbids the girl from associating with the Muslim Hamida, and this rupture reignites Hamida’s previous trauma of repudiation. Once again, she’s stifled by sacrosanct socio-religious codes that govern who she can care for and befriend.
Hamida next interacts with Taro, an unwell Hindu woman forced into prostitution by her husband, who is himself preoccupied with his mistress. Taro has come to visit her parents who side with their son-in-law. Her mother declares it his “privilege” to behave as he does, while Taro’s in-laws are simply more or less indifferent. They justify their son’s actions by pointing out that he feeds and clothes Taro. Meanwhile, between fits and blackouts, Taro calls out the injustice of patriarchy and marriage. Her cries catalyze Hamida’s introspection and ignite her rage, prompting her to consider the flaws in what she imagined would have been her idyll—marriage to Ram Chand.
Next up is Pagli, a madwoman with a thin, charred body, fiendish laugh, and ghoulish shrieks. She lives in an abandoned shed in the village outskirts and eats leftovers that people leave for her. Harmlessly wandering about the village, belly and breasts exposed—at times completely naked—Pagli discomforts established codes of etiquette. What’s more, she’s apparently inspired by real life. In an interview for the journal Mahfil, Pritam told Carlo Coppola, “I did see that madwoman myself,” in reference to Pagli.
Pagli’s protruding stomach serves as a disturbing revelation. She’s pregnant, having been raped by an unidentified offender. While this violation enrages the village’s women, the men who make up the Panchayat (village council) try and fail to cast her out of town. Without understanding what her body is undergoing, Pagli dies alone in labor. Hamida discovers the newborn still attached to her corpse by umbilical cord and saves him, breastfeeding and caring for the infant as her own. The Hindu elders of the village declare the baby is Hindu based on unverified claims regarding Pagli’s religion and are incensed by Hamida’s intervention. To these men, Pagli’s death has offered them an opportunity to express their religious fundamentalism. Despite Rashida’s attempts at reason on behalf of Hamida, the elders take the baby away. While the separation causes her distress, it nearly kills the orphan, half-starved of breastmilk and affection. Seeing how poorly the infant fares, the men return him to Hamida, not out of compassion but because they don’t want the child’s blood on their hands.
Once again, Hamida embraces motherhood beyond blood ties. Celebrating socially condemned non-normative bonds, Pinjar simultaneously challenges the supremacy of patriarchy-regulated biological relations. The novella’s very exposition is a testament to this—there’s a vivid description of Hamida, pregnant with Rashida’s child, yearning to expel the unwanted fetus just as she flings slugs away from peas she shells. Pinjar thus starts out with Hamida’s disgust, puncturing notions of maternal affection revered in mainstream South Asian (and other) narratives. Beyond her own son, Hamida’s dominant interaction within the domain of “legitimate” kinship is with her parents—they abandon her in deference to social respectability. Hamida’s bond with Pagli’s child stands in contrast to these difficult relationships. Once the infant and Hamida are reunited, the baby’s health is restored.
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The encounter that elicits sheer agency in Hamida is her final one, with Lajo, Ram Chand’s sister. During Partition, Hamida sees Ram Chand leaving for India. He tells her that Lajo, married to Hamida’s brother, has gone missing. With Rashida’s help, Hamida discovers that she is being held hostage by a man in the very space that once was Lajo’s home.
Lajo is a victim of crime perpetrated at the nexus of patriarchy and religious chauvinism. With new demarcations of land, Pinjar reflects how such violence scaled up. During the riots, Hamida witnesses a girl paraded naked on the streets. She finds another—scared after narrowly escaping a refugee camp where women were raped—hiding in a field. Such grotesque accounts are part of alternate histories that hegemonic discourse attempted to erase. By creating space for these histories in her fictive realm, Pritam strove to remember those on the periphery.
At great risk, Hamida disguises herself as a khes (a thick cotton cloth) seller and enters the house to plan with Lajo an escape route. In orchestrating the flight, Hamida refashions the sequence of events in her own abduction. Refusing to remain a victim, she draws on her own experience to bring Lajo to safety and keeps her hidden in her own house until someone from India sends for her. In the interim, Hamida and Rashida care for Lajo like a daughter. Hamida furthermore takes it upon herself to make sure history does not repeat itself; she promises that the family that once repudiated her will not do the same to Lajo.
The 1949 Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act provides the framework by which Lajo’s husband and brother return from India to get her; under that edict, India and Pakistan agreed to exchange abducted women. There to see Lajo off, Hamida meets her brother for the first time since her own abduction. Overwhelmed with emotion, Hamida’s brother asks her to come away with them too. She declines and instead demands from her brother the assurance that Lajo is welcomed back in the family without the slightest disdain.
Hamida’s decision not to go to India comes with the recognition that the return of thousands of abducted women to their families wasn’t an indication that society was suddenly progressive. The recovery mission was more about fixing the nation’s bludgeoned pride after loss of land via Partition. Since women were akin to territory, bringing back abductees from the enemy country symbolized a retrieval of it.
Pinjar’s heroine is aware of her fractured identity—she’ll never contentedly be Hindu nor Muslim, neither Pooro nor Hamida. She doesn’t feel at home on either side of this divide and chooses to remain where she is, accepting her liminal self. It’s in the bond she shares with other marginalized women through the novella’s pages that she resides in spirit.
Pritam delved into women’s trauma long before academics and historians on Partition—Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das, and Urvashi Butalia—started to examine it in the 1990s. She employed the tools of fiction to expose the inexplicability of this trauma. With words infallibly falling short, Pritam mingled realism with a fragmentary style of narration that meshes together social encounters, violent episodes, vivid metaphors, disturbing dreams, memories, intimate self-reflections, and introspection on society. The novella lacks the temporal markers that indicate how much time has passed between episodes and exhibits an abundance of characters with ruptured psyches. The protagonist tacks between monikers, dissatisfied by what each represents. Deliberate stylistic choices by Pritam, these peculiarities evoke a simultaneous numbness and confusion, a sense of stagnation amidst chaos, illustrating what Cathy Caruth calls “the peculiar and paradoxical experience of trauma.” That Pinjar did this seventy-five years ago, during the turbulence of the 1950s—when the country’s internecine vivisection impacted every facet of life—makes it particularly memorable.
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