Beyond Partition examines the modalities of gendered violence and its representation in post-Independence India through analyses of various kinds of texts — literary, theatrical, oral, and sartorial — that represent and/or configure these forms of violence and their human impact. Misri’s central thesis is that representations of violence inflected by notions of gender have been intricately and inextricably linked to ideas of statehood in postcolonial India, so that women and violence have formed one of the centralities in the “idea of India”.
While focusing on women-centred experiences and representations, Misri, however, does not ignore the ways in which masculinity, religion and nationalism have often interacted with each other to result in particular forms of violence against men in community-specific contexts. Moreover, one distinguishing feature of Misri’s work on the stand-off among nationhood, gender and (militarised) violence is that she examines how public-domain notions, like those of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘honour,’ often inscribe and legitimise gender violence in communal and familial contexts.
Suparna Banerjee The book begins with a consideration of the recent demonisation of ‘India’ in the Western media following the brutal gangrape of a student in New Delhi. December 2012. From here it moves on to reflect on “the contentious status of India as a violent... power that profited from ... international hesitation to decry the crimes of the postcolonial state”. In this context, the author elaborates on the gap between the “communally and regionally specific ideas of nationhood” — constituting “internal borderlands”— and “the politically bounded, militarily enforced entity known as ‘India.’” To make her point, she invokes the abuses conducted by the postcolonial nation state in the North East, in Kashmir and over Dalits everywhere in the country.
Indeed, Misri makes a bold claim that “the history of postcolonial India has been a history of violence”. She identifies 1947 and the Partition as the beginning of a history of politicised animosity — between India and Pakistan, Hindus and ‘Others’, ‘India’ and its fringes, the upper caste and the Dalits — and examines the gendered scripts underwriting much of this violence and its relation to differing ideas of ‘India’. In order to do this , the book turns to the domain of cultural representation as the site where the violence of ‘India’ gets imbricated with gendered ideologies around the family, the community and the nation. In this, Misri follows the prompt of feminist and subaltern historiographers who have emphasised the evidential validity of subjective resources — oral histories, testimonies, literary and cultural narratives — over the generalities of official history that has traditionally excluded women and other marginal communities.
Looking for elements of this suppressed discourse, Misri reads Sadaat Hasan Manto’s Black Marginalia (1948) in Chapter 1 and scrutinises Manto’s representation of male on male violence engendered between warring religious mobs in the Partition riot. The sartorial semiotics of de-turbanning, however, is interpreted in a more complex manner by Misri than by Manto, who, Misri alleges, at times makes a simplistic reading of the emotional investment made by male Sikhs into markers of their faith. Chapter 2 considers a set of women’s narratives that interrogate patriarchal memorialisations of the Partition in order to bring out the widely suppressed violent reality of pre-emptive ‘honour killings’ of women within families. Misri counterpoints Krishna Mehta’s Hindu nationalist narrative Kashmir 1947 against Sikh Canadian Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, a text that plumbs the ideological continuity between competing patriarchies.
Moving beyond Partition, Chapter 3 considers two mutually implicated forms of violence peculiar to the postcolonial Indian state — the so-called caste-atrocities and encounter-killings — through readings of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and press photographs of lynched Adivasi women. While the former illustrates the state’s role in enforcing caste boundaries in Kerala of the 1960s, the latter shows how public understanding of casteist violence is determined by framing devices that often expunge the caste roots of such violence. Chapters 4 and 5 analyse performative practices enacted by women to protest against the state sanctioned violence that affects them. The idea of nakedness both as a form of torture inflicted by the state and as a dramatised form of protest against that torture is fleshed out by Mahashweta Devi’s short story ‘Draupadi’ as also by a range of naked performances by women, including a group of Manipuri women demonstrating against rapes perpetrated by army men. Misri perceives these performative tactics as puncturing the hermeneutics of rape-as-power and of the cultural significance of women’s shame. Chapter 6 considers the performative protest techniques deployed by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a women-led organisation that highlights the enforced ‘disappearance’ of Muslim men, considered anti-nationals by the Indian state.
The ‘Epilogue’, while debating the “ethical valence” of the “violence of the oppressed”, suggests that such violence might put some productive pressure on contemporary conceptualisations of ‘India’— ones that might move beyond the limitations and excesses of the Brahminical, neoliberal, patriarchal nationalism that currently determines the idea of ‘India’.
An examination of how gendered practices of state-mediated violence impacts people who live outside the heteronormative framework of Indian society — people on the LGBT spectrum —would have enhanced the scholarly value of Misri’s work. Beyond Partition is a suavely written, insightful book that makes a significant contribution both to the discourse around postcolonial statehood in India and to the study of gender violence and its representation in the post-Independence Indian nation.
Suparna Banerjee is an academic and the author of Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood.
