Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  If recovering ‘voice’ is not unproblematic, this is further complicated by the fact that voices themselves are differentiated. They have a hierarchy. In the process of interviewing people over an extended period of time, I found, time and again, how difficult it was to recover women’s voices. In joint interviews — and because Partition is so much a part of ‘family’ histories, and also because families are often fearful of ‘letting’ their members speak about Partition without the elders, usually the men, being around — it was always the men who spoke. If addressed directly, the women would defer to the men. In separate interviews, whenever those were possible, women would often begin by saying they had nothing to say, nothing, that is, of any importance. Gradually, they would begin to talk, but often would say only those things they thought you wanted to hear, or those that they thought the men wanted to hear. Over the years of speaking to both men and women I learnt to recognize this as something oral historians have often pointed to. In a perceptive article, Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack point out that a woman speaking about her life may often use two separate, sometimes even conflicting perspectives: ‘one framed in concepts and values that reflect men’s dominant position in the culture, and one informed by the more immediate realities of a woman’s personal experience. Where experience does not “fit” dominant meanings, alternative concepts may not readily be available. Hence, inadvertently, women often mute their own thoughts and feelings when they try to describe their lives in the familiar and publicly acceptable terms of prevailing concepts and conventions. To hear women’s perspectives accurately, we have to learn to listen in stereo, receiving both the dominant and muted channels clearly and tuning into them carefully to understand the relationship between them.’2

  Among women too there were different kinds of voices: it was relatively easier for me to locate middle class women to speak to, but far more difficult to find, say, Dalit women — try as I might, I was only able to locate one. And there was virtually no way in which I could speak to women who had been raped and/or abducted. Not only had they very effectively been rendered invisible, but many of them wanted to stay that way, their stories held closely to them. It was as if the memory of the rape, the experience of abduction, was in some way shameful and had therefore to be relegated to the realm of amnesia.

  For as long as I can remember, I have called myself a feminist. The political practice of feminism, its deep, personal meanings: these have been to me part of my very being. I have never been more grateful for this than while working on this book, for it was this that alerted me, I think, to the many nuances of the histories and experiences of women. I do not mean by this that the experience of feminism is necessarily essential to understanding the hidden histories of women, but simply that for me, it was both essential and enabling. The practice of feminist historiography, too, opened many doors. In a paradoxical kind of way, had it not been for the practice of mainstream — largely male — historiography, and the glaring absence in it of a gendered perspective, feminist historians would perhaps not have known what to look for. There is so much baggage that attaches to the feminist practice of history: in many ways it is seen as being something ‘less serious’, perhaps ‘marginal’ and certainly something that seems, by and large, to be the concern of women — which again, in the world of mainstream history, underscores its lack of seriousness. Yet, for those of us who give such historiographical practices the importance that they deserve, feminist history has been enormously enabling — opening up arenas of discussion that would not necessarily become visible. I cannot, for example, imagine looking at the histories of children if feminism had not opened up this world for me. Nor could I imagine examining the histories of scheduled castes and women comparatively had I not been able to use gender as a category of analysis. Although my book is not ‘only’ about women, I have come to the conclusion that women, their histories, and where those histories lead us, lie at the core of it.

  Silence and speech. Memory and forgetting. Pain and healing. These are at the heart of my book. At the end of several years of work, I had listened to many stories. Each was unique. In every telling I found a different Partition, in every story a different experience.3 Each account raised different questions. Perhaps the question that I was most frequently faced with was about the very nature of the exercise: a question that had to do, in the main, with remembering. Why rake all this up again? If people have lived with their experiences, in some ways have made their peace with them, what is to be gained by pushing them to remember, to dredge up the many uncomfortable and unpleasant memories that they may prefer to put away? There is no satisfactory answer to this question. The dilemma remains: is it better to be silent or to speak? Or, for the researcher, is it better to ‘allow’ silence or to ‘force’ speech?

  As with many other things, it was my encounter with Ranamama, my uncle, that turned my attention to this. When I first began to speak with him there was a tremendous sense of excitement. I was pleased that he seemed to want to tell his story. He had lived too long with his silences. When I asked him how he would feel about my taking his story further, he said, ‘Write what you like, my life cannot get any worse’. This was, however, followed by the more sobering realization that I had a moral responsibility not only towards some abstract category called ‘the truth’ but also — and especially — towards the material realities of Rana’s life. Could I be irresponsible enough to make everything he said public? Clearly not — the implications for his life hardly bear thinking about. Yet, was it not wrong then to present only a ‘partial’ picture? To hold back some of the ‘truth’ and make available another? This dilemma troubled me, and stayed with me throughout. When Sikh families from Rawalpindi spoke of the attacks and the violence they had seen, I wondered about the right thing to do. Unless I had the ‘other’ side of the story, would this not mean that I was simply making available material that could be put to dangerous use by the Hindu Right? When the question of rape and abduction of women came up, I asked myself, was it right to try and prise open their silences? Would my search for a historical truth not mean another violation?

  Many years later, I still have not found a satisfactory answer to this question. How important is it for us to excavate Partition memories? Krishna Sobti, a writer and a Partition refugee, once said that Partition was difficult to forget but dangerous to remember. But does this mean then that we must not remember it? Over the years, despite many uncertainties, I have become increasingly convinced that while it may be dangerous to remember, it is also essential to do so — not only so that we can come to terms with it, but also because unlocking memory and remembering is an essential part of beginning the process of resolving, perhaps even of forgetting. Earlier in this book I have spoken of a seventy-year old professor, a one-time member of the RSS, who broke down while recalling how he had heard a Muslim woman being raped and killed in the nearby market, but had not been able to express his horror or sorrow. Fifty years later, he was able to allow himself to remember, to mourn, and perhaps to begin to forget. Before he could do so, however, he had to be able to admit the memory. I think one must, as people inevitably do, exercise some judgment in how far you wish to explore a particular history. I believed quite strongly then, and I do so now, that it is essential for us to confront Partition, to look at its many meanings, if we are to come to terms with its impact in our lives in the subcontinent. Not looking at it, pretending it is not there, will not make it go away. At the same time, however, I believe too that we must approach this kind of exploration with caution: there are instances where silence is more important than speech, times at which it is invasive to force speech, and I think we need to be able to recognize those when we meet them.

  During the course of my interviews I became familiar with people’s reluctance to speak. What is the use of collecting these stories, they asked, will they help anyone at all? Sometimes, the reluctance was born out of a sense of the pointlessness, for them, of such an exercise. At others it came fro
m a residual sense of fear, a concern that acts of violence from ‘that’ time, could be held against them. I began to understand, gradually, that the silences of Partition are of many kinds. If, at one level, we are faced with a kind of historical silence, at another this is compounded by a familial silence, in which families have colluded in hiding their own histories, sometimes actively as the two brothers I met in Jangpura had done, and sometimes simply through indifference, as had happened, to some extent, in my own family. Sometimes the silence was a form of protest: an abducted woman, forcibly recovered by the Indian State from her Muslim abductor with whom she had built some sort of life, took to silence as a form of protest. A Punjabi refugee who had seen his neighbour’s daughters being raped and killed, refused to speak at all after this incident. Attia Hosain, a well known writer, refused to be forced into choosing between India and Pakistan — she did not want a truncated country. In protest, she maintained a silence on writing any more about Partition. For many people there was also a sense of resignation: they had lived through the dislocation and upheaval, at the time they had done all they could to put their lives together again. As several of them said: no one came forward to help at the time, what is the use of doing all this now? Who will benefit from it? Everything went back to the question Manmohan Singh had put to me: what was the use of filling all the tapes I carried with me?

  In moments of despair, I tended to agree with this. So much violence, so much pain and grief, often so much dishonesty about the violence — killing women was not violence, it was saving the honour of the community, losing sight of children, abandoning them to who knew what fate was not violence, it was maintaining the purity of the religion, killing people of the other religion was not murder, it was somehow excusable ... seldom has a process of research I have been engaged in brought me more anger, and more anguish.

  For women who had been through rape and abduction, the reluctance to speak was of another order altogether. Sometimes these histories were not known even to members of their own families, especially if they were women from ashrams whose marriages had been arranged by the ashram authorities. Or, at other times the histories were known to older members of the family but not to others. Speaking about them, making them public, this not only meant opening up old wounds, but also being prepared to live with the consequences — perhaps another rejection, another trauma. For many women, Partition represented a very fundamental tearing up of the fabric of their lives: the family is, after all, central to the lives of women, its loss was therefore deeply felt. For those who had been taken away from their families through rape and abduction, the loss was even more profound: would they even be able to find the words to articulate their feelings?

  And words are, after all, all we have. One of the things that I found in the course of my interviews and research was that people struggled to describe what they had been through at Partition, and often ended by saying what they had seen was indescribable. Ironically, and tragically, in subsequent conflicts and strife, it is Partition that has provided a reference point: to say of a communal situation that it was like Partition again, is to invest it with a seriousness, a depth of horror and violence that can, now, immediately be understood. Yet, for those who lived through the. violence and dislocation of Partition, the language they had available to them must have seemed particularly lacking to describe what it was they lived through. Partition: the word itself is so inadequate. Partition is a simple division, a separation, but surely what happened in 1947 was much more than that. Batwara, another name for division, but equally inadequate. Takseem, an Urdu/Punjabi word, again signifying division. How can these words take in the myriad meanings of this event? Not only were people separated overnight, and friends became enemies, homes became strange places, strange places now had to be claimed as home, a line was drawn to mark a border, and boundaries began to find reflection in people’s lives and minds. Identities had suddenly to be redefined: if you were a Punjabi one day, sharing a cultural space with other Punjabis, you now had to put aside all such markers of identity — cultural, linguistic, geographical, economical — and privilege only one, your religion. You had to partition your mind, and close off all those areas that did not fit the political division around you. Other things rendered the experience indescribable: for many, in the uncertainty created by Partition, violence became one of the few certainties. Ordinary, peaceable people were forced to confront the violence within themselves. Victims became aggressors, aggressors turned into victims, and people began to partition their minds: it was all right to kill if the person you were killing was the ‘other’ — but in order to obliterate the aggressor in yourself, you had to cast yourself as victim, and so, often you had to live a lie, a pretense that you had not killed. How could a simple word, a word invested with the literalness of geographical division, even approximate the many levels of experience that people had lived through? Where would you find the words that located, that identified the violence not only ‘out there’ but inside you? And it is perhaps precisely for this reason, that in some ways so many people who see themselves as victims, are complicit in the violence of Partition, that there is such a reluctance to remember it.

  In India, there is no institutional memory of Partition: the State has not seen fit to construct any memorials, to mark any particular places — as has been done, say, in the case of holocaust memorials or memorials for the Vietnam war. There is nothing at the border that marks it as a place where millions of people crossed, no plaque or memorial at any of the sites of the camps, nothing that marks a particular spot as a place where Partition memories are collected. Partition was the dark side of independence: the question then is, how it can be memorialized by the State without the State recognizing its own complicity? It is true that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of Partition. A half century later, you might well be able to read them as martyrs to the cause of forging a new nation. But alongside there is also the other, inescapable reality that millions of people were killed and in many families where there were deaths, there were probably also murders. How do you memorialize such a history? What do you commemorate? For people, for the State, what is at stake in remembering? To what do you have to be true in order to remember? It was not only that people killed those of the ‘other’ religion, but in hundreds of instances they killed people of their own families; it was not only that men of one religion raped women of the other, but in hundreds of instances men of the same religion raped women of the same religion. What can you do that marks such a history as anything other than a history of shame? No matter how much Indian politicians, members of the Congress Party, tried to see themselves as reluctant players in the game, they could not escape the knowledge that they accepted Partition as the cost of freedom. Such histories are not easily memorialized.

  In many countries in the world today there are memorials to moments of conflict and upheaval. Either with State support or otherwise, scholars have painstakingly built up meticulous archives of people’s testimonies, of photographs, letters, documents, memoirs, books in which such historical moments are represented. Very little of this exists for Partition. Until recently, little attempt has been made even to collect people’s accounts. Visual representations of Partition — despite the rich archive of photographs that must exist in many newspapers and magazines — remain limited, and while a half century of Indian independence has called for all manner of celebratory events, little has been done to mark this important event in the history of India.

  But while there is no public memory of Partition, inside homes and families the memory is kept alive through remembrance rituals and stories that mark particular events. When Mangal Singh and his two brothers came away from their village carrying with them the burden of the death of seventeen of their family members, they built a commemorative plaque with all seventeen names on it, and had it placed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. An annual forty-eight hour reading of the Sikh scriptures was held to mark the occasion of their deaths, to
commemorate their martyrdom. Till they were alive, Mangal Singh’s brothers attended the ritual with him each year. After their deaths he went to it, usually alone, and sometimes accompanied by Trilok Singh, the sole survivor of the family deaths. When I asked Mangal Singh, many years later, how he had lived with these memories, he pointed around him to the fertile fields of Punjab. He said: ‘All of us who came from there, Partition refugees, we have put all our forgetting into working this land, into making it prosper.’

  A small community of survivors from the Rawalpindi massacres lives in Jangpura in New Delhi. Every year, on March 13, they hold a remembrance ritual for the victims of March 1947. Shahidi Diwas, or Martyrs’ day, is held to commemorate the martyrdom of the many people, mostly women, who ‘willingly gave up their lives so that their Sikhi would not get stained’. Each year, survivors of March 1947 — the number declines with each passing year — get together to recount tales of the heroism of those who died in the killings. The ritual begins by offering prayers for the dead, paying homage to their memory. Then, their stories are retold — a powerful and moving account of the martyrdom of each person who died. As you listen, the picture of Mata Lajjawanti, who is said to have fearlessly led ninety women to their deaths by jumping into a well full of water, and to have jumped in first herself, rises before your eyes. You see the women, you hear their cries of ‘jo bole so nihal’ as they throw themselves into the well. And as the story ends, a bhajan rises up from a group of singers seated nearby, each year, year after year, the same words: