South Asian women writers on Indian partition (1947)family, violence and religion

Abstract

ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH (300 WORDS) This research work is an attempt to bring forward the Women’s Question during the partition of India by investigating partition fiction written by South Asian women writers. Through the medium of literature, the thesis explores the social condition of women and their complex relationship with nation and religion in the Indian Subcontinent during the pre- and post-partition era. Topics such as violence against women on the grounds of religious and national honour, women as markers of religious purity and their bodies as signifiers of national boundaries form the core of my research. Moreover, by conducting a feminist reading of partition literature, the thesis attempts to break the silence, which shrouded the roles played by and imposed upon women by the patriarchal society during a time of great unrest and uncertainty. Partition literature by women authors provides us with an alternative history and explores the culturally instigated gender roles within the interconnected framework of family, religion and violence. The methodology used in the thesis includes investigating critical historical retellings of partition along with analysing feminist perspectives that locate women within the partition framework during the partition period. My research work deploys postcolonial and feminist theories to resist a hegemonic, monolithic, male-dominated history of partition. My thesis also explores alternative sites of partition history such as the supposedly feminine domestic sphere of home. My research project aims to prove that women novelists on partition, by focussing exclusively on the lives of women from different age/class/religious backgrounds during the partition era, deconstruct normalised negative representations of South Asian women as passive creatures deprived of agency, emotional strength and intelligence. In effect, the findings of the thesis assert the notion that women authors on partition provide a mouthpiece to the otherwise silenced voices from the margins overshadowed by the grand narrative of official history. KEYWORDS: The partition of India, South Asian literature, feminist studies, violence against women, partition fiction, South Asian women authors, religion, family and home.