Body As Battlefield : Isolating Female Trauma from National Honour In Partition Literature

The Partition of British governed India in 1947 had witnessed nearly 75000 women being sexually harassed, murdered and kidnapped on both the sides of history. Raped, abducted, violated and enslaved, the female bodies became battlefields upon which personal, communal and national wars were waged, to prove a patently masculine point. Yet, the suffering of women was often subsumed within the broader narrative of Partition violence and national struggle, leading to the dilution of their individual trauma.

The notion of honour inherently entails men’s, and by extension the nation’s, assertion of control over women’s bodies and sexuality, particularly with respect to their virginity. Women serve as embodiments of nationalist and patriarchal codes of honour across multiple societal contexts, resulting in repeated victimization even in posthumous narratives that frame bodily invasion without explicitly addressing it as a crime. Thus, atrocities committed against women were intended to condemn the nation and its perceived honour.

This framing reinforces the woman’s body as a symbolic representation of national honour, with her suffering signifying the relative strength and vulnerability of the nation itself. Such representations are highly contingent on the sociocultural context in which they arise. The normalization of women’s pain often obscures whether these acts are recognized as crimes or simply contextualized as products of a particular time and space, rendering them as mere events within the larger narrative.

This paper specifically examines the traumatic experiences of gendered violence during partition, as presented in the short-stories of Saadat Hasan Manto and Shobha Rao, with reference to Urvashi Butalia’s testimonies from The Other Side of Silence. The article will isolate the female experiences of brutality from their associations to national and communal sufferings, highlighting the individuality of the female subject as a victim of gendered violence.

Keywords: Gendered Violence, Partition Trauma, Female Bodies as Symbols, National Honour, Sexual Violence