How Partition Affected the Lives of Women

Words by Sachin Raj Purohit

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This painting was done by Horace Van Ruith in the 1880s as a documentary record of costume and jewellery of the region of Punjab. The woman is wearing her full set of head, ear, nose, neck, arm, hand, ankle and foot jewellery and a costume richly decorated with 'zardozi' (gold wire/thread) embroidery. She lifts her blue gathered skirt with gold-embroidered border to show her silver anklets and toe rings, and at the same time shows the mirror ring on the thumb of her left hand and gold finger rings attached to her bracelets by gold chains. Her shoes are in front of her bare feet. (Available now as Print)

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The Method to Manto’s Madness

The Intertwined History of Hindi and Urdu

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How Partition Affected the Lives of Women

Women with mutilated eye, on her way to Pakistan during the Partition of 1947. Taken by F.E. Chaudhry.

Popular perceptions of Partition have been very limited. When asked about Partition, most people think only in terms of religious conflict or recount the “horrors” of Partition. Like other events and phenomena in history, the memory of Partition gets blurred in the wake of such a tendency. However, to better understand Partition and the lives of the very many people who were associated with it, one must go beyond such homogenization. 

Partition changed peoples lives in many different ways. The story is not just one of aggressors and victims. People came from different backgrounds and identities which existed alongside their religious identities. And in an environment of rising communal tension, these different identities profoundly impacted the way that people lived through Partition. The history of how political positions of different caste groups affected the migration of the Hindu community from East Bengal to India is a case in point. Historians Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury have made a detailed analysis of this, in their work Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946-1961. The Bhadralok Hindus could migrate much more easily when compared to the Rajbansis and the Namasudra peasant communities, due to their social and political capital. In some towns in West Bengal, the higher caste Hindus in fact preferred rich native Muslim communities over the incoming flux of poor, peasant, lower caste groups. In Delhi and Punjab, separate camps were instituted for the lower caste groups, away from those of the socially higher castes. All these insights reveal a more diverse and complex reality. The case for how Partition changed the lives of women must also be analyzed in such a context.