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India’s 1947 Through the Eyes of Women: Gender, Politics, and A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Political Science by Reiya Bhat May 2018

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This thesis is dedicated to my Grandma and to my Dadi: my two grandmothers, both born in 1926. They both crossed borders in their own ways before settling in . I owe it all to them for being

fierce, loving, brave, and raising families through numerous

hardships and challenges.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….…...4

Chapter One: Introduction………………………………………………………….……6

Chapter Two: Methods……………………………………………………………….…15

Chapter Three: A Brief Overview of Colonial and Partition ……………...... 31

Chapter Four: in Contemporary Indian Politics………………...... 38

Chapter Five: Oral of Partition Survivors…………………...……….……….50

Chapter Six: Themes from Oral Histories—Resilience, Interpersonal Kindness, and

Education………………………………………………………………………...... 67

Chapter Seven: Conclusion………………………………………………………...……74

References………………………………………………………………………….……77

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Jennifer Fredette.

I could not have asked for a better thesis advisor. Her enthusiasm, encouragement, and academic insights have made this project a true joy for me. I would not have been able to complete this thesis project without her edits, input, and support and I am forever grateful for the academic experience and personal growth I have gained with her guidance. My heartfelt thanks also go to Dr. Julie White, whose support, kindness, and knowledge of political theory and feminist epistemology have all made me a better and more compassionate writer and scholar. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Devika Chawla, who inspired me and gave me direction for this project with her written work on India’s

Partition, oral histories, and family.

Next, I would like to thank my entire family, but especially my parents, Shiv Bhat and Christine Suniti Bhat. They have nurtured me and encouraged me to always pursue my passions, which is what led me to this project. My father taught me to look to my family for inspiration, to learn from history, and to always find ways to learn more about the world in which we live. My is my true role model and she taught me to be compassionate, to be a resilient and hard-working , and to always seek opportunities for growth. The two of them have been so enthusiastic about this project, suggesting interviewees, the types of questions I could ask during my interviews, and giving me information and insights on what it was like to grow up in postcolonial India.

In addition, my mother accompanied me during my interviews in India, making the interview process feel more comfortable for both my interviewees and me. I am so grateful to both my parents for being invested in the work I do and always inspiring me to 5 work as hard as I can. I am also thankful to my older brother, Rohan Bhat, for always uplifting me, giving me new perspectives, and being my earliest friend in life. Through this project, he has listened to my ideas, given me emotional support, and helped me feel like I can accomplish anything.

Lastly, I would like to thank the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College for all their support through this thesis endeavor. With their help, I have learned to truly appreciate the learning process and to be the best scholar I can be. Through a grant from the Dean’s Research and Travel fund, I was able to fund my research trip to India for this thesis. I am immensely thankful for all the learning opportunities I have had through the

Honors Tutorial College.

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Chapter One: Introduction

The year 1947 marked the beginning of a period of dramatic change for India. In

August of that year, India was granted from Britain after decades of formal colonial rule and over three centuries of British presence in the country. Just one day after independence, India underwent “Partition”: it was carved into two, with the northwest border shifting to create the new of . The population of India was divided along religious lines, with mandated to move to Pakistan and and to newly-redefined India. Over the course of mere months, up to fifteen million people crossed this border. This period was marked by fear and uncertainty, and up to one million people were killed in rioting and . India’s Partition is one of the largest and deadliest forced mass migrations in (Dalrymple, 2016).

There is a vast body of Partition literature. However, this literature is often limited in two major ways. First, the literature tends to focus on the political leaders involved in

Partition, all of whom were men. These men include Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal

Nehru of the Indian National party, Jinnah of the Muslim

League, who later became the first leader of Pakistan, and Louis Mountbatten, the last

British to India. All political actions related to Partition were carried out by those in elected positions or those appointed by British political leaders. These , with their narrow focus on male political leaders, create a limited definition of the political world. They also neglect to address women’s engagement in the political world. Because

Partition narratives are often centered on male political leadership, the lived experiences of those who lived through Partition frequently become abstract and removed from reality. 7

By looking at the lived experiences of women who experienced Partition first- hand, however, researchers are given a greater chance to empathize with women’s narratives and an additional tool to better understand the depth of the trauma experienced by everyday people whose lives were forever changed by Partition. This more emotional side of Partition can also help researchers understand how Indian Hindu nationalism is rooted in Partition, which is central to my own thesis. Contemporary has its roots in , when British political leaders would instigate tensions between different communities in order to benefit themselves (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 106). Prior to Indian independence and Partition, Indian national identity was not based in being Hindu. However, in India today, there is a strong nationalist movement that suggests the only true Indians are those who are Hindu.

The second major limitation of Partition literature is that it tends to focus on statistics and political institutions. As a consequence, the human cost of Partition is downplayed in traditional historical narratives. Statistics cannot represent emotional trauma or the feelings of loss experienced by families that were separated, sometimes forever. Statistics tell us the numbers of people who became refugees, but they cannot tell us about the deeply emotional effects Partition had on real people.1 Examining oral histories and lived experiences helps expand the otherwise limited scholarly view of

Partition that has been created by relying primarily on institutional actors and statistics.

Millions of Indians were displaced and affected by Partition, so it is critical to acknowledge these stories.

1 There is even a limit to how much statistics can tell us about quantifiable Partition facts: due to the chaotic nature of Partition, scholars have been unable to produce a definitive account of how many people were displaced and killed. 8

Within the oral histories of Partition that do exist, there is a tendency to look at the experiences of men as the default. Women’s gendered experiences are rarely at the center of Partition narratives. When women are discussed at all, it is often in terms of gendered violence. It is true that many women were raped, kidnapped, murdered, and sexually assaulted during and after Partition. However, it is limiting to only discuss women as victims of sexual violence. This strips women of their personal autonomy and it also suggests that public life, political participation, and self- determination are exclusive to men. Women deserve to be discussed as more than victims of gendered violence. During and after Partition, have participated in politics, joined the workforce, taken care of their families and communities, and worked hard to resist oppressive structures of the colonially-imposed rules of the .

Examining women’s experiences and contributions during Partition is critical to achieving a broader understanding of Partition. Truillot (1995) writes

Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators. The

inherent ambivalence of the word “history” in many modern ,

including English, suggests this dual participation. In vernacular use,

history means both the facts of the and a narrative of those facts, both

“what happened” and “that which is said to have happened.” The first

meaning places the emphasis on the sociopolitical process, the second on

our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process (p. 2).

Oral histories fit into providing knowledge of the process of history. By analyzing only the “what happened” aspect of the story, we neglect the information that is accessible through oral histories. Partition is certainly a of the twentieth century, 9 but typical historical narratives of this time period place a bigger emphasis on World War

II and the Holocaust. One of my interviewees, a longtime politician and diplomat, suggested that this might be because the sees Partition as a localized instance of violence and a restructuring of borders, rather than an international humanitarian crisis. As this project demonstrates, Partition and the mainstream narratives about it have restructured the ethnic and religious make up of India. In addition, Partition has altered Indian identity in the long-term, paving the way for the virulent nationalism of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Individuals and families who were displaced by

Partition carry the memories of violence and an unjustly lost with them to this day and oral histories of a life shared between groups are one of the few ways to preserve these memories, as well as challenge the dominant Hindu nationalist rhetoric in Indian politics today.

When women are discussed during Partition, most of the literature focuses on their mistreatment. Mookerjea-Leonard (2005) writes that rape was a tool for and dominance during the violence that surrounded Partition. During Partition, up to

75,000 women were kidnapped. In their own communities, Hindu women kidnapped by

Muslim men were treated as “untouchable” because of the characterizations of Muslim men as violent and dirty. Nehru and Gandhi encouraged groups of Hindu women to travel to Pakistan, find women who had potentially been kidnapped by Muslim men, and bring these kidnapped women to their Hindu communities in India. The women who were involved in this cause were still framed as protecting the honor of community and of women (p. 149). Butalia (2000) expands on this cause and explains that it became known as the Central Recovery Operation. However, the women who were subsequently rescued 10 by the Indian in this operation were not consulted as to whether they wanted to leave their communities or not. As a way to unify the search process, the government decided that any woman living with a man of another religious background after March

1947 would be presumed to have been kidnapped and the government would then take that woman and bring her to India. This date was chosen because it was when violence related to Partition began in . However, this decision was problematic because there was no nuance in deciding if a woman had truly been kidnapped or not and forced relocations became another way to strip women of their own agency. In these scenarios, women were often taken away from their families and children (Butalia, 2000, p. 114).

I chose to interview women who lived through Partition for this project for two major reasons. First, I strongly believe in the necessity of oral histories to share and preserve memories and experiences. India has a strong culture and tradition of using oral histories as a way to build a sense of belonging and community. Many people who lived through Partition are far more likely to verbally share their experiences with their family members, rather than to write them down. For many people, discussions of Partition still feel raw and painful.

In 2013, India released a video advertisement called “,” which quickly went viral. The commercial showed two elderly men, one Hindu and one

Muslim, who had been friends as boys but had not seen each other in the many decades after Partition had separated them. The granddaughter of man pieces together his stories and memories to contact the grandson of his Muslim friend so they can work together to reunite their grandfathers in time to celebrate the Hindu man’s birthday. The 11 emotional advertisement touched a nerve among South Asians around the world, and it has since been viewed more than 14 million times on YouTube as of 2018.

It is difficult to collect stories about Partition because of the strong emotions and deep sorrow many people have associated with Partition memories. Chawla (2014) writes that when she originally asked Partition refugees how they understand Partition, many responded that they hate thinking about it because it is too sad (p. 206). Oral histories from those who survived Partition provide a complex and emotional narrative of Partition that is unavailable through more traditional historical narratives. Furthermore, mainstream narratives of Partition that are promoted today tend to naturalize the division between Hindus and Muslims. Nationalist and conservative political parties and groups in

India promote an “us versus them” mentality in their political rhetoric. However, it was not natural to rip apart religious communities when Partition happened. Prior to Partition, people from different religious backgrounds belonged to the same communities and viewed one another as friends. Chawla (2014) wrote that she was surprised when her father and a fellow Partition refugee she interviewed both mentioned they would eat in the homes of Muslims before Partition. She had expected this would not be the case because Muslims ate beef in their homes. However, her father and her other interviewee said they did not see them [Muslims] as any different [from us] (p. 210). The often- violent separations of diverse communities in India’s Partition often contributes to a narrative that different religious groups do not belong to the same communities, but ordinary people who lived through these experiences do not appear to necessarily feel the same way. 12

My research findings demonstrate that those who lived through Partition express the belief that the political circumstances were far outside of their control and they had little choice in leaving their homes behind and building a life elsewhere. Oral histories convey experiences and identities that can become lost in more traditional political narratives that focus on objective, highly generalizable data and institutional structures.

The second reason I chose to interview women is that I wanted to create a space where women could narrate their own stories and to be heard as an authority of both Partition and gender. Historically, women in India have not been treated as an authority of either topic. I do not want to present my work as granting women something they do not already have, as an outsider. Instead, I hoped to create a space of mutual respect and the freedom to share their own objective truths, without any interruptions.

My mother sat through almost all of these interviews with me, which fundamentally altered the interview process. My own status as somewhat of an outsider to Partition experiences and even Indian identity complicates how my interviewees interacted with me. Chawla (2014) similarly acknowledges how her father’s presence helped her negotiate her outsider status with her Partition refugee interviewees (p. 209).

She describes him as her interlocutor and acknowledges that especially her older interviewees felt much more at ease with her father’s presence and that her father knew how to help her phrase questions in a way that made her interviewees more comfortable addressing certain themes. When one of my interviewees broke down in tears remembering the violence she witnessed as a young woman during Partition, it was my mother’s openly emotional response of empathy that helped her feel heard and understood. It was more appropriate for my mother to be there and to comfort my 13 interviewee than it was for me to do the same. My interviewee turned to my mother and drew strength from her response of shared emotion. My mother’s presence granted me more of an insider status and helped build trust between the interviewees and me. As a cultural interlocutor, my mother helped bring out stories and emotions that may have remained obscured without her presence.

The experience of interviewing female Partition refugees sheds light on stories of women and their engagement with Indian politics. The women I interviewed were all young , teenagers, and young women when Partition happened. They remembered feelings of fear, loss, and uncertainty. They shared that they lost everything when they left their homes and the vast majority of them carried a few clothes and little else with them. Their families suffered and they faced various economic hardships. Yet, their stories of loss and sacrifice have contributed significantly to their worldviews. They do not vilify “the other side.” They shared memories of the kindness of strangers and how people they did not even know gave them resources to help them survive. These stories are in contrast to the rhetoric of contemporary Hindu nationalists, who claim that

Muslims should be vilified. My interviewees spoke about receiving support from people outside their immediate religious communities.

The most striking theme I pulled from my interviews was resilience. The resilience of my interviewees allowed them to face adversity and navigate their struggles with determination. They expressed feelings of mutual solidarity and community with the people they had known prior to Partition and once they had resettled in India. This sense of community contributed both to resilience and future personal success. The women I interviewed went on to become doctors, politicians, , and pillars of community 14 leadership. To be clear, not all women in India had these opportunities to experience political, economic, and social success in the early postcolonial and post-Partition period.

However, the women I chose to interview have lived lives of outward engagement with the political and social world of India.

The stories of bravery and resilience surrounding Partition create something positive out of a tragic political event, but it is important to recognize that Partition was a colonial act of violence. Britain’s years of economic exploitation and colonial rule continue to influence the into the twenty-first century. Uplifting the oral histories of those who survived Partition will not rectify the of this time period, but it does offer a way to consider the human impact of Partition and to preserve the voices of those who lived through one of the most significant periods of change in Indian history. Through oral histories and personal stories, we are able to question contemporary mainstream political narratives about how we should look at the past and how we should consider identity.

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Chapter Two: Methods

This study was designed in order to record and interpret the perspectives of women who directly experienced India’s Partition. The oral histories collected in this study contribute to a broader body of knowledge on the political, social, and cultural effects of Partition. Scholars typically have not looked to Indian women as authorities on

Partition. This study aims to uplift the stories of women who lived through Partition. It also seeks to affirm their authority as narrators of Partition. This section discusses the methodological approaches to data analysis for the project, including participant selection, data collection, data analysis methods, and ethical considerations.

Following Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, I began to reach out to family networks in India to ask for help in finding research participants. I asked family members to consider friends and acquaintances who had directly experienced Partition.

Once I reached India, I began to individually contact suggested research participants via telephone and email. I explained the research project to them, sent them the consent forms, and scheduled interview times. I met with the majority of my research participants in their homes, where they graciously allowed me to interview them for approximately one hour each.

My strategies for my interviews were based in knowledge of postcolonial , feminist epistemology, and ethnographic techniques, as well as my commitment to the value of oral histories. I left my questions relatively broad, but narrowed certain topics that were more relevant to specific research participants. Some of the questions I asked included:

• How do you view and understand Partition? 16

• Is there a particular place you describe as home?

• How did Partition affect you personally? Do you believe you did things

academically or politically you may not have done had the Partition not

happened?

• Where did you and your family live prior to Partition? Where did you and your

family live after Partition? Please describe this event as it affected you and your

family.

• How did your community change following Partition?

• How did Partition affect the jobs of your parents and immediate family

members? How did Partition affect your socio-economic status?

• Did Partition change the way you personally viewed women in political power?

My research questions and methods were intended to give voice to those who are not always visible. a vast and diverse country, and it is unrealistic to attempt to capture a full section of the population and make broad claims about lived experiences.

The interviews in this research project are simply intended to broaden understanding of how Partition affected individuals, rather than to make specific claims about the broader population. I acknowledge the limitations of my research and that the small interview sample size means that I cannot make broad generalizations about women who lived through Partition. However, the methodology and interviews in this study could be replicated through different population segments in different parts of India. This research project is not attempting to tell the story of all Indian women who lived through Partition, but it can still offer information that enriches knowledge of Partition. My hope is that future researchers would be able to use the methodology I have used to inform their own 17 research with women across urban and rural areas, through different religious communities, and with different and socioeconomic classes.

My interviews and representations of Indian women in this thesis are not all explicitly feminist, although my some of my interviews can be strategically read as feminist. Deepti Misri (2014) writes that she emphasizes the gendered locations of authors in her own Partition work, “not under the assumption that women will inevitably produce more sensitive critiques of gendered violence, but in order to foreground the different locations and investments of male and female authors, and also to warn against taking women’s accounts as feminist accounts” (p. 11). Understanding the specific experiences of women based in context and location allows more intimate access to gendered Partition experiences and simultaneously creates the understanding that gender differences are structured by social relations. Partition histories are often limited to traditional state and nationalist narratives of India. By broadening that understanding to contextualized social relations and gender, women are incorporated into a broader

Partition narrative that usually leaves out marginalized populations.

Urvashi Butalia (2000) emphasizes the importance of oral histories in a twenty-first understanding of Partition:

the oral narrative offers a different way of looking at history, a different

perspective. For, because such narratives often flow into each other in terms of

temporal time, they blur the somewhat rigid timeframes within which history

situates itself. Because people locate their memories by different dates, or different

timeframes, then the events that mark the beginning and end of histories, their

narratives flow above, below, through the disciplinary narratives of history. They 18

offer us a way of turning the historical lens at a somewhat different angle, and to

look at what this perspective offers (p 13).

Oral histories are deeply subjective, as they incorporate personal experiences and social relations, and they are often connected to other memories. With major historical events of great political importance such as Partition, there is a tendency in scholarship to value the objective fact above all else. Historians and politicians often wish to make claims based on specific statistics and dates in order to analyze the event. However, the subjectivity offered by oral narratives does not make discussions of the event less true or valid. It is simply a different form of narration and a different framing of the event.

Objective facts provide important information in the same way that subjective oral narratives offer perspectives of the humanitarian costs and social outcomes of Partition.

Some authors even claim that oral histories allow an accessibility to Partition in the classroom, where students usually only learn about Partition from historical texts and statistics. Jayagopalan (2016) writes about how students offering family narratives during classroom discussions of Partition allowed fellow students to understand how Partition affected everyday families and to increase feelings of empathy. He reflects on a student sharing that her grandmother’s family migrated from to during Partition.

Expecting Partition to be a temporary arrangement, her family buried the majority of their valuables in their backyard because they knew transporting valuable items would be challenging and potentially dangerous. The student’s grandmother managed to keep a few gold with her and knead them into dough that she carried. She then convinced border officials that she had to carry the dough with her to feed her younger siblings in case they became hungry along the way. Jayagopalan reflects that the sharing of these 19 narratives in the classroom made other students more conscious and engaged in examining other Partition narratives that they then read about in class (p. 48).

Because Indian women born prior to India’s independence faced marginalization from both Indian patriarchal structures and British colonial structures that enforced other standards of patriarchy, feminist epistemology was a central method of inquiry for this project. Feminist epistemology is understanding that gender influences concepts of knowledge and practices of inquiry (Alcoff, 1993, p. 2). In my case, it became critical to situate myself in the narrative of my interviews and narrating my own subjectivity. I do not want to claim total objectivity in my interview work because that is not an accurate reflection of the personal stake I have in this project. In addition, my identity influences how I approach this project. In my own identity as an immigrant of Indian origin, I consider the concepts of crossing and returning through borders. While my own displacements have been by personal and family choice, my immigrant identity shapes how I consider other forms of moving across borders and dislocations, even though my research participants were displaced by state-mandated policies that were not their own choices.

In collecting the oral histories of my research participants, I sought to ensure that they had full control of their narratives and what they wanted to share with me. I did this in order to emphasize the oral narrative part of my project as collaborative. In addition,

Indian culture has a rich history of storytelling and verbal communication as methods to pass on and share information inter-generationally. I felt confident that in-person discussions would illuminate personal Partition histories that would not come through clearly in writing. Furthermore, are not monolithic, and I felt it was 20 important to allow research participants to broadly discuss their individual religious and cultural backgrounds. This sharing of information seemed that it would be much more complete if done verbally.

I completed the majority of my interviews face-to-face and in person, although I completed two interviews via telephone after returning home to the United States. I obtained informed consent from each participant to record our interviews and then did audio recordings of each interview. I later transcribed the data and coded it to find emergent themes. I had a broad set of requirements for the profiles of my interviewees.

These were:

1. They must have been alive during India’s 1947 Partition.

2. They must have been born in present-day Pakistan or India and raised within

South .

3. They must be women.

4. They must have personal memories of Partition or have family oral histories

related to Partition.

Locating Myself Within the Narrative

My own relationship to India has influenced my desire to explore the themes of

Partition. Both of my parents were born in India and lived there until they emigrated from

India to Australia in 1992. My paternal grandmother was born in what is today Pakistan in 1926. She moved to India prior to Partition to marry, but the rest of her family came to

India in 1947 when mandated by the state. Never having met my paternal grandparents and never having learned about Partition in my American schooling, I knew little of this family history until I was a teenager. As a seventeen-year-old, living away from home for 21 the first time in Istanbul, , I found myself missing my family often. When Google

India released an emotional advertisement about two adults who used Google to reunite their elderly grandfathers who had been Partition refugees, I sent the video to my parents.

I had long conversations via email with my father about Partition, religion, and the politics of state boundaries. At this point, I began to do cursory internet searches of

Partition and I was horrified to learn just how many people had been displaced and how many had experienced or participated in violence stemming from this pivotal moment in

Indian political history. I had known of stories shared by my father’s aunt about Partition, but I was unaware of the scope of how many people had been affected. I began to consider the unique challenges faced by individuals and families who were essentially forced to start their lives over in an unfamiliar place, forever losing their and their roots. My personal identity as a first- immigrant whose grandmother’s family lived through Partition grants me an intimate type of access to a community of people who lived through Partition. However, I am able to listen to Partition narratives with a critical distance as a relative outsider.

Discussions of Partition have historically been read and narrated by the experiences of men. For women, the independence of India was associated with Partition.

As both events occurred, women often had to leave behind familial channels and support systems (Bhardwaj, 2004, p. 70-3). Women have been largely excluded from discussions of Partition. If women are included, the discussions are usually framed in the context of women as victims of sexual violence (Sidwha, 2000, p. 18). This not only restricts women’s agency, but it also contributes to the idea that the sexual purity of women should be their most important trait. In my work in dealing with gendered oral histories of 22

Partition, I wish to discuss the experiences of real women who lived through Partition and to have the focus be on the women themselves and not on political leaders or men.

While I want to convey the stories I learned as honestly as possible, I want to make it clear that I have a stake in sharing these stories. My family history and the cross- cultural border-crossing I have experienced shape how I see the world. In addition, the experiences of my parents and grandparents before me makes me feel that I must honor the stories I have learned. I believe that the themes of displacement and familiarity are critical aspects of Partition narratives. I have my own experiences with these themes, but under entirely different contexts and circumstances of choice. My family roots are entirely in India, but I was born in Australia. When I was a young child, my family and I immigrated to the United States from Australia. I have respective claims on origin, birth, and national identity on each of these . However, I do not feel that I can claim any of them as home or entirely as my own. These countries are all home and are all familiar in some sense, yet I am displaced in all of them. I can empathize with what it feels like to be displaced, but I do not bear the burden of having no choice in my movements and rebuilding my life as a refugee. I seek to learn about displacement as a result of tragedy, while my own displacements have been by product of personal choices. I explain this not to center this narrative on myself, but to locate myself within the narrative. My relationship to my location as I consider how to discuss the politics of location with my research participants because location shapes how we understand displacement and identity.

Oral histories are culturally significant in Partition narratives because family narratives, recipes, personal histories, and more are typically shared in oral form rather 23 than written form in India. Oral histories are able to capture personal experiences and emotions in a way that is not readily visible in quantitative data analysis. In addition, oral histories are able to uplift the voices of ordinary people who are not always able to share their experiences otherwise. Oral histories are a critical part of my Partition ethnography.

I interviewed women who lived during Partition, as well as women who have family histories of Partition stories. Through the process of listening and remembering together,

I hoped to give women a space to be an authority on their own narratives, since Partition literature has been historically exclusionary to women. I hoped that this space would allow women to be an authority on both their gender and Partition, when they are rarely treated as authorities on either subject.

While oral histories are culturally relevant in the context of India, I also believe that oral histories are especially important in Partition narratives. Anecdotally, those who have lived through Partition often express that they felt they were not truly included in this significant political moment. Many express the belief that Partition was out of the control of ordinary people and only politicians had real influence over the events that unfolded. When interviewing her father, who was a Partition refugee as a child, Chawla

(2014) writes that he reflected on Partition, “It was a sad thing. It should not have happened. It was and is the fanaticism of the politicians. People did not want it” (p. 217).

I believe that oral histories give interview participants a space to share what Partition meant for them personally in a way that is not easily visible in many historical and political accounts of Partition. Oral histories can specifically convey a narrative of displacement and what it meant to develop new homes, lives, and political affiliations in a context that was reconstructed as home. 24

Because of the lack of authority women are granted in discussions of gender and

Partition, feminist standpoint theory is critical in how I frame my narrative and how I construct my questions and interviews. Feminist epistemology takes my gender and the gender of my interviewees into consideration and inform my practices of inquiry. While the political experiences of men influence my discussion of Partition, it is not the priority in the narrative I will be sharing. Knowledge is subject to position and the power and location of those who have the knowledge. Therefore, the women I interview offer unique insights on the gendered dynamics of Partition.

In order to successfully utilize feminist epistemology in the practices of my inquiry, I believe it is important to locate myself clearly within the narrative and to reaffirm my relationship to my location frequently. While I am focusing on gender as key aspect of identity and my oral history participants and I are all women, the intersection of gender and location means different things to my interviewees and to me. As someone who was raised and has spent her life predominantly in the western world, I acknowledge that I will have different experiences and worldviews from my participants who have predominantly lived in . I aim to honestly convey the stories of my oral history participants, but it is important for me to ensure that I do not make broad generalizations about what it means to be a woman who survived Partition and lives in India. I expect to discuss gendered experiences with politics and how state policies can unfairly target women. This is part of state-based oppression. However, I want to avoid the tendency to address all women’s issues as example of gender-based oppression. As Chandra Talpade

Mohanty writes, the assumption of women’s issues as being a coherent group leads to a homogenous perception of women’s oppression and the “average third world woman” 25

(Mohanty, 1984, p. 56). I do not seek to make broad claims on women’s experiences and oppressions in India. Instead, I hope to highlight how state policies shape the experiences of individual women.

When discussing Partition, framing the narratives of those who lived through this significant moment in India’s political history is a challenge. Partition is a tragedy of the twentieth century with the millions of people displaced and one million or more killed in communal violence and rioting as Partition resettlement occurred. India’s Partition exemplifies the failures of colonial rule, violence from fear of , and violence caused from uncertainty. In her collection of oral histories on those who have lived through Partition, Chawla (2014) notes that assigning terminology for people who experienced Partition is challenging (p. 56). Many do not choose to self-identify as refugees because their homes before and after Partition were once part of the same nation. Chawla ultimately chooses to identify her participants as refugees, feeling it is the most honest way to convey the stories of her interviewees.

I do not entirely reject the label of refugee. It is not inaccurate, as Partition was state-mandated and people were forced to relocate to the other side of a new border.

However, I do not want my interview participants to feel as though I am choosing a label for them. Colonial politics, Partition, and subsequent policies of the Indian government have limited and controlled women’s agency in a variety of ways. I do not want to contribute that by assigning a label that my participants reject on a personal level. I asked how my participants self-describe their lived experiences of Partition. Some chose the word “refugee,” while others described their experiences as Hindus or non-Muslims who were forced to relocate. I realize this means that I do not have a uniform and 26 contextual way to describe all of my research participants. However, I am willing to risk a lack of uniformity in terminology if it means I am learning and ultimately conveying their experiences honestly. For now, I choose to use the term “those who lived through

Partition.” Other sources, such as the organization The 1947 Partition Archives, use

“witness” when referring to people who experienced Partition. (1947 Partition Archive,

2017).

Perhaps part of the challenge in discussing and framing Partition is that there is no uniform way to describe its significance. As I have stated before, I do believe that

Partition was a tragedy because it resulted in millions of displacements and deaths. I think the subsequent military tension between India and Pakistan have also contributed to challenges in reconciling what it now means to be Indian, versus prior to Partition. Even without the millions of deaths from sectarian violence, Partition would still be a tragedy because mass displacement is an atrocity in and of itself. Those who lived through

Partition ultimately lost their homes and roots in a violent way because of a state- mandated decision. The nature of loss caused by Partition makes it difficult or impossible to revisit and identify with one’s roots. In addition, the organization The 1947 Partition

Archive claims that there is widespread public amnesia regarding Partition. The historical impact of colonialism is widely recognized and discussed in India, but Partition is often excluded from the colonial narrative, even though colonial power and rule played a key role in Partition. Part of the public amnesia of Partition may be based in the struggle to openly recognize it as a tragedy. Because there is no shared public consensus about how to treat Partition, or whether the events of 1947 should be remembered with a sense of mourning, it is difficult to address the lasting impacts of Partition. Partition can be seen 27 as a final act of colonial control and violence. Discussions of Partition in English potentially contribute to failure to recognize it as a tragedy. In her book work, Chawla explains that Partition seems like a neutral word, but the word “Batwara” conveys more emotion (2014, p. 3).

In a conversation with a male relative who left present-day Pakistan due to

Partition as a three-year-old, I learned anecdotes that widely match other forms of narratives from other Partition oral histories, including my own interviews and other literature in the field. He informed me that once his family reached Delhi, they lived in an abandoned home that had once been occupied by Muslims who had left Delhi for

Pakistan during Partition. To my relative’s knowledge, the same thing likely happened with his family’s former home on the other side of the border. Knowing that people were only able to take what they could carry and had to leave behind most of their possessions,

I am fascinated and saddened by this idea of millions of families living in the shells of the lives of other families who had to abandon their homes. From this family member and from other anecdotal evidence I have gathered from other family members through the years, many people did not expect Partition to be permanent. They expected to temporarily leave their homes and to ultimately return home and resume life as it had been before Partition. As we know now, this is not what occurred.

The theme of home and what home means is critical in narratives of Partition. In her book, Chawla (2014) situates and locates herself in her narrative. She explains that she left India as a graduate student, so her relationship with India is of “home” and also

“not home.” In her oral history narrative, she expresses the idea that home can be both strange and familiar; it is not a fixed place (p. 27). Upon returning to India to conduct her 28 field work, Chawla reflects “I am no longer from here; my movement to America has remade me” (p. 37). In my own narrative, I wish to convey my own relationship to familiarity and home in India. India and Pakistan both contain my familial roots.

However, my relationship with my ethnic homeland was disrupted before I was even born, by my parents’ move to Australia in 1992. I am able to celebrate my roots and find a sense of cultural familiarity in India, but India is not mine to claim for myself.

Whenever I am interacting with people I do not know in public places in India, they quickly ask me “Where are you from?” knowing that India cannot be the complete or correct answer for me.

For me, what is most significant about the idea of home is that it is often represented as a yearning for security in the narratives of Partition. To reiterate, my experiences of dislocation and struggling to find familiarity are not comparable to those of a Partition refugee because of the differences we have in circumstances of choice and sociopolitical context. However, I believe that seeking home for security and permanence are common threads in my own narrative, as well as the narratives shared by my interviewees. The insecurity that comes with displacement becomes an aberration.

Security is framed as normal and the expectation. This connection suggests that home reflects the security of permanence and comfort with one’s location. My respective relationships with India, Australia, and the United States are ethnic origin, birth, and current national identity. However, for myself, and I suspect some of my interviewees, national identity becomes a fluid concept. For me, it is because I have not established permanent roots in any particular place yet and I do not have any roots in the United 29

States, as a first generation immigrant. For my interviewees, this fluidity is because the state reconstituted the boundaries of their homeland without their permission.

For people who lived through Partition and especially those who are old enough to remember life prior to India’s independence and Partition, I imagine that defining national identity and that relationship to colonial legacies presents unique and difficult challenges. British colonialism affected every aspect of Indian society through , religion, government, and reifying class structures. While the British formally left India in 1947, they left behind various structures and institutional practices that have caused conflict in India over the last seventy-one years. For people born and raised in India following independence, the relationship between an independent state and a culture which colonialism had infiltrated was complex.

My parents, both born in the decades immediately following Partition, have shared with me what it was like to be young in this era for them. Born to an Air Force family, my father grew up speaking English and Hindi at home. He attended British boarding in the foothills of the and spent his summer holidays with his family in hill stations around the northern part of the country. My mother was born and raised in . Her family was strictly Anglican and she attended private Christian schools her whole life. Her father worked for the state government and her family spoke only English at home. While my parents were raised in different contexts, they both grew up in families that held the ideal that one’s proximity to “British-ness” proved professionalism, intelligence, and success. Chawla explores the dichotomy of celebrating

India, yet embodying British culture in her work. She writes that British youth were supposed to reject Britain, but simultaneously embody British speech and mannerisms (p. 30

15). In her interviewees, she noted “symptoms of colonial nostalgia,” such as consuming and toast every afternoon and pride in “good” English that did not have a strong

Indian accent (p. 101).

There is no simple way to convey the lived experiences of people as a result of the tragedies of Partition. In my work, I combine feminist epistemology, gender, colonialism, and theories of displacement. My methods of examining these stories is not intended as a better or revised history or as a truth-seeking project, but to use my project as a form of emancipatory research. There will be limits with my oral histories, but I acknowledge that I am not working to create a complete history of Partition. Through my work, I hope to use oral histories and ethnographic research to convey a part of history that is not easily visible solely through conventional political texts.

31

Chapter Three: A Brief Overview of Colonial and Partition History

British colonial presence defined Indian politics for centuries. The British first entered India in 1600 with the Company, chartered by . At this time, the Mughal in India was at its height and welcomed the British into India to minimize the dominance of the Portuguese and Dutch (Metcalf & Metcalf,

2012, p. 45). The British imported millions of pounds’ worth of textiles from India by the eighteenth century. An agreement Mughal Emperor and Sir , James

I’s ambassador to the Mughal court, allowed the British to establish factories at key

Mughal ports. However, by the , the ’s strength began to falter and the British turned to a policy of armed defense to protect their factories and sites from other foreign powers. This armed defense policy began to lead to conflict between the Mughals and the British (p. 47). In various , the East

India Company increased its political and economic reach through trade agreements. In three major provinces in 1765, the Company secured revenue collecting rights in return for an annual fee. This agreement effectively made the Company the emperor’s deputy for nearly a century (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 53). The strategic agreements between

Mughal emperors and the contrasts the widespread narrative that

India was a declining state ripe for conquest by a progressive . Instead the trade agreements suggest that Britain chose to enter India precisely because of its flourishing economy (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 55).

The increased economic dominance of the East India Company eventually led to

British political rule of India. The appointment of as India’s first -general of the Company’s Indian territories contributed to a consolidation of 32 power. Hastings believed that India was governed by a fixed code of laws and codes that had been established by law-givers of the past, but that these laws had been corrupted and misinterpreted over time. He worked to simplify these laws and see them observed in what he believed was the original intent. Hastings further believed that the laws governed

Hindus and Muslims separately. Seeing these categories as central to the organization of

Indian society reified Hindus and Muslims as separate political categories (Metcalf &

Metcalf, 2012, p. 58). As I will claim later in my thesis, this also influenced how many

Indians constructed their own identities for decades afterwards. In the late eighteenth century, Lord Cornwallis arrived in India to help the East India Company govern some provinces. He quickly blamed India for the misrule by the British, claimed that all people in India were inherently corrupt, dismissed all senior Indian officeholders of the East

India Company, and supported a policy that would only allow British and European-born men to hold senior civil positions in government (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 59).

Cornwallis’ arrival in India signals a shift to more direct political control of India, versus the previous economic control. The proportion of British soldiers in Indian armies dramatically increased through the eighteenth century. During this time, the British also worked hard to cultivate political loyalties from specific minorities. At first, the British often treated Muslims as disloyal fanatics who would attempt to restore the Muslim faith in India (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 106). We see this type of language nearly two centuries later among rightwing Hindu political leaders in contemporary India. However, during Britain’s colonial rule of India, the British realized that giving Muslims special treatment and cultivating Muslim loyalty would be to their own advantage should the

British need political support in conflicts against princely states headed by Hindu leaders 33

(2012, p. 106). With the first British-administered census in 1881, Hindu and Muslim laws and codes were simplified, rigidified, and systemized.

With these, so were British pseudo-sciences, claiming the superiority of some races, as well as classifying some groups of people as belonging to “feminine races.” The

British systemization of and religion contributed to attitudes suggesting that people from different backgrounds could be categorized in a hierarchy (Metcalf & Metcalf,

2012, p. 112). This logic would continue throughout the whole of British colonial rule.

In the , tensions between Indians and the British reached a peak when the

British declared and India at war with unilaterally. During this time period, India experienced various issues and crises related to war, including the entrance of Japanese troops in northwest India and the severe in , which killed up to two million people. The famine was worsened by the administrative failure by the

British, who prioritized sending grains to troops fighting in the war and stopped the arrival of rice from Japanese-occupied Burma (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 209).

Through 1945 and 1946, India and Britain both went through major changes. In

Britain, Churchill’s Conservative administration was replaced by a Labour Party one.

With this change in leadership and the growing independence movement in India, Britain began to more seriously consider an independent India. In India, began to break rank with the , with whom he had worked to support independence for the past several years. He proposed a plan for a Pakistan, or

“land of the pure” where Muslims could live and be the majority. Indian National

Congress and Britain both wanted to secure a unified India, but were willing to organize 34 provinces where Muslims could be the majority (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 217).

Tensions grew between Jinnah’s and Nehru’s Congress.

The British ultimately appointed Louis Mountbatten as the last viceroy to India in

1947 (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 218). The British drafted a plan that required a central authority to manage India. The Muslim League and Jinnah were under the impression that this plan implied a separate Pakistan and, simultaneously, Congress believed the plan’s focus on a central authority rejected the creation of Pakistan. The Muslim League and Indian National Congress both believed that they would get what they wanted, but

British leadership led them both astray with the plan’s vague language (Stein, 2010, p.

351).

By the time Mountbatten took his position as the last viceroy, Britain was struggling economically in the years immediately following World War II. As a result, there was a strong incentive to release India as a . After centuries of economic and colonial exploitation of India, Britain was ready to leave India because avenues for easy financial gain had dried up. British interests in India were largely self-serving, which explains why British colonialism disrupted so much in India without concern for what that would mean for India’s population.

Once appointed as viceroy, Mountbatten proposed a plan that bound Indian freedom and partition together (Stein, 2010, p. 354). However, it was uncertain to the

British how many different leaders would take control of independent India. Most British political leaders did not believe a unified India would be possible by this stage. This accelerated Partition plan was unanticipated. A Punjab Boundary Commission met for a week during July 1947. At the time, Partition was scheduled to take place in June 1948. 35

Eager to hand over power and leave India before Britain experienced further economic disruption from an increasingly unstable India, Mountbatten sped up the independence and Partition plan to August 15, 1947. (Tinker, 1997, p. 699). Additionally, Cyril

Radcliffe was the cartographer appointed to draw the border between India and Pakistan.

He had never been to India prior to Partition and had limited understanding of India’s geography and communities around the border he drew. The combination of moving

Partition’s date earlier and the uncertainty about the location of India and Pakistan’s border contributed to chaos and fear surrounding Partition (1977, p. 703). August fifteenth was the day of India’s independence, and India was then partitioned just one day later, creating the nation of Pakistan2 (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 219).

Following Partition, there was widespread violence and massacre on both sides of the border. Those who lived through Partition almost universally recall seeing a variety of forms of violence and brutality. (2000) writes that once it was clear that the state had decided to Partition India and Pakistan, both Hindu and Muslim communities began attacking each other. This violence was especially brutal in communities along the border of India and Pakistan, which was very hastily drawn by the

British. In these communities, entire populations were regularly wiped out (p. 156).

Much of the violence was centered in Punjab, which was effectively sliced in half during Partition. Historically, the violence is remembered as senseless. However, India in the 1940s was also a highly weaponized and militarized society, with one-third of eligible

2 There is a pervasive rumor that Mountbatten also wished to leave India quickly because his wife, Edwina, was having a romantic affair with . This has been referenced in some historical analyses as well as in popular culture, including the Netflix original series , in Season 2, Episode 1. 36 men serving in the army at some point. With military training, these men who had served in the army were well-trained in modern weaponry and were able to organize and direct attacks. Villages, trains, and refugee camps were all targets of attacks. Trains were an especially common target of violence and trains would often reach their destination with hundreds of dead bodies on board, provoking strong feelings of anger and the desire for vengeance, creating a . (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012, p. 221). A large number of Partition refugees crossed the border on trains and many Partition refugees express clearer memories of trains than of anything else. Chawla (2014) speculates this is because trains were the last physical connection many people had to their homelands (p.

196). Trains were a frequent site of violence because they were crowded, chaotic, and people carried only the most valuable possessions they could manage to hold with them.

Refugees vividly recall looters and soldiers boarding the trains, stealing any valuables they could, and killing people in the process. Other than violence on trains, Partition survivors widely recall seeing violence and slain bodies in the streets of their hometowns and during Partition journeys along roads and in fields.

Metcalf and Metcalf (2012) argue that the immense loss of life during and after

Partition led to a widespread perception that people could only feel safe among those who shared their immediate community and identity (p. 221). This mentality of a divide between religious communities did not exist in the same capacity prior to Partition. In my own fieldwork, I found that my interviewees spoke positively about Muslims in their communities before Partition. They regularly said “[They] Muslims were not different from us,” and pointed to the belief that Partition should not have happened and it was a decision made by politics, which had nothing to do with ordinary people. However, the 37 narratives of rightwing nationalist leaders in India support claims that people should be around people from their own religious communities as much as possible. They glorify

Hindus as the “true” Indians and vilify Muslims as disloyal and as traitors. India’s

Partition is a turning point in the history that influences the language and policies of rightwing Hindu nationalist leaders in India today.

38

Chapter Four: Hindu Nationalism in Contemporary Indian Politics

Partition marked a new beginning of politics in India. Some of the defining moments of twentieth century politics in India are characterized by violence and fear between different religious groups. One of the most well-known instances of during the twentieth century is the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, which led to the deaths of at least 3,000 Sikhs in India (Aulakh, 2015, p. 208). Responding to rising Sikh militancy in Punjab, then-Prime Minister ordered the to remove Sikh militants from Harmandir Sahib Complex in . Part of this military operation included an assault on the , the holiest Sikh temple. The temple was significantly damaged during the military operation, which prompted anger and fear from India’s Sikh population. A few months after this military operation, Indira Gandhi was assassinated at her home by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikh.

The next day, anti-Sikh riots erupted throughout India. This episode of violence is almost always referred to as “riots” by the Indian state and in public memory. Following

Indira Gandhi’s death, her son Rajiv commented on the violence and publicly cemented the Delhi ’s position that violence was natural and expected, which trivialized the widespread brutality (p. 217). However, some historians argue that the 1984 anti-Sikh attacks were so brutal and led to the deaths of so many that they should not be classified simply as riots. Aulakh (2015) argues that labeling the anti-Sikh attacks as a riot allows the government and public to absolve themselves of blame and treat the violence as

“unorganized and spontaneous mob activity.” This silences the victims of the attacks and also denies central government and police complicity in the attacks. Aulakh argues that the 1984 riots should instead be classified as a because that definition clarifies 39 the systemic nature of the attacks, as well as the police complicity (p. 208). Non-Sikhs enacted severe violence on Sikhs during the attacks partially due to physical Sikh visibility in India. Sikh men are particularly visible due to their because uncut hair is a symbol of religious faith for men. During the pogrom, perpetrators of violence

“would pull on , knock off turbans, and even scalp Sikh men.” Aulakh also writes that Sikh women faced humiliation, abduction, and many forms of sexual violence during these riots (p. 209).

During the pogrom, the Indian National Congress Party (also simply referred to as

“Congress” or “the Congress”) was the majority party at the national level. Indira

Gandhi, her father Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as Mohandas Gandhi were all Congress members. Around seventy English-educated Indians came together in 1885 to form the

Indian National Congress. The Congress became a model for nationalist movements elsewhere in the world, including , as well as a main source of stability in

India in the early post-independence years. Congress’ world visions were intended to put the public good and the Indian nation above interests of self, caste, and community

(Metcalf and Metcalf, p. 136-7). The party has historically promoted its liberal social values, their members’ roles in the fight for Indian independence, and their beliefs in secularism. However, those who survived the 1984 claim that Congress Party members and ministers as well as the Indian police contributed to the violence and provided weapons to assailants. The Congress Party has never taken responsibility for any involvement from the attacks (p. 210). The lack of accountability from a major political party has likely led to distrust between minority groups in India and the state government. 40

The other major political party of the twentieth century and beyond is the

Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP has long been associated with the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which was founded in 1925. The RSS does not contest elections or seek a mass base, but this stridently anti-Muslim party puts forth a vision of

India as the land for Hindus (Metcalf and Metcalf, 2012, p. 229). The modern iteration of the BJP can be traced back to 1980, when it evolved from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a party originally founded in 1951 that opposed the secular of the Indian

National Congress Party. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh strongly opposed Indian National

Congress policies that they felt were intended to appease Muslims and any minority communities. The legacies of the beliefs of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh Party are visible in contemporary India through the success of the as one of India’s major political parties. In the BJP’s own documents, it claims to advocate for “Hindu nationalism, social conservatism, a free-market economy, and robust national defense”

(Ruth). The emphasis on Hindu nationalism narrows the definition of Indian identity to focus on Hindu religious values, which marginalizes minority religious communities in

India. Those who subscribe to the ideals of Hindu nationalism feel that the government, customs, and culture of all of India should revolve around .

While the BJP has been part of mainstream Indian politics for over half a century, it was largely unsuccessful in national elections during the early twenty-first century, while the Indian National Congress dominated parliamentary elections. In the decades following Partition, the widespread Indian political discourse was based in promoted by the Indian National Congress. However, the BJP experienced sweeping victories in the 2014 national election and BJP candidate 41 became the , securing a BJP majority government for the first time in years. This was the first time that a non-Congress party won an outright majority on its own since 1977 (Heath, 2015, p. 123).

Heath (2015) claims that elections in post-independence India can be divided into three major periods. From 1947 to 1967, Congress dominated national politics as a secular, catchall party that enjoyed support from across the political spectrum. Then in

1967 to 1993, Congress remained the most popular party at the national level, but was less dominant than it had been in the decades prior. Then from 1989 forward, India has moved to a competitive multiparty system which cannot be defined with Congress at its center (p. 124). In 2014, the BJP experienced its greatest political success in national elections yet. At the same time, Congress received its lowest proportion of votes ever.

There are three main reasons this shift in votes occurred. The first is the conversion hypothesis, which suggests that Congress voters may have switched to BJP voters in response to the political climate of 2014. After a decade as the party in power,

Congress faced scandals, charges of corruption, and accusations of incompetence. There was no strong prime minister candidate in 2014, so the party appeared not to have a strong direction for the 2014 elections (p. 124). In 2014, Congress was led by the party vice president, Rahul Gandhi, the son of Rajiv Gandhi and grandson of Indira Gandhi.

Perhaps voters were no longer interested in a family of political giants leading national politics and the BJP votes were reactionary.

The second hypothesis relates to the mobilization of new voters. The voter turnout was 66.4 percent, which was the highest ever voter turnout for an election for India’s lower parliamentary house. If this hypothesis is accurate, it can largely be attributed to 42 the lively Modi and BJP campaign across India. Modi spoke at over 400 rallies in India prior to the election, which is highly unusual in Indian politics. Furthermore, this election is considered to be the most expensive in Indian history, which may have attracted more voters to the polls.

Finally, a franchise hypothesis also relates to voter turnout. More than 553 million people voted in the 2014 elections, which was a major increase from 417 million people in the 2009 elections. The franchise hypothesis suggests that the increase in voter rolls in

India can be attributed to alternative forms of mobilization that have not been used in prior elections, including concerted voter registration drives. Alternatively, the increased voter rolls could be related to electoral malpractice and the registration of phantom voters, since the increase of voters on voter rolls was not in proportion to increasing populations of cities in India (p. 124-5).

By charting voting records and turnout changes between the 2009 and 2014 elections, Heath (2015) ultimately found that two of the previously-mentioned hypotheses can generally explain the outcomes of the 2014 elections. The conversion hypothesis confirms that a significant transfer of votes took place from Congress to BJP.

However, the BJP won votes from non-Congress rivals and Congress lost votes to other parties, too. In addition, the structure of party competition in India varies widely between individual states, so a conversion hypothesis cannot fully explain the 2014 shift of votes.

The other hypothesis that can help explain the new voting patterns was the mobilization of voters. Heath’s research suggests that the BJP had dramatic breakthroughs in states where it had previously performed poorly, while simultaneously marginally increasing its performance in states that had already voted favorably toward the BJP in earlier elections. 43

Therefore, new voters were mobilized in states where the BJP had been previously unpopular more than anywhere else (p. 133).

The BJP attributes its own success to its focus on economic development and promises of strong governance and creating jobs and prosperity. During the 2014 elections, the BJP also vowed to make the government decision-making process “more transparent, citizen friendly, corruption free, and accountable” (Dutt, 2014, p. 17).

Notably, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was invited to attend Modi’s inauguration ceremony in , which was the first time a leader from Pakistan or

India had attended their counterpart’s inauguration ceremony since independence in

1947. This gesture was intended to promote peace and stability between the two nations.

Modi’s website later touted that the inauguration was part of India’s mission to actively

“engage with the global community to strengthen the cause of world peace and development” (2014, p. 17).

The BJP’s sweeping and historic win in 2014 may have come as a surprise to some, but the party had established itself as key to Indian politics of the twenty-first century in the years prior to the election. The BJP embodies ideals of , or Hindu nationalism. Violent displays tied to Hindu nationalism became more prominent following Partition and right-wing Hindu nationalist parties strongly benefited from the fear, anger, and loss felt by those who were affected by Partition. In early 1948, Gandhi was shot and killed by Hindu nationalist , who was angered by his perception that Gandhi was too inclusive in his vision for India. Godse and others who supported him believed in a two-nation and two-religion theory, which advocated for a 44 purely Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan to be separate from each other (Howard, 2016, p. 35).

Hindutva is an based in fear. There is a strong emphasis on protecting

Hindu bodies (especially female bodies) from the predatory sexuality of Muslim bodies

(Anand, 2011, p. 1). According to Hindutva principles, and Muslims are cast as foreign and disloyal to India. Religious minorities and especially Muslims within India are seen as more dangerous than Muslims outside of India because there is a perception that they weaken the Hindu national body (p. 4, 29). Hindutva leaders claim India faces constant disloyalty from Muslims in India, suggesting that they cheer for the Pakistani cricket team over the Indian team and that any area with a higher Muslim population is due to Muslims trying to create “mini ” (p. 40).

For Hindutva, perhaps the greatest danger from Muslims is the threat of overpopulation. When Anand (2011) interviewed Hindutva activists in India, he found a common vocabulary and shared myth-making of stories leaders had allegedly heard from others, claiming that lecherous Muslim men were kidnapping naive, young Hindu girls in order to convert them and to use them to reproduce more children at a faster rate. Muslim women are portrayed as complicit in these kidnappings (p. 65). Beyond the one- dimensional Hindutva portrayal of women solely as producers, the rest of their vision for women is also limiting. The Hindutva version of women’s empowerment idealizes family and also refuses to challenge patriarchal values and inequalities (Anand, 2011, p. 111).

The Hindutva leaders obsess over the virility and irresponsibility of Muslim men and the overfertility of Muslim women (2011, p. 75). Yet, these same leaders insist that all good Hindu men should strive to have six sons: two to protect the border, two for the 45 economy, and two for the service of religion. These Hindu men are encouraged to

“compete” with the “overpopulating” Muslims (2011, p. 106). With this rhetoric, I recall one of my own interviews. This interviewee did not otherwise seem to display overt prejudice toward Muslims. However, when she referred to Muslim men kidnapping

Hindu women during Partition, she characterized Muslim reproduction in animalistic terms:

“...their idea is to get more women to produce more Muslim kids because

they think the strength of the vision is in numbers. If you see the biology,

which species have survived? The ones who are very fertile. The ants have

survived. Ants have survived millions of years. Why? Because they produce

profusely. And the larger animals needed more food so their area of finding

food was very much less because they require larger areas and produce

fewer kids, so they perished. So if they produce more kids, their chances of

survival are better than those races that do not produce. have

dwindled and almost anyone will tell you that is because production is very

bad. You see. So they have learned that art. That you produce more kids,

never mind what happens to them, whether they eat or not eat or study.

Doesn’t matter. Numbers. They have learned the biological truth about

survival”

I was startled to hear her explicit characterization of Muslims as over-fertile and over-producing. With her statement of, “They have learned the biological truth of survival,” she made an ominous warning. That phrasing evokes the language of rightwing

Hindu leaders who use paranoia and fear to suggest that Muslims are overpopulating in 46 order to make the Hindu population the minority in India. Statistically, we know that

Hindus make up roughly eighty percent of India’s population today and that Hindus are not at risk of becoming a minority community in India. This language and paranoia have seeped into mainstream India and even a woman who did not express other overt prejudice toward Muslims believed that Muslims utilize specific knowledge about biology to keep their populations growing.

Earlier, I claimed that Indian politics in the decades following Partition can be characterized by violence. Less than a decade after the anti-Sikh attacks of 1984, Hindus burned down the Babri Mosque in Ayodha. This mosque was allegedly built on the site of a Hindu holy temple devoted to Lord . In 1992, Hindu nationalists, who were part of the Ram Janmabhumi movement, believing that the temple to Lord Rama must be restored, destroyed the Babri Mosque. This moment of violence was framed by the attackers as one of national awakening, and therefore above politics (Anand, 2011, p.

127). The destruction of the mosque led to riots between Hindus and Muslims and up to

2,000 people died in these 1992 riots. The Indian state has become increasingly involved in these instances of violence, but police are now frequently seen as public of the Hindutva worldview. During the 1992 Ayodha riots, police were actively involved in the physical violence (p. 131).

Then in 2002, a train of Hindu pilgrims were on a train from Ayodha after visiting the site of the Babri Mosque. The pilgrims were allegedly being loud, disruptive, and refusing to pay for items they had purchased. Under uncertain conditions, four cars of the train caught on fire, and dozens of people died in the fire. Following this incident, a

Hindu nationalist group called for a bandh, or strike, which commonly precedes riots in 47

India. Widespread riots then broke out in , leading to up to 2,000 deaths, the majority of whom were Muslim. The riots brought out accusations of state complicity, including that political leaders did little to quell the violence and even actively encouraged violence. Since 2002, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has faced accusations of allowing the riots to happen and even encouraging the police to let rioters continue with violence or join in the destruction themselves (Dalrymple, 2014, p. 25). In 2009, the

U.S. Department of State banned future Prime Minister Modi from entering the United

States due to his probable role in the violence.

During the 2014 election season, in order to gain minority religious support, Modi often publicly referred to the link between the Indian National Congress and the 1984 pogrom that led to the deaths of so many Sikhs. However, he did this to deflect from his own role in the anti-Muslim 2002 pogrom in Gujarat (Aulakh, 2015, p. 224). According to Pande (2014), Modi chose to follow the lead of companies such as Cadbury or Coca-

Cola, which had suffered imaging issues after product complaints. He acknowledged the

2002 pogroms, expressed pain or dissatisfaction that they had happened, but never apologized or took any blame.

The 2014 rise to power for Modi can be seen as a parallel to the 2016 American election of Donald Trump. For Indian magazine Business Today, Pande (2014) interviewed various supporters of Modi. They made comments such as, “We are not interested in politics. We want change. Modi can deliver that change. People are sensible, they are not carried away by mere talk,” and “I have never been very politically conscious. But it is frustrating to see our economy slide back from the progress it made.

So, I stepped out to vote, for the first time, for Modi." By focusing on issues related to 48 economic growth, the promise to make India be recognized as a world power, and a strong military, Modi was able to capture right-wing Hindu support without explicit use of Hindutva ideology until after he had won the election.

Anand (2011) describes Hindutva ideology, and by extension, the BJP, as the embodiment of a “schizophrenic nationalism” (p. 2). This schizophrenic nationalism is illogical and can be characterized by paranoia. For decades, rightwing nationalist leaders have promoted specific beliefs that are not founded in any type of fact. One example of this is the claim that Muslims in India have strategized a plan to rapidly increase the

Muslim population and create an independent land for Muslims within India called

Mughalstan (p. 57). There is nothing to indicate Muslims in India have crafted a plan to create “Mughalstan,” but Hindu nationalist leaders use these irrational fears to create fear among Hindus of “overpopulating Muslims” and to encourage Hindus to have more children. This description of a “schizophrenic nationalism” suggests that Hindutva translates to a nationalism that is dangerous for all religious minorities and also upholds a patriarchal vision that severely limits the political participation, agency, and self- autonomy of women. Furthermore, Hindutva leaders use Partition as proof of the disloyalty of religious minorities. These leaders claim that non-Hindus who remain in

India are purposely weakening the political body of the nation (p. 29). For Hindutva leaders, Partition was not enough to keep all Muslims out of India. Muslims, other religious minorities, and secular Hindus have remained in the country, which they believe has made it weaker politically.

My interviewees often reported feelings of solidarity between groups. Even my interviewee who compared the reproduction of Muslims to that of ants reflected on the 49 kindness she was shown by other people during her difficult Partition journey, including

Muslims. Interviewees repeatedly made comments such as, “They [Muslims] were just like us,” “None of us had control in this [Partition],” and “We were all forced to leave our homes.” Through oral histories from numerous sources, many Partition refugees have shared a common belief that Partition displaced and harmed ordinary people who did not want India to be divided into two.

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Chapter Five: Oral Histories of Partition Survivors

Butalia (2000) writes that Partition exists in a duality of public and particular, meaning that Partition exists publicly for all to read in history books and exists in the particular or private in stories that are told and retold within homes in India and Pakistan

(p. 6). An understanding of Partition is incomplete without access to both the public and the particular, but the particular is heavily contextualized. The identities of people who survived Partition shapes the ways in which the stories are remembered by others.

Chawla (2014) suggests that Partition narratives and stories related to rebuilding homes are gendered. In her own oral history and data collection, she found that women’s

Partition stories tended to be more about the “conversation of struggle,” which linked their labor to building new lives. On the other hand, men’s Partition stories normally focused on the more public dynamics of life, emphasizing work and politics outside the home (p. 172). These dynamics suggest that the public and the particular are gendered and one cannot exist without the other. In her own research, Butalia found that there are diverse forms of information on Partition, but the information she found was mostly based in the political elements that led up to Partition. The more human dimensions related to friendship, loss, grief, nostalgia for homelands, and other emotions were largely absent from Partition research of the twentieth century (p. 6).

Before beginning this thesis project, I knew that collecting oral histories was absolutely vital to my thesis work. Storytelling and oral histories are central aspects of

Indian culture and many family histories are passed on through verbal stories, rather than being written down. I knew that oral histories would provide information and perspectives that would not be as readily available through purely academic and historical 51 texts. Through the course of this project, I interviewed nine women who directly experienced India and Pakistan’s 1947 Partition or whose families experienced Partition.

In addition, I interviewed an Indian diplomat and political leader in order to gain her perspectives of Partition from a political standpoint. I especially wanted to do this for her perspectives on patriarchal structures in Indian and Pakistani culture and how these structures have affected women’s gendered experiences related to Partition.

Latha

Latha’s interview was entirely different from my other interviews because she was not alive during Partition or personally affected by Partition. Because of this, her narrative was not a personal one, but she was able to share more official information, representing state narratives in some way. I hoped that as a female political leader, Latha would be able to give me some insights. She did give me some important input, but her more official narrative lacked the personal and emotional experiences of a first-person

Partition oral history. My subsequent interviews offer information that is unavailable through a more official state narrative. However, Latha was able to share perspectives with me that I appreciated.

Latha entered the in the 1970s and formally retired in

2011, but has done work with numerous NGOs and think tanks internationally since retirement. During her political career, she served India in many capacities, including as an ambassador to two nations and as the deputy to the head of a major national government organization in India. Latha never directly did diplomatic work with

Pakistan, but she said that anyone who works in Indian politics should be educated and aware of India and Pakistan’s history. Latha’s extensive political background allowed us 52 to discuss systems of power, inequality, and gender issues. With my other interviewees, I wanted them to narrate their oral histories as their own truths, but I did not seek to attach a claim of feminism to all of their individual stories.

In this interview, Latha and I discussed the framing of Partition as a twentieth century tragedy: “I think if we look now at the twentieth century, people will see the great tragedies as , World War II, the Holocaust…I don’t think that the

Partition of India figures into an international context. It’s regarded as a localized displacement between two countries. But it truly was much more than that. It was a humanitarian crisis and I think the world underestimates the effects of Partition and how many people were affected by it.” I speculate this is because Partition has been narrated through the impersonal stories of borders, colonial government decisions, local leaders, and numbers, rather than using first-person narratives to understand the emotional and human impact of Partition. The thoughts that Latha expressed were similar to thoughts I have had through my research process as well. Knowledge of Partition has not really seeped into a broader western consciousness the way other tragedies of Europe have.

Following the tragedies of the Holocaust, there have been many efforts to preserve first- person narratives, but these same preservation efforts have been much more recent in

India. However, the population of people in India who lived through Partition is now dwindling, seventy years later.

Latha and I were also able to discuss gendered dynamics of Partition violence.

Latha brought up the concept that conquering women is often symbolic of conquering land and sexual violence toward women was a significant aspect of Partition violence.

She also expressed the belief that the Indian movement of “rescuing” Hindu women who 53 had assimilated into Pakistani Muslim families after Partition and forcing them to relocate to India did more harm than good. She said, “To just arbitrarily rule that every woman had to be returned to where she was pre-Partition I think was wrong of society on both sides. I think that has always been the issue, as long as somebody else, whether that is a man or woman, feels that they can choose for a woman. There is no real freedom for women. Every woman must be free to make her own choices. Therefore, it really becomes a gendered issue when you study what happened during Partition.”

I’m sure her diplomatic training influences how Latha approaches Indo-Pakistani relations, but she was quite positive to Pakistan in our interview. She shared, “What has been the effect of post-Partition identities of both India and Pakistan and determining how and along what lines women have progressed in both societies. To be fair, and not all our people are fair, there are plenty of enlightened, emancipated, and well-educated

Pakistani women who are actually fighting for women’s rights in Pakistan, as much as there are Indian women. The absolute numbers and percentages may vary, but the idea that Indian women are that much more fortunate and only Indian women are emancipated is not really true.”

Latha also brought to my attention that the experiences of urban and rural Indian women post-Partition would have been very different. She said that most Indians displaced by Partition were in dire straits and that the life expectancy was around twenty- seven years old. Latha expressed the belief that women in rural areas might have had more freedom in certain ways because they did agricultural work, harvested crops, and would sell their goods in markets. On the other hand, poorer urban women were often not 54 permitted by their families to take on jobs or other urban work because it would be seen as a “man’s job.”

In all honesty, Latha’s interview for me was easier than several others. I suppose part of it is that we have a family connection and I have known her since I was a child.

Her academic and career background also allowed us to have more theoretical discussions on feminism and politics. But, Latha is also highly educated and has a closer proximity to western experiences than anyone else I interviewed did. I have to consider the uncomfortable truth that I found Latha easier to speak with because I also have a closer proximity to western-ness. This was also one of my interviews where my interviewee directed most thoughts toward me and not to my mom, but my interviewee in this case was also not working through emotional trauma and difficult memories during our interview.

Vasantlata

Vasantlata’s interview was my first thesis interview. I had a lot of questions and some doubt going into this interview, wondering whether I would be able to communicate effectively with her, guide the conversation in a way that would be helpful to us both, and honor her story and tell it the way she wanted it to be shared. Vasantlata is the mother of a close friend of my mom and dad’s, which made me feel calmer, knowing that it might be easier to build a rapport as we were not total strangers.

As with many of my interviewees, I visited her home. She is in her early nineties and lives with her daughter, her daughter’s two sons and one son’s wife. Her daughter and grandson’s wife sat with us around the dining room table, providing and prompting information that might not have come up otherwise. Vasantlata would occasionally 55 apologize for not having good enough information or tell me that she was not sure if she could provide me what I was looking for. Many of my interviewees said similar things to me during the course of this project. The reality was that I was amazed by the life that she had lived and completely enraptured by her narrative.

When the reality of Partition became apparent to Vasantlata’s family, her dad decided that her family would all move to India. This was some time before the peak violence of Partition in the late summer and fall of 1947. Even still, she remembers the terror she felt during the journey to India. Her father stayed back in Pakistan to work but sent Vasantlata, her mother, sisters, and servants on the train. A family friend had helped them get train tickets. The windows had been blacked out so no one could see outside, but they could still hear screaming from rioters and looters. In the environment of uncertainty, there was a pervasive fear of a potential attack from Muslim men. Vasantlata remembers that she felt fear and trauma and could not communicate with others about

Partition.

Vasantlata had planned to return to Pakistan one month after leaving so she could complete her college exams. She and others had not realized that returning home was nearly an impossible feat at this point. Eventually, she realized it would not be possible for her to complete her education because her required that she finish her education in the same university where she started. Shortly after this, she moved to the then-small town of Kumta, got married, and had three daughters. She described Kumta as

“backwards” because women generally did not have much freedom outside of their marriages and did not go out in public alone. 56

After being widowed fairly early in life, Vasantlata decided she could not spend her life lacking in social status and freedom because she did not have a husband. She started a women’s social club to play badminton and sports, cook together, and do other activities so women could get to know each other in a comfortable space outside of the home. Through this club, Vasantlata expanded her social network and decided to for public . The women from her club were able to help her canvass and mobilize more support for her with their husbands and fathers. Vasantlata became one of the first female

MLAs (Member of Legislative Assembly) in India. Her Partition life experiences influenced her greatly because she lost her access to education during Partition and she believed that encouraging other women to be independent and being politically active herself would lead to positive changes in society.

Vasantlata’s extensive legislative work drastically changed employment and education access for women and girls in her community. She supported and passed a wide variety of laws, including raising the minimum marriage age to eighteen for women, enforcing mandatory schooling for girls until at least the eighth grade, developing curriculum for vocational training, and developing city infrastructure. She focused on increasing formal employment opportunities for women, but she also promoted what she called a cottage industry, business opportunities for women to sell pickles, papadums, and other foods from their homes.

This interview was the one that granted me a glimpse of the kinds of stories I hoped to hear. Vasantlata lived through major tragedy with Partition and she used her losses to make a political and cultural difference in her own community. I was struck by hearing how influential support from other women was in her life. She insisted that she 57 would not have been able to make the political changes she did if it were not for younger women convincing their fathers that things needed to change culturally for any kind of progress to occur. In addition, Vasantlata shared that her mother-in-law went to jail fighting for India’s independence and she encouraged Vasantlata to be politically engaged and unafraid of change.

Vasantlata did not dwell on the difficulties and tragedies of her life, even though surviving Partition and being widowed at a young age in India are significant challenges.

Her story shows true themes of resilience, which is a theme that came up over and over again in these interviews. In relation with my other interviews, I consider how resilience might be a gendered trait expected more of women. Earlier, I referred to the idea that women’s Partition stories tend to be more about linking their labor to building new lives. and men’s Partition stories normally focus on the more public dynamics of life, emphasizing work and politics outside the home (Chawla, 2014, p. 172). I wonder if this suggests that men’s resilience is framed as having more to do with and public success and the conversation around female resilience tends to be based in hardship and rebuilding communities and preserving the family.

Sita

Sita’s Partition narrative was probably the most aligned with the traditional conversation of Punjabi Indians who left behind their home and history in Pakistan. My mom sat in on this interview with me and Sita often addressed her more than me. When she was telling her story, I almost felt like she was not telling it for any audience and she was remembering it for herself. She once made a comment about how I could see in her eyes that she was remembering and reliving the circumstances she had survived and I had 58 really felt that. She would occasionally slip into Hindi for a few words to a few sentences at a time. Sita was one of my few Punjabi interviewees. In , there are vast communities of who lived through Partition and hold on to that legacy within their families and share their oral histories to preserve those memories. Living in South

India, I wonder if she feels like she does not have a community of people who can empathize with what she survived. I have heard from many relatives who lived in South

India during Partition that they had no real knowledge of the tragedy that was unfolding hundreds of miles to the north.

Sita was a young medical student in Pakistan when Partition violence was at its worst. She described the horrific violence she witnessed as “inhuman, animalistic” and said those participating in the violence were “feverish in the head.” She and her grandmother eventually boarded a bus to take them across the border into India. The majority of roads were blocked by the army, so they often had to get out and push the bus through water and ride through fields. Like many other refugees, they had almost no possessions beyond the clothes on their backs. Sita remembered how a family member took care of her and many other refugees as they traveled across the border, giving them basic food and a place to sleep.

In India, she enrolled in medical school and finished her medical degree. She faced a variety of challenges, including not having enough money for food or books. Sita eventually finished school and became a doctor in a before later moving to

Bangalore and opening her own hospital. Even at ninety years old, she is still a passionate medical care provider, telling me “I was put on this Earth by God to do this work.” She has delivered babies, done prenatal care, and provided abortions for decades. She does 59 not linger on a sense of spirituality or religion much, but she also said of Partition, “If there can be a hell, I have tasted it,” and that the “internal godliness [of humans] had been killed,” during Partition. She added, “What happened to the godliness inside us? We’re supposed to have some kind of spirituality. We’re born with it or something like that, but

I didn’t see it. It had been killed. That spirituality spot was not there anywhere.”

Sita did not forget the cruelties she saw during Partition and how hard life was for her after she began her life in India. I noticed that she expressed more anger to the

Muslim soldiers she remembered than other women I interviewed. Several of my other interviewees made comments about how Indians and are not so different from each other and that neither Hindus nor Muslims should be blamed for Partition. Sita did not assign blame to anyone, but after the violence she witnessed and lived through, she did not see any humanity in the Muslim soldiers she remembers from Lahore. She described how inhumanely she saw Muslim soldiers kill Hindus and how Muslims would kidnap young Hindu women to procreate. She remarked, “Their idea is to get more women to produce more Muslim kids because they think the strength of the vision is in numbers. If you see the biology, which species have survived? The ones who are very fertile. The ants have survived. Ants have survived millions of years. Why? Because they produce profusely. So if they produce more kids, their chances of survival are better than those races that do not produce.”

I felt uneasy hearing Sita describe the motives of Muslims as animalistic, comparing them to ants reproducing to survive. At the same time, I understood that she would not feel warmly to those she saw committing terrible violence. However, I do not think this animosity translated to her patients. I sat in her medical practice waiting room 60 for several hours and I saw many Muslim women in that time. I know that Sita feels dedicated to supporting the needs of women and has served thousands of low-income women with gynecological and reproductive healthcare over decades in India.

Like Vasantlata, Sita demonstrated resilience in her desire to work and serve others. For Sita, her resilience and her ability to push through tragedy seemed to come from within and stem from the belief in the work she was doing to help other women. She referred to spirituality and God twice in our interview, first commenting on the godliness and spirituality that was killed in people during Partition. Her other mention of spirituality was: “You can’t give unless God wills it. You can’t do anything. I was born to do that. That is what I was sent to this planet for, to look after women who are being so badly treated. The mortality rate was so high for childbearing. They were paying with their lives for producing children.” Despite the violence and poverty she endured in her life during Partition, her focus was on looking forward and doing everything she could to protect women and ensure they would have healthy pregnancies and deliveries or the ability to terminate their pregnancies if they chose.

Pushpa

Pushpa’s interview was one that meant a lot to me. She is the younger sister of my paternal grandmother, Sarla. My grandmother left what became Pakistan for India a few years before Partition to get married. Then in 1947, the whole family was forced to flee when Partition happened. When Pushpa was visiting her daughter in Delaware when I was a child, I remember sitting in the kitchen and listening to her talk about her Partition memories. I do not remember the specifics of what she shared, but I think the threads of my thesis project must have started at this time. I did not know that my family had 61 survived this type of tragedy and migration nor that I was technically a quarter Pakistani.

As I began seriously working on this project and writing my proposal, I often though of

Pushpa and the types of oral histories I knew it would be important to collect. I knew it was very important to me to give my interviewees the space to narrate their stories as they wanted and to do their stories justice in my thesis.

Pushpa was a young when Partition happened. She fondly remembered her home in Pakistan, with her large family, the open space, their dogs, and even their hen.

She recalled that leaving their home felt extremely sudden and they left the majority of their possessions behind and left all the doors open. To me, the mental image of this felt like leaving a life on pause. It seemed like a very undramatic way to leave behind a home that had carried life and so many memories for years. When I asked what the hardest part of Partition was for her personally, Pushpa shared that leaving her home so suddenly without any of her possessions was the hardest part, saying, “We left with not even so much as a token of our home.” She and her family were told they could carry nothing with them except the clothes on their backs. Her mother had dozens of beautiful, ornate sarees she would have to leave behind. To carry some of these with them, her mother wrapped herself and each of her daughters with two or three sarees each, so they would at least be able to carry some elegant from their home.

Pushpa did not have anything negative to say about Muslims she encountered on her Partition journey. Her father worked for the Indian railways and had many employees. She recalled that about twenty of her father’s staff came to in

Pakistan to help her family transport what they had. She was my only interviewee who was overtly positive toward Prime Minister Modi, though. I asked her about changes in 62 her community following Partition and she said that life was generally good and that people had personal freedoms and especially . She said the main problem was poverty but the government now has more facilities for minorities than before. She reflected, “Now Prime Minister Modi is doing a lot for the poor. Hopefully in another few years it will be better. He’s trying to do his best for the country. Lot of facilities for the minorities. Our culture isn’t like America for the everyone, but I think we’re now trying for minorities.” I was startled to realize that she looked at the U.S. as a paragon for how minorities should be treated in a heterogeneous society. I do not know whether these thoughts of hers reflect an optimistic, long-standing hope that India is a country where many peoples and religions peacefully coexist and people celebrate one another’s holidays and traditions happily, or if Pushpa believes in and supports the political messaging of the BJP and Modi.

I saw the theme of the belief in the innate goodness of people and interpersonal kindness come out several times in Pushpa’s story. When I asked her how Partition shaped her life experiences, she responded “…Because I was a child and it was a very difficult time…it left a big impression on our minds. But somehow, because some people were very kind there are good memories too of the people who helped us along the way.

Without the good people who helped us, we would have been killed.” She also referred to hearing about young women and girls who faced terrible violence, including being thrown down wells.

Like some of my other interviewees, Pushpa repeatedly minimized her own

Partition experiences, saying that she was very young and did not suffer the way others did. I wonder how much of this is a cultural sense of humility and not centering herself in 63 the Partition narrative. I also want to resist this seemingly ever-present idea that suffering related to Partition is not real or valid if someone did not experience severe violence themselves. Pushpa told me about a family member whose whole family was “chopped up” by Muslim soldiers and referred to that event as “very sad,” in a very matter-of-fact way.

It is undoubtedly true that some people experienced more severe violence during

Partition than others. However, it seems to me that the discussion of Partition violence is based around rape, killing, and physical assault. There is less of a conversation about

Partition as a last act of colonial violence from the people I interviewed. I actually think it’s very important to discuss how artificially imposing a border and dividing communities and forcing people to declare loyalty to one state is violent, too.

Harvinder

Harvinder’s interview was challenging in some ways because I did not personally know her prior to our interview and I did not have a sense of whether discussing Partition would be difficult for her or not. She was a family friend of some of my dad’s family members and they came with me for this interview, as did my mom. Harvinder was one of my Sikh interviewees and I got the sense of how proud she was of her heritage and identity. She reflected often on the losses her family had faced when they left Pakistan, especially their big house and overall economic wealth. When she shared the most difficult memories of her life during and after Partition, she would often slip into Hindi for many sentences at a time. Some of my interviewees would do this, but Harvinder did it for many more sentences and phrases at a time. Whenever this happened, my mom would often prompt her by repeating the phrase with the inflection of a question, but in 64

English. I’m sure that this was to help me understand what was happening in the narrative because there were certain times I did not know due to the language barrier. Harvinder more often directed her responses to questions to my mother than she did to me. This was not entirely unusual in my interview experiences, but it definitely made me thankful that my mom was there. Through these weeks of interview work and data collection, it was helpful to have my mom around for certain interviews because I felt she had an authority that I did not, as someone who spent the first thirty years of her life in India. Even though her own family did not live through Partition, she grew up in the decades immediately following Partition and my interviewees might have felt that she understood the cultural impact in a way I did not. In some ways, my mom lent an authority to the interview process that helped build trust and comfort that might not have existed if it were just me in the room.

Harvinder was nine years old when her family left Pakistan for India. She repeatedly said that she had clear memories of specific moments because it was at an

“impressionistic age” for her. I have no doubt that this is true, but I also think experiencing the trauma of loss and loss of financial security probably shaped how she remembers Partition. She shared that her grandparents were wealthy Sardars and leaders of their Sikh community in Pakistan and other community members told them they should not leave because it would cause panic among everyone else in the town. But then, people warned her family that Muslims in the area were looking for people to kill and that her grandfather would be a target as a community leader. Her family’s home was made into a refugee camp because it was such a large house. She remembers that people were lighting other homes on fire in her area and her family thought, “This burning is 65 going on but it will subside after some time.” However, fires continued and someone was shot and killed inside her home, which scared the children and prompted her family to decide to leave. She said they knew there would be a government exchange of sorts, but added “We never knew we were never to come here again. We never realized they were going to chuck us out.”

Violence and fear influenced key memories of Harvinder’s recollections of

Partition. She said that her family had to leave their cars behind because they heard rumors that refugees were being killed and their cars stolen on the path to . She did not share any explicitly negative sentiments toward Muslims, but did say that she thinks “those people [Muslims] knew [that Partition was going to happen] but Hindus and

Sikhs didn’t know.” She also remembered that Hindus and Sikhs were being widely killed in Srinagar and Muslims were being killed in , acknowledging violence from multiple groups. On the way to Srinagar, she and her family members carried nothing but a few items of clothing. She went to Srinagar with her mother, sisters, and grandparents, but her father and uncles stayed behind to allow other families to travel together. Then, her father went to go see Gandhi and Nehru speak somewhere and her father somehow managed to talk to Gandhi and Gandhi told Nehru to arrange for

Harvinder’s family to be reunited and have a place to stay. Her family stayed in the arranged bungalow for some time but left after a while because her father said it did not belong to them and they needed to move on.

Harvinder also spoke about the fear her family felt and the resentment from neighbors that she remembers her family feeling once they had settled in their new city.

She said, “We were refugees and we had come from Delhi after so long and other people 66 didn’t like it.” Her mother and grandparents had managed to carry some jewelry with them and sold it to be able to open an oil and saw mill. Her parents had built a home by the mill and they felt that they had finally managed to rebuild their lives there. However, one night when her parents were at a movie, someone set the mill on fire and they lost the entire business. Harvinder shared the majority of this story in Hindi, and I could tell that even nearly seventy years later, it was still very upsetting for her to remember. She once again repeated the phrase, “I remember this because it was a very impressionistic age.”

The mill kept burning for a long time after the fire began and Harvinder quietly said, “We suffered a lot. Too much.” It seemed like her family came from a place of economic wealth and educational privilege because she shared that her father used to practice law and began practicing again after the fire.

When I asked Harvinder what changed the most for her after Partition, she again referred to her family’s very large house and said when her family lived in Pakistan, her parents would not allow her to go see her family or neighbors alone and a servant had to accompany her everywhere. She also said that what she missed the most after leaving home were her dolls. She clearly felt pride in her family’s status and leadership, sharing that her home prior to Partition was a meeting place for Indians in the freedom struggle and that important people were always coming in and out of the house. She referred often to the size of her former home and the number of servants her family had.

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Chapter Six: Themes from Oral Histories—Resilience, Interpersonal Kindness, and

Education

Resilience:

During and after Partition, Indian women faced violence and hardship through both colonial British and Indian patriarchal structures. Rebuilding homes and communities and supporting families in a new community across the border in India presented unique challenges to the women of India. However, all my interviewees demonstrated the shared characteristic of resilience. “Resilience has been defined as an individual trait that helps an individual to function well despite exposure to considerable adversity (Block & Block 1980), and also as a dynamic developmental process reflecting evidence of positive adaptation despite significant life adversity (Sleijpen, 2016, p. 159).

Resilience is significant in the case of Partition refugees, but it can be limiting to use western measurements of resiliency in the lives of . However, the use of qualitative research methods can examine sources of resilience for this project’s interviewees, without attempting to make sweeping statements on the meaning of resiliency in Indian culture.

My interviewee Sita faced and overcame a wide variety of obstacles in order to establish herself as a doctor in India and continue to practice throughout her life. In Pakistan, she was a 20-year-old medical student who intended to graduate from her medical college in Lahore and continue practicing medicine there. Instead, Partition disrupted her education and she never returned to Lahore. Through a grueling journey of months, she and her grandmother traveled across to India by walking and taking a bus that was unable to travel on roads due to of the streets. Once in India, 68 isolated from any family members, Sita continued her medical studies in .

Without the financial support of her parents, she was unable to afford her books and meals. Eventually, networks of women who found out about her hardships helped support her with small monthly loans. She shared with me that she survived her hardships during school and those of the years after because she felt she was put on this Earth to provide reproductive healthcare for low income women. Sita went on to open the first department of gynecology in a Catholic hospital in , India in the 1950s. Her resilience appeared to come from within and she was driven by her desire to help other women.

Another one of my interviewees, Vasantlata, also found her resilience in a desire to help women. She was in her early twenties when her family left Pakistan for India during Partition. She had intended to return to Pakistan one month after leaving in order to finish her end-of-year school exams, not realizing that she would not be able to return again. Vasantlata was unable to complete her formal education due to Partition. She remembers the trains she took into India and the violence and yelling she could hear outside. Open arrival in India, she found it difficult to communicate with others what she had heard because the violence and sudden uprooting left her feeling traumatized.

Partition also led to her own personal uprooting. Once she was in India, her parents and sisters moved to and she moved to a small city, Kumta, to get married. She had three daughters, but was widowed at a young age.

In Kumta, Vasantlata felt that women were not empowered because it was not socially permissible for women to go out in public without their husbands. She utilized social and family networks in order to gain positive publicity and enable her to run for public office. This was groundbreaking for the 1950s in semi-rural India. She formed a 69 social club where women could play badminton and other sports, cook together, and socialize outside their homes. By creating social bonds in this setting, she gained support to run for office and a group of loyal friends who were willing to canvass for her and talk to their family members about why her candidacy meant a positive change for male- dominated politics.

Vasantlata was eventually elected to her state legislature in 1957, a decade after

Partition. The disruption of her formal education by Partition proved to be significant in the types of legislation she enacted during her ten years in the state legislature. She expanded educational access for children, pushed for laws to make marriage illegal unless both parties were eighteen years or older, developed standardized school curriculum, created a law requiring that girls must attend school until the eighth grade or later and take high school exams, and implemented vocational training to enable women to gain employment as nurses and social workers. Vasantlata shared that she cared deeply about legislation that would improve the lives of women and children because she felt she had lost some opportunities when Partition cut her university education . She also expressed that other women in her life influenced her political ambitions. Notably, her mother-in-law protested for Indian independence and spent time in jail. She encouraged

Vasantlata to fight for the freedoms of other women, which was a major reason she decided to have a political career.

Resilience can be described as both a process and as an outcome. As a theme, resilience is often interdisciplinary. In political science, resilience tends to be based in issues related to the economy, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. These issues are undoubtedly important to resilience, but focusing on these instances tends to remove the 70 emotional and interpersonal experiences related to trauma. Resilience as it relates to human experiences and emotions is central to this research project. A recent area of development in resilience in political science has been urban resilience, which is usually connected to extreme events, such as terrorist attacks. Prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, urban resilience was usually seen as product of natural and constructed infrastructure of a city. Since then, urban resilience has more often been related to human communities as well (Brajawidagda, 2017, p. 162). The different approaches researchers have to resilience are often shaped by the types of trauma that relate to resilience.

Goodman (2017) suggests that understanding that trauma as complex and often intergenerational can help researchers better understand resilience (310). Furthermore, the authors argue that examining trauma through single instances tends to discount complex experiences of trauma that are socially created by human issues, including poverty, discrimination, and social or cultural conditions (p. 310). Mass migration and loss of home should certainly be examined as a complex and layered trauma experience.

The authors claim that resilience can be a response to traumatic experiences. It is defined as “an ordinary process and basic human adaptation to circumstances that occur in one’s life. It is dynamic in nature, is not an either-or status, and is influenced by one’s culture and context” (310). The authors examined trauma and resilience in undocumented immigrant and refugee women in the United States in the twenty-first century. The three types of trauma found by the authors through their research were socio-political trauma, status-based trauma, and postmigration trauma (312). In the case of my own research work, both socio-political and postmigration trauma would both apply to my interviewees. 71

The researchers in the refugee study found several forms of coping and resilience with their own research participants. The first form was external processes. There were external supports such as access to resources, which were influenced by factors including geographic location, family circumstances, and social networks. In addition, social support and interpersonal relationships were key to the development of resilience for refugee and undocumented women. If women were able to make friends with other refugees or develop bonds with others who shared a language or national origin, they reported stronger feelings of resilience. The second form of coping and resilience was internal processes. Women’s beliefs, thoughts, and methods of reframing the trauma they had lived through shaped these internal processes. Internal processes were particularly important for women who did not have sufficient external processes of support. For both

Vasantlata and Sita, internal processes of resilience were central to their career success in

India post-Partition. However, Vasantlata also used external processes, especially social networks, to foster her resilience and success.

Interpersonal Kindness and Sense of Community:

The majority of my interviewees reported instances of kindness and support from other people when Partition happened. They shared stories of people offering them housing, giving them food, helping with transportation, and giving them clothing. In some cases, those who offered the help were Muslim. Especially in these situations, the people offering to help had nothing to gain by doing so. In fact, they may have been seen as disloyal by the Pakistani military or government and been punished in some way. One of my interviewees discussed how she felt that Partition stripped away peoples’ humanity and took away the internal godliness that she believes all people have. However, she and 72 others said that the acts of kindness and support showed to them by others allowed them to keep some faith in humanity. I was inspired and somewhat hopeful to think that in moments of tragedy such as Partition, there are people who see the suffering and fear of others and choose to help them, even when it is not convenient or easy.

The theme of interpersonal kindness also influences a sense of community. Prior to Partition, many of my interviewees and others who lived through this ’s history recall their immediate communities in pre-independence India. They remember going to the homes of their Muslim neighbors, celebrating holidays together, and appreciating one another’s hospitality. Despite the contemporary political rhetoric of rightwing nationalist leaders in India, perhaps Partition did not totally strip away a sense of community. Bonds of shared humanity and kindness prompted people to share what they could and help others. More than one of my interviewees expressed that they do not know if they would have survived without the help they received, which in some cases, was from strangers.

The Importance of Education and Work:

Many of the women I interviewed were fortunate in their life circumstances as young girls and women. Most of them were from urban areas, they all had access to primary and secondary education, and lived in families where their education access was both financially and personally supported. However, losses related to Partition shaped how many of them saw their opportunities and access to education and employment.

In particular, Vasantlata expressed sadness over the loss of education she experienced because of Partition. She was supposed to finish her college exams in

Pakistan and was unable to do so. She had expected that Partition would not be 73 permanent and that she would be able to return, take her exams, and graduate. She could not do this and she was not accepted at any universities in India because most schools required that students take the exams of the school in which they were enrolled at the time. Her inability to complete her formal education reshaped her life and her opportunities, but this caused her to strive to make education and employment more accessible to other girls and women, strengthening their respective communities.

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Chapter Seven: Conclusion

Partition should not be classified as just a part of India’s past. In India and in

South Asian diasporic communities, people who are alive today are among those who have been directly affected by Partition. For many, Partition is a wound from which India has not yet healed. This has been especially visible in certain moments in recent years, including the public response to the 2013 Google advertisement, “Reunion,” to which I have referred twice earlier in this thesis. I shared that the commercial prompted me to learn more about my family’s past and how the video was well-received around the world, going viral on the internet. However, the advertisement also meant something to many Indians around the world on a far broader scale. They saw themselves and their own families in the stories represented in the video. They saw the heart-wrenching stories of two boys being ripped apart from each other, almost overnight, without any explanation. They had been neighbors and not felt so different from one another. These differences had not seemed significant enough to cause them to lose touch with each other for decades, but that was the reality of what had happened to them.

Because the importance of oral narratives has been absent from Partition histories until more recently, people of older in India might have felt a connection with seeing the two men in the video suffering in silence without being able to explain the type of emotional losses they had felt as young children. The commercial also affected younger generations, prompting younger people to learn more about what

Partition had meant for their grandparents and for other older generations.

The timing of the commercial’s release is interesting when we consider India’s political climate over the last few years. The commercial premiered in fall 2013, roughly 75 six months before the Bharatiya Janata Party’s record-breaking wins in national politics in spring 2014. The BJP and other right-wing nationalist parties and groups have reified constructions of group identities and made it seem natural that people from different communities, especially religious communities, should be separated. Through the Google

India commercial, we see a representation that beliefs in separating people from different communities was not always the norm and that we have much to gain by supporting the coexistence and mutual support of diverse communities existing within the same space.

The truth is that the rhetoric of the BJP, RSS, and other rightwing and nationalist political parties and organizations is dangerous for both India’s minority communities and for women’s political engagement and participation in India. India’s Partition tells us a story about the dangers of identity politics that divides people along religious lines.

This division drives a wedge between “us” and “them” and precludes the possibility of a plural society. India’s leaders take great pride in describing the nation as a diverse one where many groups coexist together and celebrate one another’s existence. However, this claim does not hold up when national politics are defined by Hindu rightwing nationalism that prioritizes Hindu identity above all else.

This thesis offers a way to begin to understand and consider the connections of gendered experiences of Partition, Indian nationalism, and rightwing politics in India.

However, this is just the beginning. More research must be done to record and preserve women’s oral histories related to Partition. In addition, I hope there is a continued body of research on rightwing politics in India and what that means for women’s political participation. At the current stage, India’s rightwing politics creates further barriers to 76 women’s political, social, and economic equality in India and that grim reality will not change unless there is a strong shift in Indian politics.

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