India’s bloody partition in 1947 (into India, Pakistan and now Bangladesh) has been recorded in scholarly books. Mostly the emphasis is on history, politics and religious tensions. Eye witness personal accounts of partition victims, especially women, are few and far between. In her book, The Other Side of Silence, Indian author Urvashi Butalia was the first writer to systematically chronicle the fate of thousands of women who were killed or forced to commit suicide by their own families in honor killings so they would not be abducted by the other side. The excellent movie Silent Waters tells the story of a Sikh girl who when faced with the terrifying prospect of forced suicide, chose to escape and survived in the newly created nation of Pakistan as a Muslim. A late day attempt is now under way in India to examine and record the personal stories of the rapidly aging survivors of the Indian partition who are breaking their silence about a horrific past.
NEW DELHI — Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.
At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.
"None of the women protested, nobody wept," Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. "All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book."
Although the political history of the 1947 partition has featured prominently in Indian classrooms, personal stories such as Singh’s have gone unrecorded. Hundreds of thousands of Indians have remained trapped in their private pain, many ashamed of the acts they committed, others simply wary of confronting ghosts from so long ago.
Now, however, the aging survivors of partition are beginning to talk, and historians and psychologists are increasingly acknowledging the need to study the human dimensions of one of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century.
About 1,300 survivors of partition, including Singh, have been interviewed as part of an ambitious, 10-year research project that examines the experiences of people across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And since late last year, a number of new books, research papers and cultural events have attempted to lift the shroud of silence surrounding partition.
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “On The Other Side of Silence: What Happened to the Women?”
Past some border towns of Punjab state, no one in India cares about the “partition” (which is not really partition but rather nation-building, the same thing that was accompanied in Europe by centuries of bloody warfare, revolutions, world wars etc). In today’s secular India, history books gloss over the subject & tend to blame the British for deviously pitting communities against each other. I doubt that there is much of line, anxiously waiting for the “shroud of silence” to be lifted.
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Burying dark deeds in lost memories may be some people’s idea of moving forward, but history will remain whatever it is, and attempts to preserve the full stories of the past for a future generation should always be commended, even if the truth isn’t always palatable and vain-glorious. It shouldn’t be turned into a cottage industry to perpetuate hate, and therein lies the rub. I doubt that these attempts to capture memories from a passing generation will reawaken old animosities, given how far removed the current generation is from those events.
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very interesting blog.
am a new blogger. my friend pareltank recommended this blog.
highly highly readable
congratulations
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