rehearsing the partition: gendered violence in Aur Kitne Tukde
- PDF / 144,680 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 536 x 697 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 171 Views
abstract This article argues that the specifically sexual nature of the political violence of the 1947 Partition of British India installs women’s bodies as unambiguously sexed and ethnic. Through an analysis of Kirti Jain’s 2001 theatre production of Aur Kitne Tukde (How Many Fragments?), I consider how Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs appropriate colonialist and nationalist ideologies surrounding the notion of ‘woman’ as repository of cultural value. The women in Jain’s play are not a priori subjects who experience violence but rather the experience of violence makes (and unmakes) them as gendered, ethnic and national subjects. I argue that they come into subjecthood after a violent objectification and are re-constituted by their experience of national and sexual violence. The performance of nationalism – through embodied acts of sexual violence, conversion, martyrdom and state violence – is enacted upon female bodies that are transformed into political artefacts. I ask how bodies are staged and commodified by acts of political violence and argue that marking female bodies through acts of political violence constitutes a mode of transcription to communicate with other men that will encounter this body.
keywords partition; gender; violence; theatre; religion; South Asia
feminist review 84 2006 c 2006 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/06 $30 www.feminist-review.com (29–47)
29
When British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan in 1947, the violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs was enacted upon the bodies of the women of all three communities. Official numbers of abducted women during Partition are 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan.1 The multiple forms of sexual violence included inscribing tattoos on their bodies, parading them naked in sacred spaces like temples, mosques, gurudwaras and cutting their breasts off. Sometimes families traded their women in exchange of freedom, at other times women were urged to take their own lives in order to protect communal ‘honour.’ Many women simply disappeared. The symbolic elevation of ‘woman’ as the embodiment of the sanctified, inner recesses of culture and tradition ironically positioned real women as targets of violent assertions of family, community and nation. Kirti Jain’s Aur Kitne Tukde (How Many Fragments?) intervenes into existing accounts of gendered violence that narrate the ways in which the Partition radically altered the lives of numerous women.2 The play premiered at the National School of Drama in New Delhi on 29 March 2001 and was written by B. Gauri and conceived and directed by Kirti Jain.3 Aur Kitne Tukde was subsequently performed in several cities including Mumbai in 2001, Chandigarh in 2001 and Lahore in 2005. It was also staged at the Asian Women Directors Theatre Festival in New Delhi in 2003, alongside two feminist productions, Maya Rao’s A Deeper Fried Jam and Anuradha Kapur’s Antigone Project. In conjunction with these feminist performances that condemn the recent pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat, Aur Ki
Data Loading...
