Menon and Bhasin and Butalia are each the editor, coeditor, or author of several other books on women, gender, and religious-political conflict. The three authors are committed feminist scholars and activists. Both books reinterrogate partition, the exchange of populations, and the violence that accompanied it (as Hindus were displaced from Pakistani territory to India, and Muslims fr om India to Pakistan), from the standpoint of subaltern survivors' personal narratives, which the authors sporadically juxtapose with newspaper accounts and their own meticulous deconstructions of official documents, parliamentary debates, and state practices. Both books place at the center otherwise silenced subaltern subjectivities: women but also (in the case of Butalia) children and Dalits ("oppressed" those whom the British called "untouchable" and Mahatma Gandhi called "Harijan" ). Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin's Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition and Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India provide radically alternative understandings of partition, with vital implications for current conflicts and peace. Today, partition continues to be deployed by various constituencies as a trope for constructions of Hindu-Muslim conflict in the subcontinent: to provoke revenge, or for reconciliation and peace. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 has long been a subject of contentious debates among scholars of South Asia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |