The Female Face of Shame

13. Shamed Bodies: Partition Violence and Women

197 Shamed Bodies Partition Violence and Women Namrata Mitra Speaking to ethnographic researchers about fifty years after the partition of British India in 1947, Durga Rani says that during partition violence several Hindu families in the villages of Head Junu had anticipated attacks against their kinswomen by Muslim men. Accordingly, they took a series of measures: many killed their daughters by burying them alive while others encouraged them to electrocute themselves. Soon after, the villages were attacked and many young girls were abducted, gang-raped, and then abandoned. When these girls tried to return home, they found that their families rejected them; some parents encouraged their daughters to kill themselves, while others mourned “their fate” (Menon and Bhasin, 33). Durga Rani’s testimonial reveals how women were not only vulnerable to men of other communities but also to men and women of their own families and community. During partition, sexual violence against women of “other” communities (aimed to humiliate them), and preemptive attacks against one’s kinswomen (to safeguard family and community honor) became one of the predominant forms of violence. The ideal of honor conflated with the ideal of one’s kinswomen’s sexual purity was clearly valued more highly than the lives of women (and men) themselves. Veena Das, Sangeeta Ray, and Jill Didur have shown how the nationalistic investment in the images and conduct of upper-class Hindu and Muslim women framed the ways in which violence against women was represented in partition literature. Drawing on the implications of those arguments, this chapter explores how literary representations of widespread sexual violence and bodily mutilation of women during partition are frequently constructed through concepts of honor, shame, and national identity. In novels such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and short story collections such as An Epic Unwritten by Muhammad Umar Menon, which are set during partition, the perpetrators of violence frequently justify their actions in terms of “honor” and “shame.” Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to address the following questions: First, what is the relation between the rape/mutilation of women’s bodies 13 198 | Namrata Mitra and the “shame” brought to the family, community, and nation? Second, to what extent has it been possible for survivors of sexual violence to resist the “shame” as the necessary consequence of their assault? Finally, in what ways do post-partition narratives of justice or reconciliation efforts reiterate or trouble this particular gender-based concept of shame? The first section of this chapter sets up a dialogue among contemporary theories on shame and its purported role in regulating individual behavior and social values. The second section is a close reading of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (Indian edition ), renamed Cracking India (U.S. edition), which aims to analyze the link between a perpetrator’s attempts to humiliate someone and the shame experienced by the survivor . In this context it is necessary to explore the extent to which a survivor of public humiliation is able to resist the instruments of her public shaming. The third section is a dialogue between two Western feminist proposals on how to end practices in which unprivileged identity groups are routinely shamed by privileged identity groups, which are then examined in the context of violence in South Asia. Making a Distinction between Shame and Humiliation Nearly all the contemporary approaches to the study of shame by political philosophers , cultural theorists, and psychologists make a distinction between the experience of shame in infancy (when one’s parents define one’s social sphere and institute taboos ), and the experience of shame in adulthood, which is shaped by social institutions and norms. I will be focusing on the latter. Moreover, since social norms themselves are subject to change, the types of actions, claims, and identities that are considered to trigger shameful responses also change depending on their historical and cultural contexts. What triggers the feeling of shame? Moreover, what does that reveal about the individual and her social and political context? “If we feel shame, it is because we have failed to approximate ‘an ideal’ that has been given to us through the practices of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 106). Such ideals are partly shaped collectively, such as when members of a nation share ideals of either plurality or exclusivity of national membership on grounds of race or religious identity. Since one comes to share certain ideals, if one does something contrary to those ideals then one feels shame. In one’s shame, one is...