The Great Partition (27 page)

Of all the horrors of 1947, the experience of the women who were raped is the most difficult to write about. It is a history of broken bodies and broken lives. Rape was used as a weapon, as a sport and as a punishment. Armed gangs had started to use rape as a tool of violence in Bengal and Bihar in 1946 but this now took on a new ubiquity and savagery in Punjab. It sparked the deepest feelings of revenge, dishonour and shame. Many women were silent about what had happened to them: ‘in most households the woman said no, no, I was hiding in the jungle or I was hiding in the pond, or I was hiding in a neighbour's house,’ recalled Ashoka Gupta, a volunteer who worked with distraught women in the aftermath of attacks in Noakhali; ‘they will not declare, or they will not confess, that they have been raped or molested … because it will be a confession of shame, and once confessed there will be quite a possibility that they will not be taken back in their own homes.’
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Rape was the unspoken fear at the back of many minds by the summer of 1947. News had been circulating of the atrocities committed against women – indeed, these were the most powerful and graphic rumours reaching the villages. Women feared for themselves and their own bodies. Their brothers, fathers and husbands feared for the shame and honour of their family and the wider community. The women themselves now became mere shell-like repositories of the new national identities when attacks on them – or threat of attacks – were used to prise families from their homes, to punish, mark out and terrify. The voluntary and enforced suicides of women and the murder of relatives by shooting, poisoning or drowning was not uncommon as it was, in some cases, regarded as preferable to the life worse than death which, it was believed, was certain to follow after rape. Other families faced with the choice of life or death traded their young daughters in return for the safe transit of the rest of the family. A Sikh woman, Taran, told her story to the writers Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin:

One night suddenly we heard drums and our house was encircled. A mob gathered outside. I was 16, brimming with vitality. My two sisters were 17 and 14, and my mother was sick with worry. She trembled with fear. She took out all her gold, tied it up in handkerchiefs and distributed it among different family members for safekeeping. She made us wear several sets of clothes each, one on top of the other, shoes, socks everything and she asked us to hide the gold. We did not know where each of us would end up – this gold was our security. She kept crying and kept giving us instructions.
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Taran escaped. But many others in Punjab were snatched from their homes and villages by marauding gangs or literally carried away from the slow and under-protected
kafilas
that made their way on foot towards the border: ‘when we were travelling in a caravan we had some people who had guns, four or five guns among us … but women or children would trail behind, after all, travelling 150 miles some people would get tired, they never rejoined us so we believe somebody kidnapped them and took them away’. As another young woman at the time, Durga Rani, recalled, ‘The Muslims used to announce that they would take away our daughters. They would force their way into homes and pick up young girls and women. Ten or twenty of them would enter, tie up the men folk and take the women. We saw many who had been raped and disfigured, their faces and breasts scarred, and then abandoned. They had tooth-marks all over them. Their families said, “How can we keep them now? Better that they are dead.” Many of them were so young – 18, 15, 14 years old – what remained of them now? Their “character” was now spoilt.’
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As vessels of the honour of the whole community, the shame and horror fell on everybody associated with the girls: these were not individual tragedies.

Women's bodies were marked and branded with the slogans of freedom, ‘
Pakistan Zindabad
’ and ‘
Jai Hind
’, inscribed on their faces and breasts. Those who survived were often humiliated and grossly scarred. They had become symbols of terror. Even worse, many of these victims were not really ‘women’ at all. Girls under the age of twelve made up at least one third of the women recovered in the state-sponsored recovery operation that followed. The rest of the women tended to be under the age of thirty-five and from villages. They were not then, most tellingly, members of the political classes who had fought for, or who had rejected, Partition. Instead they were victims of political debates that had, up until now, barely impinged on their lives. At the worst extreme women were traded on a flesh market, ‘in the same way that baskets of oranges or grapes are sold or gifted’, in the words of Kamlaben Patel, an Indian social worker who was stationed in Lahore as part of the recovery operation for five years after 1947 and saw the bleak and complex aftermath of these attacks and abductions.
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Policemen and soldiers, as well as men of their own community, sometimes colluded.

After their ordeals, the women suffered the fears of unwanted pregnancies, tried to induce miscarriages or sought out illegal abortions. But above all, many women feared that their families or husbands would not be able to accept them or welcome them again. These fears were not unfounded. The old taboos and rigid social customs of marriage and purity had been shattered. For those who had never been married there was the fear that they were ruined and now placed beyond the social pale. They believed that their families might be better able to rebuild their lives without them. Prostitution, life on the street or in a state-run home became the grim options if women were rejected by their families, and many preferred to convert or melt into the society of their abductor, becoming a new ‘wife’ or a family servant, rather than openly admitting the shame of rape. Ironically, the misogyny and patriarchal values that cut across North Indian society at the time meant that Indian and Pakistani men had much more in common in their attitudes and actions than they ever would have admitted. Women became, as Gandhi later described them, ‘the chief sufferers’ of 1947.

Rather than being raped and abandoned, tens of thousands of women were kept in the ‘other’ country, as permanent hostages, captives or forced wives; they became generically known simply as ‘the abducted women’. Official government figures spoke of 83,000 women kept back, taken away from their families, on both sides of the border.
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Why did men keep the women they had attacked? Some became servants, forced into unpaid labour, and converted and were assimilated into a new family; others replaced sisters and wives, who had themselves been taken away. Others became ‘wives’ and started a new life with their abductor or captor, with the full knowledge of others, who were complicit or who at least turned a blind eye to the new arrivals in the family. In all these different ways, the driving force was the impulse to consume, transform or eradicate the remnants of the other community.

These waves of killing were not neatly bound by the provincial boundaries of Punjab but spilled into other places. In present-day Rajasthan, in the states of Alwar and Bharatpur, as the historian Ian Copland has unflinchingly described, ethnic cleansing killed tens of thousands while the mass killing in Jammu and Kashmir in 1947–8, which is usually forgotten or incorporated into the history of Kashmiri wars, shared far more characteristics with other Partition slaughters. The princely rulers of the states of Bharatpur and Alwar complied with targeted violence against the ethnic Muslim group, the Meos, who formed large minorities in their royal fiefdoms. Perhaps 30,000 Muslims were killed in these areas and 100,000 were forced to flee.
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The princes used their state forces to kill the Meos or to run them out of the region.
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There were stories of state police escorts killing Meos as they left the state, and the Maharaja of Bharatpur's younger brother was even reported to have boasted of how he had led an attack from his jeep and had used his sporting rifle on fleeing Meos.
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The methodical attempt to wipe out whole populations depended on a well-prepared, trained, uniformed and efficient body of former soldiers, policemen and students who took the shame, honour and protection of their communities into their own hands. Gangs armed with machine-guns in jeeps were able to inflict far more harm in one or two hours than villagers using
lathis
and pitchforks, were less alarmed by military patrols, on which they even launched unprovoked attacks, and could cover large distances. Communities gave succour and support to these militias in return for protection. To take just one example, B.L. Dutt, a government employee living in the suburbs of Lahore recalled providing a safe house for RSS meetings in the midst of the riots and hid killers in his home in the aftermath of an attack on part of the city: ‘in my own house I had lodged two men … RSS men, who had attacked the Muslims and whatnot … they remained two or three days; … government servants' houses were not searched at all’.
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The perpetrators were cushioned by sympathisers who fed or housed them in return for protection or even paid out blood money.

Neighbours sometimes looked the other way or gave tacit support from the sidelines. One of the nastiest and least discussed features of Partition was the active or passive social connivance in Punjab which radiated out beyond the province. During Partition social complicity was routine, even when those involved absolved themselves of blame and passed the responsibility for violence on to madmen, thugs and strangers. Although the timetables were supposed to be secret, it was common knowledge when trains specially arranged for refugees would run because the information was leaked by office staff, enabling the organisation of attacks along the route long before the trains had reached their destinations. On one occasion the confidential departure time of a train carrying refugees into Pakistan was even broadcast on All India Radio. Similarly, on goods trains the parcels of items belonging to refugees were selectively ransacked, suggesting that detailed information about the cargo had been passed on. Elsewhere slogans, marks on doors, census information and graffiti were employed in order to isolate and select victims. Staff on the railways were busily hoisting the new national flags on the railway stations and painting the engines with patriotic slogans. After another outrage when train passengers were robbed and slaughtered outside Macleodganj, ‘the complicity of the railway staff in the outrage was quite manifest’.
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Committed nationalists could become complicit killers.

Sometimes this complicity was motivated by fear or by the pack mentality that emerges at times of acute danger. During one attack on the Upper India Express train, when seventy or more people were killed just outside the pottery-making town of Khurja, the stationmaster refused to assist the investigating officer, denied that he would recognise any of the assailants, and said that he had been warned to stay in his office on pain of death. On a different occasion, when a man was stabbed and thrown out of a moving train, despite an immediate carriage-to-carriage search, ‘Not a soul in the train admitted to have seen anything [sic], or heard anything.’
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Sometimes passengers directly defended the culprits. One train at Hapur was held up for nearly four hours while passengers protested about the arrest of some murder suspects and elsewhere desperately thirsty refugees found that the water taps on stations had been cut off.
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The social status of those who looked the other way, or who tacitly sanctioned Partition violence, varied from prince to peasant, although the very poorest or the lowest castes rarely seem to have been the agitators. At one extreme, fabulously wealthy princes from states such as Bahawalpur, Patiala and Faridkot allowed the gangs to work freely on their lands, did precious little to disarm or suppress them and then suspiciously disappeared to summer capitals and on foreign vacations.
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At the other end of the scale, rations dealers were accused of copying their lists and helping rioters to identify the occupants of houses, and some housewives and urban craftsmen boycotted markets, ruining local traders and shopkeepers and forcing them to leave for India or Pakistan. Sometimes the joy of independence or freedom itself would spill over into euphoric bloodlust: ‘Hooligans looting in New Delhi yesterday … mob killed Muslims in shopping center while citizens hung out of windows and a sort of carnival spirit prevailed.’
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Expectations of justice plummeted. Magistrates and judges were not averse to siding with ‘their’ own community in the cases which were brought before them and acquittals were widespread on the rare occasions when Partition rioters were brought to book. Vallabhbhai Patel complained that the major problem in stemming an RSS revival after Gandhi's death in 1948 was the provincial High Courts’ acquittal of large numbers of RSS men: ‘In UP there have been several acquittals; in Bombay the acquittals have been of an almost wholesale nature and the Government has been asked to pay costs.’
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Of course, distinguishing real from imagined partiality was difficult as people lost faith in the system itself. In some cases the lack of prosecution gave rioters a sense of immunity to punishment. Frustrated and overstretched administrators or policemen were forced to release people who, in any other circumstances, they would have charged. The complete turmoil of the state made even the most meagre efforts at justice difficult but it was often well known exactly who the ringleaders were. It was difficult enough to prosecute in the first place, though, when jails were bursting at the seams. Disarming people became the next-best thing when it was impossible to put them behind bars.

The illiterate depended on others for news. In Punjab some entrepreneurial unemployed made a few rupees by cycling to the nearest town to harvest the latest stories about events and then selling them on. Rumours were not necessarily the innocent by-product of violence but played a part in creating it in the first place. Exaggeration and hyperbole paid: with limited protection from police and troops it was essential to grab the attention of the authorities, to bring help to a potential riot scene. Telegrams and appeals for help were necessarily couched in the most extreme language. But there were more calculated uses of propaganda in addition to spontaneous gossip and snatches of newsprint. This had already started in 1946, when, for instance, a delegation of Pathans from the frontier visited the cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad, inquiring into reported atrocities and carrying with them photographs of damaged mosques and half-burnt copies of the Qur'an.
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