Jyoti too is sickened by the act, unwilling to birth a bastard, “ The source of that blood is hate, not love … would it not run amok, driven by the intense desire of vengeance?” The violated female body the becomes a burden. The ritualised violation of another sexed body has seldom left women to be outcasts of the society, a figure of disgust that brings shame to the family. In the societal construct, rape has always been articulated to be the mistake of the woman, and has been an event that produced unprecedented shame for the woman. However, after the delivery, there is a sudden change of mind, motherhood overwhelms her, deciding against throwing the baby. Her condition puts her in contrary thoughts to keep the baby. Jyoti, the central character has been abducted and raped while crossing the newly laid borders, “from one jail to another?”, and has found herself in the refugee camps. Lalithambika Antharjanam writes a similar account of a pregnant rape survivor in her short story A Leaf in the Storm-the story describes abuse, survival and recovery. Those who were in an advanced state did not even have this choice for them the question of whether or not to abandon their babies must have been even more painful.”Īlso read: The Partition Of Punjab: A Tale Of Violation Of Women’s Rights Pregnant women were obviously more vulnerable than others and the decision whether to abort or carry their pregnancies to full term was an agonising one for all women, especially young ones who were going to be first time mothers. Ritu Menon in Borders and Boundaries says “ … the anticipation of just such a rejection by the very family and community that were to provide them support was one reason why many women resisted being recovered. The urge to document these narratives was brought forwards by writers like Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia and a few more. Their bodies became sites of violence, they were not only the witnesses but also treated as objects of exchange. The atrocities committed against women and their bodies have not been unknown but excluded. Though there are recorded histories of the partition, the trauma, and the sense of loss, yet there are rarely any narrative from the women’s perspective.

The communal violence was at a rise, people committed crimes to protect the honour of their own, violating humanity and legitimising revenge on the grounds of religion and ethnicity.

The demarcation of the arbitrary borders was accompanied with horrifying violence that included mass rape and murder, displacement and trauma that proceeded.

The independence of India and the history of the partition of 1947 has been recorded as the most gruesome division on the basis of religion.

Borders and boundaries ritu menon pdf