Urvashi Butalia

Chiefly on the partition of Punjab, 1947.

Voices from the Partition of India

The Other Side of Silence

This anthology testifies to women`s many concerns, whether witht a way of life, or with being caught inside the fur walls of the home, or in a relationship with someone other than the husband, or being caught at the intersection of many forces within a situation of political violence and armed conflict. In one way or another the woman`s body becomes a site upon which many battles take place; for control, for power, for progeny, but there is seldom a resolution in which the women remains a mere victim, or more acted upon than acting. Whether she is in the palaces of the gods, or caught in the body of snake, or speaking through the spirit of the countrside which witnessed her rape, the woman`s voice is unique, singular and in each story, different. While this gives substance to the cliche that India is a countr where many and varied realities exist simultaneously, it gives the lie to the cliche that all women speak with a sameness and a commonality of experiences.

The Zubaan Book of Stories by Indian Women

Inner Line

Some journeys exist in the mind. Bir Bahadur Singh is haunted by the longing to return. Forced to leave his village in Pakistan during Partition in traumatic circumstances, he makes the journey back, fifty-four years later, to pick up the connections from that long past time. In that wrenching journey, he meets his old friend who now lives in his childhood home and exchanges banter with him and with many other lost acquaintances. For those few hours Bir Bahadur is there, the past comes alive, for him and for his companion on the journey, the author herself.

The Persistence of Memory

Rajathi Salma

Kim Longinotto

Kannan Sundaram

"When Salma, a young Muslim girl growing up in a South Indian village, was 13 years old, her family shut her away for eight years, forbidding her to study and forcing her into marriage. After her wedding her husband insisted she stay indoors. Salma was unable to venture outside for nearly two and a half decades. During that time, words became her salvation. She began covertly composing poems on scraps of paper, and, through an intricate system, smuggled them to the outside world. The poems, many of which are included here, describe the hardships Salma and countless women like her suffer in their secluded lives. Eventually they reached a local publisher who printed them. Against all odds, and in a direct challenge to the stultifying traditions of her village, Salma has gone on to become a renowned Tamil poet and influential human rights activist" --

Filming a Poet in Her Village

Salma

Laxmi Murthy

The second volume to come out of a South Asia wide research project entitled Sexual Violence and Impunity (supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada) this book focuses on India and showcases new, pathbreaking research on the subject. For the first time in recent history, young and established scholars come together to explore areas such as medical protocols, the functioning of the law, the psycho-social making of impunity, histories of sexual violence such as in Kashmir and the northeast of India, the media, sectarian violence, the use of stripping and parading and much more. Peer discussed and reviewed in a series of workshops, the essays here present much that is new in research.

The India Papers

Breaching the Citadel

Women's stories in India have been handed down from generation to generation, enriched and embroidered along the way. Political change and the arrival of print culture meant that storytelling was pushed into the background. But in more recent times, these voices have once again come centre-stage - confident, varied and complex. Spanning half a century, this collection covers many languages and cultures, and reflects the vast and complex cultures of the country and its diaspora. It offers a view of the changes that have taken place, both in terms of the subjects women choose to write about and their preferred way of writing about these subjects. From established names such as Mahashveta Devi to the newer generation of young authors, such as Tishani Doshi, Katha brings to the reader a vivid array of voices.

Short Stories by Indian Women

Katha

Works by Indian women writers. In Urmila Banerjee's The Tamarind Tree Murder, a man who becomes a bigamist kills his mother to save her from finding out, in Ritu Bhatia's The Smothering, a woman married to an American first rejects her Indian past to appear more American, then goes back to it when misfortune strikes.

New Writing By Indian Women

In Other Words

This collection of writings from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan looks at the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and explores the still largely unaddressed aspects of the human histories of this time. The volume offers perspectives, first person accounts, essays, personal histories and interviews with the women who lived through Partition and those who have inherited its legacies. Taking a broad sweep, the writings here not only span three countries, thereby providing a unique and comparative perspective, but also cover a range of subject areas, from oral history to more traditional history, from visual history to sports. Also included is a selection of documents, which provide valuable archival material on the Partition. "

A Reader

Women and Partition

The dark legacies of partition have cast a long shadow on the lives of people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The borders that were drawn in 1947, and redrawn in 1971, divided not only nations and histories but also families and friends. The essays in this volume explore new ground in Partition research, looking into areas such as art, literature, migration, and notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’. It brings focus to hitherto unaddressed areas of partition such as the northeast and Ladakh.

Urvashi Butalia

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