How did women experience Partition?

The impact of Partition of India on Indian women can be assessed in the following ways:

1. Historians and scholars have written about harrowing experiences of women in those violent days. Women were raped, abducted, sold, often many times forced to settle down to a new life with strangers in unknown circumstances. Wherever deeply traumatised by all they had undergone, some began to develop new family bonds in their changed circumstances. But India and Pakistan were insensitive to the complexities of human relationship.

2.    The Government of both countries, believing the women to be on the wrong side on the border, they know for them away from their new relations, and some back to their earlier families proclamation. The Government officials of both sides did not bother even to consult the concerned women, undermining their right to take decisions regarding their own lives.

3.    As far as number of women who suffered physically as well as mentally and emotionally were related with both of the communities the Muslims as well as Hindus. According to one estimate, 30,000 women were ‘recovered’ over all 22000 Muslim women in India and 8000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan, in operation that ended as late as 1954.

4.    Women lasted their male family members because male died in larger numbers in the violence of rioting which took place between 1946-47 and even later on. Women had to console each other as they hear of the death of their family members.

5.    At time, therefore, when the men feared that their women-wives, daughters, sisters would be violated by the “enemy”, they killed the women themselves. During partition, in a Sikh village, ninety women are said to have voluntarily jumped into a well rather than fall into “enemy” hands. On 13 March every year, when their “martydom” is celebrated, the incident is recounted to an audience of men, women and children.