The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia | reviewed by Simona Sarma

 Urvashi Butalia. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Penguin UK, 2017. Length: 416 Pages. ISBN: 978-8-184-75314-1    

“There is no way we can begin to understand what Partition was about, unless we look at how people remember it”. Urvashi Butalia, a feminist writer, activist, and publisher, does an incredible job in delineating and exploring the history of Partition from an “apolitical” perspective, from the perspective of memories etched in the minds of people. Rather than considering the victims of Partition as mere “numbers” or “informants”, she looks at them as ‘human beings upon whose bodies and lives history has been played out’. She brings their suffering and pain to the fore through first-hand narratives of people who have experienced Partition in their lifetime. Some being several pages long, these narratives are poignant, heart-wrenching, and soulful at the same time. Opening a pandora’s box of emotions, this book will surely take the reader to the lanes of erstwhile undivided India, while providing a “thick description” of the nuances of this phenomenon called Partition.

Along with personal interviews, she has also looked at diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports, letters, and official documents to bring out the myriad voices of individuals that were lost in the political “facts”. Juxtaposing these with accounts of her personal life (she comes from a Partition affected family whereby her uncle and grandmother stayed back in what became Pakistan in 1947 while the rest of her family migrated to what would later become India), she does provide a lesson or two on reflexivity and feminist research methodology. While Partition for us has been in the past, Butalia brings forth the fact that it is very much a thing of the present. The divisions created then, lurks in the everyday lives of many, still.

Focussing on the experiences of violence and pain; of women, children, and Dalits particularly; she provides a feminist retelling of the history of Partition. Organising them systematically into different chapters, she deals with each group with equal passion. By drawing attention to the innumerable incidents of rape, abduction, and forcible marriage of women (often by members of their own community as against popular beliefs), followed by their forceful “rescue” (as several women resisted their return having found love and family amongst their abductor-husbands) from the enemy nation, she shows how ideas of home, community, belonging, honour, and nation were inscribed onto bodies of women. Mass abortions called safaya, performed on such “recovered” women, and the mass suicide of several women (that are now garbed in the language of valour and sacrifice) to avoid being raped by people of opposite faiths are some other shocking details that the book elaborates upon. Interestingly though, Butalia refrains from painting a merely gloomy picture and goes on to demonstrate how Partition also provided many women with opportunities to move into the public sphere, often as social workers working in the Indian state’s recovery and relief operations. She also attempts to extract the experiences of children survivors of Partition who have faced several psychological issues later in their lives. Apart from them, the children born out of “illegal bonds” were often a source of anxiety, shame, and citizenship troubles such that their stories were completely marginalised. Apart from women and children, the voices of Dalits during Partition were also shrouded in silence. Several of their narratives show that they rarely considered themselves as Hindus or Christians. Their distinctive identity posed distinct challenges like the inability to find refuge in shelter camps that were exclusively built for Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.       

In reading these “memories” alongside “facts”, she seeks to unearth a story of Partition that has remained untold, a history that has been rendered invisible by the dominant histories on Partition. The word “Partition” itself suggests a simple division. She argues that it is inadequate to account for the wider traumas and upheavals that this event nurtured. Throughout the book, she acknowledges the ethicality of such research for it requires vulnerable people to recall horrific details of their lives. Compassion and empathy perhaps could be less than adequate in such circumstances. 

This is only one side of the Partition history, which Butalia concedes at the beginning. One can also look at Sanjoy Hazarika’s Rites of Passage: Border Crossing, Imagined Homelands, India's East and Bangladesh to acquaint themselves with the “other side”. Unlike Butalia, Hazarika deals with the migration of people from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, into the North-eastern part of India during and after Partition. What makes this issue more contentious is that this “crossing” persisted decades after Partition, resulting in debates around citizenship [National Register of Citizens (NRC), a case in point], indigeneity, and the nation.       

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Simona Sarma is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is pursuing her PhD from its Advanced Centre for Women's Studies under the School of Development Studies.