ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in both texts the state of transition becomes a haunting trope, creating what the author calls ‘transitional figures’ that manifest in the two narratives in contrasting yet overlapping ways. Partition violence and its ramifications narrativised in these two texts suggest complex and ambivalent ideas of victimhood and agency contingent on specific contexts. Violence against women took different forms, including rapes, forced marriages, religious conversion and prostitution. Before the 1990s, the history of Partition was mostly the official political account. The feminist scholars’ retrieval of women’s history and analysis of the gendered violence of Partition demonstrate the entangled nexus of patriarchy, nation-state, caste and religion, and the role they play in constructing gendered identities and in maintaining borders.
