ABSTRACT

The South Asian region has been especially prone to mass displacement and relocations owing to its varied geographical settings as well as socio-political factors. This book examines the women’s perspective on issues related to displacement, loss, conflict, and rehabilitation.

It maps the diverse engagements with women’s experiences of displacement in the South Asian region through a nuanced examination of unexplored literary narratives, life writing and memoirs, cultural discourses, and social practices. The book explores themes like sexuality and the female body, women and the national identity, violence against women in Indian Partition narratives, and stories of exile in real life and fairy tales. It also offers an understanding of the ruptures created by dislocation and exile in memory, identity, and culture by analyzing the spaces occupied by displaced women and their lived experiences. The volume looks at the multiplicity of reasons behind women’s displacement and offers a wider perspective on the intersections between gender, migration, and marginalization.

This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, gender studies, conflict studies, development studies, South Asian studies, refugee studies, diaspora studies, and sociology.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Displacement: Debates and engagements

part I|154 pages

Critical essays

chapter 1|10 pages

Interconnected lives, disrupted realities

Revisiting gendered narratives from India's northeastern Partition, 1947

chapter 2|11 pages

“A language without words”

Remapping women's displacements through transnationalism in Chandani Lokugé's fiction

chapter 3|15 pages

Displacement, family sagas, and a feminist gaze

Retelling women's sexual history in Love Marriage and Bodies in Motion

chapter 4|12 pages

Prison as a paradigm of displacement

Narratives of female prisoners in 1970s West Bengal

chapter 6|10 pages

Post-riot narratives

Locating the voices of “displaced” women?

chapter 7|10 pages

Nation, female body, and sexuality

Contextualizing Hansda Shekhar's “November Is the Month of Migration”

chapter 8|12 pages

When home is a glass coffin

Women and displacement in some Indian fairy tales

chapter 9|11 pages

Women, violence, displacement

Delineating the abduction motif in South Asian partition stories

chapter 10|14 pages

Singing in exile

Relocating the notion of displacement in Usha Kishore's Immigrant

chapter 11|17 pages

The post-Independence rehabilitation displacement

The birangona case in Bangladesh

chapter 12|15 pages

“Please, dear Zari, tell my story!”

Reading women's displacement in Zarghuna Kargar's Dear Zari *

part II|42 pages

Life writings and memoirs

chapter 13|6 pages

Among her own

chapter 14|7 pages

Maps, shapes, and women breaking (out of) homes

A memoir

chapter 17|8 pages

The women in Chambal

Translated from Bengali by Sanghita Sanyal

chapter 18|6 pages

Women in conflict