ABSTRACT
The 1947 Partition of British India was attendant with death and devastation in catastrophic proportions because of conflict along religious lines. The present study proposes to explore selected short stories that delineate the violent displacements faced by women due to abduction across the northern, western, and eastern sectors of the Indian subcontinent. These dislodgements—physical, societal, and emotional—were terribly frequent around this fateful period, as belligerent groups targeted womenfolk of their ‘enemy’ religion by objectifying them as embodiments of their respective communal groups. When not killed, most of these women were abducted and sexually abused before being either cast out or, in some cases, appropriated into the familial folds of the perpetrators. While a small portion of them managed to overcome the associated trauma and assimilate themselves into their ‘new families’, for the rest it was a saga of unbounded miseries. Creative writers have striven to represent the untold experiences of these women, and the literary texts taken up for analysis in this article, written in various Indian vernaculars and subsequently translated into English, have the merit of supplementing statist histories of the Partition. The artistic response of writers to this overwhelming dislocation, and their stance towards granting of a subjective voice to the suffering female characters would constitute the prime focus in course of this study.
