ABSTRACT
Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novel Pinjar is set in the time of Partition in 1947 and tells the story of a Hindu girl Pooro who is abducted by a Muslim man Rashida and forced into marriage as an act of revenge against her family. Her own family will not take her back since she has been ‘tainted’. Pritam tries to show that women, because they are treated as ‘male property’ in conflicts, are emblematically the objects of harm that male groups seek to cause to each other. The chapter invokes a later film version of the novel by Chandraprakash Dwivedi that made changes to show how the dominant ideology of the Indian nation – using its own secularist ‘tolerance’ to privilege it over Pakistan. This demonstrates how steadfastly the novelist sticks to her purpose. The chapter argues that India’s humanist regret at the violence of Partition masks regret that India was ever partitioned and Amrita Pritam, because she wrote her novel so immediately after Partition, takes a genuinely women-centric perspective that might be difficult today.
