ABSTRACT

The chapter takes up a rigorous analysis of Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning as they narrate the crumbling of a hitherto secured world from the point of view of upper/middle class women. The chapter especially problematises the Central Recovery Operation, which was launched in November 1947 to exchange abducted women, between India and Pakistan, based on their religious identity to bring home the argument pertaining to the crumbling of the secured world of these women. The choice of these novels is also governed by a consideration of the locations and contexts of the two writers, one who speaks of the Partition as experienced in Punjab, the other who engages with the experience in the context of Bengal. These authors expose the hollowness inherent in words like ‘honour’ and ‘rescue,’ propagated by the state in order to demarcate women’s identities and existence. These terms appear in sharp contrast to the democratic potential represented by the nation-in-the-making in 1931, when the Karachi Resolution of the Congress was passed, declaring women as citizens equal before the law, irrespective of religion, caste, and creed. Both Pritam and Devi further engage with the tenuously emergent aspect of the female subject’s psyche, which expands into a concern with the dynamics of masculine subjectivity as well. The authors are concerned with the reconstitution of what might be described as a gendered modern habitus.