The Story of the Birth of a Nation and the Recovery of its Women
by Aishwarya Agarwal
This article is part of the Gender, Sexuality, and Decolonization Resource Page blog.
On the night of 14th August, 1947, Jawahar Lal Nehru famously said “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”[1], celebrating the end of British rule on the sub-continent. However, along with the end of colonial rule came the division of British India into the new nations of India and Pakistan. The Partition, as it is referred to often[2], came with a spate of violence, death, mass migration, and displacement. The violence was often gendered and women, on both sides of the new border, were severely affected, facing abduction and sexual violence[3]. In this context, it became imperative for the new nations of India and Pakistan to take actions to mitigate the effects of this violence. One of the major focuses of these actions was the question of the abducted women, and on 6th December, 1947, the Inter-Dominion Treaty signed by India and Pakistan established rules to facilitate the recovery and rehabilitation of abducted women. This was further formalised by the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act 1949 which further clarified the definitions of “persons” and the rules to be followed by officials in the case of recovery and restoration[4].
One of the themes that became apparent through these measures was the concept of nation and the role women played in these new nations, including their agency in choosing their nationhood. An analysis of The Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act shows that abducted women had little choice in deciding whether they were Pakistani or Indian, raising questions about the idea of nationhood in nascent India and Pakistan, especially when it came to women and contexts of violence and displacement (often double displacement)[5]. From inception itself, the lines of nationhood were drawn, formalising the understandings of who was Indian and who was Pakistani. Through the Abducted Persons Act, these demarcations, especially as they were applied to women and their agency, will become more apparent as the essay progresses.
To begin, it is important to understand the context of the Partition. By 1945, not only was it becoming increasingly clear that British rule would come to an end, but also that the region would be split into two territories, India and Pakistan. By July 1947, British withdrawal from the sub-continent and the Partition were formalised in British Parliament[6]. However, there are two important things to note—first, the formal geographic boundaries of territorial divisions were defined after Independence; and second, while Partition was officially announced in July, rumours of the partition had begun to spread much earlier, and violence relating to these rumours had followed shortly. In the months leading up to Partition, local accounts highlighted numerous attacks and abductions of women as they migrated from their villages[7].
In the violent chaos that followed, official estimates suggested that 50,000 Muslim women had been abducted in India and 33,000 non-Muslim women in Pakistan[8]. These abductions became a matter of urgency, and in December 1947 the Inter-Dominion Treaty was signed. The Treaty decreed, in no uncertain terms, that persons who were thought to be abducted would be recovered, regardless of their wishes[9]. Urvashi Butalia notes that the Treaty addressed that “persons” meant “women,” and no mention was made of men at all[10].
By 1949, the Inter-Dominion Treaty was lapsing, and, after much deliberation in the Legislative Assembly, the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act was passed[11]. Much like its predecessor, the Act authorised a Tribunal to decide the national identity of recovered women. Conflating them with children of minor age, the Act defined abducted persons as follows:
The process of recovery started with an application filed by the family of the abducted woman. She was then located and recovered. The problem that arose however was that many women did not want to be recovered[13]. In some cases, the women had lived in their new situation for too many years, and had children with the men who had abducted or bought them[14]. Many had married family-friends and neighbours who were willing to take them in and protect them[15]. This is where the questions of agency start to arise. Upon recovery, Butalia posits that limited agency was exercised by the women in question[16]. However, women social workers entreated by the State to aid in their task of recovery exercised agency over these abducted women, often ‘persuading’ them to move from their situation to the rehabilitation camps. From here, they could be returned to their families, often sans the children they had beget from these unions. The rights of the older children remained with the fathers, and younger children were often taken under custody of the State, as children of war[17]. The State had declared the union between the abducted women and men of the other nation illegal, rendering the children borne of this union to be illegitimate as well, outside the conceptualised vision of the State[18].
The Act itself was not without opposition, even in 1949, when it was still in the early stages of development. Menon and Bhasin take stock of the parliamentary debates over the Bill that eventually became the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act of 1949, and highlight that many of the leaders involved raised the issue of a woman’s right to choose her national identity. Women were equal citizens in Independent India, yet the Act took away their right to choose to be citizens, and their right against unlawful detention. The Act states:
It was argued that Habeus corpus, or the right to be brought to court to decide the legality of one’s detention, was negated by the Act[20]. Despite these misgivings, the Bill passed without any amendments[21].
Menon and Bhasin posit that the new Indian nation saw itself as the rightful guardian of the abducted women, and therefore, through its Tribunals, felt justified in deciding whether they were Indian or Pakistani[22]. For the secular State of India especially, it is fascinating to note that the recovered woman’s nationality was judged on the basis of her religion. A Muslim woman who had been converted to Hinduism was Muslim, and Pakistani, and a Hindu woman in the same situation was Indian[23]. According to Butalia, the attack on woman could be viewed as an attack on religion, the men, and by association, an attack on the nation[24]. If the abduction of women was an attack on the new nation, then their recovery was a strike to regain the nation’s lost pride[25]. As long as Indian women remained in Pakistan, and vice versa, the nation was not truly independent. It did not matter whether women identified with these narrow national boundaries or not, or whether they chose to stay or not.
Veena Das looks at anthropological scholarship and conceptualises a relationship between the State and family where both use the same frames to identify the ‘other’ and have similar considerations of honour and purity[26]. The honour of the abducted women then, is a matter of not just familial, but also national importance, and ‘impure’ women are in the conflicted position of being outside of the gambit of what fits the conceptualisation of the nation. This, Veena Das suggests, is especially apparent when talking about the children of the abducted women, who being born of illegitimate unions, were from birth, outsiders to the nation[27]. In this way the nations of India and Pakistan needed to recover these women, and create regulations to ensure that they could be reintroduced into the family fold within the frameworks of honour and purity, including legislating their forced recovery, and often separating and them from children borne to illegitimate unions[28].
In this moment of rupture women’s bodies became symbolic of many things, in many ways begging the question—did they remain their own? They became symbols for the nation, for the community, and for family[29]. They signified a reminder, in absentia, of the fragmentation of the nation, and the loss of women became a loss of pride for the nation as well. Within these parameters, the nation acted like a guardian to the abducted women, feeling justified in choosing for them.
What agency then did these women have? Almost none, not in indicating what nation they belonged to. While the nation through its social workers tried to recover as many women as possible, the question of their acceptance in society remained. Many writers have posited that Muslim men in Pakistan were more likely than Hindu men to take their women back post recovery[30]. Leaders like Nehru and Gandhi made appeals to the Hindu men to accept their women, using popular religious myths as examples[31]. Pippa Virdee questions these claims and wonders whether it is true that Muslim men were more accepting of the recovered women[32]. In this situation the recovered women were forced into nationhood, at the cost of their own well-being, or at least at the cost of what they thought was best for them, even wanting to remain with their captors in many situations, something many social workers were unable to understand[33].
In the process of nation-building, women became spoils of war. And thus, recovering them and restoring them to their nationhood became an act of self-determination for the nation, even at the cost of the wishes of the women concerned. Virginia Woolf famously remarked, “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country.”[34] For India (and Pakistan) this was inconceivable. The Abducted Persons Act lapsed in 1957, but it remains an important reminder of the nation’s conception of women, and their rights in the very first decades of its life.
Aishwarya Agarwal is an alumna of the Master in International History and Politics program at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She is interested in exploring the intersection of post-colonial violence, identity, and popular narratives in South Asia.
[1] Tryst with Destiny | Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Independence Day Speech | 1947, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cudc5Mhlcc. 0:25-0:33.
[2] Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[3] Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Duke University Press, 2000).
[4] Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.
[5] Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and Abduction of Women during Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 17 (1993): WS2–11.
[6] Devendra Panigrahi, India’s Partition: The Story of Imperialism in Retreat (London: Routledge, 2004), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203324882.
[7] Gyanendra Pandey, ‘The Long Life of Rumor’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 2 (2002): 165–91.
[8] Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’, p, 4.
[9] Urvashi Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 17 (1993): WS12–24.
[10] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition’, p, 16.
[11] Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’.
[12] ‘Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949’, Pub. L. No. 65 of 1949 (1949), https://bombayhighcourt.nic.in/libweb/actc/1949.65.pdf. p, 1.
[13] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’; Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.
[14] Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’; Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[15] Veena Das, ‘National Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Unwanted Women and Children’, in Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 55–83.
[16] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[17] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[18] Das, ‘National Honour and Practical Kinship’.
[19] Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949. p, 2.
[20] Das, ‘National Honour and Practical Kinship’.
[21] Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’.
[22] Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’.
[23] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[24] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[25] Pippa Virdee, ‘Negotiating the Past’, Cultural and Social History 6, no. 4 (1 December 2009): 467–83, https://doi.org/10.2752/147800409X466290.
[26] Das, ‘National Honour and Practical Kinship’.
[27] Das, ‘National Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Unwanted Women and Children’.
[28] Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’.
[29] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[30] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’; Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’.
[31] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’; Menon and Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance’.
[32] Virdee, ‘Negotiating the Past’.
[33] Butalia, ‘Community, State and Gender’.
[34] Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Read Books Ltd, 2017).