The book under review is one of the most significant workson the
aftermath of the Partition of 1947. Its chief objective
is to reconstruct thePartition experience in the East. The perspective is multidisciplinary andbased on an awareness of gender, class and community. They have conceptualizedthe Partition experiences, riot, migration and resettlement in terms of thenotion of ‘trauma’. However, the refugees moved far beyond the sense of‘victimhood’ to ‘triumph’, a sense of confidence and ability to survive andattain success in the face of stiff hurdles. The editors notice that thedisplaced women in
particular ‘displayed exemplary resilience, fortitude,patience and strength to emerge victors against the combined nightmare ofassault, exodus, displacement, grinding poverty and broken psyche’. ‘In West Bengal, in particular, the historic assertion of therefugee-woman as the tireless breadwinner changed the digits of feminineaspirations of the Bengali bhadramahilaand altered the social landscape irrevocably.’ The same thing happened in Punjab also. The coming out of the women from the privatedomain to the public is one of the most remarkable developments inpost-Partition West Bengal.The Trauma and the Triumphhas definitely developed a new approach in studying the impact of Partitionon the Bengali women. The gender perspective of this volume finds two channels–1) demonstrating how the politics of gender accompanying Partition used rapeand other forms of violence as an instrument of nationhood, 2) bringing out therole of sexual difference in the human struggle for rehabilitation andpresenting women as the main agents in this. It is the second concern thatmakes the volume distinctive. Jasodhara Bagchi’s article in the volume shows how thecommunity and the family were as much instrumental in the production ofgendered majoritarian imaginings of the nation as the state, how they were allobsessed with female chastity as a mark of national glory and treated the rapevictims accordingly. Meghna Guha Thakurta develops a methodology for the use offamily history in understanding the Partition and further uses a comparativeframework to understand the similarities and differences in the Partitionexperiences (related to gender in particular) of Hindus and Muslims. RachelWeber finds some complexities in the women’s emergence form the private domainin the
aftermath of Partition, as this was legitimated by the role of thepatriarchal ‘colony’ community on the basis of women’s role as wives andmothers. She wonders whether this was not a mere expansion of the ‘private’ toinclude new roles, rather than a real assertion of women’s equal right in thepublic sphere.