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Student Research submissions 2015 (2015 research options) Research Journal |
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Caryn Livingston
15
November 2015
From Sati to Partition: An Exploration of Violence Against Women in
India
Journal Entry 1: Introduction
I want to consider honor killings of women and female suicide in
post-colonial Indian literature and how the violence Indian women face is
explored by post-colonial writers through the genre of the novel. During this
semester we have encountered a variety of genres dealing with colonial and
post-colonial topics, including film, poetry, literary theory and criticism, and
online sources. However, the novel seems unique in its ability to confront the
typical problems of depicting different cultures through a “self-other” lens.
The novels I plan to examine are Khushwant Singh’s
Train to Pakistan and Bharati
Muherjee’s Jasmine. Both novels
address the idea of suicide in post-colonial settings, though
Jasmine explores this idea more
thoroughly as many of the people who commit suicide in a way that is culturally
endorsed are widows committing sati.
Train to Pakistan deals directly with the Partition of India, and considers
how societal perspectives of women influenced the potential of violence towards
them.
One
of the advantages of the novel that has seemed most relevant during this course
is its ability to allow so-called first world readers to identify with
protagonists and perspectives very foreign to their own experiences. Because the
novel is not only about self-expression, readers are able to meet the novelist
on their own terms and potentially connect with the novel in ways even the
novelist may not have intended. According to Mikhail Bakhtin in “Discourse in
the Novel,” the novelist “does not purge words of intentions and tones that are
alien to him, . . . he does not eliminate those language characterizations and
speech mannerisms (potential narrator-personalities) glimmering behind the words
and forms, each at a different distance from the ultimate semantic nucleus of
his work, that is, the center of his own personal intentions” (1105). While the
novelist likely selects the genre specifically for the insight into characters'
minds and motivations it allows, the genre of novel as a form allows for
interactions of ideas inherent in language that even the novelist does not
choose or expect.
This
interplay of ideas facilitated by the language of the novel more closely
reflects reality than other genres. “The development of the novel is a function
of the deepening of dialogic essence, its increased scope and greater precision.
Fewer and fewer neutral, hard elements (‘rock bottom truths’) remain that are
not drawn into dialogue” (Bakhtin 1106). Rather than considering only one
perspective, be it the poet’s perspective in lyric poetry or the audience’s
perspective in drama and film, the reader of
Jasmine and
Train to Pakistan is able to interact
with the perspectives of the narrative voices and of characters in the novels,
while still maintaining the reader’s sense of self. Once multiple perspectives
are introduced, a dialogue is established and it becomes easier to understand
those characters whose lives are not similar to ours without viewing them as
unequal to us.
In my
exploration of the topic I’ve selected, I plan to consider sources including
historical research and criticism, literary theory, and other student works.
However, for the reasons discussed above, I believe it’s necessary to pay close
attention to depictions of these events in the novels to gain an understanding
of them without remaining too distant from them and the cultural context in
which they occur or viewing the people involved as “others” compared to my own
Western and modern sensibilities.
Journal Entry 2: The Practice of Sati
The idea of a woman immolating herself after the death of her husband was
featured prominently in Jasmine. We
learn early on about a young bride whose life Jasmine envies who burns herself
on the stove after her husband’s death. Jasmine’s mother also attempts to
immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre and lives a miserable existence
when she is prevented from doing so. Finally, Jasmine’s original plan for her
immigration to America was to burn herself along with her keepsakes from home
related to her husband. Though it is not named within the text, this practice is
known as sati.
The website Women in World History discusses sati. Around the year 200
the Laws of Manu were compiled in India, which stated that Hindu widows should
remain sati by not remarrying, according to Barbara Ramusack, who authored the
pages on sati. In Sanskrit, sati meant “chaste or pure.” Over time the meaning
of sati changed to signify the ritual suicide of a Hindu widow on her husband’s
funeral pyre as a symbol to eternal devotion to her husband. “Thus sati . . .
came to mean both the practice of self-immolation and the Hindu widow who died
by this ritual. Such a widow was thought to become a goddess and to bring
auspiciousness or good fortune to her birth and marital families” (Ramusack).
This practice saw mixed reviews from European colonizers. “As it expanded
its political control during the 18th century, the English East India Company
viewed sati as a disturbing religious practice but permitted it so as not to
antagonize Hindu subjects” (Ramusack). It was explicitly legalized in 1813,
after which time “there was a sharp increase in the number of satis” (Loomba
244). However, even when the British began to condemn the practice, the
condemnation was not complete, as “their accounts continued to have subtle
praise for the wifely devotion of Hindu widows” (Ramusack). Modern views of this
practice are complicated, as scholars attempt to determine the degree to which
widows committing sati acted under their own volition. “In a diverse body of
work, [the widow] becomes the privileged signifier of either the devoted and
chaste, or the oppressed and victimized Indian (or sometimes even ‘third world’)
woman” (Loomba 242). Study of sati is difficult, as the danger exists in both
viewing a society with such practices as the inferior “other,” and in ignoring
violent deaths of women through fear of being culturally insensitive.
In an
examination of scholarship on the issue, Ania Loomba points out that a prominent
writer on the subject, Ashis Nandy is angry “not [at] the colonial state but
[at] Indian feminists who are seen as deculturalised, inauthentic, westernised
and alienated from an appreciation of their own culture, which their village
sisters embody in the act of immolating themselves” (248). This explanation is
unsatisfactory to both Indian and western feminists who tend to prioritize
women’s lives over cultural mandates. However, the question is still
complicated, as “the struggle now was clearly over female volition—with
feminists claiming that the entire notion of a voluntary sati is retrogressive
and the pro-sati lobby insisting on the freedom of choice” (Loomba 249).
Unfortunately, the voices of the women who attempted or committed
sati are mostly absent from the
scholarship, according to Ramusack, who says, “for the stories of Hindu widows
who committed self-immolation or attempted to do so and decided against doing so
at the last minute, historians must rely on British and Indian, usually male,
witnesses of the spectacle of sati.”
Journal Entry 3: Honor Killings during the Partition
As we discussed in class, the release of India from the British Empire in
1947 and the partition of India into India and Pakistan were simultaneous and
resulted in a violent upheaval within the former colony. About 14.5 million
people travelled between the two countries in the weeks surrounding the
partition, with estimates of those killed during the process ranging from
200,000 to 1 million. Women suffered a tremendous amount of violence during this
time. In Beyond Partition: Gender,
Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India, Deepti Misri states,
“Feminist historians of the Partition have noted the staggering range of sexual
brutalities that Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh women suffered at the hands of rioting
mobs during this time,” including rape, mutilation and disfigurement, branding
or marking with triumphal slogans, public humiliation and murder (55). However,
“in addition to these, women were subjected to another prevalent form of
violence that had long remained unacknowledged—although highly visible—in the
powerful cultural memory of the Partition: the preemptive ‘sacrifice’ of women
by their families in order to save family and community honor” (55). This sort
of sacrifice is mentioned in Train to
Pakistan, when a man on a train kills his wife and child in an attempt to
end their suffering, and when the narrator of the novel states, “Sikh refugees
had told of women jumping into wells and burning themselves rather than fall
into the hands of Muslims. Those who did not commit suicide were paraded naked
in the streets, raped in public, and then murdered” (Singh 121).
Typically, honor killings and female suicides for this purpose during the
Partition have been viewed with much of the same admiration as women who
completed sati. “The suicides of women during the Partition fit quite neatly
within these heroic narratives of women’s self-sacrifice and could be
memorialized accordingly,” Misri writes (56). Only since the late 1990s has that
narrative faced significant criticisms from “feminists [who] have insisted that
the ‘suicide’ of large numbers of women for the sake of honor be reframed and
named as ‘violence’—that too, violence perpetrated within families and
communities rather than simply being brought upon them by hostile enemies” (56).
Misri evaluates narratives of several women during the partition and
draws the conclusion that a prevailing view in support of honor killings was
that of difference between the religious communities of Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu
involved in the Partition. In other words, the violence inflicted on women to
protect them from a more violent “other” group was more honorable because the
“self” group was inherently more humane and therefore committing the violence
only to protect women within the group from less dignified out-group violence.
However, the many narratives from women who suffered violence during the
Partition demonstrate that all of the groups were capable of the same sort of
violence. “By revealing the violent core of all communities involved in the
violence, they defuse the oppositional rhetoric through which Hindu, Muslim, and
Sikh, as well as India and Pakistan, continue to imagine themselves in the
postcolonial present” (86).
Journal Entry 4: Reviews of Student Papers
Allen Reid’s essay “Jasmine: A
Story of Self-Evolution” examines the choices Jasmine makes within the story
that defy the traditional expectations established historically for women in her
position. Jasmine is both a widow and a victim of sexual violence by a male
member of an out-group. Reid writes that after the death of her husband, Jasmine
“prepares to defy the patriarchal codes of a society that is thousands of years
old” through her “plans to go to America and commit ritualistic suicide on the
college campus that Prakash had planned to attend.” However, as my historical
review of the practice of sati explains, this plan is not truly in defiance of
patriarchal codes of conduct for a woman in Jasmine’s position. While it’s true
that Jasmine has travelled much further for her planned self-immolation than the
typical Hindu widow, this plan fits within the normal context of sati to honor a
less-traditional husband whose hopes were set on America. Just as a pure widow
should, according to this tradition, Jasmine is prepared to end her own life on
the pyre representing her lost husband’s greatest hopes.
Reid also discusses Jasmine’s rape by Half Face, the man who smuggles her
into America. I agree with Reid that this event prompts the break with tradition
that Jasmine undergoes. “By not killing herself and instead becoming the
destroyer goddess Kali, she does two things: she breaks free from traditional
Indian culture and breaks traditional patriarchal control,” Reid writes. At this
point, Jasmine rejects the notion that the honor killings during the Partition
reinforced, that violence perpetuated on a woman by the woman or a member of her
own group is somehow superior to allowing that woman to be a victim of out-group
violence. Reid argues that when Jasmine metaphorically transforms into Kali and
kills Half Face, “she destroys traditional Indian culture that calls for her own
death.” I think that this is partially, but not totally true. It is true that
women dying or being killed for honor’s sake is an aspect of traditional
culture, but Jasmine is only destroying that aspect of her culture with her
actions. She is also more fully embracing another aspect, from which she draws
Kali. As she showers after her rape, “we have the idea of her old identity being
washed away,” Reid says. Jasmine’s continual rebirth as she moves from identity
to identity embraces the more empowering reincarnation aspect of her Indian
culture.
In Valerie Mead’s second final essay, “Shades of Grey: Gender Roles in
Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature,” she discusses the roles women had in
Train to Pakistan. She writes that
women in the text “are treated as secondary objects, something that men can and
do use and do not have choices of their own. The entire town in which the work
is based seems to accept this way of thinking and does not discourage Jugga or
any other man from doing the same, which can prove that women were not valued in
this society, at least as much as men were.” She also says that Jugga treats his
secret partner Nooran “like dirt,” and that Nooran doesn’t seem to mind such
treatment. This is an understandable view to take, as the women in the novel are
all viewed through a narrator, while the other novel addressing these subjects
in India, Jasmine, features
first-person narration through the eyes of a woman. We don’t have exactly the
same vantage point in Train to Pakistan
though we are allowed glimpses of characters’ internal motivations. However,
Mead does begin to fall into a trap of “self-other” thinking within her essay as
she says that “virtually all” of the colonial and post-colonial texts read
during the semester treat women this way. While she concludes her essay with an
acknowledgement that most characters don’t remain strictly defined by their
gender roles and that it’s important not to focus too much on “black and white”
interpretations of right and wrong in cultures, she does seem to largely accept
this as a means of interpreting treatment of women in post-colonial writing, and
not to extend it to perhaps our own culture.
Mead acknowledges that Jasmine
is the easiest text with which to put aside the “self-other” viewpoint and
evaluate Jasmine’s actions on her own terms. She writes, “To the outside
observer, Jasmine may not be the most liberated person, but through her
rejection of tradition and acceptance of modernity, she is just more liberated
than the other characters mentioned.” Mead’s essay reinforces the value of the
novel as the genre that can enable understanding of a story between characters
and readers of different cultures. The interiority provided in
Jasmine is the most straightforward
example we were given, and both students whose essays I reviewed recognized
that. Mead did unfortunately fall into the trap of othering the culture depicted
in Train to Pakistan, as she took all
of Jugga’s boasts and early actions at face value, without acknowledging that
his treatment of Nooran was gentler than his treatment of most other characters
in the novel, and that in the end, she was much more important to him than a
“secondary object” Mead saw.
Journal Entry 5: Web review
The
“Women in World History” website, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for
History and New Media at George Mason University, details primary sources,
case studies, and teaching modules on women’s issue around the world and across
history. Topics relevant to our discussions include the British Empire from the
17th through the 20th century page and the Africa and South Asia sections in the
Primary Sources page.
The South Asia section focuses heavily on the practice of sati, which was
discussed in Jasmine and which I
researched for my second journal entry. It contains art on the subject,
including a digital image of a copper engraving made by a European man depicting
the practice. According to the site, many Europeans traveled to India to see
cultures they considered exotic. One interesting feature of the engraving
featured on the site is that “in it, all the people are portrayed as Europeans
and in European-style dress. For example the brahmans at the left side are
attired as Baroque painters sometimes portrayed Old Testament prophets.” As I
mentioned in the historical review of sati, European men often expressed a
degree of admiration for the willingness of women who performed sati to kill
themselves rather than live after their husbands’ deaths. This depiction seems
to elevate the Indian widow, in the minds of a European audience, to a level of
equality for her dedication to her husband, making her an ideal woman.
The Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence was created to form an online
database of massacres and genocides in the 20th century. It covers events around
the world, and I chose to explore the site for its coverage of India and the
violence that occurred during the Partition. I expected to find substantial
documentation of violence during Partition, and I did. However, an interesting
case study that I found on the site pulled my attention away from the accounts
of the Partition and in a very different direction. The case study is on squads
of vigilante women in India, known as the Gulabi Gang and the Pink Sari Brigade,
combatting gendered violence. This idea immediately called to mind Jasmine’s
incarnation as Kali when she enacts vigilante justice on her rapist. The case
study explores “how marginalized women, who have resorted to organized violence
in an attempt to secure justice, walk a tightrope between legally reprehensible
and socially condoned action” (Sen).
While the Pink Sari Brigade started with just five friends responding to
a friend’s abusive husband, Sen says, over time the gang’s small successes
attracted dozens of the women’s neighbors. Within five years, the gang consisted
of more than 20,000 women organized into districts. What I found most
interesting about this was that it completely contradicts the western idea that
all of the women in what we think of as more traditional countries are helpless,
second-class citizens willing to put up with any abuse. This view, while
seemingly sympathetic to the women, also dehumanizes them, because many of us
couldn’t imagine living in such a way and think less of people who would. We
tend to think that makes those women less human than we are. The fact that women
have organized into such large groups to deal with issues their frequently
corrupt or disorganized governments will not or cannot deal with shows how wrong
this perception is. Much like how Jasmine is able to take control of her life
and kill a man who is threatening her, and how Nooran defies the expectations of
her father and religion to pursue what she wants, Indian women are also
demanding control of their lives, and justice for crimes done to them. Jasmine
is a remarkable woman, but it’s clear when learning more about the lives of real
Indian women that she is not truly unique, but representative of the many
remarkable Indian women who, though their culture differs from American culture,
are clearly as human as western women and have clear expectations about the sort
of treatment they deserve from their society.
Journal 6: Scholarly Article Reviews
In her article on representation of women in literature on the Partition
of India, Ana Gatica examines how the characters Nooran and Haseena, the dancer
Hukum Chand hires, are represented in
Train to Pakistan. Gatica takes a very negative view of their depiction,
stating that “women [in the novel] are mere assets that have to be transported
along with goods and animals to the other side of the frontier; they are
per se voiceless creatures” (97). She
reads Nooran’s conversation with Jugga’s mother as being very negative as well,
saying that the mother “rejects the young girl’s request and makes ambiguous
promises to her, letting us see how strongly she stands for the patriarchal
discourse of honour and its prescribed behaviours for women” (91). While it is
true that none of the women in the novel are in positions of much power, and
that frequently events are totally outside of their control, this seems like a
simplified reading to me.
Nooran has few options in Train to
Pakistan, but she is not voiceless as Gatica suggests. According to her,
both women “are conformant with their tradition, accepting their fates with
passivity and no great expectations; they were raised not to question, not to
take active roles but to just witness events” (91). However, Nooran’s decision
to reveal her secret to one of the few other female characters in the novel is
against the wishes of her father and against tradition, which would not condone
the relationship between her and Jugga. Moreover, Nooran’s conversation with
Jugga’s mother may have been one of the major catalysts for Jugga’s final
decision to sacrifice his own life to save the woman he loved and their unborn
child, along with all other passengers on the train. Haseena is less active, but
like all of the characters in the story including the most powerful, Hukum
Chand, she is more swept up in the events around her than conforming to
traditional standards.
I also examined a book review of
Jasmine, written by Uma Parameswaren. The review criticized the novel for
stereotypes it perpetuates about life in India and America, including Jasmine’s
encounter with the astrologer as a child and her swim in the river when she
encounters the decomposing dog. These criticisms likely have merit, as her
depictions of life in Midwestern America sometimes fall back to stereotypes as
well. However, Parmeswaren also is critical of Mukherjee’s depictions of violent
upheavals in Indian politics and illegal immigration, which I disagree with.
Parmeswaren writes that “the entire Khalistan secessionist movement in
the Punjab is reduced to gang slaughter and incredibly twisted vendetta” (699).
While Jasmine does not focus much on
the larger political scale of the conflict that kills Jasmine’s husband, it
seems to me that is simply not the story
Jasmine is meant to tell. Jasmine’s experiences, though they seem very
unusual to many readers, are in some ways very domestic as well. Like virtually
all of the other women in the post-colonial literature we have read, Jasmine is
not involved in the larger political schemes happening in her country. As a
woman, her role in society is limited, and to me, her experiences in India
relating to the violence there seemed more to tell the sort of story that could
happen to anyone living through an event like that—a sort of everyman, or
everywoman, experience of sectarian violence. Violence did enter her life, but
she didn’t enter into a larger revenge scheme that has come to be expected in a
lot of American stories. She did alter her life to accommodate the violence that
had entered it, but like many women characters, she was confined to doing so
within a set of parameters of the current life she was leading in India.
Parameswaren also criticizes
Jasmine’s immigration experience as “a well-oiled assembly-line trade” (699).
However, her experience in the novel was uncomfortable, frightening, and
ultimately violent. One fact the recent refugee crisis in Europe has made clear
is that an assembly-line for immigration outside of normal channels established
by countries does exist. It also is frequently violent and horrible, but much
like in Jasmine refugees have
contacts at certain stops on their journey, have frequently unscrupulous people
they must bribe and depend on in the process, and have to hope that they will
survive the journey, though as Jasmine
demonstrates, violence against women is in no way confined to India, and arrival
at a destination is no guarantee of an end to violence and exploitation.
Conclusion:
In my exploration of violence against women and female suicide in India,
I learned that India like many countries has a sad, unfortunately true history
of women suffering horrible violence at the hands of a patriarchal society, but
the view Americans have of it is often skewed. We are used to thinking of women
in India as helpless victims and martyrs suffering at the hands of inhuman men,
as white American culture frequently views non-white men. However, as I learned
through my historical research into sati, European men were prone to looking
sympathetically upon a societal practice that ended a woman’s life when her
husband died, as they admired and perhaps envied the idea of a wife who would
rather die with them than live without them. European culture was clearly not
significantly more enlightened on views of women, and as the Pink Sari Brigade
demonstrates, Indian women who are tired of inadequate legal avenues to address
violence done to them are more than capable of physically punishing men who
commit that violence. As usual, it is useless to view Indian women as helpless
others—it only serves to dehumanize them and fails to depict them accurately.
In the future, I would be interested in pursuing the idea of colonized
women pursuing vigilante justice further. I gave it passing thought while
reading Jasmine in class, but I was
not aware of the massive vigilante gangs that women were forming in India to
combat exactly the sort of violence Jasmine faces. As many countries
experiencing political upheaval or governmental corruption are unable to
maintain law and order for their citizens, I wonder if this is something that
will begin to appear more frequently.
Works
Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton & Co., 2010.
1072-1106. Print.
Drake, Edward Cavendish. A Gentoo Woman
burning herself on the funeral Pile of her deceas’d Husband. 1768. Copper
engraving. A New Universal Collection of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages and
Travels. London.
Loomba, Ania. “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity,
Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Postcolonial Writings on Widow
Immolation in India.” Feminist
Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2003. 241-62. Print.
Gatica, Ana V. “Literary Representations of Women During and After the Partition
of India (1947) in the Works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh and Bapsi
Sidhwa.” Pakistan Journal of Women’s
Studies 21.2 (2014): 81-100. SocINDEX with Full Text. Web. 14 Nov. 2015.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition: Gender,
Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India. Urbana, IL, USA:
University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New
York: Grove Press, 1989. Print.
Parameswaran, Uma. Rev. of Jasmine,
by Bharati Mukherjee. World Literature
Today 64.4 (1990): 698-99. Web. 14 Nov. 2015.
Ramusack, Barbara. “Sati.” Women in World
History. Roy Rosenzweig Center for
History and New Media. George Mason U, 2006. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.
Sen,
Atreyee. “Women’s Vigilantism in India: A Case Study of the Pink Sari Gang.”
Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. Center for International Studies and
Research, Dec. 2012. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Grove Press, 1956. Print.
