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Urvashi Butalia is a feminist-activist of India, writing in English who has founded the first publishing house in India for feminist writings and studies in collaboration with Ritu Menon in 1984. Her second great contribution to the field of women empowerment is the foundation of Zubaan in 2003 for the feminist publications. Butalia has received much acclamation for her epoch-making research book, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998) which records the differences between the official documents of partition history and the oral traumatic experience of the partition-survived women. Butalia accepted the challenge to encourage the partition-survivors for unfolding their long- buried unprecedented agony of physical and cultural assaults. After listening the narratives of several victimized women of partition, Butalia realized the dichotomy between memory and history: while collecting the personal histories of these women, who were silenced either by their family or by their situations, Butalia found the recorded official history of partition, both in India and Pakistan, incomplete and subverted to suit the authorities of the status. 

The purpose of this research article is to support the claims of Butalia who says that once the memory is raked up, it comes out with the multiple layers of partition history, crossing the limits of the closed and tailor-made history.

This paper is based on the reviews of various books which have been discussed through out the paper.

Butalia located and helped a number of Partition victimized survivors to dig out their long-buried and silenced memories of Partition which have been largely ignored or neglected by the official public records. She devoted her ten years to her research work for collecting the personal histories for her extraordinary memoirs, The Other Side of Silence. She didn't accept the fact, related to riots which are already published in the books of Partition; rather, she visited personally to all those Partition victims to collect the materials of these terrible events and compiled them as the living but unheard tales to the Indo-Pak division. She confesses : “The tragic reality is that the division-empire’s answer to what our colonial rulers saw as the intractable problem of the peaceful coexistence of people of different religions and communities-left behind a legacy of bitterness and enmity that ensure blind hatred, terrible prejudices and deep ignorance which we are still dealing with today” (2). The distinguished quality of this book is its research-methodology which combines the lengthy transcripts from interviews of around seventy people and Butalia's own observations and commentaries over the stories.

These random interviews and stories taken from various partition-victims, living in India, Pakistan and abroad, created a complex problem of compiling these materials into a book. Nevertheless, she compiled all her collected materials into the eight chapters of this book which are-Beginning, Blood, Facts, Women, Honour, Children, Margins and Memory. In the chapter entitled, ‘Beginning’, She introduces herself a Punjabi citizen of India, belonging to the family of Partition refugees. She felt provoked to write her book on Partition memories when she herself had witnessed the kidnapping and massacre of the family of the sikh in October 1984, occurred due to the assassination of the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. The second chapter, ‘Blood’ recounts her visit to Pakistan only to know the well-being of Butalia's Ranamama and her maternal grandfather, who decided to convert themselves and to say in their ancestral house at Lahore, mainly to secure their property rights. The third chapter is ‘Facts’ because Butalia collected the official and political records and datas, leading to the decision and announcement of Partition on June 3 1947. The fourth chapter is highly emotional and pathetic because ‘it contains the long-buried memories of partition and its recovery by Butalia from an eighty-year old lady, Damyanti Sahgal, living all alone in a little cottage in Hardwar. The title of this chapter is ‘Women’ because Butalia collected the real stories of women's abduction, their rape and forcible marriage, the discovery and recovery of women from both sides of border, exploitation and disgrace of their feminine bodies in the centres of Rehabilitation. Butalia gives a detailed descriptions of inter-communal marriage after the Carnage of Partition which were made out of love and compulsion. The recovery and rehabilitation of these kidnapped women made their lives worst because they suffered from the trauma of both physical disgrace and alienation in their own family.

The chapter ‘Women’ depicts in detail the life of Damyanti Sehgal, from her flight from Pakistan to India and her social work, related to the recovery and rehabilitation of households of abducted women with the support of her aunt, Premvati’ Thapar. The recovery of the Indian-converted into Muslim women raised a question to the secular credentials of independent India, because the recovery and rehabilitation committee of India was interested only in taking the converted Indian women. Some of the Hindu women, adopted in Muslim family, refused to be back in their poor family in India, for they had no grievances against their conversion. They confessed that they were satisfied to be the women of a comfortable house with their secured identity. They had rejected their religion-based identity which caused them immense sufferings. One of the traumatic love-story, narrated in this section, is that of  Buta Singh and Zainab.  Zainab was saved from the Hindu mob-violence by Buta Singh who ultimately fell in love with him and married her. When everything got settled in their lives, the Muslim brother of  Zainab took her back to Pakistan mainly to secure the property on her name. Thus, the true love of the two human souls got devastated.

The Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Ordinance was made an Act in 1949, but the definition of ‘abducted person’ was difficult to determine because a number of women were living in their adopted family on their own free will. The violence and aftermath of Partition covered largely the physical assault, abduction, recovery and rehabilitation of the women from both sides. That's why, Butalia comments that “History is a women's Body” (3).

Chapter five, entitled as “Honour” deals with the mass suicide of women, both in Punjab and Lahore, to preserve their honour as well as that of their families. The male members of the family expected this embracing of death from their female members because the women of the house constitute the purity, weakness and Honour of the families. The encouraged the groups of women to commit suicide for maintaining the purity of their body and the owner of their families. These suicides where glorified as acts of martyrdom. Butalia condemned these provoked acts of suicide which were excluded from the overall definition of violence. Butalia labels these acts of sacrifice or mass suicide as ‘Patriarchal consensus’ (4) and regrets that “to actively remember these women as symbols of the honour of the family, community and nation is then also to divest  them of both violence and agency’. (5).

Chapter six is ‘Children’ in which Butalia says that the history of Partition would never accept the experiences of children and their real narrations as something facts. The Historians reject the memories of the adult, matured victims as something unreliable, and with such intellectual and rational approach, they would reject the utterances of the children as Childish, immature talks. When some of the partition-victimized children grew adult, and they wrote their traumatic stories, filtered through their memories, their stories are called autobiographies, not history. Butalia visited the clothes shop of Trilok Singh at Amritsar who recollected his own story of escape from Pakistan when is uncles decided to kill the women and the children of the family as martyrs since they were unable to protect them from the Muslim mob while reading and listening to the partition victims four decades after the savagery of Indo-Pak division, Butalia realizes that partition history also contributes the children's memories- “these stories, told by adults, were stories about what had happened to them at children” (6). Anis Kidwai, a dedicated, self-styled social worker, visited Irwin Hospital in Delhi in 1948 to rehabilitate the orphaned, abandoned and deserted children. To identify these children as Muslim and Hindu was a difficult task which had to be completed before their settlement. There was a rumour that members of the rival communities liked to pick up Hindu female children to serve their own purpose of keeping a domestic aid or making a prostitute. Some of the traumatized children trusted nobody, and naturally the preferred silence to speak. This lack of children's history of partition is exposed by Butalia who says that “if women are difficult subjects and silences have built about so much in their lives, how much more difficult it is to look at the lives of children (7). Butalia accepts that most of adult Partition stories are the stories of children, filtered through their memories.

In chapter seven, ‘Margins’ Butalia draws our attention to those sections of humanity, the partition histories of which still remain, to some extent invisible in the historical accounts of the Indo-Pak division. According to Butalia, whenever we talk and think about the Carnage of Indo-Pak division, we calculate the casualties in terms of either Hindus or Muslims, but we do never think about the schedule casts, untouchables, Harijans, Dalits whom we technically call ‘the marginalized section’. Butalia came across a sweeper named Maya Rani from Butalia in 1986 whom she asked about her survival strategy during the days of communal riots of 1947. To her surprise, Maya Rani informed her that they used to plunder the evacuated houses of Hindus and Muslims because they belong to neither side. They were Harijans who had nothing to do the regions of Pakistan and India. Nevertheless, there were groups within the Dalits who used to support the Hindu if they were working in the Hindu-dominated locality, and similarly the Dalit working in the Muslim-dominated area had their own choice. At this point, Butalia says that “while Christians and Harijans may have had communities and organizations to represent them, to attempt to make their voices heard, for many others this was not possible”. (8)

The last chapter is ‘Memory ’ in which Butalia makes a comparison between the memories of the Partition victims and survivors on the one hand and the modern, documented history of Partition on the other that she did learn at school. She regrets for the absence of official memorials in India so that the loss of the lives may be commemorated. Butalia criticizes the art of modern historiography which does not attach much importance to the memories and stories of the victims. The stories of the partition survivors were considered subjective and highly sentimental. That's why, Lucien Frevert, the great French historian, rejected the emotional tales as “primitive feelings” and warned his contemporary historians against the basic human sensibility and emotions because they might change the rational word into ‘a stinking Pit of corpses (9). Similarly, Pippa Virdee says that the new historiographical school of the early 1980's seemed to be more concerned with “a history from below approach” than with the “history of great men” (10). Ira Raja in his review of Butalia's book about justifies her research methodology of interviews and oral testimonials on two grounds-’One is her urge to do right to the survivors of Partition, and the other is to exhibit her inclination towards the Postmodernist disposition of distinguishing the ‘truth’ from opinion” (11). Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a very clear distinction between memory and history when he says that “history seeks to explain the event and the memory of pain refuses the historical explanation and sees the event causing the pain as a monsterously irrational aberration” (12). Butalia’s quest of Partition history or histories from the memories of the survivors may also be termed as the continuity of the Past of the Present surviving generation, as David Blight comments that “storytelling is the human quest to own the past and thereby achieve control over the present” (13). There is, no doubt, about the fact that human memory moves in various directions and it is really difficult to organize them into One unit of facts. Official history is written for the general people whereas historical facts, based on memories, are generally sound effective for the narrator and the listener or reader.

In the second edition of The Other Side of Silence, Butalia has added a preface, entitled ‘Return’ in which she admits that the ideals and concepts of society keep on changing with the changed situations of society. She asserts her claim by saying that the connotations of “nationalism and “patriotism” underwent a drastic change after the four decades of Partition. See also mentions the names of two female writers of Partition literature, Krishna Sobti and Amrita Pritam, who have depicted their own personal memories of 1947 Partition in their celebrated fictional writings. Butalia is of the view, the existence of Partition survivors and their stories among us today continually reminds us that this was once a shared history, and in many ways, even today, it continues to cross and extend borders as only personal stories can do. Butalia speaks frankly that she has collected the personal stories of survivors through their recollections or memories not from the academic point of view, but just to widen out of scope of Partition history which appears fragmentary, prejudiced and incomplete after listening to the unheard voices. The field of memory opens up the multiple layers of Partition Carnage and double dislocation of physical and cultural identity which, as Butalia believes, must be probed. The memory has no language of its own; it needs articulation to communicate it in its right perspective, but the memories of sexual savagery were difficult and dangerous to be articulated by the Partition survivors. Moreover, the world of suppressed memory is infinite, and it encourages the researchers with the dictum : “the more you search, the more there is that opens up” (14). Butalia gives references to Henry James who wants the writers, readers and historians to feel the past and get the real taste or since of it by discovering its channel in the present. Even though the survivors want to forget their clouded past willfully, yet they like to unburden their mind by divulging the ugly facts or events of the Past. In the words of Anne Whitefield head :

 “….. Forgetting considered in all its

complexity, dissolves to be taken seriously,

both because it is an inseparable and

not always sufficiently recognize aspect

of memory itself, and because some

measure of forgetting is necessary

requirement for personal and civic

health” (15).

Butalia expects that the present generation, fighting in the name of class and caste, must take lessons from her collected organized stories of Partition Carnage so that the sectarian forces must be wide out.

Butalia's much celebrated memoir, The Other Side of Silence has been an attempt to unearth those aspects of Partition Carnage and its consequent traumatic experiences which lay buried or silenced in favour of honour and masculine historiography. She even visited Lahore to collect the history of her mother's family which remained divided with the division of the Indo-Pak border. During her research work on Partition for ten years, Butalia found that the recorded history of Partition would remain insufficient if the Partition memories from the silenced section was not added. Butalia organized a large number of stories, based on the memories of the survivors or of the marginal sections which seemed to her more original and truthful than those of the well-documented history, meant to be teaching at school. To avoid the amnesia of Partition, these research work to revive the memories and experiences of the survivors is necessary. Her research methodology on Partition survivors and their silenced memories is exemplary because it combines the oral naratives of the past and Butalia's commentary in the present.

1. Butalia, Urvashi. The other side of silence : voices from the Partition of India: penguin, Random House, India. 1998. P. Xii.
2. Ibid ; P. Xii.
3. Ibid ; P. 143.
4. Ibid ; P. 212.
5. Ibid ; P. 216.
6. Ibid ; P. 258.
7. Ibid ; P. 286.
8. Ibid ; P. 328-29.
9. Frevent , Lucien Febvre. Emotions in History. Pro Quest E book, Central : Central European University Press. 2011. P. 29.
10. Virdee, Pippa. ‘Remembering Partition Women, Oral Histories and the Partition of 1947’. Oral History Society. 41. 2 (2013) : 49-62. JSTOR. P. 50.
11. Raja, Ira. “Stories to Tell : Women's Agency , Activism and Emancipation in South Asia. Australian Feminist Studies. 17. 37 (2002) : 101-107. Taylor and Francis Online. P. 102.
12. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Remembering Village : Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition”. Inventing Boundaries : Gender, Politics and the Partition of India. (Ed.) Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi : Oxford University Press. 2000.  P. 322.
13. Melissa, Chen. Ideas Beyond Borders. 2017. P. 13.
14. Butalia, Urvashi.(1998) op. cit. P. xxx
15. Whitehead, Anne. Memory.  Routledge , 2009. P. 157.