Beyond Humanity: Revisiting the Ethics of Body Politics and Violence Against Women in Partition Literature

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Puneet Singh

Abstract

The literary, historical, political and cultural stories of the partition which have been created by writers demonstrate that women, regardless of their cultural and religious backgrounds, were the worst affected by the recently recognized India-Pakistan border in 1947. The time period saw numerous forms of violence against women, regardless of any feeling of community. It has been a negative tradition to target all pious things for abusing, and revenging. Women have been regarded as a soft corner for all human beings. The bodies of women have been recognised as a notable tool for abusing and misbehaving. kidnapping stripping, making naked, rapping, deforming, cutting of breasts, engraving with religious symbols, and finally killing of women on the name of creed were witnessed in a great number which was the consequence of partition. The research work intends to give a complete analysis of the values and symbols of women's breasts by drawing on the ideas of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on power politics. Many literary, cultural, historical, religious, and political texts have used the period as their backdrop. The rhetoric of mother India was framed out of chaos and violence particularly against women and generally against the mass. As a result, it is considered as a movement having wounded breasts as a metaphor for border crossing and as a terrible testament to the history of Partition, endangering the stability of the country. The world witnessed the worst partition in the history of the world. The paper attempts to examine the Partition massacre by focusing on and comprehending female corpses with scratched breasts as abject who break the bounds of normative society and show its flaws in light of Julia Kristen's abjection theory. The values, ethical considerations, political ploys, and communal sensibility presented in this piece may be seen as a terrible repudiation of a brutal decolonization process and as an occultist for feminist resistance. The misery and sadness of maimed women's bodies are used as an illustration of the dialectic between history and the body by authors like Bapsi Sidhwa, Bhishm Sahani, and Khushwant Singh. There is the development of breaches of women's rights.

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How to Cite
Puneet Singh. “Beyond Humanity: Revisiting the Ethics of Body Politics and Violence Against Women in Partition Literature”. The Creative Launcher, vol. 6, no. 3, Aug. 2021, pp. 66-71, doi:10.53032/TCL.2021.6.3.13.
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