Exploitation and Sufferings of Women in 21st-Century Partition Novels: A Study of Amit Majmudar’s Partitions (2011) and Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory Colony, 1950 (2020)

Abstract

The female in the literary depictions of Partition can be easily pictured as not only passive victims of  historical events but as the main actors of the drama where it is possible to see the emotional, moral, and cultural violence of Partition. In the 21st century Partition writing, this interest is even keener. The revisiting of the event by contemporary authors is not only meant to tell the story of political division but rather to regain the voices that were stifled, forgotten or buried under official histories.                              This paper assumes Partitions and Victory Colony, 1950 is about women as the most grievously injured subject of Partition not only due to physical violence but due to having the historical disaster that was catastrophe sustained in their body, feelings, work, and memory. The two novels show that women are exploited in various ways; physically, psychologically, socially, economically and symbolically. Meanwhile, the works make the non-theory of female victimhood more complicated as women appear as survivors, witnesses, and carriers of the world truths that continue their lives in the broken world. By using these writings, the Partition literature of the 21st century deepens feminist historical knowledge through the revelation of the central place of the suffering of women in the meaning of Partition itself.