Suchergebnisse

This article examines Gandhi's writings, speeches, and correspondence, produced mainly from 1946 to the end of his life, on the subject of violence against women during the riots surrounding the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Gandhi, the article demonstrates, persistently fails to address the gender pathology revealed at the heart of South Asian society by these violations, a pathology to which men were subject, but of which women were the victims. The article compiles a comprehensive overview of Gandhi's shifting positions during this brief, though cataclysmic, period, in the belief that in so doing a certain core aspect of mainstream Indian nationalism's patriarchal underpinnings can be laid bare to critique.

This paper offers a feminist reading of a novel and short story by Jyotirmoyee Devi on the predicament of Hindu and Sikh women who were abducted and/or raped in the riots surrounding the Partition of India in 1947, repatriated subsequently on state initiative, but rejected by their families and communities. I contend that the rejections were motivated, and even ideologically rationalised, by a long and complicated history of the patriarchal fetish regarding women's sexuality. Using Jyotirmoyee Devi's writings, I examine how women, sexually abused by the rival community in the riots of Partition, unless excluded, become representative of the 'fallen' nation.