The concept of ‘border' in the context of diasporic subjects revolves around both spatial and psycho-cultural dimensions. The Partition of India has led to the emergence of the ‘Hindu' or ‘Bengali Diaspora'. This dispersion has jeopardized the lives of South Asian women, making them undergo a process of ‘selfing' in the new (host)lands. This chapter deals with the impact of the process of rehabilitation on the conflicting forms of the ‘new' identity or the identity ‘shift' among South Asian women in diaspora. The goal is to reinscribe the geo-political borderline as a symbolic threshold to the self-construction of the Bengali women, a corollary question to the dichotomous changes in their societal stature, as it appears to be a constant cue in their mental space. To this end, Foucault's principles of heterotopic spaces to observe the dissociation of the parallel spaces in the process of the ‘selfing' of the displaced women are presented.
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The women’s question was one of the many concerns of the nationalist project and the civilizing mission through which the politicized sympathy of the so-called ‘civilizers’ came upon the status of women in the mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, as it was then a land of renaissance and cradle of numerous revolutionaries. The primary interest of choosing the state of women was to amplify the need for modernization and preserving the colonial reign that could allegedly ‘help’ India against the ‘barbaric’ customs designed for its women (especially Hindu women) along with the treatment they received from the then patriarchal paradigm. The entire issue was a real drawback; thus, the change was highly needed. Primarily, the mission was a practical improvement, initiating women’s education, bringing changes to their behavior and approaches, interests, and attires, and it created a new cultural notion, the ‘New women’. They crossed the threshold of the home to the world of university and true professions. But historically, India as a nation was not waiting for her independence to be delivered hand in hand, several other communal riots and insurgents were laying their ground along with the freedom movement resulting in the Partition of Bengal and Panjab, birthing new nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh, separated from the free Dominion of the Republic of India (the first proposition of the Partition of Bengal Province in 1905, aborted in 1911, followed by the final territorial recognition through the Indian Independence Act 1947, August 14th and 15th). A major shift, millions of migrants rushed into swapping both sides of the border with great trepidation, dislocated and dissipated in a quest for being relocated. According to Sriwastav,
Whereas in Punjab the migration was accomplished in one fell swoop, that is within a brief period (1947 to 1950), in the east, the migration from ‘East Bengal’ first and later from ‘East Pakistan’ and ‘Bangladesh’ has continued till this day. (Sriwastav, 2020, p. 1)
This national unrest caused terrible harm to numerous lives but the misery that fell upon the women, in particular, was no lesser than a double-edged sword: their pre-existing anonymity added up with a fear of abduction, killing, and new-faced challenges. Some embraced martyrdom as the family of some repatriated women would even refuse them, questioning their ‘purity’. The class divisions and their consequent privileges were already there, evidential in the autobiographies of the late 19th century women. No doubt why it is a popular opinion that the Partition is the ‘darker side’ of Independence (Malhotra, 2017). The Partition is an integral part of South Asian history entailing a significant number of metanarratives, oral history, and ‘lived archives’ (Malhotra, 2017) of millions of people travelled across the border and it has been shaping the identities of the South Asians, generations after generations, the remnants of which are very palpable even today.
Countless research works, both in English and regional languages, have already been directed to the Partition Holocaust and the gradual emergence of Indian feminism. Factual studies are done by the writer like Urvashi Butalia (in her The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India), ground studies are reported by the newspapers like “The Hindu”, “The Telegraph”, ‘The Times of India”, and “The Star of India” etc. Most popular forms of the Partition theory are based on documentations on the refugees, gender-based study, or registering the narratives of spatial diaspora and theorizing migrancy. But this chapter aims to unfold the multifaceted psychological shifts that the women phased through at that time of de- and re-territorialization and later being played by their memory. This concept-based study examines more than one text, from a kaleidoscopic vantage of cross-referencing texts and databases (interviews and field studies) in a systematic and conceptual method. Supporting the importance of the Partition micro-narratives, Sriwastav said, “Accounts of women from the field endorse this protracted nature of Partition in the East of the sub-continent and emphasize the agential role of women countering the very deadening effect of the holocaust and its aftermath” (Sriwastav, 2020, p. 2).
To evaluate the predicament of the ‘aftermath’ which is even pulsing through the present time, this study parallelly focuses on the discontinuity of the ‘woman’s question’, one-upon-a-time-central-concern and its whereabouts; following the research questions: