Beyond Partition Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India

Dissident Feminisms

by Deepti Misri

In Beyond Partition, Deepti Misri shows how 1947 marked the beginning of a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of "India" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against men and women, she establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what "India" means.



Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, Beyond Partition offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and of India.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nation-states are imagined communities. They are held together in part upon the concerted belief of citizens in the narratives & values of the state. It is difficult to do this, & state powers often even resort to violence to enforce the singular, accepted idea of the state.

In this book, Deepti Misri studies how competing ideas of "India" after 1947 (post-partition, postcolonial) is accompanied & contested with forms of gendered violence. Gendered violence is not only brutally practiced by those who militarily enforce a hindutva, fascist idea of "India" but unfortunately also by regional communities who in their resistance to violence & erasure they face from the enforcement of the fascist "India," also perpetuate their own gendered violence through narratives of sacrifice & honour (the stories she shared of sikh men beheading their female relatives to protect their honour from the muslim mobs who will rape them was so difficult to read. The honour that was protected was in fact the male honour, so that their women are not violated).

Women are often recipient of great violence in post-partition violence, & this is especially the case for dalit women who additionally bear the violences of casteism. The state has routinely deployed rapes, sexualized torture, extrajudicial killings, & militarized violence in their geopolitical protection of "national security." When it comes to gendered violence, it is not entirely about women, however. Misri also highlights the gendered violence face by men, who are described & violated in ways that present them as "effiminate."

Misri looks to representations of violence in culture, texts, photography, & even performance to uncover the ideological discourses underlying these representations. How does violence take on a specific form, & have a specific meaning, in specific historical & cultural contexts? In protest, how do you reproduce or reveal acts of violence without reproducing an act of violence? I enjoyed reading especially the representations that she finds empowering; the representations that resist & undercut & stare oppression in the face, as was the case in the works of Mahasweta Devi. Also really enjoyed her epilogue on the violence of the oppressed.

"To say that the violence of the oppressed gestures toward a more expansive idea of India is not simply to endorse violence or turn away from its unpredictable aftermath, but rather to invite scrutiny of the long history of ideas of nation, failed as well as successful, that have created these oppressed groups & their resistant violence. It is to search for new idea of India, perhaps even going so far as to ask whether that idea is recuperable at all."

[Mills College Library]

305.4842 M67843 2014