Changing Lifeworld of the ‘Permanent Liability’ Women

India’s eastern Partition in 1947 rendered scores of people homeless and Stateless overnight. Partition, Das (2017) points out, is regarded not only as the foundational moment in the evolution of post-Independence States in the subcontinent, but also the beginning of forced displacement of population in the region.While the better-off – educated, belonging to the ‘right’ class and caste – made use of their urban networks to settle in the city of Kolkata, which was every udbastu’s(refugee) coveted destination, the majority of the refugee population, however, was comprised of the unlettered and disenfranchised, of which the agriculturalist namashudra community formed a sizeable population. Most such people were cooped up in transit camps, separate refugee camps for families, ‘unattached women’[1] and the ‘permanent liability’[2], and several more had to wait for long periods of time in railway stations – particularly, Sealdah and Howrah – before such accommodation could be made available to them. Gradually, people were chosen from amongst these camp-residents to be given land and rehabilitated in parts of West Bengal and later, in other states. While most preferred to be given space in West Bengal, in particular the city of Calcutta, the refugee population was spread out across the country’s various states, namely, Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and the Andaman Island. ‘Unattached women’ were kept out of this ambit of rehabilitation by virtue of their ‘unattached’ status which rendered them ineligible for receiving rehabilitation facilities on their own.

Bharadwaj Dutta (2006) notes that the Punjab Partition had a somewhat liberating impact on women, in spite of the struggles and trauma, as the changed circumstances acted as a catalyst for women’s participation in the public sphere. Butalia (1997: 91) describes this as the ‘unforeseen consequence’ of the Partition, in the context of Punjab: ‘the mass influx of refugees and the consequent necessity of fulfilling their needs for shelter, jobs, food, and clothing, opened up a new career for middle-class women, social or welfare work, which, in turn, enabled their entry into the public sphere in an unprecedented way.’ Unchecked violence meant that several women became the default breadwinners for their families and in seeking these survival strategies gained access to education, training and employment. Raped and abused women, who were not accepted back into their families, could begin their lives with a new identity in the refugee settlements and townships. In a sense, their sphere of responsibilities increased beyond the home and the hearth under these circumstances. In the context of Bengal partition, Weber (2003) concludes that although the upper-caste better-off Bengali migrant women were at the forefront of re-settlement, land-grabbing, re-building their homes and thwarting eviction through collective action, they did not necessarily move beyond the private and into the public sphere. As men, women and children were held captive by circumstances, their scope of interaction might also have undergone some changes. Living in transit camps, in tents or waiting by the port, the women’s lifeworld must have changed significantly. They were now ‘exposed’ to the world beyond their households. Rather, to Weber (2003), women’s private sphere expanded to incorporate a larger range of responsibilities, due to the circumstances presented by the Partition of Bengal. For the poorer, lower-caste, unlettered women, especially the ‘unattached women of the PL camps, their lives became circumscribed by the State’s patriarchal protectionism. They were housed in guarded camps, their every movement recorded, and their activities surveilled. Under the garb of safeguarding their ‘honourability’, women’s lives were outrageously circumscribed; adult women residing in the PL camps would be allowed to go out of the camp at prescribed hours, and failure to return on time would fetch them punishment in front of the other inmates, which served as a lesson for all. The camp premises, the routine of the camp life, the logic of the rehabilitation mechanism, and ultimately, the State, became part of the refugee woman’s private sphere as the conditions stretched their sphere of the private to incorporate more and more public institutions and their workings.

Further, Manchanda (2004) accurately surmises that the figure of the female refugee is one of an absolute victim, devoid of any agency or scope of individuality; especially in the context of the PL women, they are at best non-subjects and their treatment at the hands of the patriarchal state system is one of infantilization. The hurt of the uprooting, thus, affected the refugee population on multiple levels which went beyond the trauma of the violence and losing their bhite-mati [3] overnight, but seeped into their very psyche – which Basu (2013) has termed ‘soft violence’ – that has started unfolding in the form of personal narratives and autobiographies only in the last decade. While we reflect on the incompleteness of the post-Partition settlement, the unique characteristics of the eastern Partition in comparison with Punjab, and the caste-class dimensions of the movement of people which followed the Partition, what remains pertinent to explore are the journeys of the women and the stories of the eastern Partition they uncover.

-Ilina Sen and Raka Banerjee

08.04.2018

[1] Term used by the rehabilitation officials to identify women who were either single, or had lost their husbands to violence, or gotten separated from their families during the Partition.

[2] Term used by the rehabilitation officials to denote ‘unattached women’ and infirm refugees who were permanently dependent on the government for their sustenance. They were housed in ‘permanent liability’ camps and were ineligible for rehabilitation.

[3] Ancestral land

References:

1. Basu, Jayanti. 2013. Reconstructing the Bengal Partition: The Psyche Under A Different Violence. Kolkata: Samya.
2. Bhardwaj Dutta, Anjali. 2006. ‘Oral History of Partition’ in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 22, (Jun. 3-9, 2006), pp. 2229-2235.
3. Butalia, Urvashi. 1997. ‘Abducted and Widowed Women:Questions of Sexuality and CitizenshipDuring Partition,’ inMeenakshiThapan (ed.):Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 90-106.
4. Das, Samir Kumar. 2017.‘In Search of the Nomadic: Methodological Explorations’ in Panjab University Research Journal (Arts), Volume XLIV No 2 July-December 2017, pp. 77-94.
5. Manchanda, Rita. 2004. ‘Gender conflict and displacement: Contesting ‘infantilisation’ of forced migrant women’ inEconomic and Political Weekly, 39(37), pp. 4179-4186.
6. Weber, Rachel. 2003. ‘Re (Creating) the Home’, in JasodharaBagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (ed.), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Vol 1. Kolkata: Stree, pp. 70–71.
   

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