partition and sexualization of women

-Akashleena 

Manik Bandopadhyay’s "The Final Solution" unfolds amid the crushing uncertainties of Partition-era Bengal, where refugee families end up living on railway platforms—the bleak, transitory spaces of modern statelessness. Mallika, the story’s frail protagonist, is portrayed in this “mattress-kingdom,” crowded with her child, a sick husband, and her sister-in-law, conveying in visceral detail the collapse of domestic sanctuary and the commodification of female bodies. Into this fragmentation steps Pramatha, a pimp masquerading under the guise of aid. Mallika, driven by starvation and the instinct to save her child, accepts his offer, even though she understands that her body, her dignity, is the price. Her final desperate, violent act—strangling Pramatha—is portrayed not as moral collapse, but as radical reclamation: “What did he take me for? Am I weak just because I’m a woman?” she asks, her body both wounded and weapon. Bandopadhyay refuses to cast her as passive victim; instead, he renders Mallika’s body as site of both violation and radical agency under extreme duress.

Protiva Basu’s "The Marooned" echoes this pattern of Partition’s gendered violence, albeit through a different familial lens. Here, readers are transported into the direfates of Bindubashini—an elderly matriarch—alongside her widowed daughter-in-law and her young granddaughters, Milu and Bulu. The story conveys the nightmarish unmooring of their existence, uprooted from East Bengal and stranded in a land that sees them as expendable. Basu renders their bodies and identities as suspended in violent liminality: robbed of property, haunted by dislocation, they are vulnerable, particularly the younger women, to abduction, trafficking, and even sexual predation, though Basu leans into the symbolic, vivid terror rather than graphic detail. In the tragic culmination, Bindubashini is abandoned, expelled even, from the jeep meant to carry refugees, left behind to die unnamed in an alien land, her body assimilated into the earth and symbolizing the brutal erasure of womanhood amid political calamity.

Intertextually, both stories underscore how Partition turned women’s bodies into landscapes of violation, survival, and political allegory. Mallika’s physical coercion and violent retaliation gesture toward how economic and patriarchal collapse devolved maternal agency into bodily barter, and then, into revenge as redemption. Bindubashini and her kin, on the other hand, illustrate a generational continuity of fragility; their bodies become testament to the betrayal of protective social structures and the violent edge of statelessness and stately negligence. Both texts force us to acknowledge that during Partition, the violation of women’s bodies was not ancillary but central—sites where communal hatred, political failure, and economic desperation intersected.

Yet the novels diverge in how they grant, or withhold, agency. Mallika stages a violent reassertion of self—her body becomes weapon, signifier, home for her child’s salvation. Basu’s women, in contrast, are tragically unmoored: victims of both geography and gender, their bodies offering no narrative of resistance, only haunting disappearance and symbolic loss.

In weaving these texts together, we encounter a constellation: women's bodies during Partition were simultaneously abused, instrumentalized, and silenced, but also, at moments, transformed into insurgent sites of agency. The intertextual echo between Mallika’s furious reclamation and Bindubashini’s ghostly erasure makes us confront the complex interplay between violence, gender, and survival under catastrophe.

Together, these stories contribute to a feminist historiography of Partition—one that resists patriarchal marginalization and refocuses our gaze on women's embodied suffering and transformation. They demand that Partition’s dominant narratives—often centered on male experiences of migration, nation, and loss—are haunted and reconfigured by the bodies of women, burdened and resistant alike.

                                                         -Aritri