The Skeletons of Silenced Voices: Partition and Gendered Violence in Amrita Pritam's Pinjar

The 1947 partition of the Indian Sub-continent is archived predominantly as the culmination of a series of political negotiations and as the transfer of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim populations across the cartographic lines drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. The empowered historiography of the Partition, skewed in favor of agreements, laws, and facts, obfuscates the gendered experience of this catastrophe, reducing the suffering of women to numbers and statistics. One way to holistically understand the Partition, its impact on people, and the subsequent post-colonial identity formation is to foreground the myriad marginalized experiences. It is in this context of centering the margins that literary representations of the Partition gain significance. To this end, Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novel Pinjar offers interesting and valuable insights. This paper aims to argue that the novel, through its secular narration and the inter-religious female solidarity of its characters, demonstrates how gendered experiences fissure the empowered narratives of communalism. It will also focus on the themes of violence against the female body, psychological trauma, identity crisis, and female solidarity as explored in the novel.