Partitioned Desires: Female Agency and Interfaith Relationships Around the Partition of India

ABSTRACT Through an examination of the phenomenon of abduction, I suggest that the preoccupation with women's violation during the 1947 Partition of India has obfuscated a history of female desire. Considering accusations of kidnapping made by women's families against men belonging to a different religion in instances of interfaith desire, I demonstrate that abduction operated as a category families mobilized to control female sexuality both prior to, and during, the Partition. In privileging women's agency and desire in my historical account, I challenge the feminist positing of sexual violence as the hegemonic category for the consideration of gender during the Partition.