Where is my home, my nation?: Cinematic Memory of the Women who were Abducted During the Partition of India in 1947

Abstract

This paper is an intense engagement of the partition saga and the experience of women in the process of the remaking of ‘Nations’. It aims to narrate the memories of survival and aftermath lives of abducted women who faced horrendous acts of violence in wake of evolution of ‘partition’ times. The tales of horror inflicted the arrival of nationalistic rhetoric on the bodies of women presents the gendered notions of nationalism and its horrendous expressions. Interspersed with readings from literature on the subject of partition with an analysis of discourses mostly from eleven selected films from Hindi cinema, this paper highlights the textual understanding of the films in the context of the idea of nation and sufferings of women in the nation building process. It revisits the patriarchal inflictions on the body of a woman in the larger context of the dark desires of macho-nationalism through the intersectional analysis of texts and subtexts of the selected Hindi films.