Individual voices of women in selected novels and memoirs of Partition/ দেশভাগের নির্বাচিত উপন্যাস ও স্মৃতিকথায় নারীর স্বতন্ত্র স্বর

Abstract

In 1947, Partition is the deepest scar in the heart of society in the Indian subcontinent. There was immense struggle in the lives of the people of the country divided in the name of independence, leaving their familiar homes, villages, and familiar surroundings. Partition literature has raised the cry of the people who migrated from West to East or from East to West in search of homeland. The main theme of this essay is to explore the individual voice of women in the context of partition. In the woman narrative of the Partition, the struggle to survive in the new country by dragging the kidnapped, raped and torn bodies of women into hellish torture became the archetypal image of the country. In various novels of partition such as 'Neel Kanth Pakhir khoje (Atin Bandyopadhyay), 'Agun Pakhi' (Hasan Azizul Haque), 'Sandhya Ratt Shefali' (Miss Shefali), 'Indubala Bhater Hotel' (Kallal Lahiri), to 'Pinjar' (Amrita Pritam) is the awakening of the female being. Communal riots, the struggle to establish a new life from spiritual turmoil or the life of a single family to the sleepy life of a colony, from the terrible camp life to the refugee crowd of Sealdah Station, the struggle of lives is reflected in literature. women are always the second sex of the male dominated society. The impact of partition affected Punjab and Bengal ‘differently. The hellish violence inflicted on women in Punjab was far worse than Bengal’s Women. In Bengal, women's trauma, memory and life struggle are much stronger. Like the partition of India and Pakistan, men were brutalized by the physical segregation of women. Men did not stop with kidnapping and raping girls of the opposite religion. By painting the slogans of their own religion on the women's bodies or forcing them to walk naked in front of the procession, the communally divisive barbaric men proclaimed the victory of the male dominated society. A woman becomes a symbol of a nation and a religion, as she is an object of patriarchy; So the woman became a symbol of trampling the honor and pride of the opposing religion and nation. The female body was desecrated in the same way that a land was defiled by communal violence during the partition of the country. Indian Canadian novelist Saina Singh's novel ‘What Body Remembers’ portrays the brutality and horror of patriarchy's capture and control of women. In fact, in the primitive mentality of seeing land as one with women, women have to pay the price at the crossroads of life.