'Nobody talks of the plight of the women’: Oral History and the Partition of British India in 1947 by Discovering Historical Sources

discovering_historical_sources — 2025-09-18 08:39:52 UTC

In 1997, after four years as the BBC India correspondent based in Delhi, I persuaded BBC World Service radio to let me make a series of five half-hour programmes about how Partition had been experienced on a personal level. This was informed by my background as a historian and practitioner of oral history. The BBC allowed me four months to travel across South Asia gathering about 200 interviews – the audio tapes are now held in the archive of SOAS University of London – and I had the invaluable support of BBC journalists across the region, many of whom helped me find interviewees and sometimes acted as interpreters.

Some of the interviewees were famous public figures – novelists, politicians or high-ranking soldiers who had publicly spoken or written about their families’ experience of Partition before; but most were ordinary people who had been caught up in extraordinary times, people who we tracked down sometimes by luck, sometimes by simple journalistic persistence. Some of the interviews illuminated one of the most painful and hidden aspects of Partition – the murder, rape and abduction of tens of thousands of women, as feuding religious communities (broadly Muslims on one side and Hindus and Sikhs on the other) sought to dishonour the other community by violating ‘their’ women.

Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories had reflected incidents of rape and abduction particularly in the Punjab, but collecting oral histories emphasised the much wider prevalence of sexual violence at the time of Partition and the terror that it engendered. The novelist Quratulain Hyder was 20 at that time and she told me of travelling by train with her mother amid heightened communal tension and a profound sense of menace:

Article written by Andrew Whitehead. First published November 2022.

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discovering_historical_sources — 2025-09-18 08:42:31 UTC

In the Punjab in particular, those seeking to move in order to be on what was for them the ‘right’ side of the hastily drawn international border between India and Pakistan, often travelled by train. And these refugee trains were on occasion set upon by mobs which killed and abducted those from the other side of the religious fault line. The writer Amrita Pritam, then in her 20s and pregnant, was a Partition refugee heading from Lahore to Delhi by train. And it was on board a train that she wrote ‘An Ode to Waris Shah’, her powerful poetic expression of the plight of Punjab’s women:

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Both of the newly independent nations, India and Pakistan, went to some lengths to seek to retrieve abducted women. Yet 50 years later some women were still in institutions set up in the aftermath of Partition. With a fellow journalist I visited the Gandhi Vanita Ashram in Jalandhar in the Indian state of Punjab. Among those anxious to share their Partition story, and determined that her ordeal should be heard and respected, was Parkashwanti, who in the summer of 1947 took refuge in a rice mill with her husband and young son. They were robbed by a mob and her husband was taken away but then managed to return, fearful that another attack was imminent:

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As the violence gradually abated, both governments adopted a systematic approach to seeking out and returning women who had been abducted. Sheila Sen Gupta told me how she was part of a retrieval team on the Indian side of the border:

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Abducted women, once found, had no agency – sometimes they had been married to their abductor and had a new family – but if they were traced they were sent back. Even an operation intended to help women at times treated them as property and their restitution as a matter of national honour more than individual justice.

‘Nobody talks of the plight of the women’, Sheila Sen Gupta told me. ‘We talk about Partition, Partition, Partition. We talk about all the property lost. But the women on both sides suffered so much. It’s terrible. It’s something beyond conception’. Oral history is one vital means of challenging that silence and recording women’s testimony.

Among those I interviewed in 1997, there were a handful of men who admitted to being perpetrators of Partition violence – most were remorseful, though one or two sought to justify their actions. No one admitted to carrying out sexual violence. But there were certainly rapists and abductors among all of the principal religious communities, just as there were victims on all sides too.

The oral history of Partition reveals what has been rarely acknowledged until now – that the communal tensions of the time inflicted a terrible toll on women’s lives and bodies.

Quratulain Hyder interviewed by Andrew Whitehead

discovering_historical_sources — 2025-09-18 09:06:48 UTC

This excerpt from an interview with Quratulain Hyder has been shared courtesy of Andrew Whitehead, the full interview is available in the SOAS archive.

Please be aware that this audio clip contains a description of a violent attack.

Amrita Pritam interviewed by Andrew Whitehead

discovering_historical_sources — 2025-09-18 09:09:09 UTC

This excerpt from an interview with Amrita Pritam has been shared courtesy of Andrew Whitehead, the full interview is available in the SOAS archive.

Please be aware that this audio clip contains references to violence and suffering.

Parkshawanti interviewed by Andrew Whitehead

discovering_historical_sources — 2025-09-18 09:12:30 UTC

This excerpt from an interview with Parkshawanti has been shared courtesy of Andrew Whitehead, the full interview is available in the SOAS archive.

Please be aware that this audio clip contains descriptions of violence and references to death.

Sheila Sengupta interviewed by Andrew Whitehead

discovering_historical_sources — 2025-09-18 09:15:23 UTC

This excerpt from an interview with Sheila Sengupta has been shared courtesy of Andrew Whitehead, the full interview is available in the SOAS archive.

Please be aware that this audio clip contains references to the abduction of women.

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Written by Andrew Whitehead

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.