Archives of Sexual Violence: Some Testimonies from the Partition of India

The article interrogates testimonies of sexual violence against women, like rape, abduction, forced conversion, and forced marriage, during the partition of India in 1947. Unlike sites of violence such as Rwanda, there were no commissions set up either by the successor governments in India or Pakistan or by international agencies to investigate the massacres. Partition violence does not easily fit into the usual frames of genocide or ethnic cleansing used in academic writing on conflict. In the absence of identifiable perpetrators and villains of the partition violence, members of a community were perpetrators wherever they dominated and victims where they were few. The archive for this article consists of statements by survivors and observers of the massacres to the local authorities; for example, army officers and social workers supervising the “recovery” of abducted women or running refugee camps. Interviews were conducted with survivors of the partition many years later, which are generally marked by silence about sexual violence. Questions arise about the meager testimonies and the bias in the archive regarding selection, collection, and publication. Ethical issues abound, including the selective appropriation of testimonies for political ends. Were women silent because disclosure would invite stigma, or is it that trauma is expressed by silence? And finally, how do survivors move toward closure?