Reading Violence: Gender, Violence, and *Representation in India and Pakistan (1947--Present)

229 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The first half of this study focuses on the literature and historiography of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. I explore the violence between religious communities as represented in the work of Bhisham Sahni, Abdullah Hussein and Saadat Hasan Manto, as well as the phenomenon of family violence against women in the work of Urvashi Butalia and Shauna Singh Baldwin. The remainder of the study moves beyond the Partition to examine "honour killing" in novels by Salman Rushdie and Nadeem Aslam, caste violence and police brutality in the fiction of Arundhati Roy and Mahasweta Devi, and a recent protest by a group of tribal women in Manipur who publicly stripped to protest the sexual violence of the Indian military. In moving from the gendered violence of Partition to that of the postcolonial moment, I observe the persistence of communal ideologies since the Partition, as well as their rearticulation with national and state identities in India and Pakistan. I also argue that these writers' frequent representation of the gendered violence within communities effectively contradicts the besieged narratives of self-persecution at the heart of communities and foregrounds the shared patriarchal contract across warring communities.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD