The Partition of India – Part 5: A Crisis Made Flesh
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we're here.

and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network. And as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. You are listening to part five of a multi-part series on the partition of India. Now, if you're still with me at this point, I just want to take a second and say thank you. I know that this has been an uncharacteristically long series, and I appreciate your patience as we take the time to explore all the nooks and crannies

of this topic. But if you're starting to get a little partition fatigue, I totally understand. And don't worry, after we've concluded this series, we'll return to the typical conflicted format. The two-parters, the one-parters, that kind of stuff.

As they say, sometimes less is more, and very soon we will leave India, and maybe even the 20th century behind, in search of other interesting and unexpected topics. But with all that said, let's turn our attention back to the subject at hand. In the previous episode, Unholy Rush, we experienced partition through the eyes of the people who lived it. The

The people who suffered unimaginable violence and fled for their lives towards hazy, uncertain futures. We cobbled together a mosaic of first-hand accounts, and through that cracked and splintered lens we began to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to live through this thing.

We met Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Parsis. We met victims of violence and the perpetrators of it. Gang leaders and gundas, refugees and relief workers. But we also stayed tightly tethered to our core cast of characters. In particular, the Lady Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. In the capital of Delhi, Edwina and Nehru risked their lives, day after day trying to curb the violence.

Nehru, unable to administer the problems into submission, ran into the streets and confronted the violent mobs with little more than a hot temper and a stiff upper lip. Edwina, meanwhile, organized and directed thousands of relief workers to provide food and shelter to the tsunami of refugees washing across northern India. The impact of partition on the subcontinent was so incalculably vast.

that we could spend months, maybe even years, chronicling every story and every anecdote from the time, but in today's episode, I want to turn our attention toward a very specific and often overlooked aspect of the partition crisis. The violence in 1947 touched millions of people, but there was one group of South Asians that was particularly and acutely affected by the upheaval. Women.

As 12 million human beings surged back and forth across the subcontinent in great, churning rivers of misery, women in particular found themselves in the crosshairs of some of the worst violence the 20th century had ever seen. As one academic put it, partition was, quote, Another writer phrased it in an even more chilling way, quote,

A whole generation of women was destroyed by partition. And Mohandas Gandhi himself said that women were, quote, the chief sufferers in 1947. And the reasons for this are myriad and complicated and fascinating, and we will explore all of it. But I do want to stress that this episode will not just be a non-stop horror show of doom and

and gloom. When talking about atrocities throughout history, there's always a temptation to linger to the point of excess on the most lurid parts, to seek empty shock value over substance. That's not what we're going to do here today. We're going to tell a story, one of sadness and violence and heartbreak, yes, but also one of bravery, resilience, and hope. Women went through incomprehensible experiences during partition, and their stories deserve to be continually told,

revisited, and analyzed. But it all serves as a frustrating reminder that all over the world, from Mumbai to Tehran to Mississippi, women are often the first casualties of political and social tension. When factions clash and ideologies collide, women's bodies often become the literal and figurative battleground on which these conflicts are waged.

So, this episode is dedicated not only to the women in India and Pakistan who struggled and suffered and died in 1947, but also the millions upon millions of women who are struggling right now across the world, clawing and gasping and fighting for the simple and fundamental right to bodily autonomy. Welcome to The Partition of India, Part 5 – A Crisis Made Flesh

It's September of 1947. We're in a government office in Delhi, India. And outside the window, the capital is in crisis. If satellite imaging had existed in 1947, the city would have looked like an open wound. Fires were burning, pouring twisted pillars of smoke and smog into the air. At street level, you could barely hear yourself think, above the screaming, the shouting, the gunshots, and the sirens.

The nation of India was barely a month old, and already it seemed to be coming to an end. As one eyewitness put it, quote, "...telephone lines down, the postal system in disarray, trains cancelled, bridges destroyed, and streets filled with people, writhing, crawling, being trampled underfoot, being looted and murdered and dying, dying like flies."

Inside this government office sits the Prime Minister of India. After three decades in politics, after countless long years of striving for freedom from the British Empire, Jawaharlal Nehru felt like a failure. After all this time, he finally had real power in his hands, and yet he did not know what to do. As Nehru said at the time, quote, life here continues to be nightmarish.

Ancient religious hatred was coursing through the country's young veins like toxin. Religion, that superstitious relic that made men into beasts and women into slaves. Nehru fumed at the outrage of it all. The refugees pouring in from Punjab brought new stories every day, each more horrifying than the last. Tales of Hindus butchering Muslims, of Muslims butchering Sikhs,

and of Sikhs descending on villages with military efficiency to wipe entire families out. Religion was to blame, yes. Since his youth, Jawaharlal had hated its influence over his people, had resented its stranglehold over society. And yet, it was also the force that animated the best man he knew. His great mentor, Mohandas Gandhi, was the most religious man he had ever met, and also the most ethical, the most moral, and the most righteous.

Perhaps, the roots of the crisis went deeper than faith. After years of steady political polarization and identity politics, the dam had finally broken. As one academic described, "Such a plural society may apparently remain peaceful for long periods of time, each group silently accepting, tolerating, and sometimes ignoring but still deeply aware of the growing socioeconomic cleavages among themselves.

Under stress, such societies may suddenly implode.

Whatever was happening to India, Jawaharlal Nehru felt powerless to stop it. All he could seem to do was drive around at night, alone, unable to sleep, seeking out mobs to confront and gangsters to chastise. He tried to help however he could. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, He set up a city of tents in his garden and filled that and his house with refugees and

including two Muslim children he had personally rescued from a roof in Old Delhi while a riot raged below. Every day, he walked in the streets and listened to people tell him their sorrows. I know, I know, my brother. It is my sorrow too, he would reply. End quote.

On the rare occasions he could stand to be in his office, he looked through papers and reports, a sea of documents, detailing innumerable problems and difficulties, death by a thousand paper cuts. But one day in September, a different sort of document came across Nehru's desk. It was a 14-page report from a close friend.

a fellow Congress politician named Mridula Sarabhai. Sarabhai and Nehru went way back. They'd come up together in the heady, hopeful days of the early independence movement. Both were acolytes of Gandhi, and both were devastated by what was happening to India. Shortly after Independence Day, Sarabhai had rushed to the Punjab to see what was happening with her own eyes. And what she found there...

horrified her. She returned to Delhi and typed up a report for Nehru, 14 pages in all. And as Nehru read through the pages, the contours of a new and terrible problem began to form, something that he had failed to anticipate. According to this report, all across the Punjab, tens of thousands of women had gone missing. Young women, old women, little girls and teenagers, all gone,

vanished with barely a trace. In newspapers and police reports across the Punjab, lists of names were being written. Sikh women, Hindu women, Muslim women, all missing. And with every passing day, every passing hour, the lists were getting longer. The 14-page report that Nehru was reading described kidnappings and abductions, human trafficking and rape, sexism,

sexual violence on a biblical scale. The Punjab, it seemed, had become a crucible of suffering for women. And as Nehru continued to read through Sarabhai's report, his blood began to boil. In the chaos of the mass migration and the growing refugee crisis in the Punjab, women

women of every religious community were being targeted. Emboldened by the absence of police and encouraged by deep-seated grievance, men were stealing women from their homes and spiriting them away across either side of the border where their families and friends could never find them.

much less recover them. It was a crisis that crossed all divisions, affected every community. As one writer put it, "...men of all three religions delighted in their momentary sense of power over vulnerable women." And in the gloom of his office, Nehru reached the end of the report. Something obviously had to be done, but how?

The resources of the new nation were stretched thin. The army was in the midst of a paralyzing reorganization, the police were overwhelmed, and the government employees were working themselves to the point of exhaustion. Nehru could barely keep order in the capital itself, and as for the British army, well, they were long gone, or sitting on their hands.

As the writer Declan Walsh describes, quote, Whatever happened, the British were determined to stay out of it. Thousands of British troops stationed in India were packed onto steamships headed for Europe. Those left behind were ordered to avoid any trouble unless British lives were at risk. End quote. But still, something had to be done. Tens of thousands of women had been tortured and taken. At this very moment, many were being hurt, over-

and over again. Someone had to save them. Someone had to get them back. Later that month, Nehru flew to Karachi, the capital of Pakistan. Tensions were already very high between the two nations, and thus far, every attempt at collaboration or cooperation had been strained at best and combative at worst.

Partition had not only split the subcontinent in terms of geography and politics, but in terms of resources as well. As historian Andrew Lowney describes, quote, "...the Indian Independence Bill created two separate cabinets and administrations for the two countries. All the government posts, including the police, army, judiciary, postal system, and civil service, would have to be split between the two countries and their assets divided."

But for Pakistan, it was the greater challenge, as everything had to be created from scratch. There were almost a million people working on Indian railways, with over 150,000 who wanted to transfer between the countries. There was no way this could be done in the time available. Apart from dividing human resources, there was all the equipment that had to be split, down to who received the last trombone in the Lahore Police Band.

End quote. But on this issue, the problem of abducted women, the governments of Pakistan and India were in lockstep. They both agreed that this was a major problem. And so in September of 1947, the two nations agreed to work together to recover the missing women and return them to the country in which they belonged. And by December, they had an agreement in writing. According to Urvashi Bhutalia, quote, "...seized by the problem of the large numbers of abducted women...

the Indian and Pakistani governments arrived at an agreement, the Inter-Dominion Treaty of December 6th, 1947, to recover as many abducted women as could be found. The operation came to be known as the Central Recovery Operation. End quote. And so, a task force was formed.

A small army of social workers, assisted by local police, set out into the Punjab to track down these missing women. They had unprecedented near-unilateral authority, the ability to cross borders, venture into either nation, and seek out their quarry. They visited homes and villages, apartment blocks and farmhouses, and in those places, they began to discover the true, terrifying scope of what was happening to women in India in 1947.

Religion, as Nehru suspected, was at the root of the problem. But that was a gross oversimplification. Beneath the surface, it was an issue of identity, of opposing communities who wanted to hurt each other, not only physically, but symbolically. As M.J. Akbar writes, "...a war over symbols began the moment India became free."

And to these specific communities, the ultimate symbol of the health, vitality, and honor of their people was their women. As militias and gangs descended upon towns and villages in the Punjab, they extracted terrible costs. Houses were burned, fortunes were stolen, and livestock were slaughtered. But the ultimate wound they could inflict, the one that cut the opposing religion the most deeply, was to violate their women.

As Barney Whitespunner writes, "...rape was an instrument of coercion. It was a way of humiliating husbands, fathers, and brothers which both demonstrated their powerlessness and, given local custom, violated their property."

In the eyes of these communities, you could rob a man, beat him, take away everything he had, even kill him. But if you wanted to really hurt him and the community he was a part of, the simplest and the most irrevocable way to do that was to violate his wife or his daughters or his mother. As Yasmin Khan writes, quote,

Women feared for themselves and their own bodies. Their brothers, fathers, and husbands feared for the shame and honor of their family and the wider community. The women themselves now became mere shell-like repositories of the new national identities when attacks on them or threat of attacks were

were used to prize families from their homes, to punish, mark out, and terrify. End quote. Indian and Pakistani women became physical manifestations for the honor of their communities. They became parcels of territory to conquer and defile. And like ancient armies sowing salt over the fields of a defeated rival, men of each religion sought to destroy these women forever. Not only in the eyes of their families,

but in their own. As Urvashi Bhutalia writes, "...their bodies became the battleground on which these men of these two newly formed nations fought their battle." As Yasmin Khan puts it, partition marked, "...the terrible beginnings of an era when women became the repositories of national identities and their bodies were used to demarcate possession of land and space."

Even before partition, the threat of sexual violence was palpable. It loomed over Indian women like a cloud. Always there, always at the edges. A glance, a stare, a comment...

But by 1947, the religious hatred was at a stratospheric level, and the threat of sexual violence followed that trajectory. As one woman remembered, "...we had become enemies all of a sudden. I still don't understand. Despite having lived through it, I cannot explain exactly what happened at that time. It was as though we were living through some awful dream." Partition seemed to open a Pandora's box to something new, something different.

As Yasmin Khan put it, quote, The violence which preceded partition was grave, widespread, and lethal. But after the 15th of August, 1947, it took on a new ferocity, intensity, and callousness. End quote. And while men and boys were cut and stabbed, shot and beaten, drowned and dismembered,

The women of those communities became the most tempting targets for partisan mobs and roving gangs. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims considered themselves fundamentally different from one another, yet there was a chilling sameness to the way the attackers treated women. As one historian wrote, quote, "...ironically, the misogyny and patriarchal values that cut across North Indian society at the time meant that Indian and Pakistani men had much more in common in their attitudes and actions than

than they would ever have admitted. End quote. And one academic attempted to deconstruct the psychology that fueled the tidal wave of reciprocal sexual violence. Quote, It was, perhaps, their extended and inflated male egos which made them do this. It is my religion that is being attacked, my women being defiled, my community which has been made to look down upon. Therefore, I have to avenge it, and if I fail to do so, my manhood and my

in my honor, will forever be gone. This would perhaps in partly explain why some men, who led an otherwise peaceful life, killed scores of people and later wondered how they could do so. They felt their anger brewing up inside them, at the sight of all the mayhem around them and when these emotions of anger and helplessness were whipped up by some speech or sight of brutality by others, religion was forgotten and pure animal instincts came to the fore. This was one way that they could quench their manhood.

In this whirlwind of emotions, women were the easy targets, as they carried the honor of the enemy community and could also be easily overpowered. Sexual violence in the Punjab became, as Yasmin Khan writes, In the city of Amritsar, Muslim women were paraded through the streets and stripped just like bananas peeled.

According to the journalist Shorish Kashmiri. In Lahore, mobs broke into homes and apartments searching for women to use or kidnap or kill. As a Hindu woman named Durga Rani remembered, "...the Muslims used to announce that they would take away our daughters. They would force their way into homes and pick up young girls and women. Ten or twenty of them would enter, tie up the menfolk, and take the women." End quote.

Out in the countryside, women and girls were simply picked off and stolen from the long refugee caravans winding across the plains. As one survivor recalled, quote, "...when we were traveling in a caravan, we had some people who had guns, four or five guns among us, but women or children would trail behind. After all, traveling 150 miles, some people would get tired, and they never rejoined us. So we believe somebody kidnapped them and took them away."

The worst part was that the attackers were not always strangers. A Sikh tea merchant named Narinjan Singh remembered his 18-year-old daughter being carried away by, according to one historian, quote,

The joint task force that was formed in the winter of 1947 to find and recover these women was faced with an imposing task. And the longer they searched, the more stories they uncovered, the more women they found, the more complicated and twisted the issue became. It was, as the writer Kavita Daya put it, quote,

A crisis made flesh. And that crisis was getting worse by the day. Thankfully, there were already people mobilizing to stop it.

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It's late October, 1947. We're in the capital city of Delhi, standing in front of a house. By the standards of the time and place, this house is huge. It has two stories, ten bedrooms, gleaming white columns, and a spacious, sprawling green. This place is easily one of the largest and nicest residencies in the capital. And yet, on this October afternoon, the house feels tiny, cramped, claustrophobic.

Hundreds of people are packed into its courtyards, its hallways, its waiting rooms, drawing rooms, and bedrooms. To a visitor, it must have seemed like the entire city of Delhi was crammed into this house. According to one eyewitness, the place was, quote, teeming with people, its galleries choked by the incessant traffic, end quote. And all of them, young and old, rich and poor, Muslim and Hindu, are waiting to catch a glimpse, a glance, a fleeting look at the person who

who lives in this house. Because this place was the temporary home of the most famous person in India, if not Asia, if not the Eastern Hemisphere. This was the home of the Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi. In 1947, Gandhi was more myth than man, a towering folk hero who commanded the attention of governments worldwide and the adoration of millions at home. In the

In the mind's eye of many Indians, Gandhi was still the wiry and impish activist of the 20s and 30s, a spry and sinewy champion of Indian independence, throwing salt in the eye of the evil imperialists. But in 1947, if you stood in line at the house in Delhi, if you waited all morning, pushed and jockeyed and squeezed your way into the house for one of Gandhi's daily prayer meetings, you would have seen a very different picture. The Mahatma was old.

and withered, a creaking bundle of sharp angles and gentle gestures. The year that an independent India had been born, Gandhi had turned 78, and he looked his age. But behind the wrinkles and the toothless gums, he was the same man that he had always been. His sparkling wit, his radiant intellect, and his iron moral code were all intact. Even at 5'5", the gravitational pull of his personality was colossal.

And on that October afternoon, hundreds of people were hoping to catch a glimpse of it. And one of those people was a 41-year-old woman named Anis Kidwai. People went to see Gandhi for many reasons. Some people went to him for guidance, for purpose, for comfort. Some people went to him for help.

Some just went to bathe in the glow of his celebrity to claim that they'd actually seen him in person. But Anis was in Delhi to see Gandhi for a very real, very personal reason. She had recently suffered a terrible tragedy, what she called, quote, "...the greatest injury of my life, a wound after which neither grief nor pain could touch me again."

End quote. And she hoped that the Mahatma could steady her spinning compass. A few months earlier, Anissa had been content. Happy, even. She had managed to find something precious. Something that most people spend their entire lives looking for. She had a person that she loved. A husband.

named Shafi. Shafi was a government administrator in a city in northern India, and when partition cleaved the subcontinent in two, he insisted on staying at his post to help mitigate the suffering as best he could. But Shafi would not risk the safety of his wife, Anis, and so he sent her away to be with family. The only proof of his own safety came in the form of letters, which Anis anxiously tore open every time they arrived. And the letters painted a grim but familiar picture –

Quote, I am sitting in my office writing to you. I hear from the road below the noise of the crowd, the sounds of gunfire, the shrieks of the suffering and the wounded. Houses are burning. Shops are being looted. All in broad daylight as the police just watch. End quote. But still, Anis remembered, her husband Shafi would not leave his post. Quote,

To flee from danger, to retreat in the face of opposition, to betray his conscience under the threat of bodily harm or any other adversity stood in complete contradiction to his character. He believed that India was his home, his nation. He had the same right to reside on this piece of land, the same freedom to roam across it, the same facility to undertake business and industry on it, as was invested in any other citizen.

End quote. But Shafi was a Muslim, and at that time, Muslims in northern India were not safe, especially Muslims in high-profile government jobs. And on October 7th, 1947, Shafi was stabbed to death in broad daylight. And just like that, in the space of a breath, in the flash of a blade, he was gone. When Anis received the news, she crumbled. Quote,

My shattered heart imploded. She could not help but think how alone her husband must have felt, besieged, hated, doing what he believed was right. Quote, "...only Allah can know the torment in which he spent the remaining four or five days of his life, all alone, surrounded by enemies, menacing telephone calls, threatening letters, alone at every moment."

Anise, however, managed to steady herself, if only for the sake of her sanity. For a moment I was ablaze in a passion for vengeance, but soon I regained control. Where thousands have lost their lives, he was just one. Was it not solace enough that he had died unsullied? He did not take another's life, he did not commit cruelty, he was not responsible for the destruction of another. Whatever God in faith asked of him...

he submitted. Whatever his dues in service of humanity, he settled. Somebody once asked us, "Why was there no demand from you or your family for a proper inquiry and a search for the murderers?" What could I possibly say? I no longer had any demands or desires. I could never regain what I had lost. There was no turning back the clock. The wound in my heart would fester forever, and no spring would ever brighten the wilderness of my life.

But even though the wound continued to fester, Anis went to Delhi in search of a cure. I was going to this city to drown the greatest sorrow of my life, in the hope that in the deluge that washed over us I would sight some distant shore upon which I may anchor my future.

She sought a balm for her broken heart. She hoped, she prayed, that the Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi, would give it to her. Gandhi was a Hindu, yes, but he embraced all religions. He was of every faith, every heart, every mind. And so, Anis called for permission to see the Mahatma. And she arrived at the gleaming white house in Delhi, passed through the teeming crowds, and saw the Mahatma.

and entered into Gandhi's room. Gandhi had been briefed on Anissa's situation, the nature of her suffering, and when she stood before him, she broke down. Quote, I tried desperately to stay composed, but on seeing him, the dam broke. My tears flowed with the abandon of a distressed girl when she sees her mother approaching. I could not utter a single word. Gandhiji was the first to speak. Quote, I understand.

It is for her that I have been waiting since morning. Come, sit.

Initially, Anis was struck by the juxtaposition between Gandhi's physical fragility and his spiritual health. Quote, This man, so puny, a bag of bones, but imbued with stupendous inner strength, patience and endurance, so tireless in his ability and desire to serve, where did he come from? And now, when twenty-seven years of work was perishing, when the edifice he had so painstakingly erected was crumbling,

how could he continue to be a beacon in this pitch darkness? For how long? End quote. But still, Gandhi managed to give Anis something that day. This old, trembling man had the ability to give her what she needed. As Anis remembered, quote, Speaking softly, he said,

End quote.

Gandhi went on to tell Anis that the best cure for her grief was to dedicate her life to helping others in whatever way she could. And hearing that encouragement from the Mahatma was exactly what she needed. Her spinning compass slowed and steadied. As she remembered, quote, Had Bapu, that's a common honorific for Gandhi, it means father, not supported me, I would still be standing distressed at the crossroads, unmoving, uncertain where to go.

Anis' newfound sense of purpose led her to the refugee camps in Delhi, where hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from the partition violence in the Punjab had settled in some of the most squalid conditions imaginable. As Anis recalled, "...as far as the eye could see, tents and tin-roofed shelters were crowded together. In their midst was a ceaseless traffic of naked children, disheveled women, bareheaded girls and men, burning."

End quote. Anise did lots of things in the camps to help the refugees. She brought them water, organized food, and assisted in education. But sometimes the simplest and the most powerful thing you can do is just sit down and talk to somebody. Let them pour their sorrows into a sympathetic ear. And as Anise listened, one theme kept cropping up in story after story.

Missing women. Quote, Since the beginning of my work in the camps, I had heard the sanctuary seekers weeping over their missing daughters and wives either snatched from them or separated in their flight from the violence. End quote. Countless women had been abducted and taken across the border, coerced into forced marriages, converted, or simply trafficked into slavery. Their families had no idea how to find them or rescue them. They

they had no resources, no contacts, and no friends. So Anis started making a list of these women's names. A quote, meticulous record, as she called it. And the longer she worked in the camps, the more stories she heard, the longer the list got. She wanted to find these women, to help them. But how?

And for every woman who had been abducted, there were many more who had simply been assaulted or used and then left behind. And those women had made their way to these refugee camps too, and they bore the scars of their experiences, both physical and psychological. As one refugee remembered, quote, There was this girl, and this girl was probably just 15 or 16 years old, but she was expecting a child and would just continue to sit in a corner of

all day, with a vacant stare, not saying a word. The girl, it appeared, would suddenly sometimes become aware of her circumstances. Knowledge would dawn on her that, amidst the riots, it had happened to her, that she had been gang-raped, and this child she was carrying was the result.

And there were many women who existed in a kind of liminal trance, unable to forget, unable to heal. As one historian wrote, They were dejected and mentally disturbed. They sat in the corner with their faces covered and shrieked or fainted whenever the shadow of a man fell on them.

Pakistan Zindabad or Pakistan Murdabad, Long Live Pakistan or Death to Pakistan,

respectively and these men these rapists were claiming territory in the name of their religion planting a flag in the form of a blade and some of these rapists went even further carving their names into the woman's skin so they could never forget who had done this horrible thing to them so their families and husbands and brothers would always see the scar and always remember

Other men went so far as to carve the day, month, and year of the attack into their victim's skin, so that every time they caught sight of it, while they were cooking, or bathing, or just out in public, they would be transported back to that moment. And when blades weren't handy, some attackers used more primitive methods. As a woman named Durga Rani remembered, upon finding a few abandoned women on the side of the road, quote, "...they had teeth marks all over them."

End quote. It was horrible, harrowing stuff. As Urvashi Bhutalia writes, quote, End quote.

For women who survived these attacks, and many did not, the worst thing was not the attack itself but the shame and isolation that accompanied it. As the writer Ahmed Akbar describes, "...the woman is made to suffer twice, first from the brutality of the rape itself and then from the horror of her family. It is a double burden. It violates the woman and it also alienates her from her own society as she is considered, quote-unquote, impure."

And one academic put it a slightly different way, quote, This was an act which, in a single blow, destroyed the self-esteem of a woman, the honor of the community, and the prestige of the family. End quote. And as women traveled across northern India in the mass migrations, or simply hunkered down and waited for the storm to pass, many would do anything, absolutely anything, to avoid being violated in this way, as

As Alex von Tunzelman writes, "...it was constantly suggested that the high point of female heroism was to commit suicide rather than face the dishonor of rape, as if the shame and guilt for the crime would fall on the victim rather than on the perpetrator." It was, she continues, "...the notion that a woman's chastity was worth more than her life."

And this concept, this idea of death before dishonor, was drummed into the heads of many Indian women from birth. As one elderly woman confided to a younger relative in an interview, "...in those days of riots, we were told that it was better to sacrifice yourself than have your character tarnished, if it ever came to that. Beta, I want to explain this to you, but I cannot find the right words."

The kinds of things we were told to do to protect our reputation. The kinds of things women did to protect themselves in those days.

Those days were most unfortunate for women. Many jumped into wells. Many were killed or wounded. Their breasts were cut off and they were left to bleed to death. Some were dragged away and abducted, forced to marry or convert. Too many acts of savage violence against women. Izat, my child, honor. Always protect your izat, no matter what. That is what we were taught.

Another old woman told a journalist, "...in our community, girls were given training of some kind to protect themselves during the riots. One, we were told to keep merchie powder on us at all times and to fling it into the eyes of our assailant. Oh yes, it's very spicy chili, so it stings. And two, to keep a small knife or blade to use either on them or on ourselves."

And this was not simply homespun advice passed quietly from mothers to daughters. It was taught in some schools. One woman remembered that as a little girl during partition, she took classes that dealt with this very issue. Quote, "...these were not your regular self-defense classes. Rather, they were lessons in how to defend yourself from the enemy by taking your own life."

We were given these ruler-like things with red ink on one end, and whenever the instructors made a noise, we were supposed to cut ourselves, or at least place the ruler with the red ink where we would need to cut ourselves if we were ever harmed.

And then these ladies would come around and review the red marks and say, ''A little higher, a little to the side,'' telling us where the right artery was and what we needed to cut to die immediately. They told us again and again in those classes that if something were to happen to us, our families would no longer accept us. They would say, ''You will never be able to go home again.''

And the idea that women threatened with the possibility of rape should kill themselves was so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of North Indian culture at the time, that even Mohandas Gandhi subscribed to the view. And his advice to Hindu women on the matter was severe and reductive and uncharacteristically heartless. According to Hajarina Seed, He,

He wanted them to commit suicide rather than submit to their Muslim ravishers. They should, and this is him quoting Gandhi, learn how to die before a hair of their head could be injured. Perhaps they could suffocate themselves or bite their tongues to end their lives, he advised. Told that such methods were impractical, the Mahatma suggested the next day that they drink poison instead. His was not an idle idea. He meant all he had said.

reads Gandhi's own transcript of his comments. Such talk kept emotions running high among Hindus. End quote. Faced with advice like that, girls and teens and women began to internalize this idea and accept it as absolutely necessary. As the little girl in those suicide classes remembered, quote, After I began taking those classes, I also started sleeping with a knife under my pillow, one of daddy's fancy Burmese ones.

The training put me in such an inexplicably traumatic state that one time, on a particularly hot night when we were sleeping out in the open, two cats began howling and fighting and I got up and brought the knife close to me. I thought that they were rioters. I thought that they had come for me. And mommy shouted from her bed that they were just cats. She got up and calmed me down, but I could have stabbed myself that night. Easily. I had taken out the knife and placed it where they had taught me the artery was.

End quote. That little girl was lucky. She was never in a position where she had to actually contemplate that terrible choice, but many thousands of women did, and many thousands carried through on the act. The first big wake-up call that these kinds of suicides were happening actually took place a few months before partition, back in March of 47.

Last episode, we briefly discussed the March riots in the Punjab in which Muslim mobs attacked Sikh communities. And during those riots, there was an infamous event that took place in the village of Toa Khalsa. The women of the village, upon hearing about an impending Muslim attack, jumped one by one into the well in the middle of the town. From their perspective, it was better to drown, to die, than risk the possibility of being raped.

And there were only a few survivors to tell the tale, the women who had been at the back of the line and had jumped in last. One of those people, a woman named Bessante Coeur, remembered, quote,

Then all of us jumped into that well. Some 100 girls and boys, all of us. Even boys, not only children, but grown up boys. I also went in. I took my two children and then we jumped in. I had some jewelry on me, things in my ears, on my wrists, and I had 14 rupees on me. I took all that and I threw it in the well and then I jumped in. But it's like when you put rotis into a tandoor and if it is too full, the ones near the top, they don't cook.

and they have to be taken out. So the well filled up, and we could not drown. The children survived. End quote.

And if you didn't catch what she was getting at there, essentially what she's saying is that so many people had jumped into this well that the water had become so full that new people jumping into the well could not drown. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's cousin, a woman named Rameshvari, visited the site two weeks later and described what she saw peering down into the well. Quote, "...the bodies of those beautiful women..."

End quote.

The mass suicide at Toa Khalsa was one of the most dramatic examples of the death before dishonor phenomenon, and to this day it is spoken with a kind of hushed reverence. There have been movies made about this incident, and in them, the death of these women is depicted as a kind of martyrdom, a noble and necessary sacrifice.

And the impression that is created is that these women, and by extent all of the women who killed themselves during partition, did so clear-eyed, willingly, and with a sort of meditative calm. But when you dig a little deeper, it starts to become clear that these suicides were essentially enforced by the weight of community and familial expectation.

As one academic put it, "...the lines between choice and coercion must have been more blurred than these accounts reflect. Where in their decision did choice begin and coercion end? When vials of poison or daggers were handed to them, when pyres were ignited, when fathers with tear-filled eyes implored them to die, or when wells or rivers were pointed to so that they could drown in them, there was hardly anything voluntary about these deaths." End quote.

And when the women did not have the conviction or means to kill themselves, the men in their lives did it for them. As Barney Whitespunner writes, The story of a Sikh woman from West Punjab, Prakshavanti, was typical. Muslim Gundas attacked her village.

Her husband rushed her and her young son to the safety of the local rice mill, but the Gundas pursued them. Thinking she was about to be raped, her husband tried to kill her. He slashed her with his sword, but only succeeded in inflicting a deep gash in her jaw. She passed out. When she came around, her husband and son had been sliced up, and she had been routinely raped. Some months later, she gave birth to a daughter. End quote.

That particular man may have been unsuccessful, but other husbands and brothers and uncles and grandfathers were extremely effective. There's a story about a doctor in Amritsar, one Versa Singh, who became the de facto executioner for his community. According to one writer, quote, Versa Singh claimed he had shot 50 women per

personally. First, he shot his own wife because the Muslims came to get her. Once he had done this, all the women in the neighborhood gathered around him saying, brother, kill me first. Some would push their daughters forward saying, shoot her, put a bullet through her now. He says he just kept shooting and shooting. Quote, they kept bringing them forward. I kept shooting them.

There was shooting all around, at least 50 or 60 women I shot. My wife, my mother, my daughter." Other men, on rare occasions, chose to follow their women into death. There's a borderline unbelievable story about a Sikh man who, when faced with a kind of ultimatum, chose to snuff his entire family out in a theatrical display of violence –

As one writer and academic described,

and his family's safety assured. They could continue to live in the village without fear. And he kept listening to them, and nodding, seeming to agree. And that evening, he got all his family members together, and decapitated each one of them with his sword, killing thirteen people in all. He then lit their pyre, climbed on the roof of his house, and cried out,

Bring on the marriage parties. You can bring your grooms now. Take my daughters away. They are ready for their marriage. And so saying, he killed himself too.

Once again, one cannot help but desperately grasp for some kind of explanation for this behavior, this worldview, this logic that seems insane on its face. Another man who had killed his wives and daughters, although not himself, tried to explain his thinking to an interviewer. As the journalist wrote, quote,

He would say, how could I see my wife, my daughters fall into the hands of the Muslims? I recalled Sikh history, the bravery of our people. I wasn't a murderer. I was their savior. And I said to him, that must have been a terrible burden for you to bear. He said, not at all. No burden. He subsequently remarried, had children, and wrote a book about it all.

There are countless stories like this, of men killing the women they claimed to love, armored in the rationale that they were saving them from a fate worse than death. But it begs the question, were they protecting these women's honor or their own? Was it even these women's choice to make? The short answer is, of course, no. These women, it seemed, were property. Like a table, or a chair, or a truck. Mine, not yours.

ours, not theirs. A woman's intrinsic value, or lack thereof, was completely defined by the men in her life. And like a retreating army breaks a tractor, or destroys a tool, or salts a field so that the enemy cannot use it, these men killed their own wives and daughters so that they would not be quote-unquote corrupted, or taken, or converted. And these stories are myriad.

and endless. We could fill hours and hours, episode after episode, with horrifying anecdotes, but an ugly thread runs through it all. As one academic put it, quote, "...in each case, however, the common factor was the dispensability of women."

It's October of 1947. We're in a small village in Pakistan, not far from the border with India. A young man named Akhtar Hussain, a Muslim, is walking through the town, looking at the houses, the barns, the wells, the outhouses. His eyes crawl and search and probe over every surface of the town, every nook and every cranny. Akhtar is not from this village, and it becomes clear to the suspicious residents

that he is looking for something. And their suspicions were correct. The truth was, Akhtar was not this man's name at all. Nor was he a Muslim. It was a cover name. A fake identity to help him gain access to remote places like this. The man's real name was Khairati Lal.

and he was part of the joint recovery operation to track down and rescue the tens of thousands of women who had been abducted during the partition crisis. As the tides of people gushed back and forth across the border in the fall of 1947, opportunistic men lay in wait, snatching young girls and women from the peripheries of the refugee columns. It could happen at any time, if you fell behind or got lost or even stopped to use the bathroom.

You might find yourself tied up, gagged, and thrown over someone's shoulder. Like hyenas stalking a herd of gazelles, predatory men gorged themselves in the Punjabi countryside. Once they were taken, the women were assaulted or sold or married off. They disappeared into an abyss of strange people and strange places.

with little hope of ever being reunited with their families. Many were forced to convert to another religion or marry the same man who had raped them days earlier. Their situation, it appeared, was hopeless. Their fate sealed. Or at least it would have been, were it not for people like Kairati Lal, a.k.a. Akhtar Hussein.

Kairati had realized that he would have a very hard time finding kidnapped Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan unless he could move freely throughout the country. And so, he adopted a Muslim alias and cultivated close ties with the Pakistani police. When he got a tip about a missing girl from a grieving father or a panicked husband or an inconsolable mother, he would track the lead down as best he could, arriving at the villages where they might be.

The cloak and dagger theatrics were an underhanded but necessary part of the job. Social workers and volunteers like Kairati had to resort to, according to one historian, quote, "...all kinds of subterfuge to find abducted women."

Often, the local police, meant to be accompanying and helping in the tracking down of women, would send ahead a warning, and the women would be hidden away. Imaginative social workers countered this in a variety of ways by adopting disguises, false names, acting secretly and on their own, or just storming their way into homes where they suspected abducted women were being held.

and today Kairatilal was prepared to storm through this entire village, if necessary. But as he was walking past one farm, something caught his eye. He saw a man sitting on top of a large pot in the center of the yard. Kairati stopped, and when he looked closer, he could see the pot was covering a small hole in the ground. He asked the man what he was keeping in the hole. The man scowled and replied, "'Pigeons.' He told Kairati not to touch the pot."

or the pigeons would escape. And of course, something about this seemed shady to Kairati. Something seemed off. So he forced his way toward the pot, lifted it, and peered down into the hole. And looking up at him were not pigeons, but three young girls, scared out of their minds. When Kairati looked back at the farmer, he saw that the man was aiming a pistol at him.

The gun was rusty and old, but it was still deadly. The man said that he would shoot, and Kairati, like some kind of Indian Clint Eastwood, replied that even if the man did pull the trigger, he probably couldn't hit him. With his bluff called, the farmer threw the pistol into the dirt, and inside the house Kairati found three more girls.

Six in all. That dramatic anecdote comes from a 1997 BBC radio program by historian Andrew Whitehead. And it almost sounds like an episode of CSI Partition, which is a show I would totally watch. But not all of the stories from the recovery operation were

were such clear-cut tales of good and evil. Back in Delhi, the widowed social worker who we met earlier, Anis Kidwai, continued to witness the problem from her own unique vantage point in the refugee camps. Since her transformative meeting with the Mahatma, she had rediscovered a sense of purpose. But Anis still did not feel like she was doing enough. Quote, I had made acquaintances in the police. I gave the officers the names of abducted women I had recorded in my notebook.

End quote. As she attempted to comfort the recovered women, she felt like her words were completely inadequate, that she was unsuited to the task. She remembered regretfully, quote, And there was no one here to vent one's feelings on, no one to unburden one's heart to, end quote.

End quote.

But despite the inadequacy of her therapeutic skills, some of the stories genuinely moved Anis, and she could not help but admire the resiliency of some of these girls. Quote, I can never forget the three adolescent girls from Najafgar. One was rescued and sent to me by a Swami disciple of Bapu. That's Gandhi.

and she narrated her tale. This is the girl speaking to Anise, quote, "'The three of us were taken to the same village. The other two girls were both with the same man.'

and I was with another. Although a close watch was always kept on us, we managed to get a few moments together, and then we would whisper to each other what we could do to free ourselves. One day, my two friends managed to steal a sickle, and later that night, when the man began to snore, they placed the sickle on his throat and pressed it down. And then this is Anise speaking again. Just imagine the scene. These pre-teen girls plot a murder over many months. They're

Their hands aren't strong enough, so they press down on the sickle together with all their might. But at the loud gurgling sounds from the man's throat, their control deserts them, and they run for their lives. The sounds alert others in the house, and they give chase. How far could those frail legs carry the girls? They are soon caught and fall prey to the maddened crowd. Yet the only regret their friend has...

is that she couldn't do the same. As a woman, I can only pray that each one of India's and Pakistan's daughters is exactly like them.

But not all the tales were so inspiring. Hearing story after story, account after account, Anise became aware of a startling new wrinkle in the partition ordeal, a tangled web of opportunism, corruption, and human trafficking. To her disgust, she discovered that people in the military and police of both nations were often complicit and even active participants in the epidemic of sexual violence. She called it a conspiracy that transcended borders.

Quote,

Abduction of all young women during the attack. Division of these spoils among attackers, police, and army. The conspiracy transcended borders. Despite the violence, it was rare for any young girl to be killed, though they were injured at times.

The, quote, hot stuff would be distributed between army and police. The, quote, substandard falling to the share of the attackers. Then these girls would be passed from one hand to a second to a third so that they would have been bought and sold four or five times by the time they came to be the pride of some hotel or reached a safe house to be the dalliances of policemen.

As each girl was unaware of the conspiracy, she would think of this man, charging into the melee and gathering her into his strong arms, as her angel of mercy. And when that good soul gently proffered his scarf to cover her body, stripped bare by attackers, all ghastly memories of her mother's carcass with its throat slit open, her father's blood-bathed body, her husband's still-writhing corpse would be driven from her mind."

and she would melt with gratitude for her savior. A long time would pass before she would understand that this man was not the blameless one among the looters or the decent one among the policemen, that all of them practiced the same quote-unquote heroism, and by the time the secret was revealed, the waters would have risen above her head. It would be too late for her to run from him. She was going to be a mother, or she had already been sold to other men three or four times over. Having countenanced so many men...

What face could India's daughter show her parents or her husband? End quote. But nevertheless, the recovery operation dragged on. For weeks, for months, for years. 1947 became 1948. 1948 became 1949. And for ten long years, the governments of India and Pakistan tried to find these women with middling success.

But even in this rare display of national cooperation, that innate sense of distrust between the two countries was palpable. And that brings us to one of the greatest and most terrible failures of the recovery operation. As India and Pakistan embarked on their joint recovery operation, they agreed that any woman living among a religious majority that was not her own

must have been taken by force. The union between a Hindu woman and Muslim man in Pakistan, or between a Muslim woman and a Sikh man in India, was, by definition, illegitimate. Why else would they be together? And the decree was retroactive. As Arvashi Bhutalia writes, quote,

Thus, after March 1, 1947, any woman who was seen to be living with, in the company of, or in a relationship with a man of the other religion would be presumed to have been abducted or taken by force. After this date, all marriages or conversions that had taken place would be seen as forced, as not recognized by either of the two governments. No matter what the woman said, how much she protested, no matter that there was the odd quote-unquote real relationship,

The women had no choice in the matter. End quote. As it happened, not all the women rescued by the recovery operation wanted to be rescued. As Butalia continues, quote, End quote. Some of these women were just scared, according to Butalia.

According to Anis Kidwai, "...how was she to know whether her self-professed rescuer was friend or foe? What if the rescuers were also traffickers? Until now, whichever strange man had taken her had sold her. The fact that the rescuer wore a police uniform was no guarantee either."

End quote. Other women were angry and resentful towards the family who had failed to protect them. According to Anis Kidwai, quote, I also met some young girls who angrily scorned the offer of return to husbands who had proven so cowardly that they just turned tail and ran, leaving the honor of their family, the mother of their children, at the mob's mercy. These women would go mad with anger, saying, You ask us to go back to those impotents?

So,

Some women decided that their lives had actually improved after being kidnapped. Here's Butalia again. Quote,

who took them to the cinema. Why should they leave such men and go back to covering their bodies with rags and slaving in the hot sun in the fields? If she leaves this smart, uniformed man, she will probably end up with a peasant in rags, in the filth, with Adanda on her shoulder, and so they are happy to forget the frightening past or the equally uncertain and fearful future and live only for the present.

Anise Kidwai could only comment, "...we found that most abducted girls didn't want to return." And again, she regretted her inability to say the right thing. "...the activists had to reassure the women, support them, build trust, and gently try to turn their hearts towards accepting the idea of return."

But I'm sorry to report that we were all unequipped and incompetent. None of us had any understanding of the psychology, nor did we try to gain it. We would just parrot the few catchphrases that were habitually used in such circumstances, and when they proved ineffectual, as they often did, we would berate the girls.

But oftentimes, the real reason the women did not want to return was brutally simple. It was shame. Deep, burning, lifelong shame. Many of these women, especially Hindu women, assumed that their families would not want them back after having been quote-unquote polluted by a member of the enemy religion. And more often than not, they were right. As Yasmin Khan writes, quote,

Their families said, how can we keep them now? Better that they are dead. Many of them were so young, 18, 15, 14 years old, what remained of them now? Their character was now spoilt. As vessels of the honor of the whole community, the shame and horror fell on everybody associated with the girls. These were not individual tragedies.

Another academic explained, "...marriage and conversion, to the other religion, was a symbolic death for any Hindu or Sikh girl." Mohandas Gandhi, infuriated and saddened by the situation, had sharp words for those families who refused to take back their abducted women. Quote,

End quote.

But even stern words from the Mahatma were not enough to change the situation. One elderly woman remembered, quote, And the saddest thing was that many of these women refused to go back to their families across the border for fear of no longer being accepted. This was their life now, for better or worse. These women, when asked why they thought their families would no longer welcome them, said that they had now become sort of like half-Muslims.

End quote. But there was another reason many abducted women didn't want to be rescued. In the aftermath of their rape, many had become pregnant. And they had carried those children to term, given birth to them, and were in the process of raising them. But those children were technically citizens of the countries they had been born in, and

and if the woman wanted to go home, she would not be able to take her child with her. As Urvashi Bhutalia writes, "...the child, born of a mixed union, was a constant reminder of the violation of the woman, of the fact that she had had sex with a man of the other religion. So women were given a choice. Keep your children with you and stay, in all probability, in an ashram or group home all your life, or give them up and go back to your old family."

End quote. As one academic explained it, quote, these women were made to feel that through their bodies they had turned traitors. End quote. And Urvashi Bhutalia continues, quote, the women had to be brought back. They had to be, quote unquote, purified. And this meant that they had to be separated from their children, the, quote unquote, illegitimate products of their illegitimate unions. Only then could moral order be restored and the nation made whole again, and

And only then would the emasculated, weakened manhood of the Hindu male be vindicated. If partition was a loss of itself to the other, a metaphorical violation and rape of the body of its motherland, the recovery of women was its opposite. End quote. And so many women were dragged, kicking and screaming back across the border to a family who did not want them. Forcible recovery, the Indian government called it.

Torn away from their new life and rejected by the old one, they were forced to exist in a permanent state of emotional limbo. All across India, facilities were created to house these recovered women, who had no real home to go back to.

In the end, it was just another different kind of violation. In a horrible irony, by attempting to help these women reclaim their dignity, the governments of India and Pakistan trampled over their autonomy all over again. As the writer Kavita Daya puts it, "...abducted women were represented as properties belonging to a particular national community. They determined that all abducted women should be rescued or returned to their rightful owners."

namely, the nation which coincided with the dominant ethnic community. End quote. Urvashi Bhutalia expressed it a little more viscerally, quote, The woman as a person did not count. Her wishes were of little consequence. She had no right to resist, defy, nor even to appeal, for the act denied even that basic freedom. Not only was she forcibly recovered, but if she disputed her recovery, she had no recourse. End quote.

And so, what began as an earnest and noble mission to rescue women, the quote, chief sufferers of partition, as Gandhi put it, devolved into a territorial reclamation of quote, national property. As one victim put it in the most tired, sad way imaginable, quote, What of a woman? It is her lot to be used, either by her own men or by others. End quote.

And Urvashi Bhutalia sums it all up, quote, The recovery operation for abducted women continued for nine years after partition, though recoveries began to drop off after the initial few years. In all, some 30,000 women were recovered, about 22,000 Muslim women in India, and about 8,000 Hindu and Sikh women from Pakistan, end quote.

As we bring this episode to a close, I have to admit, I tried and tried and tried to find some kind of positive anecdote to end on. Some kind of cathartic story that would wrap up part five with a glimmer of hope or positivity, but I couldn't find anything that made sense. I couldn't find anything that felt like anything less than a dishonest candy coating to make the medicine go down a little easier. And that same lack of closure, that same sense of shell-shocked dissatisfaction, was

was acutely felt by the social worker Anis Kidwai, who we've spent so much time with this episode. At the end of the day, after the partition violence had died down, all she could do was hope that people would remember, if nothing else. Quote,

Somehow, that evil time is now past. A bloody saga has been writ on the pages of history, a terrible tale that will beckon the youth to it hereafter. The government, political leaders, and intelligentsia ask us to let bygones be bygones, but I cannot understand how people can escape these memories when all around them are strewn the signs of what took place. To

Today, so many of us have heaved a sigh of relief. Whatever it was, thankfully it's over and we can live in peace again. I fear this is self-delusion. We may not be free of that cycle of action and reaction. We also have to serve the sentence for our crimes. The bitterness in the hearts and minds of our offspring has upset the peace of their families.

If we are not careful, this generation may raise even the ruins of humanity that still stand.

Well, folks, that is all the time we have for today. Considering the heaviness of this topic, I wanted to keep it mercifully short, but it was an aspect of the partition story that I just could not pass over with a throwaway comment or a shock value account. We needed to really dig into it, and I'm glad we did. And hopefully you are too. In the next episode, we will reach the end of our story on the partition of India.

In Part 6, we will turn our attention back to the core cast of characters that has served as our narrative ballast for this entire time. We'll conclude the story of Muhammad Ali Jinnah as he reflects on the consequences of his long campaign for Pakistan. We'll say farewell to the Mountbatten's as they prepare to leave the subcontinent

and their friend, Jabaharlal Nehru. And of course, as promised, we will end our story with a heavy focus on Mohandas Gandhi. We'll experience the partition crisis of 1947 through his eyes and explore the extraordinary lengths he went to in a vain attempt to make it all stop. And so once again, goodbye for now. As always, thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me and I hope you have an awesome day. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.