However, there were no direct stories from the women who had directly experienced these horrors. Her experience diving further into women’s experience of Partition included stories of abductions, rapes, and honor killings. Her goal was to locate a people’s history of Partition by telling untold stories such as those of women, children, and Dalits. While discussing oral histories as a data collection tool for research, Butalia highlighted the challenges of trying to examine the Partition.

The clash between personal memory and popular historical narratives set the talk’s overall tone.īutalia followed with a story that sparked her interest in studying the 1947 Partition. She recalled asking a Punjabi-speaking beggar woman, “Where are you from?” and received a question in reply, “Hune ya pehlan? (now or before?)” This encounter, led to the realization of the magnitude of Partition’s impact on the lives of people, going as far as to say it created a “division of time.” The idea of this story was to challenge the popular belief that the violence of Partition only began in 1947. Following the closure of Kali for Women, she founded Zubaan Books.Ĭhakravarti shared a personal anecdote of her first conscious experience of violence back in 1946. Butalia co-founded Kali for Women, India’s first exclusively feminist publishing house. Urvashi Butalia is the author of “The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India,” which centers oral histories from subaltern communities and women who experienced the Partition. She is the Delhi project director for the SAI Partition Project, ”The Demographic and Humanitarian Consequences of the Partition.” Chakravarti writes on Buddhism, early Indian history, caste and feminism, and contemporary issues. Uma Chakravarti is a feminist historian who taught at Miranda House, University College for Women, Delhi from 1966 to 1998. On March 8, 2018, feminist historian Uma Chakravarti and feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia gave a seminar on Partition. You can find all the details on our events page and by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We have plenty of exciting events planned for Spring 2018 and will continue for the rest of the year and beyond. SAI’s new India Seminar Series, at our Delhi headquarters, is gathering steam.

Partition by Urvashi Butalia