Historians who write about horrific events such as ethnic cleansing or civil war must often sift facts from a muddle of emotion, prejudice, and faint recollection. And yet this very pursuit of an antiseptic or impartial truth threatens to strip history of vital aspects of human experience. To what extent might so-called facts of recorded history actually serve to conceal or silence voices of those who have endured catastrophe? Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence attempts to recover the "underside" of the Partition of India—stories of women, children, and outcasts that have been buried beneath priorities of more conventional approaches to history writing. At the same time, Butalia's narratives shed light upon the role of religion in shaping identities of families and communities. With tensions between India and Pakistan threatening to boil over into war, this revisionist history is all too timely.

On June 3, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, an event that resulted in the largest single planned migration in world history. Roughly 12 million people were compelled to leave their homes and resettle in another territory, designated primarily for persons who shared their religion. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, as communities were convulsed by an orgy of communal violence and anarchy. More than 75,000 women were abducted or raped; but their stories have found no prominent place in history. Historians have preferred instead to focus on the "high politics" of the Partition: state-level negotiations, conflict between political parties, and, of course, the "surgical" boundary line that divided two nations, drawn by the infamous colonial Boundary Commissioner, Cyril Radcliff. This conventional "gaze on the past," says Butalia, has tended to pass over "feelings, emotions, [and other] indefinable things that make up the sense of an event." Moreover, the preoccupation with high politics has marginalized the voices of ordinary people—those who suffered most from the events in question.

In order to retrieve the voices of the marginalized, Butalia turns not to official reports kept securely in the National Archives of India or the British Library but to the "alternative archive" of human memory. Without memory, there can be no individual or group identity. But how exactly should memories of the living shape our understandings of the past? Memory, after all, may act as a reservoir of prejudice and hatred, yet the articulation of memory may also help heal wounds of the past. Butalia treats her interviewees as eyewitnesses to a colossal human tragedy. Though she does little to "cross-examine" them, she places them in context. Her historicizing of the narratives adds to their coherence and brings a visceral dimension to events that might otherwise be viewed from a cold distance.

Above all, Butalia gives voice to the thousands of women who were raped or abducted while crossing the India-Pakistan border. At the time, reports of missing women had become so frequent as to prompt both governments to embark on a Central Recovery Operation, intended to locate women who had been abducted by members of the "other religion" and return them to their families. But the effort was riddled with difficulties. Could women trust agents of the state any more than they could trust their abductors? In some instances, Butalia shows, police and other officials were complicit in the crime of treating women as commodities, to be bought or sold for one purpose or another. Some women never found their way back to their original families. As victims of rape or abduction, they lived out their lives in a constant state of exile and silence.

Identifying victims of abduction posed yet another difficulty for the Recovery Operation. Within a climate defined by Hindu-Muslim hostility, the very fact of a mixed marriage aroused suspicions of abduction and the absence of choice. But what were officials to do if they found women who wanted to remain with their "abductors"? Here, Butalia's feminist convictions become most pronounced. "For the majority of Indian women," she writes, "marriage is like an abduction anyway, a violation, an assault, usually by an unknown man. Why then should this assault be any different? Simply because the man belonged to a different religion?" While levying a critique against the practice of arranged marriage, such words also challenge the primacy of religion in defining a woman's identity.

Indeed, Butalia portrays religious identities as sites for patriarchal control and suppression of the female voice. Amid the turmoil of Partition, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men protected their honor by maintaining possession and control over their women. Butalia's interviews turn up ghastly accounts of fathers killing or "martyring" their wives and daughters in order to facilitate their own migration and "protect" their women from possible abduction, rape, or forced conversion to another religion. The same "religious" sensibilities, however, made it uncertain whether a woman would be welcomed back into her original family after having been raped by a member of another religion.

In particular, Butalia argues, notions of purity and pollution, derived from religious tradition, shaped familial sensibilities. Because of their relatively greater preoccupation with notions of purity, Hindu and Sikh families, she observes, were more reluctant than Muslim ones to readmit women. Thus, while graphically depicting trials of women of the Partition, such accounts also point to the significant role played by rival religious traditions in shaping consciousness among ordinary Indians—a hotly contested topic.

Indeed, scholars of South Asia frequently betray anxiety over how to represent the place of religion within Indian society. If popular accounts leave the impression of immemorial antagonisms (just as the recent conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo were widely said to be the result of ancestral hatreds), those who write from the political Left tend to place the origins of India's religious divisions no farther back than the colonial period. Had it not been for the British, who classified Indians according to religion, Hindu and Muslim identities—so the story goes—would have been far more overlapping, breathable, and syncretistic. Religious disputes over territory would have been less pronounced, and the Partition might never have happened.

The academic assault on primordialism of any kind—of religion, race, or ethnicity—assumes that difference itself is the cause of conflict. We are encouraged to view religious differences as false products of "colonial modernity." The real or authentic "sacred East," by contrast, is marked by syncretism, tolerance, and nonviolence. Such values are epitomized in the outlook of Gandhi and fleshed out in the lives of village peasants. But this romanticized view is anchored more in the preconceptions of nineteenth-century European scholarship than it is in Indian realities. It downplays the role played by Indians themselves in constructing their religious boundaries, through revival, reform, and reinterpretation of their traditions.

A middle path—between exploding identities in the name of tolerance and viewing them as fixed, timeless essences—is the order of the day. "We must develop a notion and a practice of identity," Miroslav Volf writes, "which is situated somewhere between a formless hybridity and a rigid purity—a notion and a practice both strong enough not to be dissolved and porous and complex enough to be hospitable to 'impurities' and 'differences.' "1 Now more than ever, the need for such balance is urgent.

Chandra S. Mallampalli is assistant professor of history at Westmont College.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.