Borders and bodies: women, violence, and martyrdom in Shauna Singh Baldwin's partition fiction

Abstract

Through the lens of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s fiction —“Family Ties” (1996) and What the Body Remembers (1999)— this paper addresses how for many women, national independence is a tale of trauma, how the country’s freedom is inseparable from their loss of homeland through Partition, the loss of control over their bodies in the inter-community riots, and, finally, their loss of home through betrayal by their families. The paper examines how the predicament of women who died to preempt violation —whether through suicide, or murder by kin-men— celebrated as “martyrs,” and those who suffered rejections within the family after the fact, disputes cultural representations of the home as “safe space” and the family as unreservedly loving.