AGENCY BEYOND VICTIMHOOD: EVERYDAY RESISTANCE AND SURVIVAL STRATEGIES IN TRAIN TO PAKISTAN AND ICE-CANDY-MAN

Abstract

In South Asia, partition of India in 1947 is a true representation of a monumental and catastrophic event that became a source of uprootedness of communities and radically redeveloped socio-political realities. It was marked by brutal violence, primarily the gendered exploitation, where women became battlefields in the name of religious, communal, as well as national honor.

Some of the pioneers, including scholars, feminist historiographies such as Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Urvashi Butalia draw our attention critically to this communal trauma and religious exploitation that women suffered during Partition. They highlight largely spread abduction, sexual exploitation, and silences imposed by oppressors that fractured and defragmented the communities and imposed harrowing personal costs (Menon and Bhasin 12; Butalia 43). Their comprehensive and mentionable work have played a key role in registering these horrors and provide strength to recover female voices that had long been silenced in dominant literary and historical works.

Yet, this study claims that during Partition a trauma-centric lens risks eclipsing the subtler voices, everyday forms of female agency exercised under patriarchal and communal exploitation. Survival of the women was not only a response and outcome of victimhood but also by their major and minor acts of negotiation, endurance, and solidarity. These acts were open and often domesticated within the context of family and society. These powerful strategies become a source of resist naive binary categorizations of victim versus survivor preserved dignity, nurtured connections, and challenged domination in adaptive ways.

This study relocates the critical attention in Partition literature to the everyday female agency as a system of multi-dimensional contextually embedded practices. Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh and Ice-candy-man by Bapsi Sidhwa offer ample textual reasons to discuss how characters such as Nooran, Haseena, Ayah, Godmother and as a child narrator, Lenny are negotiating their way through the world of violent turmoil. These characters demonstrate the enduring and fluid female agency by perseverance, silence, participatory relationships, and immoral witnessing to target the disintegration and trauma of Partition.

Theoretically, the research is based on the idea of everyday resistance developed by James C. Scott; the concept includes resistance as a repertoire of non-confrontational and covert resistance that includes silent dissent, feigning ignorance and moral subversion intended to escape oppressive surveillance as well as to preserve agency. Such forms of resistance are usually not visible, but when they materialize as a group, they tend to destabilize dominant hegemonies. This is complemented by feminist-postcolonial approach to Dr. Aroosa Kanwal, in which she narrates stories of women having their own smart, ethical places of negotiation in opposition to strata of colonial and male violence. Kanwal in her structure suggests the moral importance of tales that are deemed peripheral to the narration of resilience and counter memory.

Moreover, postcolonial feminist criticism of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is instrumental in problematizing the procedure of giving voice to subaltern women, deconstructing the formation of the space of possibilities of recognition and speaking. This was a cautionary note that it cautions against romanticized interpretations of agency and insists on subtle academic involvement of power processes on personal perspective of female during Partition through Partition literature.

By the work of Menon and Bhasin Foundational in feminist historiography where the factual reality of the Partition women is recorded outside victimization simplification, where everyday behavior emotional labour, silent endurance, family negotiation, solidarity are defined as fundamental forms of resistance and survival is proposed this research holds an integrative framework. This strategy requires the scholarly recognition of not only spectacular violence and exploitation but also the concealed and subtle methods and strategies that women used to shape an agency in discontinuous and violent spaces.

By altering the critical lenses through the interchange of the trauma-only approach to the feminist archival imagination and historiography, the current research makes a significant contribution to both past and present studies by recognizing the invisible but palpable resistances. It introduces novel and untapped interpretative possibilities to Partition literature to explore, multi-layered and subtle female subjectivities. In broader terms, this piece of work adds to the feminist and postcolonial theory in that it introduces the survival and resistance of the suppressed and marginalized groups not only through dramatic conflict but also through adaptive, relational, and moral practices. What are obviously instilled in their daily lives in the context of repressive socio-political unrest.