Violence In Tamas, And Badami's

Uprisings, riots, revolutions and even minor skirmishes with racial and political overtones provide an outlet for men to commit atrocities against women. Documentation of such atrocities is either inconsequential or tangential. The paper therefore deals with violence that women are subjected to during communal riots with special emphasis on rape as sexual violence through Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan(1956),Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas(1975) and Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?(2006). Violence according to Hannah Arendt in her essay On Violence (1970) comes with authority or “unquestioning recognition” tied to power which needs no justification. Violence therefore is an “instrumentation of strength” (James 53) which silences

The trouble begins with the arrival of the ghost train carrying the slaughtered bodies of Hindus and Sikhs from the side of Pakistan and with the arrival of refugees from these riot effected places with heart’s filled with hatred due to the violence they have witnessed. Slowly the whole village becomes divided and eventually burst into a communal violence to establish one’s superiority over the other. On the other hand Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1975) is set in a small town of the frontier province in 1947. It tells the story of Nathu, a sweeper, who is bribed and deceived by a local Muslim politician to kill a pig for a veterinarian. But, the following morning the carcass is discovered on the steps of the mosque and the already tension filled town now erupts. Muslims massacres scores of Hindus and Sikhs, who in turn kill every Muslim they can find. It should be noted that the incidence reflected in this novel are true accounts of the Rawalpindi riots of 1947. Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006) is set in India and Canada; and it tells the lives of three women Bibiji aka Sharanjeet Kaur, her niece Nimmo and Lila Bhatt at the backdrop of the Khalistan movement and Operation Blue Star, which led to the assassination of the then Prime Minister Smt. Indira Gandhi; which further led to the

On the other hand Anita Rau Badamai’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?(2006) shows the psychological violence that a women is subjected through after witnessing the partition and its violence and also the post partition riots of 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi through the character of Nimmo. The character of Nimmo is studied here in the lights of Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of volatility of bodies. Grosz in her text Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporal Feminism (1994) takes up two prominent views on body to present her own view. She writes that on one hand the body is regarded as an exterior expression of interior dynamics (like desires, the subconscious structure). That is the body is the process of “inside out” (in Grosz’s term). The other prominent view is that the body is an expression of the dominant social discourse that surrounds the subject that is “outside in”. But for Grosz the body is the “intersection between the two” (Cahill 80). That is the body is like a Mobius Strip which has the advantage to show the relation “between two things- mind and body.” (Cahill