The Treatment of Women: Part Two (with Pritika Chowdhry)

linked in the show notes. Warning, the following episode contains stories of rape and extreme violence. You know, slowly but shortly from the nineties, it was entering my conscious, my public and social conscious that practition of India was a very big event, really shaped the Sudasian geopolitics and also people. It lives in families, It lives in families, histories. I was fully understanding my inheritance, like this is what I inherit, you know, as an Indian woman, this is part of

my cultural and familial inheritance. Once we make the association that the past isn't meant to stay in the past, what can we do to make sure the memories and experiences of people who came before us don't get lost in the void. Last week, you heard some of the ways women were weaponized during partition from Adula Waldron, a survivor who wrote a novel to process her personal trauma.

From this week, we're going to focus on what we can do now to acknowledge these women, to make sure their experiences don't get lost no matter how much time has passed. From I Heart Radio, I'm Nehasse and this is Partition, a podcast that will take a closer look into this often forgotten part of history. I can't quite remember how I stumbled upon this artist's work. I think I was just looking for people who were sharing stories

about partition in any capacity. Once I looked at her photos, I immediately knew I wanted to talk to her and find out more about her intricate and honest works about Partition. I call myself a post colonial filminist artist that's Practico Jodrey. I make art installations that are anti memorials to traumatic geopolitical events, such as the partition of India, eleven and so on. In these anti memorials, I tried to excavate the counter memories of these events. The counter histories of

these events. Pertica as an artist, curator, and writer who focuses on anti memorials and counter memory. Though I hadn't heard these terms before, I immediately understood their meeting as she explained them to me. In essence, there are the crux of this podcast. So an anti memorial basically goes against the grain in terms of traditional monuments, which are you know, state sponsored monuments tend to be rather large, breaking motor structures that glorify the nation state in some way.

Anti memorials do the almost opposite, so they are usually smaller in scale, They are usually temporary, they are made usually of fragile and precarious materials, and most of the

time they critique the nation state. There are, of course, statues and other entities named after Jinna and Ahru in Pakistan in India, and while there are still some statues devoted to our colonizers, they are not well preserved and many are in the process of being removed, a notion similar to Confederate statues being removed in the United States. Counter memories, similarly, are memories that center the experiences of

people that don't get to write history. So the national version the nationalist hero version, so to speak, of a traumatic event is usually quite different from what was experienced on the ground by people that were at a disadvantage. In the context of the tradition of India, these tend to be women and the Muslim minority. These two also don't get to write the history of the partition to any great extent. They are usually very silenced. Their experiences

are not heard, they're definitely not centered. Coming to terms with our past is essential. We must own up to our history, no matter how despicable it. Maybe think about reparations being made to the descendants of slaves. While no amount of money can erase the wickedness of the past,

at the very least it offers some accountability. You've heard me say time and time again that the great men in history narrative is the one that gets the limelight in most cases, and everyday people, especially women, get shafted. The everyday people are the ones that lost their homes, were separated from their relatives, attacked, and must truly live with a sequences from these so called great men. This

is where the counter memory comes in. So counter memory is an exercise, It's an individual act of resistance it's a fu Coldian term to excavate intentionally these histories that have been lost, that have been raised from nationalist narratives, and then to center those. Pertica mentions that a counter memory is a fu Codian term. The term was coined by French philosopher Michelle Fuco. Counter memories hope to break the cycle of sharing a sugar coated history and questioning

the power structure of information that is widely available to us. Essentially, it is through counter memories where we get the so called inconvenient truths, the truths we don't get in history books, the truths that are vastly different from the fantasies they are addressed up as. No matter how Indians and Pakistan, he's fall into the timeline of events. We all have a partition story. I asked Partika what hers was. I am half Cynthia and half Bengali. Pretiica is referring to

two different regions. Sinth is a province in Pakistan where I'm also from, and Bengal is a region on the eastern side of India which you may remember was split by Cyril Radcliffe in the height of the n partition riots. My grandparents and their extended family migrated from Karagi to Delhi.

You know, our family doesn't talk about like I had to really extract it out of my mother and Um, she was initially quite resistant to talking about it because she was like, well, what's the point of talking about all this, you know, past traumas and things like that. It's just better to just forget. Extract is the perfect word to like in her recollection of getting information from her mom to getting a procedure as unpleasant as getting

a tooth removed is flawless. The partition lives very much, lives and functions as a force, as a ghost or however you want to call it. In the current jew politics of South Asia. That was what led me to sort of question my mother about what exactly happened in

n What does she know? So she was only um I believe, three years old at the time, so she doesn't really remember, but she knew enough that she was able to fill me in on quite a few details over the course of several telephone calls, because I was in the U S by then. Over the course of those many international telephone calls, particle slowly and covered the

horror stories her family witness during Partition. I found out that my grandfather's extended family, like his brothers and sisters and them, they all migrated, but they migrated at slightly different times and had sighted different all within August of nine, but through different modes like you know, train or car or whatever, they were able to manage. And my grandfather was in a pre decent position in the Indian railways. He was even able to get like an air ticket

for a part of that journey. But the entire family, the extended family, was not that lucky. And they there were one whole part of their family, like one of his siblings, and their entire family was completely like killed in the in the trains that you know, when they were coming to India. Only one nephew of my grandfather survived and he had like some sixteen stab wounds. Yea, his other sibling sister, his hard daughter, one of her daughters,

was abducted and lost. They were never able to find her. Bertica mostly found out about Partition through film and television, and when she started pursuing her m f A, all

the pieces came together for her. When I came to the US after a few years, you know, I went back to school, I started doing the Grand program UM and you Double Medicine UM and m f A, and there I had the opportunity to attend a graduate seminar on cultural memory, and there I finally found like a framework to really examine and analyze cultural memory in all its different nuances. So there is the hegemonic narratives, there

is the erased narratives. And that's where I started to understand these uh concepts of counter memories, counter histories, subaltern resistance to these anti memorials or you know, anti monuments or however you know, people use site different terms here, but this is where I started to kind of gain a vocabulary to process and then to sort of understand

how I can make art about it. So in my conversation with Pertica, switched gears to a more complicated and disheartening to topic general sible rape is a concept I have a hard time wrapping my head around. Rape in general is a concept I have a hard time wrapping

my head around. Activists and researcher Wherehema Begham rights. United Nations Security Council Resolution eight states that sexual violence is a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, and still fear in disperse and or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or an ethnic group. Throughout time, we have seen sexual violence, especially in the form of rape, being used to demoralize and destabilize entire communities, destroying the structure of

families and societies in spaces of conflict. We can assume sexual violence is inevitable when village elders are raped in public, sons are forced to rape their mother, or soldiers rape women in a village with their brothers and husbands forced to watch. These acts are strategic and efforts to annihilate an entire community. The use of the word tactic is just very upsetting. To think of rape as a strategy, or to chalk it up to unnecessary evil of war

is as detestable as it is outrageous. So partition is is a very complex thing. It's a very complex geopolitical event. There are many aspects of it. You know. She created her first partition related work in two thousand and seven while in grad school. That one was called Queering Mother India.

So in that I wanted to understand how this construct of Mother India had maybe enabled the perverse logic of using rape as a weapon in communal rights, where you know, the body of the women of a community can become the symbolic battleground where if you, you know, violate the women's bodies, you can inflict a very deep wound and humiliation to the men of that community. So it's very much a battle amongst men, but it gets played out

on the bodies of women. That's the perverse logic of using rape as a weapon, especially in these patriarchal societies. Punishing women was not a one off aspect of partition, but one that has been perpetrated in other historical events like Bosnia and Rwanta. But back to South Asia, culturally, we really revere women too. I mean, we have gardesses

that we worship. So I could not quite understand this complete contradiction of you know, on the one hand we worshiped goddesses, but then on the other hand we violate

women's bodies brutally, you know. So that was the whole idea of that anti memorial, where it comprised of, you know, about a nine or ten foot tall woman that I had made in ceramic in clay and it was fragmented, so you know, her body was in fragments around the gallery, and this is to sort of allude to how women's bodies were dismembered, you know, as part of the symbolic violence in the partition rights. Pertica shows the female body

as the mutilated and brutalized body of Mother India. When outside the traditional depictions of Mother India as a serene, demire maternal figure who reproduces the nation as expected of her, the icon of Mother India itself becomes broken by communal violence m H. As she discusses more of her installations, Pretica mentioned many of them are named after books or films that she was inspired by. So the second Anteme memorial I titled it What the Body Remembers because you know,

as an interra textual citation to the novel. And in that I focused only on the lower half of women's bodies. And they are also twice web size, so it's just the lower half of the female body, but each one

of them is about six ft top. Due to the large nature of these pieces, she notes that the belly and pubic areas are at eye level, making a statement want can't easily ignore m and they are engaged in schoolyard games like playing hop scotch or jump pro or being on a swing, and then there's like a soundscape in there where it's the sound of you know, an old time steam engine sort of approaching and then leaving, and that it is just placed on a loop, so

it's the sort of this ominous sound of a train coming and then leaving. Unfortunately, the pieces and what the Body remembers suffered irreparable damage while being transported, but photos of the art can be seen on Partica's website. However, she has a solution to bring them back to life by recreating them as digital three D models and releasing them as n f T s, a statement I never thought I would say on this show. If you don't know what an n f T is, I share you

I am the worst person to explain it. The next one that I made after What the Body Remembers was Silent Waters, which is an intratextual citation to a film by Seba Summer in which she sort of narrates the life story of a woman who was abducted and raped and then eventually ended up marrying one of her rapists as a form of survival, and of course those memories hunt her but there's this sort of culture of silence in the village where she lives, where nobody mentions it

and she doesn't mention it, and that her survival is sort of conditional to that. But eventually one of her brothers finds her because they never stopped looking for her. He comes from India and he finds her, which then breaks the silence of her abduction and rape. Campani came out in two thousand three, and I'll discuss this film further in a later episode. In this installation title Old Silent Waters, I created a hundred and one feet and these are also larger than life, so they are like

fifteen sixteen inches lunches, bigger than most human feet. They are glazed black, dead black, and when I displayed them, I filled them to different heights with salt water, so during the exhibition, the water evaporates and leaves like a crystalline residue of the salt in the feet. There's also a soundscape in there where, um, you know, it's the sound of running feet, rainfall, and then a body hitting water,

so like somebody may be jumped into a well. Some of Parta's other installations that focus on partition include remembering the crooked Line, which uses games as a motif. Like in the body, remembers and displays separations of other countries in broken column a series of hanging latex and silicon casts printed with neutral colored bricks and stones, hanged dispersed in a gallery. These casts represent the monuments to partition that should exist in the affected countries, but they don't,

except for the monument representing the Liberation War. In this war, Bengalis living in East Pakistan fought for their independence, eventually emerging victorious as a new country, Bangladesh. This war was one of the many traumatic and violent events that stemmed from partition. It is a story that deserves its own time, research and respect. It is my hope to share some of those stories in the future and in memory, leaks, traces and drips. Pritica uses dripping water to express the

regularity of communal riots. So what can we do now? I asked Perteca this question, and I'll be the first to admit it was pretty loaded. How do we pay tribute to women affected by partition? How do we honor them? Mm hmm, Yeah, that is a big question, you know, because rape is still stigmatized, right rape is a stigma that is still largely carried by women. Right. It's hard to center these narratives of rape because again, remember the victims of rape, right, their survival after the rape in

a lot of situations depends on their silence. Like it's it's not of benefit to them to break their silence. Right, So up until as a society, women carry the stigma of rape, and women's silence about their rapes is what is valued rather than the redressal of the wrong. I think it would be very hard to reverse that trend,

you know, in any significant way. So I guess what we can do people like you and me, you know, creatives who are not directly impacted by the rapes, but you know, as researchers and as creatives, we can research it and preserve those memories and in a way in different cultural artifacts you know, art, podcasts, books, storiography. You know, however, we are able films. Retica's work has been on display

in a pleatora of museums around the world. As the senior curator for the South Asian Institute of Chicago, She's putting together a seventy five anniversary project where many of her works will be showcased the exhibit. It is aptly titled Unbearable Memories Unspeakable Histories. At the top of the episode, you heard Prithicca say that Partition lives in families and this history is something she inherits. I had shared many of the same sentiments in an earlier episode. Partition is

a living and breathing thing. I too, believe it is my legacy to share these stories and ensure they don't get lost. Perhaps the most important aspect of Brithicca's work is that it can be seen online, thus eliminating any barriers. It doesn't matter what side of the border you belong to, or whether Partition is a part of your story or not.

The accessibility of Prothicca's work allows everyone, no matter where you are or who you are, to take the first step towards learning about this history that would otherwise be forgotten. In episode one, you heard me mention that there are no partition memorials in either India or Pakistan. What is being done to reserve this history? There are a number of people and organizations recording and documenting survivor accounts, and I was lucky enough to talk to some of them.

And discuss the task of collecting memories. I sort of casually started recording story on a trip to Punjab in two thousand nine. People thought it was insane, like really strange what I was doing. People who had witnessed it started to line up and it was like, Oh, there's a need, like people want to tell the story until next week. I'm Nejasis and this is Partition. Partition was developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created

by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Seni a median. Partition is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becker Ramos. It is edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score composed by Mark Hadley.