Review

Reviewed Work(s): She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety
by Srimati Basu; Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition by Ritu Menon and
Kamla Bhasin; The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi
Butalia
Review by: Shelley Feldman
Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3, Gender and Social Policy: Local to Global (Autumn,
2001), pp. 228-232
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316860
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 228 AMY HUDNALL

Amy C. Hudnall is a lecturer in the History Department at Appalachian

State University. She is currently working on a study of present-day
human rights policy and cross-cultural collaboration as a means of mini-
mizing inter-ethnic conflicts and human rights abuses.

Note

1. "[A]n approach to quality of life assessment pioneered within economics by

Amartya Sen and . . . highly influential through the Human Development
Reports of the United Nations Development Programme" (70).

She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety
by Srimati Basu. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999,
305 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $21.95 paper.

Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition by Ritu Menon and

Kamla Bhasin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998,
274 pp., $20.00 paper.

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi
Butalia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, 308 pp., $54.95
hardcover, $17.95 paper.

SHELLEY FELDMAN

Rarely does one have the pleasure of reviewing books that offer an innova-
tive reading of important areas of recent scholarship and provide an
epistemic challenge to prior interpretations. Each of these books focuses
on women as authors of their own destiny and as creators and transformers
of social relations and institutions from which they had previously been
elided. In so doing, they offer a feminist critique of extant analyses of
property relations and war. Srimati Basu's study of the gendered division
of property illuminates property relations as the site of conflict between
established systems of privilege and the principles of individual rights
and liberties. Basu is centrally concerned with how modes of reinscrib-
ing socioeconomic hegemonies are experienced by women in relation to
their access to property and how they navigate established patterns of
property transfer to fundamentally complicate the accepted commitment
and enactment of gender equity.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 229

Each of the five substantive chapters in She Comes to Take Her Rights
explores the myths and practices that sustain particular property rela-
tions. The second chapter broadly outlines women's control of property,
including prevalent modes of inheritance; chapter three highlights prop-
erty exchanges around marriage and the meanings and purposes of wed-
ding exchanges; chapter four explores the various myths invoked by
women to explain their attitudes regarding their entitlements and how
they negotiate demands for family property; and chapter five evaluates
the relationship of women's view of the law with the myths of wealth
to offer a picture of the socio-cultural transformation of resource control
by women. Chapter six inverts our focus from women to the ways in
which entitlements are represented in legal texts to how prevalent myths
encode women's entitlements to property within legal judgments. Basu
also examines the dowry as a contribution to the clothes and jewelry
of the bride as well as the consumption interests of the in-laws and
concludes: "Despite exceptional cases of women receiving family prop-
erty and subtle negotiations by women to retain natal ties, patriarchal
principles of inheritance remain both ubiquitous and markedly stable in
India" (157).
Both the strategy that Basu employs and the insights she offers are
attentive to social class and the spatiality of Delhi City, India as a complex
field of economic, social, ethnic, and cultural diversity. She is attentive to
the diverse and divergent meanings that control of property may have for
members of the three Delhi communities that comprise her sample: dif-
ferences between rural and urban property ownership, variances between
ownership and rights of occupancy (critical for understanding the eco-
nomic security of widows), and the distinction between de facto and
de jure "heads" of joint families. Thus, she asks: "How do cultural fac-
tors affect the outcome of laws intended to bring about social reform?"
(11). This animating question situates the law within the context of its
paradoxical meanings for different members of the nation, and as a series
of relations that depend upon kin-based constructions of justice, security,
and entitlements. Property rights, in other words, are as much about
intense cultural contestation as they are about the economic control of
production and social resources.
The studies by Menon and Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries: Women in
India's Partition, and Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the
Partition of India, are animated by a quite different focus-the intimate
relationship of war, gender, and violence. Each volume engages the absence
of women from the stories of the 1947 Partition of India, specifically the
experience in Punjab, and shows how feminist analysis disrupts both
normative understandings of nationalism as ideology and interpretations
of state-building as simply a set of bureaucratic practices. Both of these

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 230 SHELLEY FELDMAN

masterful studies not only sustain a growing awareness of the intimate

relationship of war, gender, and violence, but also are at the forefront of
efforts to show how women and women's bodies, as signifiers of commu-
nity, lead to the erasure of women as subjects. Each shows how women's
bodies provide a template for kin and collective honor, as well as for
disgrace, and how violations are justified by inscribing them in a memo-
rialization of a national past and the construction of a religio-nationalist
future that holds women as central to tradition, spirituality, and the
meaning of community. Surely, elite histories of Partition either erase
women as subjects in their concentration on high politics, or assume
women to be among the masses of victims whose experiences can be
homogenized as an effect of the costs of war. In challenging this view,
these extraordinary contributions transform the debate about war and
nationalist struggles by showing how women, as well as their erasure,
are constitutive of historical discourse.
These books also provide an important methodological note; they
highlight the salience of oral testimonies in exploring the everyday worlds
of those who lived through the partitioning of Punjab, and are attentive to
the difficulty of asking about, and having people remember, the personal
and collective violence of the period. In their attention to listening and
then revealing the silence attendant to the Partition, the authors make
transparent the fetishization of war as the work of men who protect
the soil, as well as national, community, and family honor. By inviting
women to "speak for themselves," each book challenges the objectivity
and adequacy of elite histories and draws important connections to other
communal contexts. In a crucially important and cogently argued intro-
duction, Menon and Bhasin describe their methodological approach to
providing women space to speak for themselves, but acknowledge as well,
the contribution of archives and fiction, memoranda, reports, official
statements, and government documents.
Borders & Boundaries and The Other Side of Silence situate the Parti-
tion in the context of religious and nationalist struggles that organized
ethnic difference spatially, through the creation of the separate states
of India and a divided Pakistan. Menon and Bhasin's contribution is
organized into six thematic chapters: violence, abduction and recovery,
widowhood, women's rehabilitation, and, an integrated concluding sec-
tion which explores the processes of rebuilding and belonging. In each
chapter, the authors show how women's bodies are considered by men of
rival communities as a territory to be conquered and by kin as the mark of
familial honor. The author's also question women's own transgression of
the body by choosing suicide rather than the dishonor of forced rape and
mutilation. While the authors are attentive to how women may indeed
come to view death as preferable to humiliation, they recall painful
memories of men killing female kin to protect their own honor.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 231

The Other Side of Silence is organized thematically: "Beginnings,"

"Blood," "Facts," "Women," "Honour," "Children," "Margins," and
"Memory." Subtly, yet boldly, Butalia draws on her own family to open her
search and to connect to the women and men who help her implode extant
histories of Partition. In addition to the kin who animate her harrowing
tale, she talks with displaced orphans and children of abducted women,
as well as Dalits, or untouchables, to emphasize the distinctiveness of the
experiences of Partition for other low-status community members.
Signaling the significance of their work for understanding the genocide
of women associated with the struggles in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the epis-
temic claims of these authors also unsettle history as usual. Despite
the half-century separating the study and people's actual experience-
between the Partition of the subcontinent and the project of ethnic clean
ing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Partition and the communal violence
in South Asia throughout the 1980s and 1990s-the authors show how
neither moralism nor apologies erase the physical and emotional pain
wrought on those who lived through the war, nor does it erase our own
responsibility for and painful ignorance of the meaning and experience
of other wars in similar contexts. As Butalia eloquently notes: "I began
to realize that Partition was not, even in my family, a closed chapter of
history-that its simple, brutal political geography infused and divided
us still" (5).
For women who survived the genocide, there also is an important story
of recovery and rehabilitation and the varied ways in which Partition
"victims" were treated by the state, community networks and social
workers, and their own kin, an account that can be described as the
second story of Partition. This period of recovery, rehabilitation, and
memory highlights how state and community resources and the initiation
of welfare and legislative responsibility enabled women to rebuild their
lives in the midst of trauma and exclusion. In the words of Krishna Sobti,
a writer, and a Partition refugee, "Partition was difficult to forget but
dangerous to remember." Butalia then explains, "while it may be danger-
ous to remember, it is also essential to do so-not only so that we can come
to terms with it, but also because unlocking memory and remembering is
an essential part of beginning the process of resolving" (269).
All three books are accessible to both undergraduate and graduate
students in courses that examine gender and ethnic conflict, nationalism,
politics of identity, women and property, war, feminist methods, and
theories of the body. The volumes by Butalia and Menon and Bhasin
make a particularly important contribution to the significance of oral
testimonies to historical analyses. In these times, where ethnic cleansing
is a phrase so readily on our minds, these studies are a reminder of the
pain and suffering that is attendant to the particular experiences of those
living in worn-torn places, struggling to come to terms with the costs

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 232 SHELLEY FELDMAN

of nation-making. They call into question the attendant issues to efforts

to build national and sub-national movements in terms of naturalizing
the irreconcilability of religious difference and the particular ways in
which inscriptions of othering and exclusion often build on gendered
violence-of rape, mutilation, or murder. The books force us to think
about the complex meanings associated with recovery, for those brutal-
ized by the encounter with war and nationalist projects and for those
who assume that wars are finite events, controlled when a resolution is
sought and realized.

Shelley Feldman is Associate Professor of Development Sociology and

former Director of the South Asia and Gender and Global Change pro-
grams at Cornell University. Of her numerous articles and books, her
most recent publication is Informal Work and Social Change. Her current
research is a feminist institutional history of post-1 94 7 partition in East
Pakistan.

Islam and Equality: Debating the Future of Women 's and Minority Rights
in the Middle East and North Africa edited by the Lawyers Commit-
tee for Human Rights. New York: Lawyers Committee for Human
Rights, 1999, 208 pp., $20.00 paper.

Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disap-
peared Children of Argentina by Rita Arditti. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999, 251 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper.

The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in

Conflict by Cynthia Cockburn. New York: Zed Books, 1999, 247 pp.,
$65.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper.

RENEE G. SCHERLEN

The three books under review explore a diverse range of issues and a wide
geographical area. In these pages, we find women as activists as well as
women as subjects of states and international law. Despite the broad scope,
a reader encounters overlapping ideas within the three. Of particular
importance are the concepts of transnational organizations, public versus
private domains, feminism, and identity. These terms emerge as central
to understanding women in contemporary politics. A comparison and
contrast of the treatment of these ideas in various settings reveals areas of
debate and consensus surrounding women and their role in international
politics. Furthermore, throughout all three books, the reader is conscious
of the link between the political and the personal, especially for women.

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