Agency of women in bengal partition fiction a study of select novels and short stories

Abstract

Looking back on Partition it becomes obvious that for a long while religion and gender have become increasingly intertwined in the political turmoil that envelops South Asia. Religion has been transformed into a vehicle through which the state has sought legitimacy; political parties have contested the state and social movements have been organized. The suppression of women has long been used as a political weapon as the women have been denied political power. The forces of the patriarchal society, its religion, its customs confine the women in the domestic space. Their confinement in the domestic sphere associates them with the stability absent in the constantly changing outside world. They are identified with the home that holds within its four walls peace, religion, and cultural heritage. They are the keepers of the purity and integrity of the community. Women have been engaged in activism within and against communal politics. Until quite recently, the ways in which states, parties and women themselves strategically appropriate gender to achieve social change, have been ignored. This reflects colonial, Orientalist assumptions about the privileged place of religion and of womenand#8223;s piety. In the process the complicated forms of female identities, which emerges from the interplay of gender, class and religious identities, are ignored. newline