I wanted to look at some of the shifts that Partition brought about in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (The Skeleton). Hamida is generally empathetic and moved by the suffering of the many women who were abducted — and worse — during Partition. But Pritam complicates this empathy with a countervailing feeling once India and Pakistan decide to facilitate the exchange of abducted women:
A sense of resentment surged in Hamida’s mind. When it had happened to her, religion had become an insurmountable obstacle; neither her parents nor her in-laws-to-be had been willing to accept her. And now, the same religion had become so accommodating! (100)
In Hamida’s eyes, the trauma of Partition broke down (to some extent) the rigidity of the religious social structures that alienated women like her from their families. For me, this landed as unexpected. Between the spatial division of the two religions and the terrible violence each community inflicted on the other, one might expect the opposite outcome. Instead, Pritam portrays Partition as a rupture in these existing logics. In a way, it is an account that offers deep agency to the individuals involved. In the face of a society that violently enforces this logic of religious division, people come to be less limited by religious convention in a certain narrow sense. In Pritam's portrayal, the trauma of violence and transplantation brings people to a place where they simply value the life of their daughters and their sisters over culturally constructed notions of their purity. When “it was a sin to be alive in a world so full of evil” anyway, when the world already made it “a crime to be born a girl” (87), how could it make sense to worry about one’s daughter’s purity?
Hamida’s character herself reproduces this dynamic. Before Partition, when she winds up in Rattoval and encounters Ramchand, the man who would have been her husband, she cannot speak. She cries so much she cannot see. For her, the encounter lies outside of the possibility of language: she cannot express any social meaning. It even lies outside of the realm of sensory possibility: her body physically prevents her from seeing him. But the limitations of social convention are not enough to contain her sense of connection with him: “like one taken by the hand, [she] seemed to follow a predestined path to the fields. Even in the dark she found the acacia tree under which the evening before she had encountered Ram Chand” (78). There, she finds him again, but she tells him: “Pooro has been dead a long time” (79). Before Partition, Hamida forces herself to feel that her old identity died with her abduction. Though she seeks out encounters with Ram Chand — a human symbol of the life she could have had as Pooro — those encounters are hardly encounters at all. They are (i.e. Hamida makes them) unintelligible, as Pooro is dead.
During Partition, when Ram Chand is uprooted from his village and is passing through Chatto as a refugee, their encounter no longer carries this weight. Last time, Hamida’s return to the acacia tree where they met carried the weight of predestination. This time, she just walks up to him: “‘You need food or provisions?’ she asked him casually.” This time, they interact as peers. They talk. What once was unspeakable is now a conversation. The structures that made their encounter ‘impossible,' or outside the realm of social and sensory intelligibility, were no more. All of this prompts a sequence of events in which Hamida/Pooro ends up saving Lajo (Ram Chand’s sister and her sister-in-law) from abduction. When she returns Lajo home, she meets her estranged brother. In that moment, she says:
"When Lajo is welcomed back in her home, then you can take it that Pooro has also returned to you. My home is now in Pakistan,” she said to her brother.
“Whether one is a Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whoever reaches her destination, she carries along my soul also,” Pooro said to herself and made a last vow by closing her eyes (127)
Whereas before Partition, Pooro was dead, Partition’s dissolution of religious social structures gave her life again.