Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal

Coming Out of Partition is a narrative of the Bengali refugee women, both Hindus and Muslims after the Partition of India in 1947. The story of their struggle is not merely a saga of mental and physical trauma, which did exist, but also a portrayal of their hardship experiences for shelter, rehabilitation and employment. In this arduous journey, they came out of Partition and emerged as new women of a distinct category, self-reliant, and soon turned into social, cultural and political activists of a progressive secular dimension. Spaces and roles they could acquire in this ’new’ alien situation were earlier denied in their sheltered and secure places in the pre-Partition days.

Gargi Chakravartty, taught in the Department of History, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. Her book, Gandhi: A Challenge to Communalism, a critical appraisal of Gandhi’s struggle against the forces of communalism, was published in 1987. She is also the author of P.C. Joshi: A Biography (2007), and editor of People’s ’Warrior’ Words and Worlds of P.C. Joshi (2014).