Body, Power and Gendered Identity: Inscribed Bodies of Men in Partition Fiction

Abstract

A widely-held perception which has developed through and within the feminist literary as well as theoretical framework is to analogize the land ravaged by war to a female body raped by the aggressive attackers. The semblance qualifies the female body as an impetus for objectifying the interrelation of power and identity formation. During the partition of the sub-continent as well, the gendered coloration of the instances of violence has historically foregrounded the case of women more than any other gender. This research aims to study the possibility of viewing the invaded land as a male figure castrated, and the male body as an omphalos for relations of power and a site on which systems of discourse and power inscribe themselves. The investigation is supported by the work of Judith Butler (2004, 2005), a feminist who challenges the idea of the ‘body’ as a strong marker of identity and sees it instead as a surface for social inscriptions. This study digs into the insistent denial in Butler’s work on being involved in any identity politics in order to make the following inquisitions: Is Butler’s belief in a shared identity in terms of ethnic, racial, and sexual existence equally valid for the other ethnic, racial or sexual groups? When Butler says that body is a site for cultural and political inscriptions, which violently imprint the body to give it a meaning, does she mean a specific gendered body, i.e. a female body, or can it also be the body of a man? As with women, can the bodies of men also be seen as vulnerable in the face of the violent markings engraved by the coercive power representations? Can the mutilation of a male body, as presented in novels such as Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, be regarded as just as powerful a symbol of colonial and ethnic assertion of power and identity as that of the molestation of the female body?