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Historians who write about horrific events such as ethnic cleansing or civil war must often sift facts from a muddle of emotion, prejudice, and faint recollection. And yet this very pursuit of an antiseptic or impartial truth threatens to strip history of vital aspects of human experience. To what extent might so-called facts of recorded history actually serve to conceal or silence voices of those who have endured catastrophe? Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence attempts to recover the "underside" of the Partition of India—stories of women, children, and outcasts that have been buried beneath priorities of more conventional approaches to history writing. At the same time, Butalia's narratives shed light upon the role of religion in shaping identities of families and communities. With tensions between India and Pakistan threatening to boil over into war, this revisionist history is all too timely.
On June 3, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, an event that resulted in the largest single planned migration in world history. Roughly 12 million people were compelled to leave their homes and resettle in another territory, designated primarily for persons who shared their religion. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, as communities were convulsed by an orgy of communal violence and anarchy. More than 75,000 women were abducted or raped; but their stories have found no prominent place in history. Historians have preferred instead to focus on the "high politics" of the Partition: state-level negotiations, conflict between political parties, and, of course, the "surgical" boundary line that divided two nations, drawn by the infamous colonial Boundary Commissioner, Cyril Radcliff. This conventional "gaze on the past," says Butalia, has tended to pass over "feelings, emotions, [and other] indefinable things that make up the sense of an event." Moreover, the preoccupation with high politics has marginalized the voices of ordinary people—those who suffered most from the events in question.
In order to retrieve the voices of the marginalized, Butalia turns not to official reports kept securely in the National Archives of India or the British Library but to the "alternative archive" of human memory. Without memory, there can be no individual or group identity. But how exactly should memories of the living shape our understandings of the past? Memory, after all, may act as a reservoir of prejudice and hatred, yet the articulation of memory may also help heal wounds of the past. Butalia treats her interviewees as eyewitnesses to a colossal human tragedy. Though she does little to "cross-examine" them, she places them in context. Her historicizing of the narratives adds to their coherence and brings a visceral dimension to events that might otherwise be viewed from a cold distance.
Above all, Butalia gives voice to the thousands of women who were raped or abducted while crossing the India-Pakistan border. At the time, reports of missing women had become so frequent as to prompt both governments to embark on a Central Recovery Operation, intended to locate women who had been abducted by members of the "other religion" and return them to their families. But the effort was riddled with difficulties. Could women trust agents of the state any more than they could trust their abductors? In some instances, Butalia shows, police and other officials were complicit in the crime of treating women as commodities, to be bought or sold for one purpose or another. Some women never found their way back to their original families. As victims of rape or abduction, they lived out their lives in a constant state of exile and silence.
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