Women Breaking the Silence over Violence: Revising Historiography through Sorayya Khan’s Novels

Abstract

The partition of British India in 1947 and the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971 witnessed violence that changed the cartography of the Indian subcontinent. This article explores a connecting thread between the history of violence during these epochal events and the commonality that both were followed by a conspicuous silence in the official historiography. It probes the disjuncture in the unreconciled history where silences corroborate official historiography and the unhealed wounds of victims of violence can be traced in the literary historiography produced by Sorayya Khan. This article is an analysis of her thematic choices and her treatment while writing about the victims of nationalist violence and its perpetrators. It examines her relentless effort to break this collective amnesia and silence of a society that witnessed, violated, massacred, and assaulted millions of its citizens to secure its borders. Her writing needs attention as it fills silent gaps in the historiography of Pakistan, and unlike most of the writers, she challenges the pervasive perception of men as heroic soldiers or perpetrators of violence and women as victims. She posits women as agents for breaking the silence over violence and thereby revises the official historiography.