The formation of a new land and the destruction of others started with the mutilation of a woman's body. The act of sexual violence against women during conflict is a longstanding casualty of war. Often brushed off, its great significance to understanding the physical and psychological torture of victims is ignored. Hence, the cycle continues as more women get raped, abducted, or mutilated, branded, and subject to forced marriages with each passing conflict.
Often when the main cause of the conflict is control over territory, ideology, or nationality, the act of sexual violence aginst women is an expression of deep rooted masculinity in a patriarchal society. The objectification and ownership of women’s bodies can be comparable to ownership of land and territory, which is why dominating it is seen as dominating the ‘other’.
Anthropologist Veena Das writes that during the partition, women would often be tattooed with “Jai Hind” (Long Live India) and “Pakistan Zindabad” (Long Live Pakistan) to burn a memory of loss and domination, so that the men will never forget that their women had already been occupied and ruined by other men, and dehumanize them as trophies of war. By extent, their land and their honor had been ruined.
These acts of violence strip a woman of her ‘feminine’ qualities of being a nurturer, mother, and wife - the essential pillars of a community - dismantling society from the bottom. By abducting women as hostages, forced wives, or captives, men were able to act on the impulse to consume, change, and erase the remains of the other country, solidifying themselves as the sole ruler and controller over the territory and dominion.
Other feminist writing interpret sexual violence as a way for men to reclaim their masculinity. When outside forces invade a state, the local men feel emasculated, as their role as protectors has been threatened. In return, they facilitate violence upon women to reclaim their sense of agency, control, and dominance.
Through this lens, the partition can be seen as the men's failure to protect the unity of a nation and inability to defend their women, and in turn, the men of victim state had also taken it into their own hands to protect their honor by killing drowning, shooting, sacrificing, their women and children, some by their own accord, to avoid being ruined by the enemy.
“the story of 1947, while being one of the attainments of Independence, is also a gendered narrative of displacement and dispossession, of large-scale and widespread communal violence, and of the realignment of family, community, and national identities as a people were forced to accommodate the dramatically altered reality that now prevailed.”1
Stripping, parading naked, mutilating, tattooing, disfiguring, branding the genitalia, amputating breasts, raping, knifing the wombs open, killing fetusus, all acts of sexual violence, tells us that women were used as objects as men - weaponized for their own honor. A woman’s sexuality is a direct extension of her menfolk's masculinity and manhood - when shamed and ruined - has to be avenged.
In the end with all this violence, it is women who are ultimately dealt with the most violent consequences. Each one of these acts of violations has specific meaning and physical consequences. Above all, women’s bodies are weaponized as conquered territory, claimed and branded by the invaders.
The acts of violence may be continuous or simultaneous, such as starting with stripping and ending up with rape, branding, and tattooing. It might take place publicly, or with family forced to be witnesses. Tattooing ‘pakistan zindabad’ or ‘hindustan zindabad’, brand the woman for life but also ensure that her family will never accept her again, and cause eternal humiliation for her, her family, and community.
For the partition specifically, sexual violence against women on both sides deepened the divide between the religious communities through the bodies of the women, in a way, ‘becoming’ those countries, imprinting shame and dishonor onto their community. Branding and tattooing breasts and genitalia with religious symbols extended the violation, metaphorically, to future generations - casting them as traitors to their origins, meaning that the bloodline will end there.
Amputating breasts was seen as a form of desexualizing, stripping away the woman’s role as wife, mother, and nurturer because a violated woman could no longer be seen as a legitimate vessel of lineage or fertility by her own community. Thus, each act of violation transcended beyond the individual woman. It was designed to restrict her from any future she might have offered her community, turning a single act of physical harm into an intergenerational injury.
Hence, her body, was never just a body, it was the battlefield where communal identity, honor, and continued rule were fought over, making sexual violence a central instrument during the 1947 partition of India.