An Unrestored Woman - Shobha Rao

The Partition of India, which took place in August 1947, saw the largest peacetime migration in history. The rush to avoid being left on the wrong side of the border saw 10 million people displaced; in the violence which accompanied this mass movement of people, up to 1 million were killed, whilst women were particularly vulnerable – up to 50,000 Muslim women in India were kidnapped, along with 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan.

In 1949, the Indian government passed the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, legislating for the return of kidnapped women to their communities. As is often the case, however, legislation could not solve a complex social problem. Many women were put at risk by being forcibly returned to families who now saw them as impure; mothers were often separated from children, who were considered the ‘property’ of the nation in which they had been born.

The psychological effects of Partition have been longlasting, making the subject fertile ground for literary investigation. In Capital (2014), Rana Dasgupta analysed the lingering trauma of Partition, and its effect on the modern Indian state. Shobha Rao’s An Unrestored Woman tackles the same issue through fiction, examining the lives of women from multiple perspectives, looking at issues of freedom, memory, and the possibility of reconciliation. The action of An Unrestored Woman takes place away from the big cities of India, ranging from the genteel setting of Raj-era merchant’s homes to camps for displaced people and rural brothels, and across generations, from August 1947 to the present day.

Throughout the collection, Rao examines the relationship between individual women and the state. By insisting that women ‘belonged’ to a particular nation, the Abducted Persons Act turned women into the property of their communities, resources to be disputed, stolen and reclaimed. The story Blindfold highlights the way in which women are viewed as commodities from early age, marrying at 12, for a dowry, or sold to brothels at even younger ages. This form of ownership, in which girls are bought from fathers and sold to husbands or clients, creates a cycle of violence, abuse and revenge. The story focuses on the relationship between Bandra, a brothel-keeper and a girl called Zubaida. Identified as a four year old, Zubaida is purchased from her father with a silver coin as down-payment. When she comes to collect the child seven years later, the father attempts to renege on the deal, so Bandra has him beaten, and the child is taken forcibly.

Life in the brothel is a perversion of family relationships - the girls are encouraged to call Bandra 'ma', and to defer to her at all times. Zubaida is given a new name, and becomes much sought after; eventually, Bandra arranges to sell her on to a wealthy client, as a wife. Zubaida’s life is a series of economic transactions; each of these is marked by violence, and the final sale is no exception. There is a hint of The Shawshank Redemption in the story’s denouement, but Blindfold still feels visceral and fresh.

The title story exposes a counter-intuitive fact of Partition: for some, displacement was a means for women to leave an oppressive society behind. The semi-permanent refugee camps could places of hope, for all their squalor, where women could temporarily escape the influence of men. The idea of escape is further developed in The Merchant's Mistress, which follows Renu, 'nineteen when she left the refugee camp and travelled to Ahmedabad'. After seeing an older woman on a train, whose 'life had been cruel, nearly meticulous, in its onslaughts,’ Renu begins travelling as a man. The story mixes elements of traditional fables with transgressive elements - servants who enter their masters’ rooms, and usurp their places. Renu takes a position in a merchant’s house, and begins affairs with the merchant and his wife; in the breakdown of the Imperial order after Independence, she is able to create a space for herself which would never have been possible in the Raj. Eventually, she is able to exploit her employer’s complacency, and gain her independence.

The portrayal of men is interesting throughout An Unrestored Woman. Men are presented as powerless, dead, or in an opium daze. This inability of men to protect their women later manifested itself in a backlash against women’s rights, according to Dasgupta, as men sought to reassert the power which had deserted them in the chaos of Partition. In The Imperial Police, a representative of the English authorities is transferred to a police station in a rural backwater after a scandal about his sexuality. He fetishizes the dignity of Indian men, until he is violently disabused of his notions by a meeting with a colleague’s wife.

All of these themes are bought together in The Opposite of Sex, the highlight of the collection. The story focuses on a surveyor sent to map the new border between India and East Pakistan. He falls in love with the daughter of a local landowner, who has been promised to a local farmer, along with a dowry of 100 acres. Spotting an opportunity to prevent the wedding, the surveyor redraws the map to reduce her father’s landholding. In this minor functionary’s eyes, land and women are both malleable objects to be owned, conquered and manipulated; however, his actions lead to a cycle of violence and death.

An Unrestored Woman mixes sharp analytical insight with visceral literary power. While Rao never loses sight of the political implications of her writing, her characters never feel like pawns in their own stories. There is a fiercely controlled anger throughout the collection, which exposes brutal truths about the legacy of Partition, and the lingering destructive power of colonialism. Through these stories, Rao goes some way to restoring voices and dignity to the victims.