SPECIAL ISSUE 2012 h ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW h 93 Reading Women’s Journey through the Debris of Indian Partition in the “Charnel Ground of History” ANUPARNA MUKHERJEE English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (India) T he previous century, like the present one, had been “one of the Walls. Concrete, beaurocratic, surveillance, security, racist walls” (Berger 88)—of walls that pervaded every sphere. And the more we had talked about razing these walls among races, castes, religions, or disciplines, greater had been the urge to consolidate our frontiers, and to raise walls of prejudice and parochialism that kept us as captives in our small cocoons. Nazim Hikmet, who was a political prisoner in Turkey for thirteen years, while talking about his experiences of incarceration in one of his prison poems had once written, They have taken us prisoners, They’ve locked us up. But that’s nothing. The worst is when people—knowingly or not— carry prison inside themselves. 1 And the worst of these prisons that we carry within ourselves and all around us are perhaps those that are built on obdurate religious dogmas, because they point at a dangerous entente among political, religious, and economic interests, ultimately driven by a sectarian aim which sanctions and legitimizes genocidal violence in history. India’s blood-stained Partition, which was deemed as an inevitable result of the ethnic clashes between two supposedly antagonistic religious communities— the Hindus and the Muslims—in the subcontinent is an example of such carnage. In fact, Britain’s transfer of power to its colonial subjects that coincided with the country’s vivisection at the cusp of India’s independence in 1947 was fraught with such macabre memories of violence that it propelled the official historiographers of independent India and Pakistan into a forced amnesia about the Partition. Thus in the years following India’s independence the nation witnessed a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, the postcolonial Indian nation indulged in a heady quest of rediscovering its “roots” in its attempt to reconnect with India’s cultural past as a part of the larger project of decolonization as a whole; on the other,