was it easy to draw a line across the map? perhaps. but it was impossible to know how severely that line was going to cleave lives bonded by birth, community and centuries of common history. it was perhaps easy to pass an order. it was impossible to predict hoe irreparably that order was going to slit hearts and minds and mutilate the sensibilities of generations to come. it was perhaps easier to create INDIA and PAKISTAN at the stroke of midnight on 14/15 august 1947. it was impossible to divide people into neatly contained religious slots, one this side of the border the other on the other side of the border. it was perhaps easier to write a rhetorical history of numbers and frontiers ans political palaver. it was impossible to quantify loss of homes and lives. to calibrate the human costs. approximately 7 million MUSLIMS went to PAKISTAN and 6 million HINDUS and SIKHS came to INDIA. mayhem ruled both the sides of the border.A political move. A geographical division. a catastrophe that has not been clocked. the chronicles of all histories have been peopled with the heroics and the cowardice of men;and(so also with this one). the broad history of the partition skims over the history of the details of the history and the lives of the women who , as often in history were marginalised. Women - the heroes who conquered the horror , the triumphal standard bearers of sanity, keepers of conscience , comrades sans arms. Women who bore terrible violations of body and heart and mind, who lived through unimaginable horrors- and survived.Women of unimaginable fortitude and unimaginable tenderness.Women who carried on with their business as usual-cooking, washing clothes, hugging their children as they put them to bed. Women who survived partition......to prove that life goes on, that time heals and brings with it a new beginning.
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