1. The Marooned as Partition Literature/ Effect of Partition on Women.

As a result of the arbitrary Partition of India, approximately two crore people were uprooted, nearly
ten lakh were killed or rendered disabled, and nearly one lakh women were raped or forced to
convert religion. Although the official figures stated only numbers, there was hardly any
documentation of real human stories or their appalling experiences. The artistic selves of
contemporary writers of that time seemed to overcome their initial reticence, which inspired them
to produce some of the finest psychological documentation of the Partition. Thus, a branch of
literature emerged to serve as a testimony to the horrific experiences of the victims, their ordeals,
and their longing for their lost homes.

Apart from the reports of families being divided, homes being destroyed, crops being left to rot, one
of the most brutal aspects of the Partition was the widespread sexual savagery – women were
abducted and raped by men of not only the ‘other’ religion but indeed sometimes by men of their
own religion as well. Thus, many women after the partition decided to remain within the zone of
silence in order to shield themselves from being questioned about their survival story. Such
experiences frame Prativa Basu’s “The Marooned”.

“The Marooned” helps to recreate the texture of life in the refugee camps and the picture of the
contemporary established society by national governments to deal with the huge influx of migrants.
Basu vividly captures the difficulties of providing infrastructure, relief, and eventually rehabilitation
in the camps, as local officials sought to encourage families and women to support themselves by
finding employment or starting small enterprises. Basu’s story exposes how the political chaos of
partition made women universally vulnerable to men with predatory and exploitative instincts.

Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (1998)
observed that a woman’s body during the partition crisis was treated as a sight where one ethnic
group tried to prove its religious supremacy. As a result, the middle-aged widow, Bindubashini,
without any patriarch, along with her widowed daughter in law, Uttara and her two young
granddaughters, Mrinalini and Bulu, are compelled to leave their ancestral land and take abode in
the Muslim dominated Bangladesh and migrate to India. Yet, they fall easy prey to rapacious men of
their own “trusted” community.

The title of Basu’s story, ‘The Marooned’ or ‘Dukulhara’ brings out their homelessness on both sides
of the border, having to abruptly abandon their original homeland and having no safe shelter in their
new place of refuge. The throes of migration have been meticulously scripted by Basu as she depicts
– “Across the vast fields the government had arranged for two ropes to be stretched from one end
to the other, serving as passage. Thousands of people entered the narrow passage.” (Basu, 2011, p.
161)

Wild instincts are unleashed amongst the faceless crowd so that some “Clawed at the female bodies
in the crowd, some picked pockets, taking away the meagre cash one carried for the road.” (Basu, p.
161) Though Bindubashini’s family wears as many ornaments as they can, “carry the minimum
possible cash and gold”, they lose “almost everything” before crossing the border (p. 160). After two
days of incessant walking, they reach Hindustan, and come to a huge mango orchard where the
“tired starving bodies of men and women” slump to the ground “like logs of woods.” (p. 163) Forty-
eight children from 12 families hurdle their mothers in the cold. While Bindubashini’s younger
granddaughter, Bulu, starts suffering from high fever, a “rough, harsh, masculine hand” (p. 163) tries
to pull Bulu away to abuse or molest her. A terrified Uttara clasped her daughter. However, sadly
enough, Bulu succumbs to fever.
 Soon refugee women from the working class find means of survival as part-time domestics in local
households and their little daughters start begging in the streets. The sudden influx of female
refugees creates an opportunity for prosperous lustful men to dupe and sexually exploit them. As a
result, Bindubasini and her family are victimised by the rich black-marketeer, Rajit Lochan, who
sexually violates Uttara and then abandons her at some brothel, takes Milu to his friend,
Shashishekhar to deflower and debauch her, and ultimately brutally kills Bindubasini as she is unfit
to gratify the libidinous drives of the lascivious men. Ultimately, Bindubasini loses everything she
once gracefully possessed: home, homeland, family, dignity, and hope.

The present story is ‘The Marooned ‘ thus outlines the story of partition and its aftermath. The story
reminds us Khushwant Singh’s ‘Train to Pakistan’ and Manik Bandopadhyay’s ‘The Final Solution ‘, as
they offer insight into this tragic event. Basu, uses Bindubashini, the protagonist of the story, to
explore the violence and trauma that women experienced during this tumultuous time.
Bindubashini’s plight is representative of every woman’s struggle during the partition. Similar to
Mallika in ‘The Final Solution’, Bindubashini also faced harrowing experiences during the partition.
The Women were subjected to violence at various levels, including communal, familial, and micro
levels. They were raped, abducted, and killed, and were even forced to commit suicide, falling prey
to the horrors of this period.

2. CHARACTER AND ROLE OF BINDUBASINI

In Pratibha Basu’s “The Marooned” (Dukulhara), the protagonist Bindubasini is an elderly land-
owning widowed matriarch of an all-female family, comprising her widowed daughter-in-law and
two young granddaughters, residing in East Bengal. During the “break-up of the country”, her
Muslim tenants are unable to reassure her that her home would be a “safe haven…for the four
hapless women”, despite their extremely cordial past personal relationship (34). Bindubashini the
head of the family had already gone through the most pitiable ordeal of her life -- passing away of
her lone child Nirad, the solitary inheritor to the family estate. Her husband and her son died within
a year of each other. To make it shoddier, the country is partitioned.

With time though, her clandestine anguish has subsided and she senses the horror of the Partition to
be even more overpowering. Bindubashini is extremely rooted to her land. And at any rate, here, in
her own house and garden, with her swell estate and its income, she is much safer.

The mindless violence that was the result of the incitements of bigoted religious leaders had created
an unbridgeable rift between the Hindus and the Muslims, yet on a personal level, helpless to
control the escalating violence, the tenant Jamir, does his best to advice and help Bindubasini. The
long road journey to India had been “two whole days of untold misery”, and Bindubasini had left
behind “her sunlit home, her numerous possessions” and had arrived “in India with nothing” (36-
37). She becomes “like a beggar”, sleeping on the cold courtyard of the refugee camp, eating the
meagre food doled out by the relief workers. This sudden erasure of status and stability is a
recurrent theme in all Partition narratives.

The road journey becomes a chronotope, not just for loss and nostalgia, but also for the hope that
“the darkness would be lifted once they reached India” (37). This was the hope that impelled
millions of people to leave their homes behind and cross borders into unfamiliar territories. This
hope is tested severely by the plight of the refugee camp, and when one of her granddaughters die,
her hope is at the lowest ebb. Her impoverishment and desperation, like Mallika’s in Manik
Bandyopadhyay’s “Final Solutions”make her vulnerable to the machinations of the duplicitous social
worker, Keshabananda, who appears to be a messenger of “light and hope” (40). When he comes
with the offer of a “respectable” job for her daughter-in-law, Uttara, they agree, if only to improve
their destitute situation. But Keshabananda, like Pramatha, is a villain, doing all the “dirty work” to
satisfy the greed and lust of his employer, Rajiblochan Sarkar, who was the “kingpin of the black
market” under the guise of running the charitable society, “Friends of the Orphans” (43). To him, the
simple trust of Bindubasini and Uttara is stupidity that deserves to be exploited.

He exploits their trust repeatedly, taking Bindubasini’s granddaughter Milu away on the pretext of
making her meet her mother, and selling her to the lecherous film scout, Sashishekhar, who rapes
the young girl. In this story, maternal care and concern become the weakness that allows
unscrupulous men to exploit women. In the end, Bindubasini is pushed out of the running jeep by
Keshabananda, because she is now a dispensable “old woman”.

As a matriarch, Bindubasini had three saleable assets: her daughter-in-law and her granddaughters.
In the corrupted, inverted, anarchic, lawless capitalism that flourished post-Partition – a parallel,
illegal power structure – a mother was an easy victim. She will be willing to trade her body and her
labour for the sake of her children, just as Uttara and Mallika do, in different ways.

Despite being located at different class intersections, their maternal vulnerability propel them
towards the same end as rape-victims. Bindubasini, who is from an older generation, is not
considered saleable as an object of male desire, and so she is disposed with. Ironically, although the
materialistic, masculine society – as embodied in Keshabananda – dehumanise her by regarding her
as a disposable loose end, the maternal feelings in Bindubasini are so strong that her last thought
before death are of her “treasure, the apple of her eye, her darling granddaughter Mrinalini – Milu”
(47)