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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti: Reinscribing Sita on the Borders of Breaking India
_______________________________________________________________________
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh, Associate Professor,Dept. of English,Vasanta College for Women
(BHU),Rajghat, Varanasi
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Article Received:7 /4/2022,
Article Accepted: 15/05/2022,
Published online: 18/05/2022,
DOI:10.47311/IJOES.2022.4.5.04
Abstract:
Women have always been subjected to humiliation, suffering and torture under the hegemonic
dominance of patriarchy in multiple ways. The occurrences of bigger historical events like war,
partition, pandemic etc., have added unimaginable amount of the same in thousands of women’s
lives. Partition of India also happens to be one of those occasions for patriarchy to release a series
of humiliation and shame to several women from the both sides of border. This has been voiced by
many writers and Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti has remained one of those significant texts to
foreground the lot of a woman in this light. Through the moving tale of Sunder Lal and his wife
Lajwanti, Bedi has brought into the light the image of Sita who in spite of being dutiful and loyal
to her husband, was asked to leave the palace and reside in forest almost all alone. Sita had to
undergo a kind of agnipariksha. This has been represented in an altogether different time and
space with sheer psychological insights.
Keywords: Lajwanti, Sita, Patriarchy, Border, Suffering, Home, Homeless
Rajinder Singh Bedi is unanimously recognized and widely acclaimed as one of the most
versatile voices among the 20th century Progressive writers along with Sultana Jafri,
IsmatChughtai, Vishwamittra Aadil, Ali Sardar Jafri, Krishan Chander Mahendranath, Mumtaz
Hussain, Sahir Ludhianvi and Habib Tanvir. In the early 20th century, Urdu, the lingua franca of
Bedi was the language of sophisticated literature but in the magical hands of him it underwent a
metamorphosis in the same manner in which the history of the people in this era changed. Urdu
became more malleable and democratic and yet stronger than before. Bedi’s Urdu can be said to
be a perfect amalgamation of rustic, filled with regional flavor and colloquial fragrances. Bedi’s
career in films as a scriptwriter and dialogue writer of several memorable classics of Hindi cinema
like Mirza Ghalib (1954), Devdas (1955),Madhumati (1958),Rangoli(1962)Anupama (1966),
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 25
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Mere Hamdam Mere Dost (1968)Satyakam (1969),Dastak (1970),Abhimaan (1973), Nawab Sahib
(1978)Ek Chadar Maili Si (1986) and many moreoften overshadows the writer of literature, who
was termed as the “king of themes” by his contemporary writers. He has successfully established
himself as a notable writer when his two short story collections Daan-O-Daam (The Catch),
featuring his prominent story Garam Coat (Warm Coat) and Grehan (The Eclipse) got published in
1940 and 1942 respectively. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten altogether that Bedi himself
never undervalued his writing for films because in his times writers were barely paid royalty even
for their popular books. This must precisely be the reason that even the most established writers
like Manto and Sahir Ludhianvi wrote for films. In this connection, in an interview Bedi openly
confesses that he came to films as a matter of despair simply because there was nothing else to do.
It was a matter of earning a livelihood. He didn’t come with the attitude that all these people were
churning foolishness. In spite of this he maintained a fine balance between these two modes of
artistic reproduction and was honoured with the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1965 for
Ek Chadar Maili Si — a novella based on the practice of levirate marriage (in which the brother of
a deceased man is obliged to marry the widow) in Punjab.
According to Milan Kundera the realm of fiction is essentially a meeting ground of
opposites and contraries, a space large enough to accommodate competing versions of truth,
unlike the real world where each of these versions must necessarily collide with the other,
overpower and, preferably, annihilate it. He further opines that fiction does not, at least, should not
moralise. Rather it imparts a kind of wisdom –trans-empirical wisdom(as quoted in Memon xii).
Every individual being is bestowed with a visionary flash. This happens to be the reservoir of
fresh and new experiences thus leading to new stature which need not to be validated through any
external agency. Had it been otherwise, none of what is occurring today in South Asia would have
occurred as we would have been the wiser for our perusal of the fictional works written in the
immediate aftermath of Indo-Pak Partition. Again, if one were to write the history of the west
mainly on the basis of the creative achievement of its writers, it would be difficult to imagine the
same west capable of Holocaust, Bosnian Genocide, Armenian Genocide, “Stolen generations” of
Aboriginals, Native American Genocide, Pygmy Genocide and the most recently War in Darfur in
Sudan. And as further Kundera puts it that fiction does not write the history of a society, instead it
writes the history of the individual(as quoted in Memon xii).
The partition of India in 1947 and the associated bloody riots resulting into immense
panorama of futility and anarchy inspired many creative writers in India and Pakistan to create
literary and cinematic depictions of this event. The approach towards partition was mainly based
on two major situations. While some creations depicted the massacres during the refugee
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 26
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migration, others concentrated on the aftermath of the partition in terms of difficulties faced by the
refugees in both sides of the border. Literature describing the human cost of independence and
partition comprises Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), several short stories such as Toba
Tek Singh and Sahae by Saadat Hassan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti, Ashfaq Ahmad’s
The Shepherd, Jamila Hashimi’s Banished, Upendernath Ashk’s Tableland, Intizar Hussain’s An
Unwritten Epic, IsmatChughtai’s Roots, Urdu poems such as Subh-e-Azadi (Freedom’s Dawn,
1947) by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas (1974), Manohar Malgonkar'sA Bend in the
Ganges (1965),Bapsi Sidhwa'sIce-Candy Man (1988) and Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's
Children (1980), which won the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers, weaved its narrative
based on the children born with magical abilities on midnight of August 14, 1947. Freedom at
Midnight (1975) is a non-fiction work by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre that chronicled
the events surrounding the first Independence Day celebrations in 1947.
There seems to be a paucity of films related to the independence and partition but some
early films depicting the circumstances of the independence, partition and the aftermath
include:Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamul(1950),Dharmputra (1961), Ritwik Ghatak'sMeghe Dhaka Tara
(1960), Komal Gandhar (1961),GarmHava (1973) and Tamas (1987). From the late 1990s
onwards more films on these themes were made, including several mainstream films, such as
Earth (1998), Train to Pakistan (1998) (based on the aforementioned book), Hey Ram (2000),
Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001),Pinjar (2003), Partition (2007) and Madrasapattinam(2010).The
biopic like Gandhi (1982), Jinnah (1998) and Sardar (1993) also feature independence and
partition as significant events in their screenplay.
Lajwanti “touch-me-not,” the flower that shuts its leaves upon human contact happens to be the
title of Rajinder Singh Bedi’s one of the most famous and popular stories. Here Bedi explores the
tragic plight of abducted women during the violence and upheaval caused by the partition of India
and Pakistan in 1947. The holocaust of partition caused the death tolls ranging from 1.5 million to
2 million. The maximum amount of torture and infliction was mounted upon women as men of
diverse groups took their revenge by abducting and raping them as long as they could and then
leaving them to be the victim of their respective husbands, family members, and relatives.In
January 1948, Pt. Nehru too made a strong public appeal:
I am told that there is unwillingness on the part of their relatives to accept those girls and
women [who had been abducted] back in their homes. This is most objectionable and wrong
attitude to take and any social custom that supports this attitude must be condemned. These girls
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 27
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
and women require our tender and loving care and their relatives should be proud to take them
back. (Ray 10)
The repeated appeals from national leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Pt. Nehru merely
indicate that the number of families refusing to give up theirbeliefs was significantly large. In this
connection Urvashi Butalia observes that, “For the community, it was women’s sexual purity that
became important. For the state … their religious identity was paramount” (ibid).Hundreds of
thousands of Hindu women were abducted by Muslin men and vice-versa. In order to exert their
sense of individuality and identity and to retain their dignity, many women killed themselves. But
most of them continued to live a life synonymous to life-in-death or death-in-life situation as they,
including the perpetrators of violence and predators, remained silent and did not let the traumatic
emotions and chilling experiences come out of their psyche.
Bedi’s Lajwanti picturesquely maps the aftermath of great holocaust when people had
washed their bodies from their bodies, “they turned their attention to those who had not suffered
bodily but had been wounded in their hearts” (Lajwanti 14). In every street and by-lane they set
up a rehabilitating committee to inspire the families to readily accept the women returning from
the other side of the border. Rehabilitation programmes related to acquiring business, lands and
homes were carried out enthusiastically. But the most difficult task was to accept the lot of
returned abducted women and to rehabilitate them in the hearts. It was strongly opposed by people
living in the vicinity of the temple of Narain Bawa.
The campaign was initiated by the residents of Mulla Shakoor. A local Vakil Sahib was
elected its president and Babu Sunder Lal was given the most important post of Secretary. It was
the opinion of the old petition writer and many other respectable citizens of the locality that no
one would work more zealously than Sunder Lal, because amongst the women abducted during
the riots, and not recovered, was Sunder Lal's wife, Lajwanti. Under the banner of the
Rehabilitation of Hearts Committee, Rasaloonad Neki Ram took recourse to early morning
processions through the streets. Along with the song touch the leaves of the lajwanti, they curl and
wither away,Sunder Lal used to let himself loose in the thoughts of his wife, “Who knows where
she might be? In what condition? What would she be thinking of him? Would she ever come
back- and his feet would falter on the cobblestone pavement” (15)?
Sunder Lal had extended his personal pain to altogether new height and transformed the
same into public pain and anguish. In this regard Bedi writes:
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 28
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His pain was no longer his; it had become part of the world’s anguish. And to spare himself its
devastation he had thrown himself headlong into serving the people. All the same, every time he
joined his companions in the song, he couldn’t wonder at how delicate the human heart is. The
slightest thing could hurt it. Exactly like the lajwanti plant, whose leaves curl up at the barest
touch? (ibid)
But he had behaved very badly towards his Lajwanti. He had treated her as poorly as
possible. He would not let a single flimsiest pretext to go in vain to beat her. He had allowed
himself to be irritated with everything she did even with the way she stood up or sat down, the
way she cooked and the way she served his food. Lajwanti was a slender and agile village girl.
Life in the open air and sunshine had tanned her skin and filled her with an animal vitality. She ran
about the lanes in her village with the mercurial grace of dew drops on a leaf. Her slim figure was
full of robust health. When he first saw her, Sunder Lal was little dismayed. But when he noticed
that Lajwanti, even in chastisement and adversity, displaying a strong sense of perseverance, he
increased the dose of thrashing. He was unaware of the limit of human endurance. And Lajwanti's
reactions were of little help; even after the most violent beating all Sunder Lal had to do was to
smile and the girl would break into giggles, "If you beat me ever again, I'll never speak to you"
(16). In a nutshell she was a law-abiding wife. A traditional wife for whom husband was
everything. Pati Parmeshwara. Whatever be the case; husband’s beating, love, cajoling, hitting and
hurting, nothing matters. Only one smile from the husband and all the agonies are gone. Long live
such husbands.
That’s how husbands treat their wives – she knew this truth as well as any other village
girl. If a woman showed the slightest independence, the girls themselves would be the first to
disapprove. ‘Ha, what kind of man is he? Can’t even keep his little woman in line! (ibid)
Not only this, as if the physical punishment had become a yugdharma, these women
composed songs of the beating men gave their wives. Lajwanti herself used to sing: Marry a city
boy? – no sir, not me./Look at his boots. And my waist is narrow. The exclusive female body is
reduced to a commodity, to play upon.
But after losing his wife in the wake of partition Sunder Lal modified his perspectives, quite
possible out of the learning from past experiences and started taking recourse to a kind of interior
monologue and would say:
If I could get another chance, just one more chance, I’d rehabilitate Laju in my heart. I’d
show the people that these poor women are hardly to blame for their abduction, their victimization
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 29
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by lecherous rioters. A society which is unable to accept and rehabilitate these innocent women is
rotten to the core, fit only to be destroyed. (16-17)
And further, he would request people to
. . . take these women under their roof and give them the same status which any woman, any
mother, daughter, sister, or wife enjoyed. He would argue the families never to mention, even to
hint at the things the poor women had to suffer, because their hearts were already wounded,
already fragile, like the leaves of the touch me not plant, ready to curl up at the merest touch. (17)
One day the Rehabilitation of Hearts Committee was out early in the evening to preach. It
trespassed into an area near the temple which was looked upon as the citadel of orthodox reaction.
The faithful people were seated on a cement platform under the peepul tree and were listening to a
commentary on the Ramayana. Narain Bawa was narrating the episode about Rama overhearing a
washer man saying to his errant wife: "I’m no Raja Ramchander, who would take Sita back after
she had spent so many years with Ravan” (20), being overcome by the implied rebuke, Ram
Chandra had ordered his own wife Sita, who was at that time pregnant, to leave the palace. Further
Bawa added that “Can we find a better example of Ram Raj. True Ram Raj in which a washer
man’s words to receive the utmost consideration” (ibid).
To this Sunder Lal responded and spoke up that they did not want a Ram Raj of this kind.
Naturally it was taken as a defiant attitude and the crowd asked him to maintain silence and be
quiet. But Sunder Lal didn’t retreat and came forward and stated that nobody could stop him.
When he was told that he didn’t know much about the traditions of Shastras, to which quite
ironically, Sunder Lal retorted that he understood at least one thing: in Ram Raj the voice of a
washer man was heard but in the present-day people could not hear the voice of Sunder Lal. He
began to speak that Sri Ram was our hero. But what kind of justice was this, that he accepted the
words of a washer man and refused to take the words of so great a Maharani as his wife! When he
was reminded that Sita was Ram’s own wife, Sunder Lal broke out:
Yes, there are many things in this world that I don’t understand. But as I look at it, under
true Ram Raj, man won’t be able to oppress even himself. Injustice against oneself is as great sin
as injustice against another. Today Lord Ram has again thrown Sita out of his house, just because
she was compelled to live with Ravan for some time. But was able to blame for it? Wasn’t she a
victim of deceit and treachery, like our numberless mothers and sisters today? Was it a question of
Sita’s truth or falsehood or of the stark beastliness of the demon Ravan, who has ten human heads,
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but also has another, bigger one, that of a donkey? Today our Sita has been expelled once again,
totally without fault, our Sita … Lajwanti…. (21)
Here it is interesting to see the revisionist interpretations on the ending of the Ramayana
and the example of Sita.In this connection, in the Collected Essays of A. K.
Ramanujan,Ramanujan argues that we should abandon the notion ofan authoritative and original
Ramayana. There are and many variants of the text and each performance of the Ramayana has
unique textures and fresh contexts. Instead, he argues that there is no text that is original, and no
telling is a mere retelling(131-160).In When Does Sıta Cease to Be Sıta ?Velcheru Narayana Rao
writes, “In choosing to return to the earth: Sita has accomplished two things: she has proven her
chastity and demonstrated her independence, as well. It is both a declaration of her integrity and a
powerful indictment against a culture that suspects women” (Rao 226). Sita’s character, informed
by postcolonial feminist understandings, is often understood as speaking to women’s agency
within patriarchy. Madhu Kishwar in her Yes to Sita, No to Ram interviews diverse Indian women
and opines that:
…Indian women are not endorsing female slavery when they mention Sita as their ideal. Sita is
not perceived as being a mindless creature who meekly suffers maltreatment at the hands of her
husband without complaining. Nor does accepting Sita as an ideal mean endorsing a husband’s
right to behave unreasonably and a wife’s duty to bear insult generously. She is seen as person
whose sense of dharma is superior as and more awe inspiring than that of Ram – someone who
puts even maryada purushottam Ram – the most perfect of men – to shame. (290)
Kishwar in her interviews demonstrates the enduring legacy of the Sita figure among both
Hindu and Muslim women’s communities. Women regard Sita as a figure of strength in the face
of harsh conditions and thus relate to her example. Kishwar also takes into account the responses
of Indian men to Sita’s legacy. Mahatma Gandhi’s conception of Sita during independence,
envisioned modern-day Sita figures as women who do not channel all their energies into domestic
duties but who become leaders in rebuilding a just, self-governing and exploitation-free society.
Madhu also writes of Sharad Joshi from Shektari Sangathana, who developed a creative use of the
Sita symbol by inaugurating a Lakshmi Mukti campaign as Sita is believed to be the reincarnation
of the goddess Lakshmi). In this campaign, he asserted that the peasantry could not prosper until
young women or gharlakshmis (household goddesses of prosperity) had the curse of Sita Maya
removed. The curse could be removed, he argued, by assigning property in women’s names. By
telling his story of Sita’s destitution during pregnancy, Joshi intended to convince the peasantry
that they could not obtain their due from society until they redressed the wrongs of their own
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 31
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Sitas. By transferring land to their wives and daughters, they would be paying off a long overdue
debt (as quoted in The Mythology230) Thus, we see that subversive element including the version
of Sunder Lal’s defense of Sita, existing the Ramayana tradition, challenging traditional values in
the colonial/ postcolonial India.
Sunder Lal’s psychological state of being was shaken because of his sense of emasculation
and his view of ‘abducted’ women as passive victims of the other. Undoubtedly his repentance
was genuine but what kind of ‘acceptance’ was he going to provide his Laju with? Was he capable
of rehabilitating her in the same space of domestic sphere before her abduction? His dilemma
became evident when he heard the news of Lajwanti’s recovery. Sunder Lal shivered with a
strange fear and felt warmed by the holy fire of his love. Here the representations are two-fold. On
the one hand Lajwanti is represented as being aware of her patriarchal patronage in order to
survive in the community when she expresses her fear about how Sunder Lal will react to her
sexual ‘contamination’. On the other hand, Sunder Lal’s reception of Lajwanti is torn between his
negative reaction to her ‘healthiness’ and ‘well-being’ (suggesting that she may not have been as
much of a ‘victim’ of the other man as he would like to think) and the ‘new’ pressures on his
behavior as a (male) citizen in the modern nation state to welcome her back as his wife though
Lajwanti is described as inebriated with an unknown joy. When she first returned to her home
Sunder Lal neither rejected nor beaten her. She came to understand that his acceptance of her was
in exchange for her silence and performance according to the demands of patriarchy. Sunder Lal
began to address Lajwanti as ‘devi’ or goddess, placing her identity, agency and everyday
experiences under constant erasure. While he placed the ‘blame’ for the stigma attached to
Lajwanti’s honour on social conventions, he also invalidated her potential to resist those
conventions.
Therefore, the narrative suggests that the ambivalent terms of Lajwanti’s reintegration into
the community and the requirement of nation state to surrender her identity as a woman who can
question her husband or renegotiate the terms of her patriarchal patronage. Once again, another
Sita has been asked to go for trial or agnipariksha. But this trial is more difficult and arduous as it
involves no obvious resistance or protest or order from the husband. Had her husband asked her in
angry tone including beating it would have been easier for her to bear the pang, but in this case,
silence emerges as the most lethal weapon against which there is no medicine. Once again, she is
reduced to a fragile object like glass or lajwanti flower which would splinter and curl at the
slightest touch. Laju gazes at herself in the mirror and in the end, she can no longer recognise the
Laju she has known. She has been rehabilitated but not accepted. Sunder Lal does not want eyes to
see her tears nor ears to hear her wailing. Unlike Amrita Pritam’s Pooro in Pinjer who defies
Dr.Saurabh Kumar Singh Page 32
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patriarchal and territorial boundaries, effectively using her agency to critique the reality of
partition by choosing to stay in Pakistan, and succeeding in escaping from the clutches of Rashida,
her abductor, only to fall into the abyss of rejection from her parents, Lajwanti depicts a world
where women have totally internalized the idea that they are little more than commodities.
Imagine the horror of being abducted, taken to another country and being raped over and over for
days, months and even years. When such a victim returns to her home country, she is asked that
her failure to kill herself has brought greater amount of shame on the family. One is also driven
out from the very home which once promised security, safety and care. If not driven out from
home, at least one is silently ignored and rejected and politically transformed to the status of
something more than nothingness.
References
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