Few questions haunt many a times- Why did partition ever happen if it had to go through bloodbath? Why did a geographical division of land suddenly become an episode of genocide? What was partition meant to achieve and what did it actually achieve?
Partition was not only a horrific political division, with more than 20 million people displaced, more than 2 million killed in just two months, homes, villages, communities, families, and relationships destroyed, but it has another truth—the gendered genocide. Partition saw mass violence of women’s bodies. Over 75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted when India had to go through the partition nightmares in 1947. The violence against women turned out to be not accidental but intentional, communal, and patriarchal.
This truth must be told, not to reopen wounds but to ensure that women’s suffering is no longer erased from history.
Hindu and Sikh women were snatched from their families forcibly by Muslim men, many kidnapped as families prepared to move, leaving the land they once called home. They were not just abducted—they were systematically raped, impregnated, many who protested were butchered and burnt, others forcibly converted, married against their will and many kept as sex slaves. Pregnant women had their wombs ripped open and foetuses killed. Countless children vanished without a trace, leaving behind no record of their fate. Their bodies became instruments of revenge, their identities were erased, and their autonomy destroyed.
Trains crossing borders were ambushed. Women’s corpses were found naked, mutilated, and arranged in grotesque displays.
In Amritsar and Lahore, women were publicly raped, paraded naked, and killed, many were set on fire alive. Survivors and eyewitnesses documented horrific forms of genital mutilation. Women had their breasts cut off, vaginas mutilated, and were branded with religious symbols of the Islamic community—Islamic crescents on Hindu women.
In Punjab when gendered genocide news travelled, many Sikh families opted for mass suicides and ‘Honour Killings’. In villages like Thoa Khalsa (Rawalpindi) entire groups of Sikh women jumped into wells to avoid being raped. In many refugee caravans, fathers, brothers, and uncles slit the throats of their daughters and sisters to save family honour.
The trauma of partition in Eastern India, especially in Bengal, Assam, and Tripura is less discussed but equally brutal. Unlike the Punjab focus in mainstream narratives, the women of Bengal, Assam and surrounding eastern regions also endured horrific violence, mass rapes, abductions, forced conversions, and systemic displacement; some even years after 1947 due to the prolonged nature of the East Pakistan crisis. Like in Punjab, trains and refugee caravans in Bengal too were targeted. Many refugee trains from East Pakistan to Sealdah and Howrah arrived with dead or raped women. Bodies were found with genitals mutilated and breasts slashed, naked and dumped by the railway tracks between Bongaon and Jessore.
Hindu girls from zamindar families in Barisal and Khulna were kidnapped. A woman named Bina Das recounted in an oral testimony how she and her sister were abducted. Her sister was never seen again. Young girls, often under 15, were taken as domestic slaves or sex workers across the border into East Pakistan. Some were trafficked as far as Chittagong and Rangpur and sold to Muslim landlords. A woman named Anima Chakraborty from Barisal was found in a Dhaka brothel in 1951. Instances of young females being raped 40-60 times by different men became a common episode. Countless girls were forcibly converted to Islam, renamed, and married off.
Assam was deeply affected, particularly in Sylhet (now in Bangladesh) and the Barak Valley (Cachar, Karimganj, Hailakandi), and later during the 1950s refugee influx, and 1971 Bangladesh War, which is also linked to the extended fallout of Partition.
After the 1947 Sylhet Referendum, which ceded Sylhet to East Pakistan, Bengali Hindu families in Assam and Barak Valley were suddenly foreigners. Reports surfaced of Muslim League mobs targeting Hindu homes, especially attacking women. Hindu women from tea garden areas and outlying villages reported rape, forced conversion, and abductions. A schoolteacher in Karimganj, in her eighties later, once said, “We hid under the haystacks. They took the girls. They always took the girls.” Testimony from another Karimganj-based refugee in an oral history project (unnamed due to stigma) said “We left our village with just two cloths and my elder sister. At the border, we lost her.”
Families hosting refugees recalled that many women came in pregnant or mutilated, and refused to discuss their experiences. Amongst other women some had children born from rape; others had no homes to return.
Even three years after Partition, in 1950, communal riots broke out in Dhaka, Barisal, and Chittagong, triggering a second wave of attacks. Hindu women in East Pakistan were gang-raped in temples, had their breasts mutilated, and were forcibly branded with Islamic symbols. Traumatized Hindu women arrived in Assam—especially into Karimganj, Goalpara, and Dhubri. A survivor in Goalpara recalled: “My aunt had bite marks all over her. She didn’t speak for months. Later we learned she had been kept in a hut for two days by a gang.”
There is a lingering trauma and quite many old women in Barak Valley refugee colonies still refer to “that journey” or “those nights” in cryptic ways. NGOs working with Partition migrants in the 1970s and 80s reported that many elderly women remained unmarried or childless, by choice or trauma. Whoever survived hardly ever spoke. The trauma was so deep and the social stigma so heavy that thousands of women buried their stories within themselves. Many displaced women never revealed their pasts. Unlike Punjab or Bengal, Assam lacked formal recovery programs, so no systematic tracing of abducted women was done.
The assault on Tripura and the Chakma refugee women are hardly told. Tribal and Bengali Hindu women fleeing riots in Comilla and Chittagong took shelter in Tripura. Refugee camps near Agartala were full of women who had been raped along the way by gangs of people from the other side. A Chakma girl, age 13, testified in 1950 that her father had tried to poison her to avoid her falling into the hands of attackers. She survived. He did not.
Violated women’s stories remain the unwritten chapters of history. But their silence is the loudest reminder that Partition’s wounds were not only about borders, but about bodies.
