Rescued or Repressed? Muslim Women’s Displacement and Silencing in Partition Literature

Book: Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Muslim Women's Life-Writings: An Autoethnographical Approach from India by CSMFL Publications

Rubaiya Nasrin
Former Senior Research Fellow (UGC-NET JRF), PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

10.46679/9789349926509ch07
This chapter is a part of: Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Muslim Women’s Life-Writings: An Autoethnographical Approach from India
ISBN (Ebook): 978-93-49926-50-9
ISBN (Hardcover Print): 978-93-49926-84-4
ISBN (Softcover Print): 978-93-49926-34-9

© CSMFL Publications & its authors.
Published: April 15, 2026

Nasrin, R. (2026). Rescued or Repressed? Muslim Women’s Displacement and Silencing in Partition Literature. In N. Safrine, Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Muslim Women’s Life-Writings: An Autoethnographical Approach from India (pp 81-90). CSMFL Publications. https://dx.doi.org/10.46679/9789349926509ch07

Abstract

This chapter questions the layered victimhood and artistic silencing of Muslim women during the Partition of India, concentrating on River of Fire (Qurratulain Hyder), Aangan (Khadija Mastur), and The Freedom’s Shade (Anis Kidwai). Utilising an autoethnographic and feminist framework, this analysis studies how Muslim women’s lives were fractured not exclusively by intra-community patriarchy but also by the brutality of nation-building schemes and state-sanctioned “rescue” narratives that performed communal majoritarianism. It raises crucial inquiries: How were Muslim women subjected to numerous forms of marginalisation—through household patriarchy, political brutality, and state supervision camouflaged as a safeguard? Prominent to this examination is the Islamic spatial construct of zenana (women’s quarters) and mardana (men’s quarters), which perform as symbolic and lived areas within Muslim cultural life. Instead of considering the zenana exclusively as a zone of repression, the paper emphasises it as a complex arena of female solidarity, memory-making, and modest opposition. In Aangan, the zenana evolves as a feminised archive of political consciousness, where women mediate quietness and suffering while cultivating ideological transparency. In River of Fire, Hyder disrupts civilizational binaries by intertwining a documented continuum in which Muslim women inhabit and transform gendered areas of both zenana and mardana. The Freedom’s Shade, grounded in lived experience, starkly illustrates the physical and symbolic infringements of Muslim women’s bodies during rescue and rehabilitation, and their dislocation from familiar household areas. Ultimately, this chapter critiques prevalent nationalist and communal frameworks that render Muslim women passive or mute. Rather, it foregrounds their nuanced agency within and beyond the zenana, placing these literary portrayals as cultural counter-memory and opposition against historical erasure. The study contributes to a profound understanding of Muslim women’s life writings as rich sites of autoethnographic truth, where tahzheeb, household spatiality, and trauma converge in shaping gendered subjectivity during national turmoil.

Keywords: Partition Literature, Muslim Women’s Life-Writings, Zenana and Mardana, Feminist Autoethnography, Cultural Displacement

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