Cracking India is focused on how women, in particular, were affected by the splitting up of the British colony of India into the two independent nations of India and Pakistan in 1947. The kidnapping, rape, and later conversion of Ayah resembles real things that happened to many women. In her book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, writer Urvashi Butalia discusses the way that violence against women formed a crucial element of the violence that preceded and followed Partition: “Mass scale migration, death, destruction, loss—no matter how inevitable Partition seemed no one could have foreseen the scale and ferocity of bloodshed and enmity it unleashed […] still less could anyone have foreseen that women would become so significant, so central and indeed so problematic” (Butalia). Butalia and other feminist scholars have shed light on why women, like the fictional character Ayah, were so frequently the target of violence during Partition.
Before and after Partition, many women were kidnapped and raped by people of other religions. Yet this was not done only by organized violent groups but by ordinary individuals who had previously lived with their Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh neighbors in peace. Butalia argues that these crimes were used as symbol acts of founding of the new nations of India and Pakistan. Women were raped as a way to insult the other side. Similarly, if women were converted it was a way of humiliating and demeaning the other religious group. Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon suggest that women became “symbolic of crossing borders, of violating social, cultural, and political boundaries.” If women represent a nation’s purity, their “violation” represents a threat to that purity. In this way, rape was highly political in the midst of Partition.
One result of this humiliation was that women often killed themselves. Other times, they took their own lives out of fear that, even if they were recovered, their own male family members might kill them to “purify” their honor. In Cracking India, Ayah is kidnapped and raped. However, she refuses to believe that this makes her less “pure.” After being freed from Ice-candy-man, she decides to cross over to India even knowing that her family might not accept her. In this way, she refuses to believe the idea that women’s bodies represent the nation or religious community. She asserts that she is just an individual, not a symbol.
