Gendered Trauma and the silencing of Women in Pinjar by Amrita Primtam’s Pinjar

In 1947, the Partition of India was not only a territorial and political split but also inflicted great emotional and psychological scars on its people. It tore apart communities, dismantled local economies, and left behind one of the largest mass migrations in human history. It imposed unbearable suffering, shattered families, and indelible trauma—on women in particularly devastating ways. But women’s experiences have been pushed to the margins of dominant histories. As Urvashi Butalia says, “the voices of women, the ways in which they remember and recount Partition, were often marginal or silenced altogether” (103). Such silencing acts to promote the gendered nature of violence and memory during Partition. Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (The Skeleton) beautifully addresses this erasure in Puro, a Hindu woman kidnapped and displaced in the chaos, whose personal trauma is made to symbolize the mass suffering endured by thousands of women. This essay situates Pinjar among Partition literature, which differs significantly from male-authored narratives that rely on depictions of political and communal violence. Pritam, rather than mirroring these portrayals, focuses on domestic and bodily spaces where women experienced the violence of Partition more intensely and insidiously. Puro’s abduction by Rashid is symbolic of how women’s bodies were politicized—that is, as sites of communal honor and objects of religious vengeance. As Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin explain, “women’s sexuality became a sign through which community boundaries were preserved and defended” (Menon and Bhasin 45). Pritam’s narrative reclaims these silenced spaces, portraying the trauma not merely as historical fact but as lived, gendered experience. Employing feminist literary theory and the study of trauma, the essay examines Puro’s psychological collapse, social disconnection, and loss of agency. Her silences—literal and symbolic—reflect the double erasure of feminine subjectivit