The Other Side of Silence

Urvashi Butalia

4 ideas

1. The women of Thoa Khalsa well

   In March 1947, during Muslim attacks on Sikh villages in Rawalpindi district, Sikh men in Thoa Khalsa killed their own female relatives, and around ninety women jumped into a village well rather than risk abduction or conversion. Survivors such as Bir Bahadur Singh told Butalia about fathers beheading daughters who 'offered' themselves. The episode is commemorated each year in gurdwaras as collective martyrdom. It is a concrete case of community honour producing violence by families against their own members, then being remembered as voluntary sacrifice.

2. State recovery treated women as national property

   After Partition, India and Pakistan ran joint operations, formalised in India by the 1949 Abducted Persons Act, to 'recover' an estimated 75,000 abducted women and return them to their 'own' religion and nation. Women who had married, converted, or had children in their new homes had no legal say, and many were removed by force. Children born of abduction were often treated as problems to be separated from their mothers. The state rebuilt national honour through women's bodies and overrode the choices of the women it claimed to rescue.

3. Martyrdom narratives as coercion made sacred

   When a community recasts the killing of women by their own kin as heroic self-sacrifice, it turns coercion into virtue and makes the dead women's consent impossible to question. The honour frame protects the men who killed and silences women who survived by escaping, being abducted, or refusing to die. Reading 'sacrifice' stories for who told them and who benefits reveals violence inside the family that official accounts of 'the other side's' atrocities leave out.

4. Oral testimony exposes archive's structural silences

   Official and nationalist histories of Partition count deaths, borders, and political negotiations, so the experiences of women, children, and Dalits appear only as statistics or not at all. Oral interviews bring these people back into the record. The hesitations, contradictions, and refusals to speak in those interviews are themselves evidence of what the community cannot say. Silence is data about power, and who is never asked shapes what a nation believes happened.

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