• Dr. Radhika Purohit

  Author

• P. Mallikarjuna Rao

  Author

Woman victimization is one of the evils confronting women all over the world this evil is further compounded if they are placed in unstable political societies or events. Women being extremely vulnerable are easy targets of any form of oppression, humiliation, deprivation and discrimination. Partition literature explores the sexual trauma, sufferings and painful experiences of women during and after the Partition. This in many ways substantiates the fact that inequality of sexes is neither a biological fact nor a divine mandate but a cultural construct.  The paper aims to discuss the victimization of women and their traumatic experience through the perspective of a female writer namely Anita Rau Badami in her novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? a novel on the theme of the Partition of India and Pakistan. The Paper brings to light how the novelist has used her protagonists to explore a ‘female consciousness and value system’, an aspect which is conspicuously missing in the Partition fiction of the male writers. The novel substantiates how women’s writings are produced from within women’s experience or from their sub-conscious. The novelist has been influential in drawing attention to the differential history of women’s experiences during the Partition. The paper emphasizes how narrating the stories of women characters who experienced the migration and violence, a women novelist contains the potential to   reveal the complex dispossessions which is both psychic and material. The trauma, anguish, pain and ambivalence that mark the experience of Partition have been made evident and visible. 

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