Homing in on “the Unhomed”: A Reading of Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti” and Jamila Hashmi’s “Banished”

Abstract

“The political programme of creating the two nations of India and Pakistan was
inscribed upon the bodies of women” (Das 56). Veena Das’ statement succinctly sums
up the predicament of women as well as points out the centrality that their gendered
identities assumed in the wake of the vivisection of the subcontinent. Either as victims
of rape, mutilation and murder, whose bodies and identities were erased by males of
the other community, or as “martyrs” who chose to, or rather were forced to end their
lives in an effort to maintain the “purity” and “honour” of their own communities,
women were “centrally implicated” in the historic exercise of imagining and
crystallizing religious and national identities in 1947