Speaker 1: Before this week's episode, I wanted to take a moment
Speaker 1: to let y'all know about the devastating floods happening in
Speaker 1: Pakistan right now, over thirty million people have been affected,
Speaker 1: with the death toll around eleven hundred and rising with
Speaker 1: every passing day. Entire buildings are being washed away, with
Speaker 1: many people sustaining injuries. I encourage every listener to donate
Speaker 1: any amount they can to help alleviate this disaster. You
Speaker 1: can find a list of organizations to send funds to
Speaker 1: linked in the show notes. Warning, the following episode contains
Speaker 1: stories of rape and extreme violence. You know, slowly but
Speaker 1: shortly from the nineties, it was entering my conscious, my
Speaker 1: public and social conscious that practition of India was a
Speaker 1: very big event, really shaped the Sudasian geopolitics and also people.
Speaker 1: It lives in families, It lives in families, histories. I
Speaker 1: was fully understanding my inheritance, like this is what I inherit,
Speaker 1: you know, as an Indian woman, this is part of
Speaker 1: my cultural and familial inheritance. Once we make the association
Speaker 1: that the past isn't meant to stay in the past,
Speaker 1: what can we do to make sure the memories and
Speaker 1: experiences of people who came before us don't get lost
Speaker 1: in the void. Last week, you heard some of the
Speaker 1: ways women were weaponized during partition from Adula Waldron, a
Speaker 1: survivor who wrote a novel to process her personal trauma.
Speaker 1: From this week, we're going to focus on what we
Speaker 1: can do now to acknowledge these women, to make sure
Speaker 1: their experiences don't get lost no matter how much time
Speaker 1: has passed. From I Heart Radio, I'm Nehasse and this
Speaker 1: is Partition, a podcast that will take a closer look
Speaker 1: into this often forgotten part of history. I can't quite
Speaker 1: remember how I stumbled upon this artist's work. I think
Speaker 1: I was just looking for people who were sharing stories
Speaker 1: about partition in any capacity. Once I looked at her photos,
Speaker 1: I immediately knew I wanted to talk to her and
Speaker 1: find out more about her intricate and honest works about Partition.
Speaker 1: I call myself a post colonial filminist artist that's Practico Jodrey.
Speaker 1: I make art installations that are anti memorials to traumatic
Speaker 1: geopolitical events, such as the partition of India, eleven and
Speaker 1: so on. In these anti memorials, I tried to excavate
Speaker 1: the counter memories of these events. The counter histories of
Speaker 1: these events. Pertica as an artist, curator, and writer who
Speaker 1: focuses on anti memorials and counter memory. Though I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard these terms before, I immediately understood their meeting as
Speaker 1: she explained them to me. In essence, there are the
Speaker 1: crux of this podcast. So an anti memorial basically goes
Speaker 1: against the grain in terms of traditional monuments, which are
Speaker 1: you know, state sponsored monuments tend to be rather large,
Speaker 1: breaking motor structures that glorify the nation state in some way.
Speaker 1: Anti memorials do the almost opposite, so they are usually
Speaker 1: smaller in scale, They are usually temporary, they are made
Speaker 1: usually of fragile and precarious materials, and most of the
Speaker 1: time they critique the nation state. There are, of course,
Speaker 1: statues and other entities named after Jinna and Ahru in
Speaker 1: Pakistan in India, and while there are still some statues
Speaker 1: devoted to our colonizers, they are not well preserved and
Speaker 1: many are in the process of being removed, a notion
Speaker 1: similar to Confederate statues being removed in the United States.
Speaker 1: Counter memories, similarly, are memories that center the experiences of
Speaker 1: people that don't get to write history. So the national
Speaker 1: version the nationalist hero version, so to speak, of a
Speaker 1: traumatic event is usually quite different from what was experienced
Speaker 1: on the ground by people that were at a disadvantage.
Speaker 1: In the context of the tradition of India, these tend
Speaker 1: to be women and the Muslim minority. These two also
Speaker 1: don't get to write the history of the partition to
Speaker 1: any great extent. They are usually very silenced. Their experiences
Speaker 1: are not heard, they're definitely not centered. Coming to terms
Speaker 1: with our past is essential. We must own up to
Speaker 1: our history, no matter how despicable it. Maybe think about
Speaker 1: reparations being made to the descendants of slaves. While no
Speaker 1: amount of money can erase the wickedness of the past,
Speaker 1: at the very least it offers some accountability. You've heard
Speaker 1: me say time and time again that the great men
Speaker 1: in history narrative is the one that gets the limelight
Speaker 1: in most cases, and everyday people, especially women, get shafted.
Speaker 1: The everyday people are the ones that lost their homes,
Speaker 1: were separated from their relatives, attacked, and must truly live
Speaker 1: with a sequences from these so called great men. This
Speaker 1: is where the counter memory comes in. So counter memory
Speaker 1: is an exercise, It's an individual act of resistance it's
Speaker 1: a fu Coldian term to excavate intentionally these histories that
Speaker 1: have been lost, that have been raised from nationalist narratives,
Speaker 1: and then to center those. Pertica mentions that a counter
Speaker 1: memory is a fu Codian term. The term was coined
Speaker 1: by French philosopher Michelle Fuco. Counter memories hope to break
Speaker 1: the cycle of sharing a sugar coated history and questioning
Speaker 1: the power structure of information that is widely available to us. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it is through counter memories where we get the so
Speaker 1: called inconvenient truths, the truths we don't get in history books,
Speaker 1: the truths that are vastly different from the fantasies they
Speaker 1: are addressed up as. No matter how Indians and Pakistan,
Speaker 1: he's fall into the timeline of events. We all have
Speaker 1: a partition story. I asked Partika what hers was. I
Speaker 1: am half Cynthia and half Bengali. Pretiica is referring to
Speaker 1: two different regions. Sinth is a province in Pakistan where
Speaker 1: I'm also from, and Bengal is a region on the
Speaker 1: eastern side of India which you may remember was split
Speaker 1: by Cyril Radcliffe in the height of the n partition riots.
Speaker 1: My grandparents and their extended family migrated from Karagi to Delhi.
Speaker 1: You know, our family doesn't talk about like I had
Speaker 1: to really extract it out of my mother and Um,
Speaker 1: she was initially quite resistant to talking about it because
Speaker 1: she was like, well, what's the point of talking about
Speaker 1: all this, you know, past traumas and things like that.
Speaker 1: It's just better to just forget. Extract is the perfect
Speaker 1: word to like in her recollection of getting information from
Speaker 1: her mom to getting a procedure as unpleasant as getting
Speaker 1: a tooth removed is flawless. The partition lives very much,
Speaker 1: lives and functions as a force, as a ghost or
Speaker 1: however you want to call it. In the current jew
Speaker 1: politics of South Asia. That was what led me to
Speaker 1: sort of question my mother about what exactly happened in
Speaker 1: n What does she know? So she was only um
Speaker 1: I believe, three years old at the time, so she
Speaker 1: doesn't really remember, but she knew enough that she was
Speaker 1: able to fill me in on quite a few details
Speaker 1: over the course of several telephone calls, because I was
Speaker 1: in the U S by then. Over the course of
Speaker 1: those many international telephone calls, particle slowly and covered the
Speaker 1: horror stories her family witness during Partition. I found out
Speaker 1: that my grandfather's extended family, like his brothers and sisters
Speaker 1: and them, they all migrated, but they migrated at slightly
Speaker 1: different times and had sighted different all within August of nine,
Speaker 1: but through different modes like you know, train or car
Speaker 1: or whatever, they were able to manage. And my grandfather
Speaker 1: was in a pre decent position in the Indian railways.
Speaker 1: He was even able to get like an air ticket
Speaker 1: for a part of that journey. But the entire family,
Speaker 1: the extended family, was not that lucky. And they there
Speaker 1: were one whole part of their family, like one of
Speaker 1: his siblings, and their entire family was completely like killed
Speaker 1: in the in the trains that you know, when they
Speaker 1: were coming to India. Only one nephew of my grandfather
Speaker 1: survived and he had like some sixteen stab wounds. Yea,
Speaker 1: his other sibling sister, his hard daughter, one of her daughters,
Speaker 1: was abducted and lost. They were never able to find her.
Speaker 1: Bertica mostly found out about Partition through film and television,
Speaker 1: and when she started pursuing her m f A, all
Speaker 1: the pieces came together for her. When I came to
Speaker 1: the US after a few years, you know, I went
Speaker 1: back to school, I started doing the Grand program UM
Speaker 1: and you Double Medicine UM and m f A, and
Speaker 1: there I had the opportunity to attend a graduate seminar
Speaker 1: on cultural memory, and there I finally found like a
Speaker 1: framework to really examine and analyze cultural memory in all
Speaker 1: its different nuances. So there is the hegemonic narratives, there
Speaker 1: is the erased narratives. And that's where I started to
Speaker 1: understand these uh concepts of counter memories, counter histories, subaltern
Speaker 1: resistance to these anti memorials or you know, anti monuments
Speaker 1: or however you know, people use site different terms here,
Speaker 1: but this is where I started to kind of gain
Speaker 1: a vocabulary to process and then to sort of understand
Speaker 1: how I can make art about it. So in my
Speaker 1: conversation with Pertica, switched gears to a more complicated and
Speaker 1: disheartening to topic general sible rape is a concept I
Speaker 1: have a hard time wrapping my head around. Rape in
Speaker 1: general is a concept I have a hard time wrapping
Speaker 1: my head around. Activists and researcher Wherehema Begham rights. United
Speaker 1: Nations Security Council Resolution eight states that sexual violence is
Speaker 1: a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, and still fear
Speaker 1: in disperse and or forcibly relocate civilian members of a
Speaker 1: community or an ethnic group. Throughout time, we have seen
Speaker 1: sexual violence, especially in the form of rape, being used
Speaker 1: to demoralize and destabilize entire communities, destroying the structure of
Speaker 1: families and societies in spaces of conflict. We can assume
Speaker 1: sexual violence is inevitable when village elders are raped in public,
Speaker 1: sons are forced to rape their mother, or soldiers rape
Speaker 1: women in a village with their brothers and husbands forced
Speaker 1: to watch. These acts are strategic and efforts to annihilate
Speaker 1: an entire community. The use of the word tactic is
Speaker 1: just very upsetting. To think of rape as a strategy,
Speaker 1: or to chalk it up to unnecessary evil of war
Speaker 1: is as detestable as it is outrageous. So partition is
Speaker 1: is a very complex thing. It's a very complex geopolitical event.
Speaker 1: There are many aspects of it. You know. She created
Speaker 1: her first partition related work in two thousand and seven
Speaker 1: while in grad school. That one was called Queering Mother India.
Speaker 1: So in that I wanted to understand how this construct
Speaker 1: of Mother India had maybe enabled the perverse logic of
Speaker 1: using rape as a weapon in communal rights, where you know,
Speaker 1: the body of the women of a community can become
Speaker 1: the symbolic battleground where if you, you know, violate the
Speaker 1: women's bodies, you can inflict a very deep wound and
Speaker 1: humiliation to the men of that community. So it's very
Speaker 1: much a battle amongst men, but it gets played out
Speaker 1: on the bodies of women. That's the perverse logic of
Speaker 1: using rape as a weapon, especially in these patriarchal societies.
Speaker 1: Punishing women was not a one off aspect of partition,
Speaker 1: but one that has been perpetrated in other historical events
Speaker 1: like Bosnia and Rwanta. But back to South Asia, culturally,
Speaker 1: we really revere women too. I mean, we have gardesses
Speaker 1: that we worship. So I could not quite understand this
Speaker 1: complete contradiction of you know, on the one hand we
Speaker 1: worshiped goddesses, but then on the other hand we violate
Speaker 1: women's bodies brutally, you know. So that was the whole
Speaker 1: idea of that anti memorial, where it comprised of, you know,
Speaker 1: about a nine or ten foot tall woman that I
Speaker 1: had made in ceramic in clay and it was fragmented,
Speaker 1: so you know, her body was in fragments around the gallery,
Speaker 1: and this is to sort of allude to how women's
Speaker 1: bodies were dismembered, you know, as part of the symbolic
Speaker 1: violence in the partition rights. Pertica shows the female body
Speaker 1: as the mutilated and brutalized body of Mother India. When
Speaker 1: outside the traditional depictions of Mother India as a serene,
Speaker 1: demire maternal figure who reproduces the nation as expected of her,
Speaker 1: the icon of Mother India itself becomes broken by communal
Speaker 1: violence m H. As she discusses more of her installations,
Speaker 1: Pretica mentioned many of them are named after books or
Speaker 1: films that she was inspired by. So the second Anteme
Speaker 1: memorial I titled it What the Body Remembers because you know,
Speaker 1: as an interra textual citation to the novel. And in
Speaker 1: that I focused only on the lower half of women's bodies.
Speaker 1: And they are also twice web size, so it's just
Speaker 1: the lower half of the female body, but each one
Speaker 1: of them is about six ft top. Due to the
Speaker 1: large nature of these pieces, she notes that the belly
Speaker 1: and pubic areas are at eye level, making a statement
Speaker 1: want can't easily ignore m and they are engaged in
Speaker 1: schoolyard games like playing hop scotch or jump pro or
Speaker 1: being on a swing, and then there's like a soundscape
Speaker 1: in there where it's the sound of you know, an
Speaker 1: old time steam engine sort of approaching and then leaving,
Speaker 1: and that it is just placed on a loop, so
Speaker 1: it's the sort of this ominous sound of a train
Speaker 1: coming and then leaving. Unfortunately, the pieces and what the
Speaker 1: Body remembers suffered irreparable damage while being transported, but photos
Speaker 1: of the art can be seen on Partica's website. However,
Speaker 1: she has a solution to bring them back to life
Speaker 1: by recreating them as digital three D models and releasing
Speaker 1: them as n f T s, a statement I never
Speaker 1: thought I would say on this show. If you don't
Speaker 1: know what an n f T is, I share you
Speaker 1: I am the worst person to explain it. The next
Speaker 1: one that I made after What the Body Remembers was
Speaker 1: Silent Waters, which is an intratextual citation to a film
Speaker 1: by Seba Summer in which she sort of narrates the
Speaker 1: life story of a woman who was abducted and raped
Speaker 1: and then eventually ended up marrying one of her rapists
Speaker 1: as a form of survival, and of course those memories
Speaker 1: hunt her but there's this sort of culture of silence
Speaker 1: in the village where she lives, where nobody mentions it
Speaker 1: and she doesn't mention it, and that her survival is
Speaker 1: sort of conditional to that. But eventually one of her
Speaker 1: brothers finds her because they never stopped looking for her.
Speaker 1: He comes from India and he finds her, which then
Speaker 1: breaks the silence of her abduction and rape. Campani came
Speaker 1: out in two thousand three, and I'll discuss this film
Speaker 1: further in a later episode. In this installation title Old
Speaker 1: Silent Waters, I created a hundred and one feet and
Speaker 1: these are also larger than life, so they are like
Speaker 1: fifteen sixteen inches lunches, bigger than most human feet. They
Speaker 1: are glazed black, dead black, and when I displayed them,
Speaker 1: I filled them to different heights with salt water, so
Speaker 1: during the exhibition, the water evaporates and leaves like a
Speaker 1: crystalline residue of the salt in the feet. There's also
Speaker 1: a soundscape in there where, um, you know, it's the
Speaker 1: sound of running feet, rainfall, and then a body hitting water,
Speaker 1: so like somebody may be jumped into a well. Some
Speaker 1: of Parta's other installations that focus on partition include remembering
Speaker 1: the crooked Line, which uses games as a motif. Like
Speaker 1: in the body, remembers and displays separations of other countries
Speaker 1: in broken column a series of hanging latex and silicon
Speaker 1: casts printed with neutral colored bricks and stones, hanged dispersed
Speaker 1: in a gallery. These casts represent the monuments to partition
Speaker 1: that should exist in the affected countries, but they don't,
Speaker 1: except for the monument representing the Liberation War. In this war,
Speaker 1: Bengalis living in East Pakistan fought for their independence, eventually
Speaker 1: emerging victorious as a new country, Bangladesh. This war was
Speaker 1: one of the many traumatic and violent events that stemmed
Speaker 1: from partition. It is a story that deserves its own time,
Speaker 1: research and respect. It is my hope to share some
Speaker 1: of those stories in the future and in memory, leaks,
Speaker 1: traces and drips. Pritica uses dripping water to express the
Speaker 1: regularity of communal riots. So what can we do now?
Speaker 1: I asked Perteca this question, and I'll be the first
Speaker 1: to admit it was pretty loaded. How do we pay
Speaker 1: tribute to women affected by partition? How do we honor them?
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, Yeah, that is a big question, you know,
Speaker 1: because rape is still stigmatized, right rape is a stigma
Speaker 1: that is still largely carried by women. Right. It's hard
Speaker 1: to center these narratives of rape because again, remember the
Speaker 1: victims of rape, right, their survival after the rape in
Speaker 1: a lot of situations depends on their silence. Like it's
Speaker 1: it's not of benefit to them to break their silence. Right,
Speaker 1: So up until as a society, women carry the stigma
Speaker 1: of rape, and women's silence about their rapes is what
Speaker 1: is valued rather than the redressal of the wrong. I
Speaker 1: think it would be very hard to reverse that trend,
Speaker 1: you know, in any significant way. So I guess what
Speaker 1: we can do people like you and me, you know,
Speaker 1: creatives who are not directly impacted by the rapes, but
Speaker 1: you know, as researchers and as creatives, we can research
Speaker 1: it and preserve those memories and in a way in
Speaker 1: different cultural artifacts you know, art, podcasts, books, storiography. You know, however,
Speaker 1: we are able films. Retica's work has been on display
Speaker 1: in a pleatora of museums around the world. As the
Speaker 1: senior curator for the South Asian Institute of Chicago, She's
Speaker 1: putting together a seventy five anniversary project where many of
Speaker 1: her works will be showcased the exhibit. It is aptly
Speaker 1: titled Unbearable Memories Unspeakable Histories. At the top of the episode,
Speaker 1: you heard Prithicca say that Partition lives in families and
Speaker 1: this history is something she inherits. I had shared many
Speaker 1: of the same sentiments in an earlier episode. Partition is
Speaker 1: a living and breathing thing. I too, believe it is
Speaker 1: my legacy to share these stories and ensure they don't
Speaker 1: get lost. Perhaps the most important aspect of Brithicca's work
Speaker 1: is that it can be seen online, thus eliminating any barriers.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what side of the border you belong to,
Speaker 1: or whether Partition is a part of your story or not.
Speaker 1: The accessibility of Prothicca's work allows everyone, no matter where
Speaker 1: you are or who you are, to take the first
Speaker 1: step towards learning about this history that would otherwise be forgotten.
Speaker 1: In episode one, you heard me mention that there are
Speaker 1: no partition memorials in either India or Pakistan. What is
Speaker 1: being done to reserve this history? There are a number
Speaker 1: of people and organizations recording and documenting survivor accounts, and
Speaker 1: I was lucky enough to talk to some of them.
Speaker 1: And discuss the task of collecting memories. I sort of
Speaker 1: casually started recording story on a trip to Punjab in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. People thought it was insane, like really
Speaker 1: strange what I was doing. People who had witnessed it
Speaker 1: started to line up and it was like, Oh, there's
Speaker 1: a need, like people want to tell the story until
Speaker 1: next week. I'm Nejasis and this is Partition. Partition was
Speaker 1: developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created
Speaker 1: by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Seni a median. Partition
Speaker 1: is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becker Ramos.
Speaker 1: It is edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score
Speaker 1: composed by Mark Hadley.