WEBVTT - The Treatment of Women: Part Two (with Pritika Chowdhry) 0:00:01.800 --> 0:00:04.480 Before this week's episode, I wanted to take a moment 0:00:04.519 --> 0:00:07.360 to let y'all know about the devastating floods happening in 0:00:07.360 --> 0:00:11.160 Pakistan right now, over thirty million people have been affected, 0:00:11.200 --> 0:00:14.240 with the death toll around eleven hundred and rising with 0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:18.439 every passing day. Entire buildings are being washed away, with 0:00:18.520 --> 0:00:22.880 many people sustaining injuries. I encourage every listener to donate 0:00:22.920 --> 0:00:26.520 any amount they can to help alleviate this disaster. You 0:00:26.560 --> 0:00:29.040 can find a list of organizations to send funds to 0:00:29.480 --> 0:00:42.199 linked in the show notes. Warning, the following episode contains 0:00:42.240 --> 0:00:49.680 stories of rape and extreme violence. You know, slowly but 0:00:49.760 --> 0:00:54.120 shortly from the nineties, it was entering my conscious, my 0:00:54.240 --> 0:00:58.760 public and social conscious that practition of India was a 0:00:58.920 --> 0:01:04.360 very big event, really shaped the Sudasian geopolitics and also people. 0:01:04.880 --> 0:01:09.720 It lives in families, It lives in families, histories. I 0:01:09.800 --> 0:01:13.440 was fully understanding my inheritance, like this is what I inherit, 0:01:13.760 --> 0:01:16.920 you know, as an Indian woman, this is part of 0:01:16.959 --> 0:01:23.440 my cultural and familial inheritance. Once we make the association 0:01:23.760 --> 0:01:25.880 that the past isn't meant to stay in the past, 0:01:26.360 --> 0:01:28.760 what can we do to make sure the memories and 0:01:28.880 --> 0:01:32.400 experiences of people who came before us don't get lost 0:01:32.400 --> 0:01:35.080 in the void. Last week, you heard some of the 0:01:35.120 --> 0:01:39.600 ways women were weaponized during partition from Adula Waldron, a 0:01:39.640 --> 0:01:43.360 survivor who wrote a novel to process her personal trauma. 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:47.600 From this week, we're going to focus on what we 0:01:47.640 --> 0:01:51.080 can do now to acknowledge these women, to make sure 0:01:51.160 --> 0:01:55.360 their experiences don't get lost no matter how much time 0:01:55.400 --> 0:02:00.920 has passed. From I Heart Radio, I'm Nehasse and this 0:02:01.080 --> 0:02:04.240 is Partition, a podcast that will take a closer look 0:02:04.240 --> 0:02:10.480 into this often forgotten part of history. I can't quite 0:02:10.480 --> 0:02:14.040 remember how I stumbled upon this artist's work. I think 0:02:14.120 --> 0:02:16.600 I was just looking for people who were sharing stories 0:02:16.639 --> 0:02:21.880 about partition in any capacity. Once I looked at her photos, 0:02:22.160 --> 0:02:25.280 I immediately knew I wanted to talk to her and 0:02:25.360 --> 0:02:28.840 find out more about her intricate and honest works about Partition. 0:02:32.120 --> 0:02:37.760 I call myself a post colonial filminist artist that's Practico Jodrey. 0:02:39.120 --> 0:02:45.320 I make art installations that are anti memorials to traumatic 0:02:45.320 --> 0:02:50.200 geopolitical events, such as the partition of India, eleven and 0:02:50.240 --> 0:02:54.800 so on. In these anti memorials, I tried to excavate 0:02:54.880 --> 0:02:58.640 the counter memories of these events. The counter histories of 0:02:58.680 --> 0:03:05.600 these events. Pertica as an artist, curator, and writer who 0:03:05.639 --> 0:03:10.120 focuses on anti memorials and counter memory. Though I hadn't 0:03:10.160 --> 0:03:13.840 heard these terms before, I immediately understood their meeting as 0:03:13.880 --> 0:03:17.120 she explained them to me. In essence, there are the 0:03:17.200 --> 0:03:25.240 crux of this podcast. So an anti memorial basically goes 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:30.359 against the grain in terms of traditional monuments, which are 0:03:31.080 --> 0:03:35.120 you know, state sponsored monuments tend to be rather large, 0:03:35.680 --> 0:03:42.480 breaking motor structures that glorify the nation state in some way. 0:03:43.040 --> 0:03:48.880 Anti memorials do the almost opposite, so they are usually 0:03:48.920 --> 0:03:53.720 smaller in scale, They are usually temporary, they are made 0:03:53.920 --> 0:03:58.760 usually of fragile and precarious materials, and most of the 0:03:58.800 --> 0:04:06.480 time they critique the nation state. There are, of course, 0:04:06.480 --> 0:04:10.200 statues and other entities named after Jinna and Ahru in 0:04:10.240 --> 0:04:14.040 Pakistan in India, and while there are still some statues 0:04:14.080 --> 0:04:17.880 devoted to our colonizers, they are not well preserved and 0:04:17.960 --> 0:04:21.080 many are in the process of being removed, a notion 0:04:21.200 --> 0:04:24.839 similar to Confederate statues being removed in the United States. 0:04:27.160 --> 0:04:33.880 Counter memories, similarly, are memories that center the experiences of 0:04:34.240 --> 0:04:39.000 people that don't get to write history. So the national 0:04:39.600 --> 0:04:43.760 version the nationalist hero version, so to speak, of a 0:04:43.800 --> 0:04:49.400 traumatic event is usually quite different from what was experienced 0:04:49.440 --> 0:04:53.279 on the ground by people that were at a disadvantage. 0:04:53.720 --> 0:04:56.640 In the context of the tradition of India, these tend 0:04:56.720 --> 0:05:00.360 to be women and the Muslim minority. These two also 0:05:00.400 --> 0:05:03.080 don't get to write the history of the partition to 0:05:03.200 --> 0:05:07.479 any great extent. They are usually very silenced. Their experiences 0:05:07.520 --> 0:05:19.200 are not heard, they're definitely not centered. Coming to terms 0:05:19.240 --> 0:05:22.120 with our past is essential. We must own up to 0:05:22.160 --> 0:05:26.599 our history, no matter how despicable it. Maybe think about 0:05:26.600 --> 0:05:30.440 reparations being made to the descendants of slaves. While no 0:05:30.560 --> 0:05:33.480 amount of money can erase the wickedness of the past, 0:05:34.000 --> 0:05:38.520 at the very least it offers some accountability. You've heard 0:05:38.560 --> 0:05:42.000 me say time and time again that the great men 0:05:42.000 --> 0:05:44.680 in history narrative is the one that gets the limelight 0:05:44.760 --> 0:05:50.400 in most cases, and everyday people, especially women, get shafted. 0:05:51.279 --> 0:05:54.520 The everyday people are the ones that lost their homes, 0:05:54.880 --> 0:05:59.560 were separated from their relatives, attacked, and must truly live 0:05:59.600 --> 0:06:04.440 with a sequences from these so called great men. This 0:06:05.000 --> 0:06:11.440 is where the counter memory comes in. So counter memory 0:06:11.920 --> 0:06:15.360 is an exercise, It's an individual act of resistance it's 0:06:15.360 --> 0:06:20.520 a fu Coldian term to excavate intentionally these histories that 0:06:20.560 --> 0:06:24.000 have been lost, that have been raised from nationalist narratives, 0:06:24.080 --> 0:06:28.880 and then to center those. Pertica mentions that a counter 0:06:29.000 --> 0:06:33.000 memory is a fu Codian term. The term was coined 0:06:33.000 --> 0:06:37.919 by French philosopher Michelle Fuco. Counter memories hope to break 0:06:37.920 --> 0:06:41.920 the cycle of sharing a sugar coated history and questioning 0:06:41.920 --> 0:06:47.760 the power structure of information that is widely available to us. Essentially, 0:06:48.200 --> 0:06:50.719 it is through counter memories where we get the so 0:06:50.920 --> 0:06:55.200 called inconvenient truths, the truths we don't get in history books, 0:06:55.839 --> 0:06:58.560 the truths that are vastly different from the fantasies they 0:06:58.600 --> 0:07:05.080 are addressed up as. No matter how Indians and Pakistan, 0:07:05.120 --> 0:07:07.839 he's fall into the timeline of events. We all have 0:07:07.920 --> 0:07:13.360 a partition story. I asked Partika what hers was. I 0:07:13.400 --> 0:07:18.200 am half Cynthia and half Bengali. Pretiica is referring to 0:07:18.280 --> 0:07:22.240 two different regions. Sinth is a province in Pakistan where 0:07:22.240 --> 0:07:25.520 I'm also from, and Bengal is a region on the 0:07:25.560 --> 0:07:28.920 eastern side of India which you may remember was split 0:07:28.960 --> 0:07:36.080 by Cyril Radcliffe in the height of the n partition riots. 0:07:36.680 --> 0:07:43.520 My grandparents and their extended family migrated from Karagi to Delhi. 0:07:44.520 --> 0:07:47.640 You know, our family doesn't talk about like I had 0:07:47.680 --> 0:07:52.000 to really extract it out of my mother and Um, 0:07:52.080 --> 0:07:55.880 she was initially quite resistant to talking about it because 0:07:55.920 --> 0:07:57.800 she was like, well, what's the point of talking about 0:07:57.840 --> 0:08:01.200 all this, you know, past traumas and things like that. 0:08:01.240 --> 0:08:06.080 It's just better to just forget. Extract is the perfect 0:08:06.120 --> 0:08:10.040 word to like in her recollection of getting information from 0:08:10.080 --> 0:08:13.760 her mom to getting a procedure as unpleasant as getting 0:08:13.760 --> 0:08:19.480 a tooth removed is flawless. The partition lives very much, 0:08:19.560 --> 0:08:23.520 lives and functions as a force, as a ghost or 0:08:23.560 --> 0:08:25.960 however you want to call it. In the current jew 0:08:26.000 --> 0:08:29.480 politics of South Asia. That was what led me to 0:08:29.680 --> 0:08:33.280 sort of question my mother about what exactly happened in 0:08:33.360 --> 0:08:36.560 n What does she know? So she was only um 0:08:36.600 --> 0:08:38.520 I believe, three years old at the time, so she 0:08:38.600 --> 0:08:42.200 doesn't really remember, but she knew enough that she was 0:08:42.240 --> 0:08:44.720 able to fill me in on quite a few details 0:08:45.440 --> 0:08:47.520 over the course of several telephone calls, because I was 0:08:47.559 --> 0:08:51.360 in the U S by then. Over the course of 0:08:51.480 --> 0:08:55.560 those many international telephone calls, particle slowly and covered the 0:08:55.600 --> 0:09:00.960 horror stories her family witness during Partition. I found out 0:09:01.040 --> 0:09:06.640 that my grandfather's extended family, like his brothers and sisters 0:09:06.640 --> 0:09:10.680 and them, they all migrated, but they migrated at slightly 0:09:10.679 --> 0:09:15.239 different times and had sighted different all within August of nine, 0:09:15.440 --> 0:09:19.640 but through different modes like you know, train or car 0:09:19.760 --> 0:09:24.359 or whatever, they were able to manage. And my grandfather 0:09:24.600 --> 0:09:28.160 was in a pre decent position in the Indian railways. 0:09:28.520 --> 0:09:30.840 He was even able to get like an air ticket 0:09:31.120 --> 0:09:35.040 for a part of that journey. But the entire family, 0:09:35.080 --> 0:09:38.560 the extended family, was not that lucky. And they there 0:09:38.600 --> 0:09:43.400 were one whole part of their family, like one of 0:09:43.480 --> 0:09:47.920 his siblings, and their entire family was completely like killed 0:09:48.160 --> 0:09:50.800 in the in the trains that you know, when they 0:09:50.800 --> 0:09:55.920 were coming to India. Only one nephew of my grandfather 0:09:56.280 --> 0:10:00.240 survived and he had like some sixteen stab wounds. Yea, 0:10:03.480 --> 0:10:09.240 his other sibling sister, his hard daughter, one of her daughters, 0:10:09.880 --> 0:10:13.080 was abducted and lost. They were never able to find her. 0:10:41.480 --> 0:10:45.480 Bertica mostly found out about Partition through film and television, 0:10:45.960 --> 0:10:48.840 and when she started pursuing her m f A, all 0:10:48.920 --> 0:10:54.480 the pieces came together for her. When I came to 0:10:54.520 --> 0:10:57.319 the US after a few years, you know, I went 0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:00.240 back to school, I started doing the Grand program UM 0:11:00.280 --> 0:11:03.600 and you Double Medicine UM and m f A, and 0:11:03.640 --> 0:11:07.679 there I had the opportunity to attend a graduate seminar 0:11:07.920 --> 0:11:12.200 on cultural memory, and there I finally found like a 0:11:12.400 --> 0:11:17.360 framework to really examine and analyze cultural memory in all 0:11:17.480 --> 0:11:22.560 its different nuances. So there is the hegemonic narratives, there 0:11:22.679 --> 0:11:26.360 is the erased narratives. And that's where I started to 0:11:26.440 --> 0:11:33.160 understand these uh concepts of counter memories, counter histories, subaltern 0:11:33.679 --> 0:11:39.120 resistance to these anti memorials or you know, anti monuments 0:11:39.160 --> 0:11:42.000 or however you know, people use site different terms here, 0:11:42.480 --> 0:11:44.520 but this is where I started to kind of gain 0:11:44.559 --> 0:11:48.960 a vocabulary to process and then to sort of understand 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:55.720 how I can make art about it. So in my 0:11:55.800 --> 0:11:59.120 conversation with Pertica, switched gears to a more complicated and 0:11:59.200 --> 0:12:03.680 disheartening to topic general sible rape is a concept I 0:12:03.760 --> 0:12:06.600 have a hard time wrapping my head around. Rape in 0:12:06.640 --> 0:12:09.240 general is a concept I have a hard time wrapping 0:12:09.240 --> 0:12:16.360 my head around. Activists and researcher Wherehema Begham rights. United 0:12:16.440 --> 0:12:21.439 Nations Security Council Resolution eight states that sexual violence is 0:12:21.480 --> 0:12:26.040 a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, and still fear 0:12:26.080 --> 0:12:30.200 in disperse and or forcibly relocate civilian members of a 0:12:30.240 --> 0:12:34.200 community or an ethnic group. Throughout time, we have seen 0:12:34.240 --> 0:12:38.040 sexual violence, especially in the form of rape, being used 0:12:38.040 --> 0:12:42.920 to demoralize and destabilize entire communities, destroying the structure of 0:12:43.000 --> 0:12:47.760 families and societies in spaces of conflict. We can assume 0:12:47.840 --> 0:12:52.280 sexual violence is inevitable when village elders are raped in public, 0:12:52.840 --> 0:12:55.760 sons are forced to rape their mother, or soldiers rape 0:12:55.800 --> 0:12:58.880 women in a village with their brothers and husbands forced 0:12:58.880 --> 0:13:03.520 to watch. These acts are strategic and efforts to annihilate 0:13:03.600 --> 0:13:11.240 an entire community. The use of the word tactic is 0:13:11.320 --> 0:13:16.160 just very upsetting. To think of rape as a strategy, 0:13:16.840 --> 0:13:19.440 or to chalk it up to unnecessary evil of war 0:13:20.240 --> 0:13:27.800 is as detestable as it is outrageous. So partition is 0:13:27.800 --> 0:13:31.360 is a very complex thing. It's a very complex geopolitical event. 0:13:31.720 --> 0:13:36.080 There are many aspects of it. You know. She created 0:13:36.080 --> 0:13:38.760 her first partition related work in two thousand and seven 0:13:38.960 --> 0:13:44.680 while in grad school. That one was called Queering Mother India. 0:13:45.200 --> 0:13:50.760 So in that I wanted to understand how this construct 0:13:51.040 --> 0:13:56.520 of Mother India had maybe enabled the perverse logic of 0:13:56.800 --> 0:14:00.880 using rape as a weapon in communal rights, where you know, 0:14:01.640 --> 0:14:06.360 the body of the women of a community can become 0:14:06.520 --> 0:14:12.679 the symbolic battleground where if you, you know, violate the 0:14:12.720 --> 0:14:18.400 women's bodies, you can inflict a very deep wound and 0:14:19.480 --> 0:14:24.440 humiliation to the men of that community. So it's very 0:14:24.560 --> 0:14:28.200 much a battle amongst men, but it gets played out 0:14:28.480 --> 0:14:31.760 on the bodies of women. That's the perverse logic of 0:14:32.280 --> 0:14:37.080 using rape as a weapon, especially in these patriarchal societies. 0:14:39.520 --> 0:14:42.680 Punishing women was not a one off aspect of partition, 0:14:43.160 --> 0:14:46.760 but one that has been perpetrated in other historical events 0:14:46.800 --> 0:14:54.320 like Bosnia and Rwanta. But back to South Asia, culturally, 0:14:54.360 --> 0:14:58.560 we really revere women too. I mean, we have gardesses 0:14:58.680 --> 0:15:03.600 that we worship. So I could not quite understand this 0:15:04.680 --> 0:15:08.360 complete contradiction of you know, on the one hand we 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:11.480 worshiped goddesses, but then on the other hand we violate 0:15:11.800 --> 0:15:16.600 women's bodies brutally, you know. So that was the whole 0:15:16.600 --> 0:15:20.760 idea of that anti memorial, where it comprised of, you know, 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:23.400 about a nine or ten foot tall woman that I 0:15:23.440 --> 0:15:27.080 had made in ceramic in clay and it was fragmented, 0:15:27.200 --> 0:15:31.360 so you know, her body was in fragments around the gallery, 0:15:31.720 --> 0:15:35.960 and this is to sort of allude to how women's 0:15:36.000 --> 0:15:39.080 bodies were dismembered, you know, as part of the symbolic 0:15:39.200 --> 0:15:45.280 violence in the partition rights. Pertica shows the female body 0:15:45.520 --> 0:15:49.840 as the mutilated and brutalized body of Mother India. When 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:53.520 outside the traditional depictions of Mother India as a serene, 0:15:53.800 --> 0:15:58.400 demire maternal figure who reproduces the nation as expected of her, 0:15:58.960 --> 0:16:03.400 the icon of Mother India itself becomes broken by communal 0:16:03.560 --> 0:16:19.880 violence m H. As she discusses more of her installations, 0:16:20.000 --> 0:16:23.160 Pretica mentioned many of them are named after books or 0:16:23.240 --> 0:16:29.240 films that she was inspired by. So the second Anteme 0:16:29.280 --> 0:16:32.480 memorial I titled it What the Body Remembers because you know, 0:16:32.520 --> 0:16:36.440 as an interra textual citation to the novel. And in 0:16:36.520 --> 0:16:41.280 that I focused only on the lower half of women's bodies. 0:16:41.360 --> 0:16:44.240 And they are also twice web size, so it's just 0:16:44.320 --> 0:16:46.600 the lower half of the female body, but each one 0:16:46.640 --> 0:16:50.640 of them is about six ft top. Due to the 0:16:50.720 --> 0:16:53.760 large nature of these pieces, she notes that the belly 0:16:53.840 --> 0:16:57.200 and pubic areas are at eye level, making a statement 0:16:57.360 --> 0:17:04.000 want can't easily ignore m and they are engaged in 0:17:04.440 --> 0:17:08.480 schoolyard games like playing hop scotch or jump pro or 0:17:08.560 --> 0:17:12.400 being on a swing, and then there's like a soundscape 0:17:12.480 --> 0:17:16.200 in there where it's the sound of you know, an 0:17:16.200 --> 0:17:20.320 old time steam engine sort of approaching and then leaving, 0:17:20.920 --> 0:17:22.520 and that it is just placed on a loop, so 0:17:22.560 --> 0:17:25.160 it's the sort of this ominous sound of a train 0:17:25.280 --> 0:17:33.280 coming and then leaving. Unfortunately, the pieces and what the 0:17:33.320 --> 0:17:38.399 Body remembers suffered irreparable damage while being transported, but photos 0:17:38.440 --> 0:17:41.880 of the art can be seen on Partica's website. However, 0:17:42.160 --> 0:17:44.280 she has a solution to bring them back to life 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:48.000 by recreating them as digital three D models and releasing 0:17:48.000 --> 0:17:51.440 them as n f T s, a statement I never 0:17:51.480 --> 0:17:54.480 thought I would say on this show. If you don't 0:17:54.480 --> 0:17:56.880 know what an n f T is, I share you 0:17:57.080 --> 0:18:02.400 I am the worst person to explain it. The next 0:18:02.440 --> 0:18:04.760 one that I made after What the Body Remembers was 0:18:04.880 --> 0:18:09.040 Silent Waters, which is an intratextual citation to a film 0:18:09.080 --> 0:18:14.480 by Seba Summer in which she sort of narrates the 0:18:14.560 --> 0:18:18.800 life story of a woman who was abducted and raped 0:18:18.840 --> 0:18:21.280 and then eventually ended up marrying one of her rapists 0:18:21.280 --> 0:18:24.399 as a form of survival, and of course those memories 0:18:24.480 --> 0:18:27.480 hunt her but there's this sort of culture of silence 0:18:27.520 --> 0:18:30.199 in the village where she lives, where nobody mentions it 0:18:30.280 --> 0:18:32.800 and she doesn't mention it, and that her survival is 0:18:32.800 --> 0:18:35.800 sort of conditional to that. But eventually one of her 0:18:35.840 --> 0:18:38.880 brothers finds her because they never stopped looking for her. 0:18:39.440 --> 0:18:42.560 He comes from India and he finds her, which then 0:18:43.000 --> 0:18:50.240 breaks the silence of her abduction and rape. Campani came 0:18:50.280 --> 0:18:53.080 out in two thousand three, and I'll discuss this film 0:18:53.160 --> 0:19:00.160 further in a later episode. In this installation title Old 0:19:00.359 --> 0:19:04.480 Silent Waters, I created a hundred and one feet and 0:19:04.520 --> 0:19:07.560 these are also larger than life, so they are like 0:19:07.680 --> 0:19:11.679 fifteen sixteen inches lunches, bigger than most human feet. They 0:19:11.680 --> 0:19:16.880 are glazed black, dead black, and when I displayed them, 0:19:17.040 --> 0:19:23.840 I filled them to different heights with salt water, so 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:27.679 during the exhibition, the water evaporates and leaves like a 0:19:27.680 --> 0:19:33.119 crystalline residue of the salt in the feet. There's also 0:19:33.200 --> 0:19:36.000 a soundscape in there where, um, you know, it's the 0:19:36.080 --> 0:19:42.320 sound of running feet, rainfall, and then a body hitting water, 0:19:42.760 --> 0:19:51.879 so like somebody may be jumped into a well. Some 0:19:52.040 --> 0:19:56.200 of Parta's other installations that focus on partition include remembering 0:19:56.240 --> 0:19:59.639 the crooked Line, which uses games as a motif. Like 0:19:59.720 --> 0:20:03.800 in the body, remembers and displays separations of other countries 0:20:04.680 --> 0:20:08.040 in broken column a series of hanging latex and silicon 0:20:08.160 --> 0:20:12.080 casts printed with neutral colored bricks and stones, hanged dispersed 0:20:12.119 --> 0:20:16.040 in a gallery. These casts represent the monuments to partition 0:20:16.359 --> 0:20:20.159 that should exist in the affected countries, but they don't, 0:20:20.680 --> 0:20:25.840 except for the monument representing the Liberation War. In this war, 0:20:26.240 --> 0:20:30.520 Bengalis living in East Pakistan fought for their independence, eventually 0:20:30.520 --> 0:20:35.879 emerging victorious as a new country, Bangladesh. This war was 0:20:35.920 --> 0:20:38.840 one of the many traumatic and violent events that stemmed 0:20:38.840 --> 0:20:42.399 from partition. It is a story that deserves its own time, 0:20:42.880 --> 0:20:46.240 research and respect. It is my hope to share some 0:20:46.320 --> 0:20:49.959 of those stories in the future and in memory, leaks, 0:20:50.119 --> 0:20:53.920 traces and drips. Pritica uses dripping water to express the 0:20:54.040 --> 0:21:07.600 regularity of communal riots. So what can we do now? 0:21:08.200 --> 0:21:11.119 I asked Perteca this question, and I'll be the first 0:21:11.119 --> 0:21:14.560 to admit it was pretty loaded. How do we pay 0:21:14.680 --> 0:21:20.960 tribute to women affected by partition? How do we honor them? 0:21:21.040 --> 0:21:25.480 Mm hmm, Yeah, that is a big question, you know, 0:21:26.240 --> 0:21:29.320 because rape is still stigmatized, right rape is a stigma 0:21:29.440 --> 0:21:34.639 that is still largely carried by women. Right. It's hard 0:21:35.000 --> 0:21:42.400 to center these narratives of rape because again, remember the 0:21:42.480 --> 0:21:48.000 victims of rape, right, their survival after the rape in 0:21:48.040 --> 0:21:51.680 a lot of situations depends on their silence. Like it's 0:21:51.760 --> 0:21:56.560 it's not of benefit to them to break their silence. Right, 0:21:57.040 --> 0:22:02.199 So up until as a society, women carry the stigma 0:22:02.240 --> 0:22:05.760 of rape, and women's silence about their rapes is what 0:22:06.280 --> 0:22:10.800 is valued rather than the redressal of the wrong. I 0:22:10.800 --> 0:22:14.119 think it would be very hard to reverse that trend, 0:22:14.400 --> 0:22:18.560 you know, in any significant way. So I guess what 0:22:18.680 --> 0:22:20.919 we can do people like you and me, you know, 0:22:21.040 --> 0:22:24.760 creatives who are not directly impacted by the rapes, but 0:22:25.560 --> 0:22:30.040 you know, as researchers and as creatives, we can research 0:22:30.119 --> 0:22:33.080 it and preserve those memories and in a way in 0:22:33.200 --> 0:22:40.280 different cultural artifacts you know, art, podcasts, books, storiography. You know, however, 0:22:40.600 --> 0:22:46.879 we are able films. Retica's work has been on display 0:22:47.040 --> 0:22:50.119 in a pleatora of museums around the world. As the 0:22:50.200 --> 0:22:53.760 senior curator for the South Asian Institute of Chicago, She's 0:22:53.800 --> 0:22:57.439 putting together a seventy five anniversary project where many of 0:22:57.520 --> 0:23:00.639 her works will be showcased the exhibit. It is aptly 0:23:00.720 --> 0:23:07.600 titled Unbearable Memories Unspeakable Histories. At the top of the episode, 0:23:07.920 --> 0:23:12.080 you heard Prithicca say that Partition lives in families and 0:23:12.119 --> 0:23:16.240 this history is something she inherits. I had shared many 0:23:16.280 --> 0:23:20.280 of the same sentiments in an earlier episode. Partition is 0:23:20.320 --> 0:23:24.480 a living and breathing thing. I too, believe it is 0:23:24.520 --> 0:23:28.359 my legacy to share these stories and ensure they don't 0:23:28.359 --> 0:23:32.920 get lost. Perhaps the most important aspect of Brithicca's work 0:23:33.240 --> 0:23:37.639 is that it can be seen online, thus eliminating any barriers. 0:23:38.200 --> 0:23:41.080 It doesn't matter what side of the border you belong to, 0:23:41.760 --> 0:23:44.520 or whether Partition is a part of your story or not. 0:23:45.200 --> 0:23:50.040 The accessibility of Prothicca's work allows everyone, no matter where 0:23:50.080 --> 0:23:53.080 you are or who you are, to take the first 0:23:53.119 --> 0:23:57.760 step towards learning about this history that would otherwise be forgotten. 0:24:01.680 --> 0:24:04.800 In episode one, you heard me mention that there are 0:24:04.840 --> 0:24:09.840 no partition memorials in either India or Pakistan. What is 0:24:09.880 --> 0:24:13.680 being done to reserve this history? There are a number 0:24:13.680 --> 0:24:18.840 of people and organizations recording and documenting survivor accounts, and 0:24:18.880 --> 0:24:21.600 I was lucky enough to talk to some of them. 0:24:21.600 --> 0:24:29.199 And discuss the task of collecting memories. I sort of 0:24:29.280 --> 0:24:32.040 casually started recording story on a trip to Punjab in 0:24:32.080 --> 0:24:35.800 two thousand nine. People thought it was insane, like really 0:24:35.840 --> 0:24:39.439 strange what I was doing. People who had witnessed it 0:24:39.600 --> 0:24:43.280 started to line up and it was like, Oh, there's 0:24:43.320 --> 0:24:50.879 a need, like people want to tell the story until 0:24:51.000 --> 0:24:59.439 next week. I'm Nejasis and this is Partition. Partition was 0:24:59.480 --> 0:25:02.399 developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created 0:25:02.440 --> 0:25:07.480 by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Seni a median. Partition 0:25:07.560 --> 0:25:12.080 is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becker Ramos. 0:25:12.640 --> 0:25:15.879 It is edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score 0:25:16.200 --> 0:25:32.800 composed by Mark Hadley.