Subhashini, circa 1977

Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony By Nonica Datta, Oxford, Rs 695

Nonica Datta’s Violence, Martyrdom and Partition “presents the oral testimony of Subhashini, the woman head of a well-known Arya Samaj institution devoted to women’s education in rural north India”. Subhashini, born Sarti in 1914, was, surprisingly for a girl child, welcomed by her father in a family of Jat cultivators. She lost her mother when she was about a year old. Her father, Bhagat Phool Singh, an Arya Samaj preacher, remarried and went to live in a jungle. In 1919, she was initiated into the Arya Samaj — an event that would determine the rest of her life as a brahmacharini. Thereafter, she was sent to one Kanya Gurukul after another, came back unhappy to her father, was married off, and found sex horrifying. At Sabarmati Ashram, she was asked to clean the toilets by Gandhi. In 1942, she joined the Kanya Vedic Pathshala her father had set up. Then her father was murdered by “Mussalmans”. The Partition was for her providence avenging her father’s martyrdom.

The first chapter introduces Subhashini and tries to place her particular story in the general historical context of the Partition as it affected the Jat community of Haryana. The second is her testimony, peppered with vernacular expressions that try to capture the elusive cadence of her thought and gestures in their arrest and flow. The third is a letter from the author-historian to her deceased subject. Assuming that history is more a communicative than an informative performance, the author displays just the right, and up-to-date, historiographical instinct in situating the almost “accidental” unfolding of her work in “a prolonged conversation with [her] narrator”, where the historian “was not quite sure what exactly [she] was looking for”. She asks her text to be read as “parallel history” rather than as a “factual” or “historical document”.

Datta does not formulate her conception of “parallel history” very precisely, perhaps in allegiance to a rhetoric whose “recalcitrant richness” lies in the “gaps” and “silences” whose ubiquitous presence not only informs but also authenticates a spoken (hence ‘living’) narrative, as opposed to the “archives” with their “tyranny of facts”. One thing emerges clearly though — in crafting her subject’s parallel history, Datta is trying to distil a heart-stopping human story. “As time went on... I started calling her amma.”

The book’s subtitle, A Daughter’s Testimony, signals the textual problems that underscore one subject’s representation by another into subject-matter. Subhashini “is the beleaguered daughter of a martyr”. She is also a mother, a matriarch in charge of her (father’s) institution, and a mother-figure to the writer, whose own work then becomes a daughterly tribute not only to Subhashini, but also to her mother, the book’s dedicatee. And this weave of filial voices is framed by the Partition with its ineluctable mythical and metaphorical articulation with parturition.

Datta shows awareness of the necessary splitting, spilling and splicing of voices within a narrative that complicate the question of enunciative agency and autonomy. But her protestations of intellectual innocence sound disingenuous. Datta claims that Subhashini’s testimony is “intimate, not public”. She has not read it in “history books” or “novels”. Story and history are logically and etymologically cognate. But that does not make them fluid categories. The author seems to want to have it both ways, but the balancing act between the history book and the novel renders the two orders of discourse immiscible and unmediated.