Torn From The Roots: A Partition Memoir
By Kamla Patel
Women Unlimited, Rs 350

A close associate of M.K. Gandhi, Kamla Patel spent her early years in Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. She was an active participant in the Civil Disobedience Movement. Immediately after India?s independence and partition, Patel responded to the call of Mridula Sarabhai, a staunch Gandhian, who headed the non-government organization for the recovery of abducted women and worked with her till 1950. Later, she was involved in the khadi movement as well.

Torn from the Roots (translated from the original Gujarati, Mool Sotan Ukdelan) is a poignant account of thousands of abducted women who lost their families, honour and eventually their identity during the Partition. This is a memoir that brings alive a dark, sensational and largely ignored aspect of a traumatic event called the Partition which not only divided a nation but confounded the very notion of nationhood in many ways.

The split Punjab, straddling the two emergent nations, was the sphere of Patel?s hectic activity. The camps she worked in for days and nights were located mainly in Amritsar and Jalandhar on the Indian side and in Lahore on the Pakistan side. The task of her organization was to expedite the ?operation recovery? launched by both the Indian and the Pakistan governments to rehabilitate abducted women. The experience of living in the camp proves to be vast and varied, bizarre and harrowing.

Patel?s memoir confirms what Tapan Ray Chaudhury has articulated in one of his recently published newspaper articles ? that communalism, as a by-product of nationalism, was by and large an elitist formulation and did not really penetrate into the Indian mass psyche. In Patel?s account, sexual love becomes an unlikely power against the formidable force of nationalism and a breathtaking battle ensues. Ultimately, love takes a beating to nationalist forces, but not before demonstrating the fragility and fallibility of the notion of nationalism. In Freudian terms, the episode highlights how eros confronts thanatos in troubled times.

Patel gives a chilling account of the gruesome massacre of the Hindu Pathans leaving for India from Pakistan. She chronicles with sympathy the plight of those women who were forced to part with their illegitimate children while returning to their families and also the desperation of those who braved dangers to seek out the fathers of their unborn offsprings.

The translator, Uma Randeria, who had earlier translated Gandhi?s Gujarati writings into English, needs to be thanked for making this disturbing memoir available to a larger reading public.