"This paper attempts to delineate and focus on the common narrative thread running through subsequent cinematic treatises on the situation of women during the Partition, particularly those kidnapped and sexually violated during the vivisection. It proposes to construct a cultural and memorialized history of the Partition through a reading of mediated representations of literary engagements with the event, particularly the narrativization of the cinematic trope of the ‘radicalized’ Muslim and his involvement in the abduction of “chaste” Hindu women during the cataclysmic event.

This paper interrogates the reparative possibilities of representing subjugated voices in historical narratives. It examines, first, the onto-epistemic conditions under which this representation becomes possible. Further, it demonstrates that the possibility of representation is contingent upon the reproduction of the subjugated subject as a signifier of onto-epistemic difference. This form of representation fails to repair the harm underlying subjugation.