Since being introduced to her at a rather early age, I have always felt proximity with Jamila Hashmi’s works of fiction. Her prose is both inventive and accessible. She has a distinct idiom, but uses a variety of styles and makes diverse choices in selecting her themes. It is particularly important to note Hashmi’s uniqueness as a woman writer at a moment in our literary history in the mid- and late-20th century when Qurratulain Hyder and Ismat Chughtai were influencing everyone — including men — who was writing fiction.

Hashmi is not entirely unsung, but certainly less talked about in these noisy and delirious times in which we presently live. But that does not bother me too much because real art transcends time and space and continues to resurface in people’s imagination in most curious ways.

At a conference in Islamabad recently, in his keynote speech on memory and forgetting and discussing blank spots in our history that are particularly related to the suffering inflicted upon women, anthropologist Dr Kamran Asdar Ali referenced one of Hashmi’s short stories, Ban Baas. The title of the story has its roots in the Hindu mythological legend of Ram and Sita and refers to the act of leaving the city and settling in the jungle to avoid conflict and seek salvation.

The main character of Hashmi’s story is a Muslim woman left behind in Indian Punjab at the time of Partition, who is then married to a Sikh man. She bears children, including a girl whom she affectionately calls ‘Munni’. Sometime after Partition, a commission is established by the two countries to recover and repatriate abducted women on the two sides of the newly drawn border. There is both excitement and anxiety felt by these women. But Munni’s mother does not find her brother among those who arrive to take her and other women such as her to their relatives in Pakistan.

Hashmi maintains her finesse and does not divulge too much, but conveys that this was a sign enough for what would happen to the women who returned. Finally, her protagonist refuses to leave because of Munni. Perhaps she saves herself from being dishonoured once again — this time at the hands of her own family — and saves Munni from humiliation for the rest of her life as the daughter of an abducted woman who had to be converted to be married, irrespective of whether it was forced or voluntary.

I recall Saadat Hasan Manto also writing a piece on these women who were recovered, repatriated and then stigmatised for the rest of their lives by their own kith and kin. Some years ago, Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar depicted the life of one such woman — a Sikh — who had to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim man, in her film Khamosh Pani. Interestingly, it was Indian Sikh actor Kiron Kher who played the role of that woman.

Occasionally this issue may have been remembered, but mostly it is seen as something exceptional and rare and therefore wiped out of collective memory. There is little knowledge and information available about these women, particularly in Pakistan, and a near-complete silence in our books on history as well as women’s studies. Some initiative was taken in both India and Pakistan during the 1980s, if one remembers correctly, but little seems to have appeared in print on our side of the border.

In his keynote speech, Dr Ali wondered that maybe some of us had old aunts who never married, who assisted our grandparents and parents quietly in household chores, who cooked and cleaned, who seldom joined the festivities of the larger family and whose sobs we heard coming from the small, outer rooms of our houses, who were, in fact, these ‘recovered’ women. Unless we record the genocides, massacres, abductions and rapes, speak out aloud, analyse and learn about the suffering we caused and the suffering we bore, this will all continue to be repeated.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 11th, 2018