Current Research

My doctoral research examines how the legacy of British colonialism and Indian patriarchal structures, continue to silence women’s voices. My practice works from my position as a woman raised in India and belonging to a migrant family from Pakistan, which had previously taken my research to questions of intergenerational trauma and displacement. My research has been informed by the traumatic history of Partition, particularly gender based violence in 1947, when colonial India was officially partitioned into two countries – India and Pakistan. There has been a collective amnesia within India pertaining to sexual violence against women during Partition. The unsolved problematics of Partition and consequences of suppression of memory is reflected in the official silence around its traumatic past; a legacy that has been inherited by contemporary India.

Silence and the unsaid are in themselves a narrative of Partition – a narrative present through the near absence of women’s voices in dominant discourse on the subject. This intensely pregnant silence is not simply felt within Indian academia and political discourses but in Britain as well. Within India though narrative referencing colonial Indian history has largely focused on the independence struggle, it is only in recent years that narratives referencing the history of sexual violence against women have been covered by the media and researched within academia. Not to say there is scarce literature or awareness of the role British women played in furthering British Imperialism for their own political gains. Antoinette Burton writes on how middle-class British feminists invoked images of Indian women as victims awaiting redress at the hands of imperial saviours in order to further their own claims for suffrage and political rights. Burton explains further by saying, “‘The Indian Woman,’ represented almost invariably as a helpless, degraded victim of religious custom and uncivilized cultural practices, signified a burden for whose sake many white women left Britain and devoted their lives in the empire.”