Borders and Boundaries is an important contribution to the historiography of partition, specifically in the way that it doesn’t add women to a pre-existing canon, it questions the ways in which such a canon was constructed in the first place. Drawing on feminist historiography, the work interrogates a tradition in which women are primarily cast as objects of history: as victims, refugees, abductees, wives, mothers and metaphors and synonyms of communal honor, rather than as subjects of history with agency and recollections. Conventional histories have tended to be preoccupied with political negotiations, territorial boundaries, communal strife, and male political actors. Women’s experiences were incorporated insofar as they could be seen to exemplify the perils of partition. Feminist historiography shifts the parameters from asking what happened to women? To rather how did women experience, challenge and interpret what happened TO THEM?
The importance of this is not only that it brings a gendered “women’s perspective”, but it redefines what is to be considered history. Women are narrated and interpreted as facts of partition rather than merely bodies upon which Partition acted, merely adding to the horror of it all.

The “recovery” project whereby women post-partition were seen to be humanitarian efforts, but they were intimately enmeshed with patriarchal constructions of community, religion, and honor. Women who had been abducted sometimes created new lives and relationships and in some instances may have derived greater freedom from this than the loves they had led previously. However their wishes could be overridden by the state, which forcibly repatriated them in the name of recovery. The key question is whether they were recognized as citizens who had agency over their lives. This was something the state often denied. Agency over individual lives was always compromised by the imputed honor of religious communities and families, which women and their social public image remains irrevocably attached to.

This reveals a deep contradiction in gendered citizenship, the state could provide women with identity as citizens, while simultaneously treating their bodies as collective properties once issues of religion, reproduction, sexuality, and communal honor were raised.

What is most insidious about this patriarchal logic is the language used by narrators of large-scale “suicides” of women during partition in the terminologies of sacrifice and honor: women who “chose” death rather than suffer sexual violation or bring “dishonor” to their families. We must ask ourselves what society it is that would consider a woman’s death “a choice” when every escape route is blocked off by religion, tradition and social expectations? What are we doing if we celebrate these women without investigating into how it was that their bodies, lives, and death were made the repository of collective honor? Is the recuperation of women from a sexist historical text ever fully possible if we continue to view them in the ways that society created them? To romanticize these deaths as honorable sacrifices is to reproduce the very patriarchal logic that rendered women’s lives expendable in the name of collective honor.

Ultimately, Borders and Boundaries demonstrates, that it’s not enough just to recover women’s lives from the archive. What then as we see it, must be recovered is the historical subjecthood of women: their existence not simply as passive objects of partition and the state, communities, and men, but as human beings who inhabited, navigated, challenged and were frequently denied agency within those environments.