Imagining Freedom: Woman, Nation, Archive

• In Event: Shards of the Colonial Imaginary: Iconicity and the Counter-Archive

Abstract

This paper uncovers acts of freedom undertaken by women who were forcibly exchanged between India and Pakistan during the making of the partitioned states (1947). Independence from British rule through Partition injured women in the name of rescue. In what alternate ways, I ask, did women imagine freedom? I read post-rape images, medical humanitarian archives, and Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White’s photojournalism, to uncover women’s quiet, imperfect, and fleeting acts of freedom. I analyze iconic photos to give an account of displaced women as anticolonial subjects, an account missing from South Asian Studies’ vast research on the topic.

Presenter

• Rijuta Mehta, Connecticut College