Sketch the character of sunderlal of short story lajwanti
Answers
Explanation:
of human hands."
-A Punjabi Folk Song.
Outline:
“Lājwantī” by Rajinder Singh Bedi explores the plight of abducted women during the violence and upheaval of the Subcontinent’s partition in 1947. Sundarlal, an abusive husband whose own wife went missing during the conflict, actively campaigns for the repatriation of abducted women but is taken aback by the unsettling emotional transformations that attend the acceptance of his own wife back into his home. Bedi raises the problem of silence—the inability of survivors and perpetrators of violence to talk about what happened—which is a common theme in partition literature. One issue astutely raised by students in this course was that Bedi’s choice of narrational mode serves utterly to silence the main female character Lājwantī herself. In any event, the stark emotional landscape of partition violence is chillingly captured in this remarkable short story by a leading writer of the generation that lived through it.
Summary:
Rajinder Singh Bedi is considered the second best, Saadat Hasan Manto is the highest regarded, Urdu short story writer. Like Manto, his best known work centers on the immense human cost of the of the 1947 Partition of India into Pakistan and India. Much the worst of this holocaust (death tolls range from 1/2 a million on up to 2 million) was felt by the women as men of diverse groups took their revenge by raping and abducting women of other groups. Hundreds of thousands of Hindu women were abducted by Muslin and vice-versa. Many of the women killed themselves from shame.
Bedi (1915 to 1984) was born in Punjab region of Pakistan and moved to India at the time of the Partition.
He was educated in Urdu. In his early working career he was a postal clerk. Later on he got a job at All India Radio. It was there he began his writing career. From here he moved to script writing for Bollywood movies and then into directing. It will be for his 72 short stories that he is remembered.
"Lajawanti" is about a once happily married couple. Then in the riots that resulted in the Partition of India (the effects were at their very worse in the Punjab region where the story is set and where Bedi grew up) the wife Lajawanto was kidnapped. It is also a story about human cruelty. Not just the cruelty of the abductors but of the husbands and family of the abducted women.
As the story opens we see Lajawanti expects to be beaten. It is part of the marriage custom
and it almost seems a wife regards a husband who never beats her as "unmanly". Then she is abducted and taken over the border. Years go by and her husband tries to get along with his life. In time Pakistan and India authorities begin to arrange for the swapping of abducted women. A truck load of Hindu women would be exchanged for a truck load of Muslim women. There were lots of problems and quarrels over this. Sometimes men of one side managing the exchange would complain that all they are getting back is "useless old and middle aged women". The real cruelty to the women in many cases came when they returned.
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