The Long Life of Rumor

Genocidal violence leaves but a broken historical trace. Not surprisingly, therefore, the surviving records of the subcontinent's (1) Partition are marked by their fragmentariness. They move, in fits and starts, through jerks and breaks and silences--incoherent, stuttering, even incomprehensible--between the poles of testimony and rumor. Testimony, Langer notes, is "a form of remembering." Rumor, by contrast, is a form of doing--of making happen--by telling. (2) The record of Partition clearly bears the mark of both. The importance of first-person testimony (for the judge, as for the historian) requires no underlining. "I was there"; "I saw"; "I can name"; "I recognize"; and (more than occasionally for the journalist, as well as for the historian, though less commonly, we are told, for the judge) "I learned from the most reliable witnesses." Testimony's method is that of particularizing and individualizing, specifying sites and bodies that carry the marks of particular events, making "real" in everyday, physical, nameable terms. Its difficulty in the "limit case" is that it needs to articulate an unparalleled, "unthinkable" history struggling to find voice. How does the witness share "the particularity, the unshareability, and the incommunicability of pain in torture"? (3) How can we speak for the dead, who are no longer present? How can we t estify on behalf of the dead, if we are not dead? How can anyone who is not a Muselmann know what it is to be a Muselmann, as historians of the Holocaust have repeatedly said? (4) The importance of rumor in the record of violence is also established, though perhaps more in the matter of its making than in that of its evaluation or reconstruction. Rumor moves in a direction almost contrary to that of testimony: generalizing, exalting to extraordinary (even miraculous) status, and employing the sweeping terms of deluge and just desserts (actual or impending). In rumor, language is transformed from a mode of (possible) communication to a particular kind of imperative condition, communicable, infectious, possible (and almost necessary) to pass on. The impact of this anonymous, mercurial, fleeting figure is well attested in accounts of the history of violent uprisings--from Lefebvre's and Rude's writings on the French Revolution to Guha's analysis of peasant insurrections in colonial India and Veena Das's account of the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs. (5) That rumor is no stranger also to the written records and oral accounts of 1947 is hardly surprising. How seriously has all this affected our assessment of that moment? It is the purpose of this article to examine the extent to which historical discourse on Partition, from 1947 to today, takes the form of testimony or that of rumor--or hovers between the two. For this purpose, I focus on the twin questions of violence against women and the number of casualties, both of which loom large in the annals of the event. "The figure of the abducted woman became symbolic of crossing borders, of violating social, cultural and political boundaries," Menon and Bhasin write. By the time that the rape, looting, and migrations were finished, "about eight to ten million people had crossed over from Punjab and Bengal ... and about 500,000-1,000,000 had perished." (6) "Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted," writes Butalia. She goes on to note the statistical evidence of "widespread sexual savagery": "about 75,000 women are thought to have been ab ducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion)." (7) Observers described the violence that erupted so fiercely between Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims in 1946 and 1947 as "a war on each other's women" and as a war waged "especially" on women and children. …