Abstract
The paper aims at understanding and explaining mass-suicide of Sikh women in
Thoa Khalsa village during the onslaught of violence in Rawalpindi district in
March 1947. It first looks into the operative beliefs that were at play behind
gendered violence targeted against women, and then describe the incident of selfkillings in Thoa Khalsa followed by exploring the place of Thoa Khalsa incident in
Sikh memorialisation. Women, particularly the Sikh women, became vulnerable
targets of familial violence because her body came to be seen as a site of family
and community honour which needed to be rescued from any defilement from the
religious “other”. In this regard, the tragic episode of self-killings of Sikh women
in Thoa Khalsa village stands out as a reference unmatched in the entire Partition
historiography. In March 1947, in the wake of the attack by the Muslim rioters the
Sikh women sacrificed their lives by drowning into a well to escape suffering and
humiliation from the perpetrators of violence. Sikh women were treated as symbol
of a macro-community and their dishonour was linked to the Sikh panth. For this
reason, their act of mass-drowning was viewed not as “community-orchestrated
murder”; but it was rather hailed as an act of heroism and bravery which upheld
the honour and chastity of the Sikh community.
Misbah Umar, Fozia Umar. (2020) Gendered Violence and Pre-emptive Killings of Women in Thoa Khalsa Locale of Rawalpindi, 1947, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, Volume 57, Issue-4.
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