Between Home and Work: The Many Cities of Refuge in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s ‘Shei Chheleta’

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which Jyotirmoyee Devi, in her short story ‘Shei Chheleta’, maps post-partition Delhi to make visible women who were abducted during Partition and are silenced and forgotten in dominant historical narratives and memories of families and communities. The city that in the years following Partition and independence was at the centre of the discourses of refugee rehabilitation on the one hand and nation-building and development on the other, is mapped through women’s everyday occupation in the story. While tracing the routes and routines that young, respectable refugee women traverse for education and work in the city, and in the everyday domestic chores of the refugee homes, the author also explores the spaces of leisure, rest, and wandering that lie in between these routines. Through these, she offers a glimpse into the multiple lateral cities that are embedded in the capital city, as well as the women who disappear in them for the sake of urban and moral order.

Keywords

• lateral cities
• refugee
• abducted women
• home
• partition