Lajwanti tells the story of Sunder Lal’s wife lajwanti, who gets separated from him during the

sectarian
violence. Lajwanti also refers to the name of a touch-me-not plant that has the unique quality of
shrinking and curling up its leaves when it is touched. As Jill Didur observes: “the plant is popularly
named lajwanti because its curling action has been seen as indictive of shyness or shame, hence the root
‘laaj’ which refers to shame”(2006,60). The Rehabilitation committee in Sunder lal’s community sings a
Pinjabi folksong that refers to the lajwanti plant as they march through the area, suggesting an analogy
between the plant and abducted women. The lyrics state, “This is the touch-me-not; it shrivels up at a
mere touch”

The lyrics of the song also appear to have an ambivalent connotation for the Rehabilitation Committee
and the community it is trying to influence. The community looks down at the abducted women as
polluted the ambivalent interpretation of lajwanti’s curling action may be out of shyness, fear and or
shame. This resonates with the community’s ambiguous response to the recovered women. The
community seemed to respond well to other rehabilitation activites, but as the narrator comments:

As like in the previous chapters of the present study, women like Lajwanti when returned to the
domestic sphere of their own community, were often seen as polluted, having come in contact with the
‘other’ community. The folksong in this respect can be also construed as referring to the consequences
of having one’s honour defiled. It resonates with the response of many people in the community who
rejected the women once they returned. The return and the rejection are explicitly detailed in the
narrative:

Lajwanti is a story set in colonial India's partition days in a small village Mulla Shakoor where there is a
small but ambitious rehabilitating society for 'abducted' women, which carries out daily peaceful
processions inspiring the village to accept such women back to their homes and households. Sunder Lal
who is although not much eloquent sounds quite credible because his wife whose name is Lajwanti is
also abducted and while the procession often chants a local song that uses the word Lajwanti to show
how it curls up if touched. Sunder Lal feels nervous every time this name is repeated, although
inadvertently as far as his wife's name is concerned. He is embarrassed but doesn‟t reveal this to others.
When he comes to know that his wife has been found, Bedi has cleverly showed, how he escapes
revealing his emotions about it. Readers wish to know if he is really happy or like many others,
somewhere he too feels that she should have committed suicide or died. He is unable to come to terms
with the reality of an abducted woman back to her home after her chastity has been violated

It is although a matter of choice to read a text with a particular perspective, Lajwanti offers multiple
choices of responses where it can be approached at different point of entries. Lajwanti's silence, which is
the matter at hand, resonates with all such discourses in suppression. Lajwanti the character's absence
from most of the length of the story is remarkable and that makes her short and silent presence felt
strongly. She lingers in the agonized subconscious of Sunder Lal. The story, on the one hand, echoes the
loss of a particular person, if looked at psychoanalytically and on the other it ekes out a narrative of
distress of those who are displaced by forces of communal hatred and violence. This violence is also a
result of an utter failure in realizing the pitilessness sprung out of lust and despicable immorality. Sunder
Lal is not a result of an author's imagination, he dwells within spaces of an uneasy adjustment with a
strange situation that calls to duty a soul reverberating with remorse without retribution, a situation
akin to the near and dear ones of the 75000 women 'abducted' during and as a result of S. Z. Abbas- To
speak or not to speak?": Silence and Trauma in Rajinder Singh Bedi's 'Lajwanti' and Sa‘adat Hasan
Manto’s 'Open It' EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 8 / November 2015 9187 partition.
(Butalia: 4) Instead of Lajwanti it is Sunder Lal who seems to curl up when he has to do what he preaches
others, to rehabilitate "unattached women" (Butalia 279) in their hearts. As the story goes on when Miss
Mridula Sarabhai arranges for the exchange of these unfortunate women, there are some in the village
Mulla Shakoor who refuse to recognize some of their women and think as to why not those women
committed suicide. These women, who could not die or did not commit suicide, had to suffer the loss of
their own identities and "the possibility of betrayal coded in their everyday relations." (Das 72) Their
communities indulged in what Eyerman calls 'cultural trauma.' He defines it and says: As opposed to
psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional
anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the
social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion. In this sense, the
trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in the community or experienced directly by any or all.
(2) Sunder Lal, the primary witness to this cultural trauma, accepts his woman back but at heart he is
more like those who refuse to do so, the only difference is that he cannot speak it out as he is the
precursor of the local rehabilitation campaign. In doing so he becomes the agent of trauma and its
implications manifested in Lajwanti's silence. R. K. Kaul in a book review says: "Lajwanti" stands out as a
revelation of the treachery in the heart of man. Its protagonist campaigns for the rehabilitation of
abducted women but when confronted with his own wife he is embarrassed rather than relieved by her
return. (Hashmi et al 306) Lajwanti raises questions against social norms of a society surrounded by the
myth-kitty.

Sundar Lal’s devotion to his wife is in a way self-serving — it prevents him from having to
grapple with what has happened. Once Sundar Lal and Lajwanti are reunited, it is Lajwanti
alone who carries the burden of partition’s trauma, bringing into question Dasgupta’s
implication that the brunt of this trauma is experienced in the form of male emasculation.
What is emasculation if not the thwarting of one’s power to take control of one’s own
destiny generally, and one’s sexual autonomy specifically? This is something that women in
India and elsewhere in the world have never been free from. Why must trauma be given a
gender? Dasgupta is not unsympathetic to the women in his book, but he doesn’t include
them in discussions of the Delhi psyche in an equal way.
LAJWANTI  is Punjabi for “touch-me-not,” the flower that shuts its leaves upon human
contact. It is also the title of Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Urdu story about Sundar Lal and his
reunion with his abducted wife, who is also called Lajwanti. Before she was kidnapped —
like thousands of other women — amid the violence surrounding the 1947 partition of India
and Pakistan, Lajwanti was full of vitality and defiance. She was energetic and physically
strong — strengths her husband Sundar Lal tested regularly, beating her over every little
quarrel. One day she is kidnapped. Sundar Lal, distraught over her loss, deeply regrets the
way he treated his wife. Each day, he takes to the streets and rallies for the humane treatment
of once kidnapped wives who, after being rescued and returned to their families, find
themselves ostracized and shunned. Many husbands and parents in India and Pakistan
refused to accept abducted women back into the family, knowing that they had likely
experienced a man’s touch on the other side of the border. Sundar Lal, on the other hand, is
so distraught at the thought of his beloved kidnapped wife that he swears to himself that not
only will he accept her, but he will also treat her better than he ever did in past.
Finally, Sundar Lal discovers that his Lajwanti is back. When he first sees her, he is
dismayed that she looks healthier and a little plumper than she did when she lived with him;
he had expected her to be gaunt and weak. But he remains true to the rhetoric he’s been
preaching all over the village. He takes Lajwanti home. He calls her devi —“goddess,” and
promises never to beat her again. She is overwhelmed with joy. But time passes, and even as
her husband remains obliviously content to have the “queen of his heart” back, Lajwanti is
increasingly disturbed: Sundar Lal won’t let her talk about what’s happened. She feels that
she is losing herself as her husband treats her less like the woman who has stoically endured
abuse from him and abduction from others, and more like the delicate flower that is her
namesake, so fragile that even her husband won’t get close to the real her.
This story is fiction, but many of its elements are universal. The abduction of women, the
cultural pressure to reject them if and when they return, and the women’s own inability to
express their trauma — these things affected many people in the post-partition environment
of India and Pakistan, especially in the border state of Punjab where Lajwanti takes place.

. Because that woman not only is rendered ‘sexually impure’ but is a persisting reminder of the failure
and humiliation of the patriarchal family and the patriarchal community. Patriarchy shifts the
responsibility of its failure back to the woman by expecting her to choose death over loss of honour

Secondly, patriarchal society enacts a split between the recovered woman’s body and soul. The body
which was violated is banished and made invisible and the woman is accepted as a disembodied self.
Even though she is accepted back, she loses her conjugal rights, and is reincarnated as Devi, reborn on
the sacrificial pyre of her body. Lajo, thus could never be the same Lajo again, her body lost forever on
the altar of partition

But like every other recovered woman, Lajo also wanted to tell Sunderlal, ‘all that she had
suffered so that she could feel clean again’ (p.528). But she was silenced every time, by the strange look
in Sunderlal’s eyes. It is crucial that Lajo and other women like her defying patriarchy tell their story to
others. The act of narration only would reinstate such victims to the position of subjecthood, and their
survival itself then would be heroic achievements, not acts of shame and dishonor as patriarchy would
have them believe. It’s only through narrating and sharing and not through erasure, that Lajo could
reclaim her identity and be her true self once again.