• Dhanya Praveen Kumar

Conflicts in the world has witnessed women being singled out for rape, confinement, torment and execution. Violence against women, chiefly rape, has added its own marque of ignominy to recent wars. Sexual abuse of women erodes the composition of a community in a way that few weapons can. The result of rape can be devastating because of the deep-seated communal corollary to the violation and agony imprinted on the families. The harm perpetrated in such circumstances on a woman by a rapist is an attack on her family and culture, as in many societies women are perceived as repositories of a community's cultural and moral values. The paper analyses the works of three popular women writers from the Indian Subcontinent who have dealt with the historical background of instances of communal and political violence. The works taken for study are Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man, Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja and Mahasweta Devi's short story “Draupadi”. The first work deals with the partition of India and its aftermath and the second work portrays the anti-Hindu riots that broke out in parts of Bangladesh soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The short story by Mahasweta Devi deals with state sponsored violence unleashed during the Naxalbari movement. Both novels highlight how trauma of sexual violence blurs national boundaries and how the women involved are torn apart by their losses. The short story focusses on women from indigenous groups who become double oppressed when they become victims of sexual violence perpetrated by upper caste men. The paper attempts to trace the gendered impact of communal or state sponsored violence on the female characters caught in the confines of domesticity but at the same time they engage with historical, political, and economic dimension of public space. The objective of the paper is to examine the fictional representations of women caught in the crossfire of communal violence and disharmony.

gendered violence, rape, communal violence, double oppressed

"WOMEN IN THE CROSSFIRE: A STUDY OF GENDERED VIOLENCE IN COMMUNAL AND POLITICAL CONFLICTS", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 3, page no.958-963, March-2019, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRAG06198.pdf

"WOMEN IN THE CROSSFIRE: A STUDY OF GENDERED VIOLENCE IN COMMUNAL AND POLITICAL CONFLICTS", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 3, page no. pp958-963, March-2019, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRAG06198.pdf