Bodies Without Borders: The Woman as Other in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood

Abstract

This paper reads Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (1950) and Buchi Emecheta’s The
Joys of Motherhood (1979) through Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman
as the Other—the being defined always in relation to a masculine subject rather
than in and for herself. Although the two novels emerge from radically
different histories—the communal violence of India’s Partition and the colonial
disruption of Igbo society in Nigeria—they converge on a single figure: the
woman whose body is claimed, named, and moved by others while she herself
is denied the standing of a sovereign self. Puro, abducted and forcibly renamed
Hamida, becomes in Pritam’s own phrase a “skeleton” belonging to neither the
family that disowns her nor the community that seizes her; Nnu Ego, whose
worth is measured entirely by her fertility, gives everything to her children and
dies alone at the roadside, her motherhood “joyful” only in the novel’s bitter
irony. Reading the two together under the rubric of “bodies without borders,”
the paper argues that both protagonists are Others precisely because their
bodies are made to cross borders—communal, national, marital, colonial—that
their selves are never permitted to author. It attends to three shared
mechanisms of othering: the body as communal or reproductive property, the
erasure and re-inscription of the woman’s name, and confinement to what
Beauvoir called immanence. Drawing on Partition scholarship (Butalia; Menon
and Bhasin) and postcolonial feminist critique (Spivak; Oyẹ́wùmí), the paper
also asks where Beauvoir’s largely European framework must be qualified, and
locates in both novelists’ insistence on their heroines’ interiority a quiet but
real refusal of the objecthood their societies impose.