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.