This article seeks to recover the experience and agency of refugee women during the process
of rehabilitation after Partition, focusing on technical training.2
It explores the ideas that
underpinned the process of rehabilitating refugee women in the immediate years following the
Partition of India in August 1947, within the Bombay state. This article contributes to attempts in
the historiography to challenge conventional histories of Partition that have marginalised
women and focuses on recovering the agency of refugee women in rebuilding and reshaping
their lives.3
It will be argued that the Bombay state’s notions of gender shaped and informed
the type and content of rehabilitation that unattached refugee women4
received. Whilst the
state showed little evidence of any genuine concern regarding the welfare of refugee women,
unofficial organisations designed and implemented various schemes to rehabilitate refugee
women. This article will reveal the fraught and unequal relationship, between a relatively absent
state, and these unofficial organisations.