Abstract
The Partition of India in 1947 displaced approximately 15 million people, transforming settled citizens into refugees overnight. Chaman Nahal’s novel Azadi offers a profound literary account of this transformation, capturing both the universal refugee condition and the specific, gendered experiences of women. This paper first examines how Azadi portrays the refugee as a figure of displacement, trauma, and loss of identity from the destruction of home to the degradation of life in camps and the bureaucratic cruelty of rehabilitation. It then turns to the particular vulnerabilities of women refugees, analyzing how women’s bodies become battlegrounds for communal honor, how patriarchal structures compound their suffering, and how the novel also reveals women’s quiet resistance. Through close reading of characters such as Lala Kanshi Ram, Sunanda, Prabha Rani, and Isher Kaur, this paper argues that Azadi presents the refugee experience as fundamentally layered. While all refugees lose their homes, women refugees lose their bodily autonomy, privacy, and safety in ways that male characters do not face.