Rhetorical situation

Sender

The sender of the essay “Blood” is Urvashi Butalia. She is an Indian feminist publisher and writer, who has written and edited numerous books on women, gender, and communal politics in South Asia. In this excerpt from her essay "Blood," she discusses the Partition of India and the impact it had on the larger South Asian community.

In the second half of the excerpt, Butalia talks about her own experience: “working on a film about Partition for a British television channel, I began to collect stories from its survivors”. She references her own experience researching the Partition as an adult and how the stories she heard impacted her. She says when she was younger, she found many stories “hard to believe” but as an adult, she understood them in a different way: “Now I was hearing them from witnesses whose bitterness, rage and hatred - which, once uncovered, could be frightening - told me that they were speaking the truth. Their stories affected me deeply”. Therefore, although Butalia has never seen herself as directly affected by the Partition, her research has given her a new perspective on the events.

Butalia also refers to how the Partition affected her own family: “Nothing as cruel and bloody had ...