By Anj Handa
Fourteen, and no say
Content note: this piece mentions abduction, killing and child marriage.
My aunt was fourteen when she was married. Nobody asked her. At fourteen, she had no say. She had been abducted arounf the time of the British Partition of India and was later recovered from a refugee camp in Jalandhar. Soon after, she was married to my dad’s second cousin. She had grown up in the same village as my dad, near Jammu, in what was then the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
She went on to become the matriarch of our family, but that came later. A childhood friend of my dad’s, she was married to his older second cousin. Over time, as they entered adulthood in England, she became closer to my dad than his own sisters were.
Recovered, then decided for
After Partition, India and Pakistan agreed to find and return women abducted in the violence. Historians put the number at 75,000 to 100,000. Women were often sent back to families and countries whether they wanted to go or not. Some had married and had children by then, but their wishes counted for little.
A recovered girl carried the weight of her family’s honour, and a quick marriage settled the question of what to do with her. Her family, or the officials who recovered her, decided.
Who gets to decide?
Sunday 11 October is International Day of the Girl Child. This year’s theme is End child marriage and invest in girls’ rights. UNICEF estimates that one in five girls worldwide is married before 18, around 650 million women and girls alive today.
Child marriage is usually explained as culture or poverty, but that wasn’t my aunt’s story. She, along with her mother and sister, was abducted by raiders who killed their menfolk at her sister’s post-wedding celebrations. What happened before her recovery is not known, because she didn’t say.
Child marriage is what happens when the people deciding a girl’s future answer to honour, community or the state, rather than to her.
It’s closer to home than many assume. England and Wales only raised the minimum age of marriage to 18 in February 2023. The same law made it a criminal offence to arrange a marriage for anyone under 18, including religious and cultural ceremonies that are never legally registered.
Globally, the money has never matched the scale. Before recent aid cuts, only 0.025% of official development assistance went to programmes focused mainly on ending child marriage: less than a dollar a year for each girl at risk. The UK is now cutting its aid budget to 0.3% of national income by 2027.
In practice, investment means funding what keeps a girl in the room when decisions about her are made: school, an income of her own, and specialist women’s and girls’ organisations that know their communities.
Investing in girls’ rights starts with hearing their voices.
Sherawali
I am writing my aunt’s story, and the stories of the women around her, in my debut book, working title Sherawali: Women, Partition and the Names We Almost Lost. It traces my family lines through the British Partition of India in 1947 with a feminist lens: the agency of the women at its centre, and the structural conditions that silenced them.
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England’s Developing your Creative Practice grant, I will shortly undertake in-country research for the book.
My aunt’s family know I am telling her story. She found her voice later. This is my telling of her story, as best I can.
About Anj Handa
Anj Handa is the founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers, a Leeds-based consultancy specialising in inclusive governance, intersectional equity and systems change. She brings twenty years of practice in UK civil society, fifteen as an independent specialist.
She works with boards and leadership teams in charities, women’s organisations and cultural bodies, holding space for the conversations they can’t have in regular meetings: who gets to decide, and whose voices are missing when they do.
If that’s a conversation your organisation needs to have, visit www.inspiringwomenchangemakers.co.uk or get in touch.
Sources
UNICEF: International Day of the Girl 2026
Girls Not Brides: Progress to end child marriage falls short (2026)
Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998)
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (1998)
