Partitioned lives: narratives of home, displacement, and resettlement 9788131714164, 9789332506206, 8131714160

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
History, Fictional Representations, and Memory......Page 13
Survival and Resettlement......Page 16
Remembering Partition Beyond the Subcontinent......Page 24
Notes......Page 27
Chapter 1: Transcending Religious Identities: Amrita Pritam and Partition......Page 32
Growing Up in Lahore......Page 33
1947, Partition......Page 36
Today I call to Waris Shah13......Page 37
I am the Cursed Daughter of Punjab from History23......Page 41
Helplessness25......Page 43
The Story of Punjab26......Page 44
Divided28......Page 46
Frenzy32......Page 47
Pinjar: A Final Testimony......Page 48
Summing Up......Page 51
Notes......Page 53
References......Page 55
Partition Makes the Nation1......Page 57
History, Testimony, and Fiction in Representing Partition ......Page 60
Towards an Ethnography of Partition Cinema......Page 62
Love, Martyrdom, and (in) Subordination— Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha ......Page 66
Sikh Subjectivities and Partition Narratives: Some Conclusions ......Page 75
Notes......Page 77
References......Page 78
Chapter 3: The Diminished Man: Partition and ‘Transcendental Homelessness’*......Page 81
Arjun in a Divided Maha-Bharata......Page 82
Arjun Homeless in the Modern World......Page 87
Conclusion......Page 93
Notes......Page 94
References......Page 95
Chapter 4: Constructing Post-Partition Bengali Cultural Identity Through Films......Page 96
Films on the Partition of Bengal......Page 111
References......Page 112
Chapter 5: Writing Partition: Trauma and Testimony in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India......Page 113
References......Page 129
Chapter 6: Partition and Post-Partition Acts of Fiction: Narrating Painful Histories......Page 130
Notes......Page 141
References......Page 145
Introduction: Refugees in Kolkata......Page 147
On Memory and Locality......Page 149
Community......Page 151
Violence......Page 164
Government......Page 170
Glossary......Page 174
Notes......Page 175
References......Page 176
Chapter 8: Crossing the Border in Opposite Directions: Two Partition Narratives......Page 177
References......Page 186
Chapter 9: Partition in Transition: Comparative Analysis of Migration in Ludhiana and Lyallpur......Page 187
Mass Migration and the State Response......Page 188
Lyallpur......Page 190
Ludhiana......Page 194
Personal Experiences of Migration......Page 196
Conclusion......Page 201
Notes......Page 202
References......Page 203
Chapter 10: Fires in the Kangra: A British Soldier’s Story of Partition......Page 205
Background......Page 207
‘I was a Lieutenant in the Gurkhas’......Page 211
The Partition: Fires in the Kangra......Page 213
Trains to Pakistan......Page 218
Notes......Page 221
References......Page 222
Chapter 11: ‘Moving Forward Though Still Facing Back’: Partition and the South Asian Diaspora in Canada......Page 223
Notes......Page 241
References......Page 242
Chapter 12: Eternal Exiles in the Land of the Pure: Mohajirs in Mass Transit......Page 245
Notes......Page 256
References......Page 257
Chapter13: Refugee Women, Immigrant Women: The Partition as Universal Dislocation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies......Page 258
Notes......Page 268
References......Page 269
Chapter 14: Srinagar–Muzaffarabad–New York: A Kashmiri Family’s Exile......Page 271
History and Memory......Page 274
1947......Page 276
1952–53: Reform and Exile......Page 279
1989: Insurgency and After......Page 281
Notes......Page 283
References......Page 284
Chapter 15: Against Silence and Forgetting*......Page 286
Partitions of Memory and the 1947 Generation......Page 287
Stories Muted; Tongues Caught......Page 289
The ‘Hinge Generation’......Page 291
Why Rake this Up Again?......Page 293
Conclusion......Page 298
Notes......Page 299
References......Page 301
The Contributors......Page 305
Index......Page 310

Citation preview

Partitioned Lives

00_Roy & Bhatia~prelim1-6.pmd

1

8/8/2007, 10:49 AM

ii

INTRODUCTION

This page is intentionally left blank.

00_Roy & Bhatia~prelim1-6.pmd

2

8/8/2007, 10:49 AM

iii

INTRODUCTION

Partitioned Lives Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement

EDITED BY

ANJALI GERA ROY NANDI BHATIA

00_Roy & Bhatia~prelim1-6.pmd

3

8/8/2007, 2:31 PM

iv

INTRODUCTION

Copyright © 2008 Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd Licensees of Pearson Education in South Asia No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the publisher’s prior written consent. This eBook may or may not include all assets that were part of the print version. The publisher reserves the right to remove any material present in this eBook at any time. ISBN 9788131714164 eISBN 9789332506206 Head Office: A-8(A), Sector 62, Knowledge Boulevard, 7th Floor, NOIDA 201 309, India Registered Office: 11 Local Shopping Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

00_Roy & Bhatia~prelim1-6.pmd

4

8/8/2007, 10:49 AM

v

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia

vii ix

1. Transcending Religious Identities: Amrita Pritam and Partition Nonica Datta 2. Of Love, Martyrdom, and (In)Subordination: Sikh Experiences of Partition in the Films Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha Nicola Mooney

1

26

3. The Diminished Man: Partition and ‘Transcendental Homelessness’ Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

50

4. Constructing Post-Partition Bengali Cultural Identity Through Films Somdatta Mandal

65

5. Writing Partition: Trauma and Testimony in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India 82 Jennifer Yusin and Deepika Bahri 6. Partition and Post-Partition Acts of Fiction: Narrating Painful Histories Sukeshi Kamra

99

7. Growing Up Refugee Manas Ray

116

8. Crossing the Border in Opposite Directions: Two Partition Narratives Shuchi Kothari and Rita Kothari

146

9. Partition in Transition: Comparative Analysis of Migration in Ludhiana and Lyallpur Pippa Virdee

00_Roy & Bhatia~prelim1-6.pmd

5

8/8/2007, 2:31 PM

156

vi

vi

PARTITIONED INTRODUCTION LIVES

10. Fires in the Kangra: A British Soldier’s Story of Partition Deborah Nixon and Devleena Ghosh

174

11. ‘Moving Forward Though Still Facing Back’: Partition and the South Asian Diaspora in Canada Prabhjot Parmar

192

12. Eternal Exiles in the ‘Land of the Pure’: Mohajirs in Mass Transit Amber Fatima Riaz

214

13. Refugee Women, Immigrant Women: The Partition as Universal Dislocation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies Paulomi Chakraborty

227

14. Srinagar–Muzaffarabad–New York: A Kashmiri Family’s Exile Shubh Mathur

240

15. Against Silence and Forgetting Jonathan D. Greenberg

255

Notes on the Editors and the Contributors Index

274 279

00_Roy & Bhatia~prelim1-6.pmd

6

8/8/2007, 10:49 AM

vii

INTRODUCTION

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to this book. We gratefully acknowledge and thank Debjani M. Dutta at Pearson Education India for her faith and interest in this project; Bill Ashcroft for reading an earlier paper on geographies of displacement; Serge Libermann for providing a guided tour of being a Jewish writer in-place and out-of-place in Australia; fellows and staff at the Humanities Research Centre and Cross Cultural Research Centre, Australian National University (ANU) Canberra, particularly Debjani Ganguly, John Docker and Dipesh Chakravarty, for believing that more stories need to be told; Arvind Kalia for the valuable archives at the three ANU libraries; Devleena Ghosh and Paul Gillen for their invitation to talk to faculty and students at Trans/forming Cultures, University of Technology at Sydney; Patrick Wolfe for the Irish take on partitioned lives; Ralph Crane for tales of the Raj; and Steven Muecke and Heather Goodall for their work on oral histories and testimonies. Thanks also to Rosanne Kennedy, Simone Gigliotti, and Julia Emberley for the opportunity to present some of the ideas from the introduction at the ‘Testimony and Witness’ conference at ANU in February 2006, and to Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer for their example and encouragement on further developing these ideas, at the same conference. We owe special thanks to Heather Goodall for her enormously useful critical input on this project; to Ian Talbot for giving very productive suggestions; to Teresa Hubel for invaluable comments; Jill Didur for conversations; and to Satish Saberwal for reading parts of the manuscript and pointing towards new published and unpublished material. We wish to acknowledge the contributors of this volume for their support of the book and the timely completion of their papers. We also acknowledge the books and journals where the following papers first appeared: Manas Ray’s ‘Growing Up Refugee’ in History Workshop Journal, 53, 2002; an earlier version of Shuchi Kothari and Rita Kothari’s essay in Indian Journal of World Literature and Culture, vol 1.1 January–June 2004: 95–100; and Nonica Datta’s

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

7

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

viii

ANJALI GERA PARTITIONED ROY AND NANDI LIVES BHATIA

essay in Assertive Religious Identities: India and Europe (Manohar, 2006), edited by S. Saberwal and M. Hasan. Thanks are also due to the University of Western Ontario for providing institutional and research travel support, and to the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur for granting leave and assistance for working on the project. In particular, we wish to thank Partition survivors, family members, and friends who have shared stories and conversations over the years, enabling a better understanding of the complexities of relocation and displacement, and providing the inspirational energy for this book: Gurbux Singh Bhatia, Joginder Bhatia, Harbans Singh Bhatia, Shyama Bhatia, Amrik Singh Seera, Dalbir Singh Aulakh and Raghvinder Aulakh, Daulat Ram, Dayanand, Krishan Lal Gera, Om Prakash Gera, Santosh Gera, Motiram Kalra and Satwanti Kalra. Thanks to Preet, Ruby, and Vishal for constant support, and to Arif for being so delightful. To the Roys for a glimpse into the Partition in the east, and to Sayan for his understanding.

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

8

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

ix

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

On 28 May 2005, The Tribune, a newspaper published from Chandigarh, reported on the potential eviction of Partition refugees in Rajpura, Punjab from their temporary government-allotted accommodation, lovingly called Kasturba Sewa Ashram by its inhabitants.1 The government’s attempt to reclaim its land provoked panic amongst these refugees who faced the prospect of another displacement. Even though the Pepsu Township Development Board that issued the notice for eviction provides ‘unsafe’ construction as the reason for the notice, the underlying motive for eviction and reclamation may be the soaring property price of the land. The story itself remains a local affair, and despite the attention that Partition has received—especially since 1997 with the emergence of scholarly investigation of a deeply introspective nature on the ongoing trauma of Partition with its varied memories and meanings for ordinary people—this story remains excluded from national attention. And yet the story is important for several reasons. It raises questions regarding nation-building in the host countries and the meanings and implications of state protection for Partition migrants. According to Om Prakash, president of the ashram, We have used our meagre incomes to make this place liveable. For 55 years we have been living here in the hope that the government would allot us this land someday. But we have had no luck. Till 1970 we used to get Rupees 35 per month as ration from the state. But now we don’t even get that. It is painful to witness the state’s apathy. If we are thrown out, where does the government expect us to go? (The Tribune, 28 May 2005).

Clearly, for this community, fears regarding adequate state protection have been revived nearly 60 years later and jogged memories of the Partition, which is still remembered as a tragedy, something that Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya call ‘dramatic’ with its ‘refugee movements, whose scale even at that time was described

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

9

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

x

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

as unprecedented in human history’ (2000: 8). Moreover, the impossibility of this community’s return to places left behind explains why Partition may become the central defining moment of their lives, giving way to anger, despair, unsettlement, and even nostalgia—critical or uncritical—for their pre-Partition lives. Scholars agree that the Partition involved the forced migration of about 12 million people who moved across borders to their newly identified homes in India and East and West Pakistan, cost approximately one million lives in riots and resulted in the abduction of nearly 75,000 women (Butalia 1994; Menon and Bhasin 1998). Descriptions of violence by survivors are well known by now: images of trains filled with corpses as they arrived on both sides of the border, mutilated bodies, forcible parading of women and men on streets, tattooing of women’s bodies with symbols of the other religion, forced religious conversions, separation of family members and abandonment of homes. Partition is remembered as a time of great uncertainty, humiliation, anger, sadness and trauma but also one of survival and triumph about having recovered and bounced back from the tremendous personal and material loss.The work of recovering ordinary people’s stories about the Partition has begun in the last decade through a return to literary representations, survivors’ testimonies and unofficial documents.These stories avoid building Partition as a grand narrative of violence, revealing instead variegated responses of diverse ‘Partitioned subjects’ to its traumatizing violence before, during and immediately after Partition. Of note are the testimonies collected by Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence (1998) and Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin in Borders and Boundaries (1998). Striking for the vividness and detail with which individuals recount moments of violence, of frenzied mob killings, arduous travels with and without food and belongings, and the loss of family members and friends along the way, they offer analysis that questions the inadequacy of law and order, the complicity of police in the violence, and their own vulnerabilities. Additionally, creative and personal narratives assembled by Alok Bhalla (1994) and Mushirul Hasan (1997) in their collections of Partition stories, historical and critical essays by Settar and Gupta in Pangs of Partition (2002), Sukeshi Kamra’s Bearing Witness (2002), and Jill Didur’s critical analysis in Unsettling Partition (2007), to name a few, usefully recover the hitherto buried creative writing inspired by the Partition that intervenes in the elite nationalist scholarship which deals primarily with official documents, private papers, and political biographies of those in power and accords ‘short shrift’ to the personal stories of the people.2 Drawing on published diaries, excerpts from autobiographies, personal accounts, poems, stories and interviews, Hasan (1997), for instance, provides a wide array of individual and collective experiences of migration, nostalgia, and refugee trauma during and after the Partition, as does the collection of stories edited by Alok Bhalla (1994).3 In explaining the role of these stories, Bhalla emphasizes the multiple uses of memory. While in some instances, memory offers a vision to ‘counter-violence’, memory of

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

10

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xi

INTRODUCTION

the past also offers a ‘source of dignity in the present.’ Says Bhalla, ‘the history of atrocities is not forgotten, but neither is a life of connectedness. The archives of memory are used, not only to explore the life of greed and violence, but also as a source for a life of communal togetherness again’ (ibid.: xxx–xxxi). Collectively, these works address issues pertaining to the many silences surrounding the Partition: historiographical, personal, state-inflicted silences, and the silencing of women, of children and of communities. Yet the story of the Rajpura refugees recounted above reinforces that the personal narrative of Partition is still unfolding and demands the further recovery of ‘unofficial histories’ that demonstrate the ways in which Partition marked a new temporality, created not just through the violence of sectarian bloodbath but also through altered geographies whose impact continues to be felt in the adjustments individuals and families were compelled to make in their everyday lives. The further unfolding of such stories, which have left their imprint on the minds and bodies of survivors and refugees, on cities and localities, and live in the memories of those residing in the subcontinent and in the West, constitutes one of the central concerns of Partitioned Lives. In so doing, the book moves to the afterlife of Partition by focusing on the slow and continuous struggle of selves, communities and refugees to resettle in new places and to bring their experiences in dialogue to describe the comparative and interlinked dimensions of migration. In order to ensure the inclusion of a range of voices, this book brings together essays that provide accounts of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh experiences, of Bengali, Sindhi, and Kashmiri refugees, the experiences of domiciled British who remained on the margins of the Raj, and perceptions of migrants in Canada, the USA and Australia.We uncover such stories through a multidisciplinary approach which, in addition to bringing together personal testimonies, interviews, and local histories, also examines fictional forms such as literature and film. The recovery of another layer of Partition history and its multidimensional memories through testimonies, interviews, autobiographical narratives, fiction, literature and cinema in this book addresses several key themes that open up new and intersecting grounds for understanding the meanings of partitioned lives. First, it demonstrates the complexity of Partition through an acknowledgement of its effects across a range of geographical terrains within the subcontinent and beyond. Second, it addresses the ways in which memories of Partition continue to circulate across generations within the subcontinent, and mediate and intersect with the everyday realities and negotiations of diasporic communities in the homelands they occupy. Finally, it pays attention to the importance of memory and postmemory, evoking in the process comparisons with the trauma and mourning for loss of homelands that marks conditions of other forms of (involuntary or forced) migrancy, without minimizing the magnitude and scale of violence and displacement during Partition.To this end, the book highlights literary–cultural representations as important tools of

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

11

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xii

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

memory work in which narratives of home, dislocation and resettlement are never presented transparently but are instead refracted and analysed through the creative process of using the visual, verbal, and nuance, which allows us to explore the significance of Partition in the present. As well, it throws light on the ‘many faceless “victims” of Partition’—Dalit sweepers such as Moti and labourers such as Hari the gardener in Cracking India, for example; people who, in Pandey’s words, ‘stayed or fled at Partition, to face new circumstances and build new lives and communities, in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh’ (2001: 20). Given the widening circulation of Indian films among the global circuits and networks of dispersed populations from India, such attention to the creative renderings of Partition is significant; enabling, as it does, a reassessment of Partition for global audiences.

HISTORY, FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS, AND MEMORY Memory demands poetic license. —Bapsi Sidhwa (1991: 149)

In assembling the literary and the fictional, alongside personal interviews and histories, we do not privilege a particular kind of narrative or genre. Rather, we want to emphasize that these varied literary and cultural accounts complement, supplement, dialogue with and critically interrupt testimonial and historical frames of storytelling (and are in turn interrupted by them), and in so doing enable one more step towards unravelling the entanglements of the historical and the personal.Traditional historical methodologies, as Pandey points out, have been dismissive of personal recollections as bearing the imprint of bias, distortion and even exaggeration and viewed them as imposing difficulties regarding the ‘nature of evidence and the modes of analysis and representation employed in historical discourse’ (1994: 214), along with the treatment of these narratives as ‘authentic’, reliable or factual (Pandey 2001).Yet testimonial accounts, in addition to being personal emotional recollections, provide important insights into sectarian strife, violence, and trauma—issues that are of central concern to the historian. In the absence of official records about a ‘people’s history’ and the difficulty of framing and establishing historical ‘truths’, personal testimonies, argue Butalia and Menon and Bhasin, become crucial to the revisionist historiographer’s task of reconstructing an alternative story.4 Accordingly, they use testimonies of destitute women to communicate an experience of the Partition through voices that have remained silent.5 To this end, Butalia’s recovery of ‘hidden histories’ of men, women and children, about whose stories of atrocities experienced during Partition there continues to be a resounding silence, makes an important intervention in elite representations of the Partition.

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

12

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xiii

INTRODUCTION

Yet the fears of some survivors in confronting the past and their inability to publicly circulate their stories, limits our access to personal histories. Further, experiences as recounted in testimonies may be ideologically constituted, depending on the socio-personal location of the subject and mediated by a wide array of factors: gender, class, religion, ethnicity or the political moment at which they may be recalled. Memories of Partition constitute a fragmented, multiple, and contradictory vision of the event because ‘so much depends on who remembers, when, with whom, to whom, and how’ (Butalia 1998: 141).They also continue to resurface because of the ongoing political tensions that have emerged in the violence following the 1984 massacre of Sikhs, the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, the skirmishes in Kargil that exposed the historical fault lines of the formation of the two nations, the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan, and the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat (see Kaul 2002). In this context, literary–cultural representations that insert personal experiences within specific sociological frames acquire special relevance.6 They become tools for reconstructing fragmented histories and supplementing the gaps in personal stories and testimonies.Through the literary techniques and devices of storytelling, dialogue, flashback, description, and autobiography, for example, they weave meaningful stories that enable discussion of questions of violence, agency, communalism, and silence. To make sense of personal testimonies then requires a return to cultural and fictional archives that both affirm the experiences of the Partitionaffected populace and function as discursive spaces that allow the silenced subject to speak, interpret, and raise critical questions. By giving meaning to the stories of those whose experiences may otherwise remain obscure, literary and cultural artefacts signal the elaboration of the personal and make a valuable contribution to the historian’s project of recovering alternative histories, however partial or subjective. This is not because literary–cultural texts make claims to ‘authenticity’ or ‘accuracy’. Rather, the ‘poetic license’ that creative writers exercise becomes a device that facilitates the fictional means to corroborate the compelling memories of the time—memories that remain etched in the collective consciousness of Partition survivors—and allows writers, filmmakers, poets and artists to assume responsibility for what is forgotten and what they can reconstruct. And the revival of such memories through literary texts, leads to the resurgence of hidden or suppressed histories that de-stabilize and challenge official ones.7 Such destabilization is crucial since official histories have contributed tremendously to the ‘forgetting’ of the human dimension of Partition. On one level, such ‘forgetting’ has been enabled through the preoccupation with statistical analysis, dates and the ‘bare truth’ to produce narratives that suppress the terrible human experiences, and through such suppression engendered a ‘collective amnesia’ about the past and contributed to myth-making regarding the illustrious achievements

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

13

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xiv

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

and glories of the nation and its leaders (see Pandey 1994, 2001). On another level, the state’s lack of memorialization, as Butalia argues, contributes to such forgetting by effacing institutional memory of the Partition.8 Yet literary and cultural texts and artefacts also function as memorials, memorials that are especially important in light of the absence of other public or sculptural monuments to commemorate the event of Partition, and remind us of the immense significance they hold for publicly remembering and reconstructing the pain, suffering, and survival of Partition.9 They piece together memories of a history that speaks to those whose stories remain outside the orbit of official historical and public access and rigorously question the precepts of official narratives. Written or produced, in many cases, decades after the event of the Partition, they engage strategies of remembering the past to undertake the much-needed task of historical reconstruction and analysis of the effects in different parts of the subcontinent and elsewhere. As such they can be characterized as narratives of memory, which David K. Herzeberger, writing in the context of the Spanish ‘novel of memory’, identifies as ‘fictions that evoke past time through subjective remembering, most often through first person narration’ (1991: 34–45). It is also imperative that the stories narrated by survivors to strangers, sometimes several decades after the occurrence of the traumatic event, be separated from family histories that have been passed down to the ‘hinge generation’ that grew up dominated by narratives of those that preceded their birth, an experience that Marianne Hirsch identifies as ‘postmemory’. Hirsch (1997: 22) considers the importance of postmemory ‘precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’. The concept of postmemory, which Jonathan Greenberg’s paper in this volume develops in relation to the autobiographical narratives of Urvashi Butalia, Sudhir Kakar, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Prabhjot Parmar develops in relation to Deepa Mehta and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s creative works, may be employed to understand the ‘complexity’ of the memories of the children of survivors.The stories that ‘the hinge generation’ chose to remember were not always the violent ones told to outsiders or those fictionalized. Rather, these generations’ ‘imaginative investment and creation’ is apparent in their personalization of the trauma of Partition and transformation of the tales of victimhood into those of triumph.These stories might be of smaller and abstract losses retold by those who did not suffer as greatly as others, but they need to be told nevertheless. The book therefore also examines the responses of the second generation whose postmemory signposts the listener to the afterlife of Partition. How survivors and their families ‘reconstituted’ themselves in the shadow of the violence, is analysed in Deborah Nixon and Devleena Ghosh’s conversations with a British soldier on duty in Kangra during the Partition; in Rita Kothari and Shuchi Kothari’s retrieval of the memories of two migrants—a Hindu who migrated from Sindh to India and a Muslim who migrated to Pakistan; and in Shubh Mathur’s

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

14

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xv

INTRODUCTION

conversations with a Kashmiri family. These papers also highlight the domain of the listener, whose mediating voice speaks for, interrupts, or represents the voice of the speaker.

SURVIVAL AND RESETTLEMENT Scholars agree that the Partition displaced and uprooted more than 12 million people. However, the experience of these displaced persons was not homogeneous but differentiated by class, caste, gender, occupation, family connections, time and region. A special issue of Seminar devoted to examining differences between Bengal and Punjab shows that unlike the Punjab frontier, migration in the east was as ‘a continuing process’ of ‘slow and agonizing terror and trauma’ facilitated by the porous border (Bagchi 2002). Continuous migration, as Meghna Guha Thakurta (2002) avers, has not only had a curious effect on the social make-up of the region, but the mixture of motives that compelled migrations in the east was conveniently used by the state to accord discriminatory treatment to displaced persons.10 Additionally, as Ravinder Kaur asserts in a recent essay that brings out the tensions between the ‘differing’ experiences, Partition migrants were not united in their misfortune as they are assumed to be (Kaur 2006). Examining the impact of the 1947 partition on the Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar, Ian Talbot (2006) provides important comparative insights into the violence, and processes of demographic transformation, physical reconstruction, and resettlement. And arguing that ‘identical historical and macro-social processes, such as the Partition of India, can bring about different results locally’, Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff investigates Bengali refugees and Muslim settlers in Jharkhand, areas not directly affected by Partition (2004). Other ongoing work demonstrates the differentiated impact of Partition displacement on indigenous tribal groups in Tripura, and in Assam.11 Pia Oberoi refers to ongoing debates regarding the ‘exchange of population’ (as to whether the people forced to flee their homes were indeed refugees) to provide a more complex understanding pertaining to migration flows. She argues that the ‘vast numbers of people who were uprooted from their homes did not, as is expected of persons in refugee situations, lose their citizenship of a state. Rather, they expected that their co-religionists in India and Pakistan would grant them both a nationality and succour’.Yet, Oberoi points out, the ‘displaced persons during Partition had lost the effective protection of the state and would certainly have been able to prove “a well-founded fear of persecution” since this was not a “sanitized exchange of population”’ (2006: 45–46). Providing a comprehensive account, Oberoi reveals the state’s limitations in dealing with intra-national displacement.12 Partition refugees were technically not outside the country of their nationality until the Radcliffe Award

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

15

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xvi

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

was announced, when they found themselves without a nationality and outside the country of their former residence.Yet, as Oberoi observes, ‘Those persons forced to leave their homes at Partition were refugees in a meaningful sense.They were fleeing persecution, individual and generalized, they had crossed international borders in their flight, were unable to return to their homes, and the states in which they sought refuge, though not unwilling eventually to host them, believed that the vast majority of them would return to their places of origin’ (2006: 48). They were seen as refugees because of the failure of available state mechanisms for effective protection for ‘displaced persons’. One finds evidence of this in Pandey’s discussion (in the paper ‘Folding the National into the Local, Delhi 1947–48’) of the discrimination that Muslims faced in refugee camps in Delhi (2001: 121–51); in Dipankar Gupta’s analysis of the shocked response of locals to Delhi’s ‘Punjabi invasion’ (1996: 21–23); and in V. N. Datta’s analysis of the contradictory attitudes seen in residents’ initial sympathy for refugees and eventual resentment when the refugee started becoming a strong business rival (2003: 278). The refugee was welcome in the new country provided s/he remained in her/his place, that is, as the hapless victim and grateful recipient of the philanthropy of the state and its older residents. And even though family links and kinship with those in India contributed towards resettlement, the moment s/he attempted to resist victimhood by stepping out of the resettlement space s/he was allocated, s/he became the object of residents’ hostility and wrath.13 The initial exclusion of the displaced and the refugee from economic and social networks can also be attributed to the problem of translation. The refugee was unable to enter the new landscape due to the foreignness of language. In some cases, the attempt to learn the new language was greeted with mockery and even insult. A refugee who entered school in 1947 and was denied entry to a government-run school on the grounds that he did not have sufficient command over Hindi shares an anecdote that foregrounds the miscommunication resulting from the encounter of Hindi with Punjabi. Answering the schoolmaster’s reservations about admitting him with the assurance ‘tusi vekh laina’ (literally ‘you can see’, but meaning ‘give me a chance’), he further incensed the teacher who interpreted the Punjabi phrase to mean a threat (‘I will show you’).14 The miscommunication caused by the absence of isomorphism between the two North Indian languages defines the distance between Lahore and Delhi that must be traversed by the refugee to enter the enclave of residents. The eventual absorption of Punjabi refugees in the Delhi landscape through the amnesia of residents that Ravinder Kaur (2006) speaks of follows the complex process through which the refugee turns into settler. In some cases, relief mechanisms initiated through relief and rehabilitation committees after 1947 to facilitate the migration of refugees extended the trauma of those they intended to assist. In Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, a statement by the record

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

16

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xvii

INTRODUCTION

clerk of the relief committee at a refugee camp shows the ways in which official apathy is imposed through a method of record-keeping that has no room for human feelings and nuance. Says the record clerk to refugees trying to give a report, We want statistics, nothing but statistics. Just try to understand. I don’t want stories. I want the bare figures—how many died, how many were injured and the extent of their financial loss (Sahni 1988: 214).

The record clerk, in charge of collecting and compiling information, is only interested in what he calls ‘facts’. His quest for minimal information wipes out the human dimension of the stories of refugees.When Harnam Singh tries to interrupt the clerk by trying to tell him about his and his wife’s escape, about the fate of their son and daughter, and of the women and children who jumped into a well, and of those who were abducted or raped, the frustrated clerk, whose job is to accumulate ‘facts’ for newspapers and the ‘Congress Office’ systematically silences Harnam Singh in the following conversation: ‘Name?’ ‘Harnam Singh.’ ‘Father’s name?’ ‘Sardar Gurdial Singh.’ ‘Village?’ ‘Dhok Ilahi Baksh.’ ‘Tehsil?’ ‘Noorpur.’ ‘How many Hindu and Sikh homes?’ ‘Only one Sikh house. My house.’ The scribe raised his head from the register and looked at the man. He was old and tired. ‘Rather Surprising. How did you escape?’ ‘I was on good terms with Karim Khan. In the evening when....’ The scribe raised his finger gesturing him to stop. ‘Any loss of life?’ ‘No. My wife and I escaped, complete in our limbs. My son, Iqbal Singh, was in Noorpur. But I’ve no news of him. My daugher, Jasbir Kaur was in Syyedpur. She jumped into a well and died.’ The scribe raised an admonitory finger. ‘I’m asking you, was there any loss of life?’ ‘I’ve told you my daughter jumped into…’ ‘But she didn’t die in your village?’ ‘No, not in my village.’ ‘Then keep to the facts (Sahni 1988: 215).

Partition narratives are replete with case studies of such treatment given to refugees. Some received several entitlements such as free schooling, rations, allotment of

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

17

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xviii

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

property and so on while the state interpreted and internalized their experiences and desires differently.15 Joya Chatterji (2001) elaborates on the ideological differences between relief offered by the state to Bengali refugees in the years following the Partition and that demanded by refugees themselves. She shows that what the government perceived as a charitable act for ‘victims’ of Partition, refugees claimed as a right for having sacrificed their interests for the sake of the entire state of Bengal. The refugee also complicated the official notion of displacement, a trope that recurs throughout Partition literature and compels an inquiry into the meaning of place, home and belonging. In fact, the legal term employed in government documents for Partition refugees was ‘displaced persons’, displacement understood in its literal meaning as the geographical movement of persons from their homes.Yet, when defined in these terms, it leaves out internally displaced persons, ‘who are within the territory of their own country.’ And because the category of the refugee could come into being only after the borders had been demarcated, internally displaced people were not considered to be refugees.16 Nonetheless, the drawing of boundaries turned the homeland into a foreign country. Neither at home in the space of relocation nor in the defamiliarized homeland, Partition survivors felt displaced whether they migrated or not.17 In Bengal, as Dipesh Chakrabarty—who emphasizes the link between patriliny, home, and ancestral village—shows, to be udvastu or homeless within the nation was ‘to be under some kind of extreme curse’ (Chakrabarty 2003: 323).18 While other categories of intra-national migrants forced to leave their homes for a number of reasons may share the feeling of not being at home, Partition-induced displacement occurred with an intensity and scale that defies all comparisons. The different meanings attached to localities and regions as opposed to the nation also cause a divergence in refugee memory because ethno-cultural territories do not necessarily intersect with geographical boundaries.The primacy of the region over religion that has been noted in the self-imagining of people on the subcontinent also explains why migration within the same territory came to be imagined as displacement—home was imagined as a small place, a village or a town rather than as a nation or country. For some, the primacy of regional over religious affiliation also significantly destroyed the link between space, place and identity. To be placed involves not only being embedded in the geography but also in the linguistic, social, and cultural practices that emerged in relation to the place. Partition signalled for refugees and migrants the end of the fixities attached to language, ethnicity, caste, family, village, and so on that had played a significant role in the self-definition of groups in the past.While these fixities were in the process of being displaced by the liberal secular paradigm of the newly-constituted state for residents as well, the process was accelerated in the case of Partition refugees through the shock of departure. For these reasons, it would be a mistake to view Partition-induced displacement as

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

18

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xix

INTRODUCTION

an unambiguous state of exile and nostalgia. The narrative of Partition remains unredeemed by the myth of the homeland and the possibility of return home even though the desire to return, at least for a visit, does not die out. The Partitiondisplaced person is acutely aware of the impossibility of return for more than one reason. There is a certain ambivalence that marks the longing for the homeland in the Partition refugee since positive sentiments attached to the homeland are darkened by fear and insecurity. Moreover, the return to the homeland is impossible because it has become altered beyond recognition. Like Deewane Maulvi Sahib in Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers (2002), the Partition refugee is disoriented in the homeland that has an uncanny resemblance to the real, but can only survive in an imaginary homeland. For both the cosmopolitan Lahore of Hindu and Sikh sharanarthis’ imagination, and the nawabi Lucknow of Muslim mohajirs, for example, ‘home’ represents a different country. Several contributors to this book focus on the shared experiences of displacement, while foregrounding class, education, economics, occupation, personal and political connections, and even transportation in differentiating the various narratives of mobility. Pippa Virdee’s paper in this volume on migration patterns between Ludhiana and Lyallpur after 1947, which she relates to pre-Partition business networks and migration, introduces a new local dimension to cross-border migration which is in sharp contrast to patterns of migration in the east. And Somdatta Mandal reveals the ways in which such differentiated experiences were channelled in the representation of Partition in Bengali films from West Bengal and Bangladesh. Big-budget commercial productions with Bollywood stars cast in leading roles, such as Anil Sharma’s film Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), which contain brutal scenes of communal carnage, sensationalism, and nationalism, or Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (1956) or Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998), directly depict Partition violence. Several films that portray the partition of Punjab, such as Pinjar (2003), also show a love-hate relationship between Hindus and Muslims. In contrast, most Bengali films, argues Mandal, remain silent on the direct representation of political issues. In addition, these films avoid conflict as a theme, portraying instead ‘the trauma and resettlement angst that torment the lives of ordinary people’, and capture the ‘aspect of renewal, of new beginnings’. And in order to differentiate the experience of migration and displacement by ethnicity, class, age and location, in addition to gender and region, each migration tale is inflected by the specific politics of the places of migration and settlement as by the differences between the migrants. Nicola Mooney’s anthropological reading of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha compels us to recognize the role of Partition violence, the creation of borders, forcible migration, and regional dislocation in ‘the ongoing construction of Sikh subjectivity and ethnic experience’. Alongside these, Nixon and Ghosh’s interview adds a new perspective to Partition histories by showing the route of a

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

19

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xx

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

British official of the Gurkha regiment during Partition, after which he migrated to Australia, and Rita Kothari and Shuchi Kothari’s interviews with two migrants from India to Pakistan and vice-versa supplement the stories found in creative works. Manas Ray’s personal recollection of growing up in the Netaji Nagar refugee colony in Calcutta supplements the narrative references in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s fictional work, discussed in Mookerjea-Leonard’s paper. Besides, his discussion of the refugee experience interrupts the more simplistic conflation of the ‘refugee’ of the Partition with the voluntary migrant to the West who travels to and lives in America, as represented in Jhumpa Lahiri’s work discussed in Paulomi Chakraborty’s paper.With close attention to the works of three writers of Urdu literature: Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Gulzar, and Joginder Paul, Sukeshi Kamra uncovers how literary culture challenges the erasure of Partition in Indian historiography. Discussing the life and literary works of Amrita Pritam, Nonica Datta shows how Amrita’s narratives, which identify with a ‘different kind of “national” past, a different notion of creative community, subjectivity, and citizenry’, sensitize us to the schism between the historians’ accounts of Partition and the survivor’s reconstruction of the event that draws on the interplay of history and memory. The stories of refugees themselves, who have spoken of their feelings of exile and dislocation and their lived experiences in this collection, become extremely relevant for enabling glimpses into the complex layers that informed the lives of refugees and displaced persons. They reveal a dichotomy between the legal machinery and the actual practices in the resettlement of the refugees, the variance between state protection and social acceptance of refugees, one making them eligible for entitlements and the other excluding them from the cultural community. They also show that the rehabilitation measures taken by the state for the settlement of refugees through a number of schemes were sometimes complicated by hostilities from the established communities in those areas and their lack of social acceptance. As such, they corroborate the work of scholars who examine the ambivalence that marked the relations between refugees and residents. Despite comparative emphasis, existing scholarship supposes that ‘migration from West Pakistan was large-scale but was over by 1949’ (Basu 2002: 144), a claim that may be misleading. While attributed to the differentiated politics of the formation of East Pakistan and the precipitation of the Bangladesh crisis that has resulted in an ongoing inflow of refugees into Bengal, the concerted move to contrast the Partitionin-the-east (along with its displacement and resettlement) with Partition-in-thewest is also aimed at critiquing what is identified as the Punjab-centricism of Partition studies that is blamed for overlooking other narratives of cross-border migration not fitting the Punjab model. Migrations along the western borders also continued

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

20

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxi

INTRODUCTION

to take place in subsequent decades, so that Partition was not necessarily only a matter of a past event but a material reality that mediated the everyday lives of families even though the actual split had already occurred decades before. By making this assertion, we do not want to collapse these very different patterns of migration, but to caution against blanket claims about the migration in the West as a one-time phenomenon.19 The personal (yet official) archives belonging to people who continued to migrate from West Punjab (and from UP, MP, Rajasthan, etc. to Pakistan) many years after the Partition act as a foil to definitive conclusions regarding the timeline of post-Partition migration on the western border. One such example is that of a person named Singh whose specific case of migration warrants a comment.20 A ‘certificate of registration’ dated 3 September 1961, issued by the Government of India under the Citizenship Act, India, 1961 and retrieved from the personal collection of Mr Singh, part of whose family migrated from Pakistan into UP in 1956, provides proof that he migrated to India in 1956 and lived as a ‘displaced person’ and a refugee in the years between 1956 and 1961. Additionally, what makes this information important is that it presents an official record of the bureaucratic procedures involved in legitimating the identity of this ‘displaced person’. And although this document is not available in a public library or official archive, it points out the shortcomings of a historiography that refuses complex explanations about the migration process of Partition and highlights the misgivings of scholarship that reproduces the treatment of Punjabi migration in terms of a specific timeline: 1947–48. Finally, this document also raises questions about how the conflicts between ‘homeland’ on the one hand, and the nation-states’ practices concerning domicile, nationality, and citizenship, that mediate the afterlives of migrants (in places that are marked by new pressures of differences, hopes and possibilities), on the other hand, are negotiated. What happened during the years between 1956 and 1961 when Singh was not a domiciled ‘citizen’ of India? And despite family contacts that may have eventually helped towards rehabilitation, how did the difficulty of transferring/translating educational qualifications affect job prospects? How do the demands of the new nation or region conflict with demands of loyalty and the emotional attachments to the homes left behind? What happens to middle-class Punjabi families (as in the case of this particular Partition migrant), when they spread out into non-Punjabi speaking, culturally diverse cities and towns for lack of options?21 These questions are relevant, especially because Singh’s documents do not give any such information. In fact, his ‘certificate of registration’ along with character certificates and validated educational certificates, does not mention the reasons for obtaining this proof of ‘displacement’ and subsequent citizenship. But what these papers do confirm is the restoration of his original Hindu–Sikh name (from the Islamic name assumed in Pakistan after 1947). Like

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

21

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxii

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

the erasure of Partition in elite history and historiography that Pandey points to, Singh’s official documents too engage in an erasure of the very term ‘Partition’. It is only through personal conversation with Singh that one uncovers the context, not just of Partition, but also of Singh’s motivation for obtaining the proof of citizenship documents: in this case, a job for sustenance (which required not just validated educational certificates but also proof that this person ‘bears a good moral character’) and the security of belonging to the new nation. In this regard, Singh’s certificates also remind us that for those (women and children) who did not go seeking work, such proofs were not provided and resulted in the official effacement of their stories. And there may be many such official documents in the possession of people whose narratives simply remain untold. Ishtiaq Ahmed mentions a minuscule upper-caste minority consisting of a few hundred Hindus who stayed on in Lahore in 1947. Most people remained unaware of this minority until the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 when Hindus were murdered in Lahore. After the Babri Masjid incident, many Hindus, like Surya Prakash Sharma (Peter Joseph), used Christian names or converted to escape easy detection (Ahmed 2007). The restoration of Singh’s name, after migration to India, also reveals the ways in which refugees like him found themselves veering between different identities that arose with Partition and renders unstable accounts that continue to reconstruct Hindu and Muslim identities as stable and separate. But while stories such as Singh’s remain restricted to private family whispers, literary and cultural texts are spaces to which we can return for a retrieval of such accounts circulated in the public domain. In this context, it is useful to return to Sidhwa’s Cracking India, widely known for breaking the silence on abducted women through the story of Lenny’s Ayah, who is kidnapped, raped and turned into a dancing girl by her closest friends. While Ayah’s story shows the ways in which her identity shifts from the Hindu Shanta to the Muslim Mumtaz and a dancing girl, to a ‘recovered woman’ housed in the camp for ‘fallen women’ behind Lenny’s house before she migrates to her Hindu family in Amritsar, there is another story that speaks to such shifts: that of the gardener, Hari. As tensions escalate close to the time of Partition, Hari is forced to convert to Islam and his name is changed to Himmat Ali. Unlike Singh’s monological official account, it does not only tell its readers that Hari became Himmat Ali, but also why he became Himmat Ali, situating Hari’s forced conversion in the context of the desperate tensions of the time when rumours of the impending break-up of India begin to circulate. Stories recording such shifts as seen in Hari’s conversion to Islam as Himmat Ali and of Moti the sweeper’s conversion to Christianity as David Maseh in Cracking India are emblematic of the larger role literature can play in challenging official histories, serving as testimonies that provide—as JenniferYusin and Deepika Bahri show in their discussion of Cracking India—insights into sectarian strife, violence, and trauma during Partition.

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

22

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxiii

INTRODUCTION

REMEMBERING PARTITION BEYOND THE SUBCONTINENT As our discussion in the previous sections shows, Partition memories remain tied to individual and collective memories, which are continually revived through films, TV serials, and literature. While much of the existing scholarship has brought this to attention, what has escaped scrutiny is that the increasing migration of South Asian people, resources, and culture to the West before and after Independence has also resulted in these memories becoming a transnational phenomenon. How these memories connect with places outside the subcontinent is an issue worth investigating, and is taken up by a number of contributors. Paulomi Chakraborty, Amber Riaz and Prabhjot Parmar, whose essays are mobilized by the effects/stories of and about Partition in Canada and the USA, complicate stories from the subcontinent, which in turn, also complexify global narratives about migration. The local stories interrupt themes of immigration and exile, and address the changing meanings of nationalism and race-relations in the differentiated contexts of Canada and the US. In these stories of the Partition, told and uncovered in Western nations, the subtext is not so much the Hindu–Muslim communal relations; rather, the fragments they recover and question the exclusionary practices of the nation-states within which these communities/authors reside.The westward migrations and relocations of the subjects of these stories further complicate the Sindhi, Punjabi, Bengali, Kashmiri, and mohajir discourses in Pakistan and India. Even those living outside the subcontinent were pervaded by a sense of displacement as the homeland they had left behind was carved into two new national entities. A consequence of this has been the production of a body of literature from within Western nations by those who have been in one way or another touched by memories of the Partition. Harwant Singh Bains’ play Blood for example, performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1989, recalls the horrific subject of the 1947 Partition ‘to open a dialogue with a previous generation: that is, those men and women who cut away their roots to journey across the world and build what they hoped might be a better life.’ Other examples include films such as Deepa Mehta’s Earth (Canada), Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (Canada and USA) and Maniza Naqvi’s Mass Transit (USA), which receive attention in this collection as a way of providing insights into the reasons why diasporic communities remember Partition. The need to remember arises, not necessarily out of what Gillis calls (in the case of the French or the American revolution) any ‘ideologically driven desire to break with the past, to construct as great a distance as possible between the new age and the old’ (1994: 8) but to bring the relevance of the past to the politics of race-relations and national identity in the diaspora.Thus, in the case of Blood, memories of Partition are evoked to connect with the intensification of anti-immigrant sentiment under Margaret Thatcher’s government in Britain, channelled through a rhetoric that blamed

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

23

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxiv

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

postcolonial immigration as symptomatic of everything that was wrong with Britain, and enabled through a forgetting of Britain’s longstanding relationship with its colonies that would explain the reasons for the presence of immigrants.22 Rahul Varma’s play, Trading Injuries (see Varma 1998), for example, links memories of the Partition to the Quebec Referendum in Canada. Standing on both sides, navigating their own identities, writers and filmmakers in the West generate through their creative works a whole new way of understanding the meanings of their particular memories that intersect with and move beyond the politics of nation-building. They turn their creative works into commemorative sites of remembering experiences of ‘home’ (or particularize memories of home) that enable communities to make sense of the meanings of home that arise from a heightened awareness of their own cultural, geographical and national locations. This is not to say that this is the only way in which Partition memories and postmemories can work. In writing about Punjabi migrants in Britain, Dhooleka Raj argues,‘Partition is remembered and recounted or forgotten and hidden, but sometimes it emerges in specific contexts’. Resurrected and imported to Britain through visits by elder generations, ‘Partition becomes a beginning point and an anchor for many peoples’ life stories’ (1998: 58). The prior ‘sense of displacement’ caused by Partition and the movement that preceded migrations to Britain is central ‘to their sense of Punjabi subjectivity’. ‘Bringing forth the complex connections to place’, Raj suggests, ‘Hindu Punjabis in London exemplify the narration of the dialectic between ethnicity and identity within transnationalism’ (ibid.: 75). In view of this, the kind of remembering enabled by the representation of the plight of abducted women in films such as Earth can function in allegorical as well as real terms, disrupting an easy, comfortable, or nostalgic remembering of home and the past, which, as Vijay Mishra (1996) has pointed out, is a central feature of diasporic memory. The figure of Ayah in Earth serves as a reminder of the grave dangers of nationalism to the lives of women, of their reduction to community symbols on whose bodies violence was and continues to be enacted and whose exclusion continues to mark nationalistic imaginings. Such cultural productions then become a way of rupturing romantic affiliations or idealizations of ‘home’ that diasporic communities construct in the face of ‘loss’ or ‘trauma’ (Mishra 1996). Our attention to representations of Partition outside the subcontinent, then, is motivated by a number of reasons. First, increasing interest in the myriad patterns and consequences of forced and voluntary migration has created the need to revisit past moments of migration that altered the geographical, emotional, social, class, and gendered landscapes of nation-states.23 It has also enabled dialogue across geographical locations so that Partition does not continue to remain a regional issue or problem, tied as its beginnings are with British colonization and expansionism.

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

24

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxv

INTRODUCTION

Bringing attention to perceptions of Partition amongst South Asians in the West prompts a careful rethinking of definitions and meanings of terms such as refugee, exile, and displacement in ways that critically interrupt celebratory accounts of migration, specially those accounts that uncritically apply these vocabularies to South Asian writers located in the West, some of whom see national borders as mere ‘shadowlines’ rather than in all their officially imposed concreteness. The impossibility of return to the home-land that marks the situation of Partition survivors, and the link to the homeland among voluntary migrants in Western nation spaces who can literally return to their homelands caution against equating the two categories of migrants. For equating the two would be tantamount to trivializing the privation and suffering of forced migration.Yet the imagining of the homeland, in a lost desh, partially bridges the age, class, and economic divide between different sites and waves of migration. Partition and diasporic memories, literary or testimonial, invariably converge on a village or city complicating the meaning of home, nation, and identity. Our attempt is not to subsume Partition into the vast sea of migration literature and accommodate it within the all-encompassing narratives of migration studies, but to suggest a way that subjects the grand narratives of immigration, exile, and refuge that often mark the writings of more privileged sections of migrants to critical scrutiny. Paulomi Chakraborty’s analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories about Partition in The Interpreter of Maladies, and Amber Riaz’s analysis of Mass Transit, which recalls the story of mohajirs in Karachi from the space of the US, provide such interruptions. Calling attention to the history of mohajirs in Karachi and their reference and treatment as refugees rather than immigrants, Riaz emphasizes the need to make the crucial distinctions of time, history, and context in order to remind the critic that the ‘fertile territory that Salman Rushdie happily occupies [as a migrant to the West]’ becomes a place of exile and conflict for the migrant who arrived in Karachi after 1947. Chakraborty also cautions against universalization of the ‘narrative of dislocation and displacement’ of the privileged expatriate in the West, which can result in a forgetting of the specific contexts within which dislocation needs to be understood. And yet as Prabhjot Parmar points out, even (selectively) privileged migrants (such as Mehta, Baldwin, and Sidhwa) need to be listened to. This is so that we can be attentive to the ways in which their narratives bring the local and regional outcomes of Partition into the fold of a more global politics by enabling a rethinking of how political developments in Western spaces become relevant to the South Asian communities’ representation and remembering of Partition. To this end, Shubh Mathur’s paper on how Partition affected the fortunes of a Kashmiri family that has migrated to New York serves to further complicate stories of migration. By playing on the meanings of home and unhomeliness experienced by

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

25

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxvi

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

those multiply displaced, Partitioned Lives thus examines the ways in which the conflict between the imagining of ‘homeland’ in the narratives of the displaced and the states’ regulatory practices problematizes the category of nation, nationality, and the citizen-subject. Additionally, it brings to attention the relationship of memory, postmemory, and migration to children of survivors as well as the impact of remembering on children. In the children’s ‘making themselves anew’, the cataclysmic violence of Partition comes to substitute the older markers of self-definition. The new self constituted by Partition is Arjun of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun, who, as Debali Mookerjea-Leonard points out, turns refugees’ being out-of-place as the cue for altering existing relations and defining new categories of self-affirmation. Taken together, the papers in this book speak to the interrelations, complexities, and entanglements that emerge from such varied narratives of migration.

NOTES 1. Incidentally, the ‘Report of a tour of inspection of some of the refugee homes in north-western India prepared by well-known social workers of West Bengal’ (Gupta et al. 2002) mentions Kasturba Sewa Ashram in Rajpura as a ‘home for unattached women and their dependants’, numbering about 800 visited by social workers on 24 March 1955. It also refers to the Rajpura township as being constructed ‘in record time to house the refugees of Bahawalpur’. The report states that the township has 2,572 single-room tenements, 525 shops, a hospital (Ajit Jain Hospital, complete with X-ray apparatus and costing Rs 45,000 in construction alone), three basic schools and an infirmary for 500 old and destitute people that were ‘constructed at the cost of the Government of India’ but later shifted to the state government. While providing a comparative analysis of refugee rehabilitation in the East and the West, the report points out that ‘no planned large township worth the name was ever built (except Fulia)’ in the East, ‘which could go towards permanent rehabilitation of even a fraction of the 60 lakhs [six million] of refugees already in West Bengal’. 2. See Butalia (1994); Menon and Bhasin (1998); and Gyanendra Pandey (2001), all of whom point to this shortcoming. 3. Not all fictional texts provide alternatives to elite nationalist accounts. As Alok Bhalla points out in his introduction to Stories about the Partition of India (1994), some writings underscore the assumptions of nationalist history writing, presenting Partition violence in terms of sectarian strife and communalism. 4. As Menon and Bhasin assert, ‘When one is trying to unravel the complexity of an event that took place 45 years ago but still reverberates in the general consciousness, the enterprise becomes even more treacherous. But without such an attempt, the myriad individual and collective histories that simultaneously run parallel to official accounts of historic moments and their sequel, almost inevitably get submerged; with them may also be submerged the countering of accepted—and acceptable—versions to be buried eventually in the rubble of what Gyan Pandey has called the “aberrations of history”’ (1993: 2). Testimonies have also been very useful in other contexts as in Heather Goodall’s work on reconstructing aboriginal histories in her book, Isabel Flick: The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman (2004).

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

26

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxvii

INTRODUCTION

5. Also see Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries (1998). The authors argue that while there is no dearth of material on the Partition, there remains an absence of a feminist historiography. To compensate for this absence, they compile interviews with women survivors of the Partition. 6. For a comprehensive analysis of Partition in English, Bengali and Urdu literature, see Zaman Niaz (2001). 7. An earlier article by Nandi Bhatia (2002: 191–208), discusses some of these arguments. 8. According to Butalia, ‘The State has not seen fit to construct any memorials, to mark particular places—as has been done, say in the case of the holocaust memorials or memorials for the Vietnam War.There is nothing at the border [of India and Pakistan] that marks it as a place where millions of people crossed, no plaque or memorial at any of the sites of the camps, nothing that marks a particular spot as a place where Partition memories are collected’ (1998: 272). 9. Thanks to Teresa Hubel for this discussion. 10. The special issue of Seminar reproduces a report prepared by a committee of social workers that provides a detailed comparative analysis of the rehabilitation efforts in the East and the West. 11. Subir Bhaumik (2002), for instance, throws new light on the refugee debate by investigating the impact of Partition displacement on indigenous tribal groups in Tripura to conclude that Partition has ‘shaped the contours of political and economic discourse in post-partition Tripura’. Similarly, Sujit Chaudhuri (2002) recounts the narrative of Assam to show that ‘Partition has been inextric-ably intertwined with the Assamese quest for attaining a homogeneous territory’. 12. The most widely used definition of internally displaced persons (IDPs) is one presented in a 1992 report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which identifies them as ‘persons who have been forced to flee their homes suddenly or unexpectedly in large numbers, as a result of armed conflict, internal strife, systematic violations of human rights or natural or man-made disasters, and who are within the territory of their own country’ (UNHCR 2007). 13. Datta points out that refugees took up occupations such as hawking, blacksmithy, carpentry that were new to them and that by 1951, the average income of the refugee in Delhi was Rs 162.8 as compared to Rs 156.6 of the resident (2003: 278). He quotes Stephen L. Keller to show that the Punjabi refugee recovered soon from bemusement and semi-paralysis and not only set about making a new life with firmness and perseverance but finally became ‘aggressive in spirit’ (ibid.: 276). 14. His contemporary, a Punjabi woman, has a more amusing story about her experience of gaining admission in a school in Lucknow that illustrates refugees’ appropriation of state benefits.Taking advantage of the state’s offer to admit all school children in the next grade to compensate for the school days lost due to Partition relocation, she recalls having been admitted to grade VI instead of grade IV as an eight year old. On requests of anonymity, her identity is not disclosed. There is always another side. According to Satish Saberwal: ‘My own Matriculation examination in 1947 was disrupted by the rioting in Ludhiana. Finally, my school gave me only a plain pass certificate with “M.L.” for marks, meaning “marks later on”. In Calcutta, St. Xavier’s College accepted this as the basis for admitting me to a section in “ISC” starting in January—with students from Senior Cambridge stream, though the equivalence was nonsensical. The point is that it was a very messy situation to which there was a great variety of responses.’ 15. V. N. Datta (2003) provides detailed figures on the rehabilitation of Punjabi refugees in Delhi after 1947. 16. Rahman and van Schendel’s case studies (2003) of different forms of displacement from Rajshahi forced by several reasons such as education, marriage, riot, exchange, labour and so on complicate the narrative of cross-border migration.

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

27

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxviii

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

17. One is reminded of Butalia’s statement in The Other Side of Silence (1998), that the watan of the refugee—her mother’s in Lahore and Rana Mama’s in India—is in another country. 18. Chakrabarty’s distinction between basha (temporary abode) and bari (permanent home), is significant here because a new category, nation, is added to categories of belonging. Anusua Basu Raychaudhury, however, discovers in the Bengali term desh the perfect antonym for nation that she uses to develop her thesis about the discordance between desh and nation in refugee memory. Bengali self-consciousness has also coined a multiple and variegated idiom for categorizing the displaced such as sharanarthi (someone who seeks refuge and protection), bastuhara and chhinnamul (literally meaning ‘torn roots’), and ‘udbastu’ (someone who has been placed outside of where his foundations were), that means to be uprooted. Similarly, Urdu finds an equivalent for refugee in mohajir. 19. The Times of India (Kolkata edition), carried a report on 29 January 2007 (Mokkil 2006) about 12 lakh (1.2 million) people from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir ‘leading a ghettoized existence’ for the past three generations in Jammu, Kathua, Rajouri, Pooch and Udhampur districts with 197,000 spread over 34 camps in Jammu and R. S. Pora tehsils in Jammu district. The migration of these people who fled their homes, mainly in Muzaffarabad and Mirpur, first in 1947 and subsequently in 1965 and 1971 after the Indo-Pakistan wars, like the Rajpura residents, debunks the myth of migration in the West as a one-time phenomenon. Denied the status of refugees in the light of India’s official stand about POK being legally a part of its territory and deprived of benefits accorded to refugees under national and international law, these camp people also illustrate how the national focus on violence in the valley has left this marginalized group out of the J&K dialogue. 20. The full name of this person has been withheld on request. The discussion is based on personal conversation and his private official documents. 21. Anjali Gera Roy, for instance, talks about the ‘unhomeliness’ experienced by Punjabi refugees on their arrival in Lucknow and their attempts to resettle in the nawabi geographical, linguistic, and cultural landscape (2007: 16–17). 22. For analysis of the play, see Bhatia (2003). 23. Imran Ali’s book, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947, provides a fascinating history of the establishment of canal colonies in West Punjab by the British between 1855 and 1947. Many of these colonies (Sidhnai, Sohag Para, Chunian, Chenab, Jhelum) were created through grants given to agriculturalists from Central Punjab. Chenab colony, for example, was set up through grantees selected from seven districts: Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullunder, Hoshiarpur, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, and Sialkot. Thus, internal Punjabi migration could be said to have begun as early as the 1880s through this colonialist exercise.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Ishtiaq, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First Person Accounts’, http://www.sacw.ne/partition/, accessed 10 April 2007. Ali, Imran, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). Bagchi, Jasodhara, ‘The Problem’, Seminar (510), special issue on ‘Porous Borders, Divided Selves’, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, February 2002. Bains, Harwant Singh, Blood (London: Methuen, 1989). Basu, Monmayee, ‘Unknown Victims of a Major Holocaust’, in S. Settar and Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension, vol. II (Delhi: Manohar, 2002).

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

28

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxix

INTRODUCTION

Bhalla, Alok, Stories About the Partition of India, 3 vols (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1994). Bhatia, Nandi, ‘“How Long Does Lahore Burn?” History, Memory and Literary Representations of the Partition’, in S. Settar and Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension (Delhi: Manohar, 2002), pp. 191–208. ———,‘“Are there Places Anymore?” Performing the Indian Subcontinent in Britain’, Modern Drama, XLVI(4), Winter 2003: 629–45. Bhaumik, Subir, ‘Disaster in Tripura’, Seminar (510), special issue on ‘Porous Borders, Divided Selves’, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, February 2002. Butalia, Urvashi, ‘Community, State and Gender: Some Reflections on the Partition of India’, Oxford Literary Review, 16(1–2), 1994: 31–67. ———, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). ———, ‘Listening for a Change: Narratives of Partition’, in S. Settar and Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension (Delhi: Manohar, 2002). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu–Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Chatterji, Joya, ‘Rights or Charity? Government and Refugees: The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–1950’, in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 267–84. Chaudhuri, Sujit, ‘A “God-sent” Opportunity?’, Seminar (510), special issue on ‘Porous Borders, Divided Selves’, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, February 2002. Datta, V. N., ‘Panjabi Refugees and the Urban Development of Greater Delhi’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Didur, Jill, Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2007). Gillis, John R. (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Goodall, Heather, Isabel Flick: The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004). Gupta, Ashoka, Amar Kumari Varma, Sudha Sen, Bina Das and Sheila Davar, ‘East is East, West is West’, Seminar (510), special issue on ‘Porous Borders, Divided Selves’, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, February 2002. Gupta, Dipankar, ‘Partition Makes the Nation State’, in The Context of Ethnicity: Sikh Identity in Contemporary Perspectives (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 21–23. Hasan, Mushirul, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, 2 volumes, 2nd edition (Delhi: Roli Books, 1997). Herzeberger, David K., ‘Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LVI(1), 1991: 34–45. Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Kamra, Sukeshi, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002). Kaul, Suvir (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Kaur, Ravinder, ‘The Last Journey: Exploring Social Class in the 1947 Partition Migration’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 June 2006.

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

29

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

xxx

ANJALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA

Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and Abduction of Women During Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXVIII(17), 24 April 1993: WS2. ———, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali, 1998). Mishra, Vijay, ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora’, Textual Practice, 10(3), 1996: 421–47. Mokkil, Vineetha, ‘Two Countries, But No Homeland’, The Times of India (Kolkata), 29 January 2007. Niaz, Zaman, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Oberoi, Pia, Exile and Belonging: Refugees and State Policy in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies, VIII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). ———, Remembering Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Paul, Joginder, Sleepwalkers, trans. Sunil Trivedi and Sukrita Paul Kumar (Delhi: Katha Perspectives, 2002). Rahman, Md Mahbubar and Willem van Schendel, ‘I am Not a Refugee’, Modern Asian Studies, 37(3), 2003: 551–84. Raj, Dhooleka, Where Are You From? Middle-Class Migrants in the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Raychaudhury, Anasua Basu, ‘Nostalgia of “Desh”, Memories of Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 December 2004. Roy, Anjali Gera, ‘Adarsh Nagar Diyaan Gallan: At Home in a Resettlement Colony’, in Malashri Lal and Sukrita P. Kumar (eds), Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature (Delhi: Pearson Education, 2007), pp. 16–33. Sahni, Bhisham, Tamas, trans. by Jai Ratan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988). Seminar (510), February 2002, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta. Settar, S. and Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension, Vol. II (Delhi: Manohar, 2002). Sidhwa, Bapsi, Cracking India (USA: Milkweed, 1991). Sinha-Kerkhoff, Kathinka, ‘From “Displaced Person” to Being “a Local”: Cross-border Refugees and Invisible Refugees in Ranchi’, in Imtiaz Ahmed, Abhijit Dasgupta and Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff (eds), State, Society and Displaced People in South Asia (Dhaka: The University Press, 2004). Talbot, Ian, Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar, 1947–1957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006). Tan, Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Thakurta, Meghna Guha, ‘Uprooted and Divided’, Seminar (510), special issue on ‘Porous Borders, Divided Selves’, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, February 2002. The Tribune (Chandigarh), ‘After 55 Years, Govt Asks Refugee Families to Pack Up’, 28 May 2005. UNHCR, Definitions and Obligations, www.unhcr.org.au/basicdef.shtml, npg, accessed 29 January 2007. Varma, Rahul, Land Where the Trees Talk and Other Plays (New Delhi: Prestige, 1998).

00_Roy & Bhatia~Ack & intro.pmd Black

30

8/8/2007, 8:50 AM

1

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

1 Transcending Religious Identities: Amrita Pritam and Partition

NONICA DATTA

In her recent autobiography, Amrita Pritam* discusses her ‘inner journey’. She writes: I realized and gathered the moot difference between a Brahmin and myself. Precisely that I’m not a Brahmin. That’s also the difference between a Kshatriya and myself that I’m not a Kshatriya. Similarly, that’s the difference between a Vaish and myself that I’m not a Vaish. And then it also dawned that there’s a similar difference between me and a Hindu, Sikh or Muslim—that I’m not a Hindu, Sikh or Muslim (Pritam 2001: 106).

Invoking the Sufi idiom, she refers to ‘Main apne hujre ki mitti hun, main khuda ke shajre ki lakeer hun’ (‘I am the soil of Meditation, I am the line of divine hierarchy’) (Pritam 1999: 123).1 Why was Amrita Pritam searching for main, and what, indeed, led her to question her religious identity? What was the source of the anxiety that inspired her inner spiritual and creative journey? Amrita Pritam’s life history reveals how she locates herself in family, community, and nation in the aftermath of Punjab’s Partition. It suggests ways in which she attached inner meanings to religious languages. Her narrative problematizes the ‘experience’ of Punjabi women; as a witness and narrator, her account differs from narratives deriving sustenance from Punjab’s religious and communal traditions.2 Partition is the most crucial moment in defining her worldview; it enables her to forge a kainaati rishta (fraternal relationship) with the universe, and to create her world in accordance with Punjab’s language, culture and social history.

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

1 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

2

NONICA DATTA

GROWING UP IN LAHORE Amrita Pritam was born into an Arora-Khatri Sikh family in Gujranwala on 31 August 1919.That year—of Rowlatt Satyagraha—Punjab tasted a major nationalist upsurge.The province experienced Hindu–Muslim–Sikh fraternization, a sequel to the Gandhian initiatives to cement inter-community amity. Amrita Pritam wrote a moving poem on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. ‘The earthen (mitti) smell’, she recalls, ‘is linked with birth, the first breath. The year I was born, that was the year of the bloodshed in Jallianwala Bagh. The air burning with pain was mixed with the smell of mitti’ (Pritam 2000: 9). But all this changed thereafter. Amrita Pritam notices the rapid transformation of the Punjabi landscape: ‘When politics becomes manipulative, people are soaked in each other’s blood in the name of religion. Until the eruption of violence I had not known that religion could be such a potent weapon to spread hate and to use ill-will for hatching political conspiracies.’ Again,‘What sort of shadowy tree was this, which was being infected with termite till its roots?’ (ibid.: 10). Her sense of alienation was heightened by the drift in Punjab politics, especially after the Khilafat movement. Though disillusioned with the political climate, the sacrifice of Bhagat Singh and his comrades is another important milestone in her political memories (ibid.: 9). Reflecting on the execution of Bhagat Singh, she writes how, on the occasion of the death anniversary of Rajguru and Sukhdev on 23 March 1938,Tayar, Lahore’s poet, sang Bhagat Singh’s ghori (folk song). Even though the authorities had imposed restrictions, over a hundred thousand people gathered to pay their homage. Such was the poet’s impact that people continued ... to sing and weep … at that time Hindus and Mussalmans were one in raising their voice in favour of the liberation of the country. Many poets wrote songs for the Independence of the country which were banned (zabtshuda). They were then patriotic, indifferent to the manipulations of high politics (ibid.: 10).

However, these were the years when divisive trends came to the fore.While visiting her mother’s village in Gujranwala, she notices water being hawked at the railway platform as Hindu pani (water) and Muslim pani (Pritam 1999: 14–15). Renowned for its annual fair of Sultan Sakhi Sarvar, a ‘syncretic’ saint of Punjab,3 Gujranwala faced polarization along religious lines. She questioned her mother—‘Is water also Hindu-Mussalman?’ All that her mother, Raj Kaur, could say was: ‘It happens here, God knows what all happens here’ (Pritam 2001: 7). Amrita Pritam was a young girl when she heard her mother say so, and only eleven years old when Raj Kaur died (Pritam 1998: 12). But her message was not lost, as Amrita Pritam raised her voice against her grandmother, who kept separate utensils for use when her father’s

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

2 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

3

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Muslim friends were visiting (Arora 1995: 22). This was ‘my first rebellion (bagavat) against religion’ (Pritam 1998: 10), she recalls: I used to notice three glass tumblers kept away from all other pots and pans on a shelf in the corner of the kitchen. These were for use only when father’s Muslim friends were offered tea or buttermilk when they came to visit him. After these tumblers had served their purpose they were scrubbed, and washed and put right back in their ostracized niche. The three tumblers became a ‘cause’ for me, and the four of us put up a fight with grandmother. I was adamant, I would not drink from any other tumbler but one of those. Grandmother would rather see me thirsty than let me use them. The tale, inevitably, travelled to father. He of course did not until then have the faintest idea about such things. The moment he did, I succeeded in my revolt. Thereafter, not a single utensil was labelled ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’. Neither Grandmother nor I knew then that the man I was to fall in love with would be of the same faith as the branded utensils were meant for’ (Pritam 1989: 4–5).

Amrita Pritam’s grandmother would have known of the Qadamon-ka-mela being celebrated in Lahore on the first Monday after the new moon in February. She may have made her offerings at the tomb of Sultan Sakhi Sarvar in Anarkali. She may have grown up with the legends of Hir-Ranjha, Sassi-Punnun, Puran-Bhagat, and Sohni-Mahival. And she may have subscribed to the pluralistic Sikh faith of the nineteenth century (Oberoi 1990: 137). And yet, her grandmother would have known that by the turn of the century pluralist trends were being assailed in different quarters. Two important processes were at work which exacerbated Hindu–Muslim–Sikh tension and led to widespread violence in Punjab. By constructing monolithic Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities, the colonial state had given legitimacy to new categories of religious identification and enumeration. Second, religious reformists and community leaders harped on imaginary homogeneous Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities with ‘pristine’ pasts. Consequently, community-based solidarities came to the fore in public and private arenas. And cities, towns and countryside were flooded with shuddhi and gauraksha sabhas, with the Anjuman-i-Islamia’s tabligh and tanzim outfits. Thus, fluid identities, multiple vocabularies, landscapes and inter-community solidarities were overshadowed by monolithic religious blocs. Not surprisingly, the Singh Sabha denounced the richness of nineteenth-century Sikh religious tradition as ‘superstitious’, and gave the vision of Tat Khalsa. As a result, Sikh resurgence made its presence felt in rural and urban spaces. It manifested itself in different ways: for example, in the objection of two Nihangs (a sect of Sikhs) to Amrita Pritam’s father (Kartar Singh Hitkari) showing Sikh history slides on the large wall of the gurdwara. Armed with

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

3 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

4

NONICA DATTA

spears, the Nihangs shouted, ‘Cinema is not going to be shown here.’ After this incident her father gave up trying to popularize Sikh history. She could not help asking him: ‘Did that place belong to them? To those two individuals?’ And, ‘the religion you kept talking about, is that religion not theirs too?’ Her father replied, ‘The religion is mine, well for namesake it’s theirs too, but if indeed it was theirs too, they wouldn’t have unsheathed those spears.’ And she bemoans,‘That big, black box [of slides] was never opened again. His ceaseless perseverance of countless years got locked in a box—forever ...’ (Pritam 2001: 5–6). There are clear signs of the father and daughter, having lived in the composite ethos of Lahore, being aware of the divisive tendencies that had come to the fore in their otherwise peaceful environment. Her father ran a Punjabi monthly with Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh writers. Having spent many years in Gujranwala, he was influenced by its pluralist ethos. This was after all the land of Waris Shah (c. 1736–90). Clearly, the world that Amrita Pritam related to was pluralist, and yet she was equally sensitive to the divisive trends appearing in Lahore society: ‘before Partition there was a part of Lahore, where after sunset no Sikh was allowed to go. In an abusive way, they were called ‘Sikhdas’. On the other side, lived the Hindus and the Sikhs, who called the Muslims,‘Muslahs’ (Nain 1995: 44–45). Hindus and Sikhs avoided passing through the lower-class ‘Mussalmans’ mohallas (neighbourhood). ‘… During Holi, if by chance, any drop of colour was sprinkled on a Mussalman’s clothes, a riot would immediately follow.’4 Though Amrita Pritam’s world was isolated from such separatist tendencies, she did not subscribe to Lahore’s adabi (literary) culture. For one, she never attended the meetings of the Progressive Writers’ Association, which was quite strong in Lahore. Though she got to know the Urdu writers Krishan Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi well, her worldview was principally rooted in the world of Sufi poets: I only loved the Sufi poets, their kalam (poetry). Hir Waris Shah was the first book I read from my heart. My father introduced me to the Sufi poets. They were also part of my education—vidvani and gyani. I read Shah Husain, Sultan Bahu and Bulle Shah in Punjabi. In fact, Punjabi, suffused with Urdu and Persian alfaz (words), was my language. It was part of everyday speech.5

Amrita Pritam’s inner journey took a new turn in the tumultuous 1940s. She was keen to work in films, but her husband, Pritam Singh Kwatara, discouraged her. She learnt the sitar and Bharatnatyam from Tara Chaudhary, even though her family disapproved of her public performances. Ultimately, she took a job with All India Radio (Lahore) in 1945–46, and the first talk she gave was on Waris Shah. By this time she had also made two friends, who ultimately became her intellectual companions: Sajjad Haider (Urdu playwright) and Sahir Ludhianvi (well-known Urdu poet).‘With Sajjad I had friendship. But Sahir, who worked for Adab-e-Latif magazine, was my love.’6

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

4 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

5

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

1947, PARTITION ‘In 1947, Lahore was turned into a graveyard’, Amrita writes. ‘It was the politics of hate that swept Lahore in flames; at night one would see houses being in flames, hear cries of desperation, and witness long hours of curfew during the day’ (Pritam 1999: 14). ‘In Lahore, at night, I … could hear those shrieks which got suppressed in the day-long curfew….’ ‘Expecting my second child, I often went for a walk on the Mall road, an exclusive place in Lahore. There one day I saw a Sikh running around, with a knife pierced into his stomach. I immediately rushed back, and never stepped out of the house thereafter. At night, I would watch Lahore burning from my rooftop.’7 The rise in the communal temperature reminded her of her father’s persecution by religious bigots. She missed her father, who was no more, for he might have answered her ‘never-ending’ questions: ‘Does this land not belong to those who are born here? For whom are those spears flashing in their hands?’ (Pritam 2001: 6–7). And yet, Amrita Pritam refused to posit a causal connection between the violence that rocked her Lahore and Punjab’s partition. She emphasizes, ‘My Lahore was not entirely communalized’.8 In fact, at the height of violence, Hindu women continued to frequent the dargahs (shrines) of murshids (preceptors), pirs (saints) and faqirs (mendicants), she says. While the city was swept in flames, and the news of women being abducted, raped and burnt alive in thousands reached her husband’s home on Dhani Ram Road, Amrita Pritam thought it was a temporary madness. ‘A storm of hatred,’ she calls it. ‘This too will pass. It won’t last. We will be able to come back.’9 But then disaster struck. With the issue of partitioning Punjab settled, Amrita Pritam, then twenty-eight years old, immediately left with her husband and little daughter after the most horrific riots of March–April in Lahore. She was pregnant and needed regular medical attention, which was not possible in the riot-torn Lahore. She left thinking that she would eventually return after the birth of her child; that she would reunite with her two friends and repair her sense of short-term estrangement: ‘I was expecting a child at that time. One would not find a doctor. One could not even get milk or medicine. That’s why we left Lahore. One did not leave Lahore because of Hindu–Muslim fasad (riot).’ She did not take her winter clothes, and left only with a red shawl. And ‘my favourite naurattan (ornament with precious stones), I left in my cupboard’.10 It was primarily her fear of losing her friends, Sajjad Haider and Sahir Ludhianvi, that haunted her on the fateful train journey from Lahore to Dehra Dun in early May 1947. She initially took shelter in Dehra Dun, and then in search of a livelihood, went to Delhi, and saw ‘homeless people with a vacuous look—observed the land, where they were being labelled as refugees … in their own country—people without a country …’ (Pritam 2001: 7). When winter arrived she did not have any clothes, and she cut that shawl into two pieces.

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

5 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

6

NONICA DATTA

‘One piece I took while the other piece was further cut into two parts to wrap up my children.’11 Thus began her journey as a refugee. What memories? I was overtaken by a storm of hatred. Nobody realized that people would suffer so much—houses being burnt down, neighbours killing each other, and women being abducted and raped. I was haunted by what I saw at the railway stations in Dehra Dun and Delhi. There was darkness all around. How could so many millions be dispossessed and displaced?12

From a running train, ‘in the darkness outside, the mounds of earth seemed like the entire land is littered with graves.…’ ‘The blowing breeze seemed to be moping over the darkness! At that hour, I recalled a composition of Waris Shah, who wrote a long, historic tale of Hir—and people memorized it in each and every home. I too conversed with Waris Shah …’ (Pritam 2001: 7). As she records: 1947 … Uprooted from Lahore, I had rehabilitated myself at Dehra Dun for a while, but later went to Delhi for work and a place to live in. On my return journey, I could not get a wink of sleep on the train. The pitch-black darkness of the night was like a sign of the times. So piercing were the sighs the winds carried and echoed, it seemed we were back in mourning over this watershed of history. The trees loomed larger and larger like sentinels of sorrow. There were patches of stark aridity in between like the mounds of massive graves. The words of Waris Shah, ‘How’ll the dead and departed meet again?’ surged back and forth through my mind. I thought, a great poet like him alone could bewail the loss a Hir once had to bear. But who could lament the plight of millions of Hirs today? I could think of no one greater than Waris Shah to chant my invocation to. In the moving train, my trembling fingers moved on to describe the pangs I went through (Pritam 1989: 21–22).

Thus, while travelling from Dehra Dun to Delhi in 1948, she wrote the nazm (poem), ‘Aj Akhan Waris Shah Noon’, on a scrap of paper (Pritam 1998: 24): Today I call to Waris Shah13 Today, I call to Waris Shah—speak from your grave! Today, open the next page in the book of love. Once, a daughter of Punjab wept and you wrote an epic on her suffering O Waris Shah! Today, tens of thousands of daughters of Punjab are weeping. You, the friend to those in agony—rise up and look at your Punjab! Today, corpses litter the pastures. And the Chenab river runs with blood, Someone has poured poison into the five rivers And those waters have drenched the fertile fields So that every growing thing in this land has now turned poisonous

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

6 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

7

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Every inch of every growing thing has turned blood red. And worse, the curse of it has ripened. The poisoned wind gusted into every single wood, Transformed every bamboo flute into a serpent. First, it bit the charmers and they lost the magic of their mantras Then it bit whoever came their way Its venom sealed the people’s mouths And then the poison spread Soon all Punjab turned blue. The song cut-off in every throat Women friends who together once sat spinning parted Threads on bobbins snapped The humming spinning wheels fell silent. The boatmen sank the boats with their own hands The peepul trees broke the swings on their own branches Where once piped melodies of love, the flute was lost All of Ranjha’s brothers had forgotten how to play. The blood rained down upon the soil, seeping down even into the graves. The princesses of love are weeping in their tombs. Everyone became Kaidon (Hir’s uncle), thieves of love and beauty Where can I find another Waris Shah today? I call to Waris Shah—speak from your grave! Today, open the next page in the book of love.

‘I knew Waris Shah recognized the pain of this soil, and of a woman, a human being’, she explains. ‘This story was inside me. After all, Waris Shah emotionalized the legend of Hir-Ranjha beautifully, for it is believed that he himself was in love with a Hindu woman, Bhag-Bhari (the fortunate one)’, she adds, ‘and he was, in fact, expressing his own love and suffering in the form of Hir.’14 This poem was recited everywhere. ‘But there were also those who started showering abuse on me in newspaper columns, speculating on why I related to a Mussalman Waris Shah and dared to voice these sentiments. Those belonging to the Sikh faith asserted I should have related to Guru Nanak. And the communists asserted that I should have related to Lenin—not to Guru Nanak …’ (Pritam 2001: 9–10). Such reactions only strengthened her resolve to steer clear of the politics of religiously-informed identity:‘Writers are the zamir (conscience) of our own people. And can zamir be Hindu, Sikh, or Mussalman.… Is the light of the sun also Hindu, Sikh or Mussalman?’ (Pritam 1999: 111–12). ‘Do you know’, Amrita told me, ‘that the poem is sung at the mazar (tomb) of Waris Shah in Multan (Pakistan) on the occasion of Jashne Waris Shah? People cried and sang when they heard the nazm over the radio’ (Pritam 1998: 26). ‘In camps, people, dispossessed and dislocated, tied this nazm into a knot, and wore it as an

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

7 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

8

NONICA DATTA

amulet.’15 Waris Shah’s popular appeal in Punjab’s cultural landscape was the principal reason for the poem’s popularity on both sides of the border. By invoking Waris Shah, the eighteenth-century Sufi poet, Amrita Pritam draws upon the literary cultures of Punjab. More specifically, she uses the qissa tradition of which Waris Shah was one of the chief exponents. She thus reflects on Punjab’s cultural topography and regional identity, and dwells on how worldly identities are repeatedly transgressed by love (Shackle 2002: 58). Central to the qissa genre is the theme of love between a Muslim and a Hindu. ‘Such love is at once transgressive and assimilative’, argues Christopher Shackle, ‘for at the same point that Panjabi poets highlight it as illicit love, they also undermine the very categories Muslim and Hindu as oppositional and incommensurate’. Crossing all dividing lines—of time and place, creed and class—the qissa genre did indeed forge a distinctive ‘language of identity’ (ibid.). Amrita Pritam uses the Punjabi love stories, in verse, to cope with the painful religio-political reality of Partition. Waris’s own affiliation to the Chishti order of Sufis, founded by Fariduddin Shakarganj (c. 1173–1266) of Pakpattan,16 profoundly nourished her creative and emotional self. Time and time again, Waris’s message in Hir-Ranjha that it was because of Baba Farid that the Punjab remained free from sorrow and suffering gave her solace and hope. For Waris,‘the people’ included both Hindu and Muslim Punjabis. Committed to the idea of ‘the land of the five rivers’, he was conscious of Punjab’s distinct regional identity (Grewal 1984: 114). After all, ‘few genres show a more powerful attachment to the specificities of place than the Punjabi verse romance called the qissa … which was largely the creation of Panjabi Muslim poets’ (Shackle 2002: 59). Though the qissa tradition was at its most creative in the period from 1650 to 1850 (ibid.: 64), it was strengthened via oral and print media in late nineteenthcentury Punjab.The most popular ballads, Mirza Sahiba ki Sur, Waris Shah ki Hir, and Sassi-Punnun (Latif 1892: 267) were enacted in the streets and bazaars of Lahore. Mirza Sahiba ki Sur was a ‘spirited story, well told, and its recital forms a part of every festive gathering.’ The same was true of the Hir-Ranjha story.They were popular partly because ‘music, singing and dancing are all amusements much enjoyed by the natives’. This form of story-telling was strengthened by the ‘strong presence of the professional Mirasis or Bhats, a tribe of hereditary ballad singers, whose songs, ballads, and tales, recited at weddings and other festivities, are in reality the favourite literature of the day’.17 With the growth of the vernacular printing press, Lahore’s burgeoning publishing industry turned into a leading centre of Punjabi literary creation.18 Not surprisingly, Fazal Shah’s (1827–90) version of Sohni-Mahival enjoyed immense popularity in the late nineteenth century (Shackle 2002: 66). He wrote five qissas: Sohni-Mahival, HirRanjha, Sassi-Punnun, Laila-Majanu and Yusuf-Zuleikha. Kishan Singh Arif (1836–1900)

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

8 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

9

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

penned the Shirin-Farhad, in 1873, in the traditional bait popularized by Waris. Other prominent qissakars were Ghulam Rasul Ghulam (1813–74), the author of Sassi-Punnun (1850) and Ghulam Rasul (1849–92) who wrote the romance of Yusuf-Zuleikha. They were followed by Mohammad Buta Gujarati (1836–1919), whose greatest composition was Mirza-Sahiban’s romance, and Joga Singh, whose Hir was printed in Lahore in 1889. Furthermore, Kahan Singh published Hir in 1883. Bhagwan Singh (1850–1902), too, composed romances of Hir-Ranjha (1886), Mirza-Sahiban and Sohni-Mahival (1891) (Sekhon 1996). The continuing universal appeal of this unique literature is attested by the ‘number of nineteenth-century manuscripts recording its compositions in Gurmukhi’ (Shackle 1988: 106). Yet these qissas were not just a part of the ‘Sikh literary heritage’; in fact, ‘Sikhs were not only late comers to this well-established poetic tradition, but part of a Punjabi heritage which was being developed as a literary medium for the creation of superb verse by Muslim poets’, (ibid.). Significantly, these love legends were not ensconced within any religious tradition (Oberoi 1990: 139–40), but constituted the core of Punjab’s literary cultural past expressed in Punjabi, a shared repertoire of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Though efforts were made to undermine the fluidity of the qissa tradition, it continued to form an alternative space of shared culture, invoking multiple pasts, kept alive by scores of poets, writers, and cultural performers. Amrita Pritam was one of them. At the time of Partition and amidst the horror of violence, Sufi poets became Amrita Pritam’s companions. ‘Somebody once asked me who were my contemporaries. I said Shah Hussain (1538–99), Sultan Bahu (1629–91), and Waris Shah (1736–90).’19 In addition, she was deeply influenced by the Qadiri poet Bulle Shah’s (1680–1757) famous invocation, ‘Bulha, how should I know who I am?’ His kafi (short mystical poem) opens with, ‘Hindu, no! nor Musalman’.20 Surely, Bulle Shah and other great lyricists of the late Mughal period derived their themes and symbols from the popular cultures and folk traditions incorporating Islamic, Hindu, and Sikh vocabularies. Bulle Shah’s use of the legend of Hir-Ranjha, in particular, reflects a synthesis of Krsnaite and Nath elements, and a commitment to the ‘composite and often syncretic nature of Panjabi popular culture’ (Matringe 1992: 190, 198). Further, his mystical allegories demonstrate his affinity with the cultural universe of Punjabi people. Such Sufi poets moulded a diffuse conception of South Asian religious identity (Shackle 2002: 57).Their thoughts were extremely diverse and manifested in many forms (Qureshi 1973: 25). Their poetry appealed to audiences across religious boundaries.21 Amrita Pritam’s ‘literary inheritance’ was symbolized in the ‘fire of life’ that ‘burnt in the love legends of Sohni, Sassi and Hir’, which she still carries within herself. She inherited the fire ‘lit by the poet Waris’, she says in her autobiographical

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

9 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

10

NONICA DATTA

poem ‘Akhar’ (Words). And yet she laments, ‘nobody nourishes fire in the city of stones’ (Pritam 1990: 58). The fire motif commemorates that history and culture whose desecration she mourns. The tragic death of the legendary lovers signals her own disenchantment with societal, political, and communal pressures, and her creative rejection of an assertive religious identity.This was not all. By using the love legends of Sufi poets, she identifies with and appropriates a ‘syncretic’ Punjabi identity. The amorphous Punjabi literary tradition enabled Amrita Pritam to interrogate the logic of Partition. ‘There was no basis for Partition,’ she maintains.‘It had fragile foundations. Punjab’s legacy is a shared one: our poetry starts with Baba Farid in the twelfth century. From then onward our language is common, and we share the same poets. After all, there was a tehzibi rishta (cultural relationship) between Hindus and Mussalmans.’22 Punjab’s literary cultures gave her the sensibility to respond to the violence and pain of Partition, and to cope with her anguish after her uprooting and displacement. As she narrates, ‘the Partition of India continued to become a festered wound in the bosom of history. Nobody would ever know how the dreams of so many girls of this country were slaughtered.… Then I had written a long poem, “Tavarikh” (History), which echoes the voice of a young girl, who like thousands of other such girls, got lost somewhere’. Here she compares Punjab’s partition with the anguish of an abducted woman: I am the Cursed Daughter of Punjab from History23 I am the cursed daughter of Punjab. Just look at my fate. How can I speak— My tongue is cracked My hands are tied together And my feet are bound.

There is a narration of suffering: What evil was done to me! What a curse fell upon my head? The lines of fate written on my forehead Have turned into serpents.

The symbol of Sohni is central to the narrative: I was the beauty of five rivers And now look at my fate! Storm, come Flood the earth So I can drown myself!

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

10 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

11

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Further: Who brought the unfired waterpot And made me drown in the river?

An abducted woman cries out for her lost identity: My destiny is sleeping, while the world is wide awake Only I know what I am; only my faith knows I tear the red choli (bodice) from my body Take off my bracelets. I break myself in pieces And become mere threads.

Returning to her past, which she has lost, she cries: Over there, rumours fly The people who gave me birth are still alive O traveller, just listen to me— How can I walk when my knees and ankles are broken? Where has my mother gone?

Using the symbols of Sohni and of Punjab’s great ‘river of love’,24 the woman laments: There is no boat, no oar How can I cross the Chenab?

And the poet invokes her childhood memory: I don’t know where that courtyard is Or where the toys I played with have gone I was sitting in my room Who broke in through the wall? Where was the doll I was playing with? Where is the henna meant to be painted on my hands? Where is my red wedding veil? Nobody to make the tiny braids in my hair Nobody to weave in the golden flowers, To put a golden chaunk (mark) upon my head. My hair has become wild.

Further: Nobody to consult the stars The honour of the house was crushed in the bazaar. Where is the mother who is queen?

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

11 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

12

NONICA DATTA

The father who is king? Who has cursed the daughter? Where are my own sisters, my own brothers? Who has torn apart the ties of wood? Where are the childhood friends, my own village? Who can I tell what happened to me— As if my limbs had been torn from my body? Who brought the unfired waterpot And made me drown in the river? Where are those who gave me birth? Where are the friends who wish me well? I am the cursed daughter of Punjab My eyes forever filled with tears. The earth was broken apart And no one cared. Who separated blood from blood?— Brutality and bloodshed without end Duty and faith were put on sale. The women of the country were put on sale.

Without using the categories of religion, community and caste, Amrita Pritam underscores a woman’s experience of Partition as universal and irreparable. ‘Who can sense the pain of such a girl—the youth, whose body is forced into motherhood’ (Pritam 2001: 12). Helplessness25 My mother’s womb was helpless I too am a human being I am the mark of that bruise When Independence dealt its blow I am the symbol of that accident Which left its mark upon my mother’s forehead. My mother’s womb was helpless. I am the curse of the human race Born at a time when stars were falling The moon lost its light When the sun went out. My mother’s womb was helpless. I am the scar of a wound The blackened spot on my mother’s body I am the burden of that evil which my mother had to bear Smelling the stench of her womb

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

12 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

13

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Who knows how difficult it was To grow such terror in the belly When all the time her body’s flesh and bones were smoldering. I was the fruit of that time When the trees of Independence were in bud. My mother’s womb was helpless.

Amrita Pritam describes the trauma of rape through the metaphor of a mother’s womb.The womb is a victim of Partition’s madness:‘I am the symbol of that accident.’ She identifies the birth of an accursed child from the womb with Partition.The ‘evil in the womb’ manifests itself in the division of Punjab into two parts, like the surgical operation on the womb.This was a helpless womb like a helpless Punjab, and it bore ‘fruit’, when, as she says, ‘the trees of Independence were in bud’. The course of ‘independence’ was torn asunder. The child that was born was in fact a ‘blackened spot’. Her Punjab was, in many ways, a scar of the wound. Amrita expresses her disillusionment with Independence, nation, and the newlydrawn territorial boundaries that destroyed the rhythm and dreams of everyday life. In her poem, ‘The Story of Punjab’, she writes, ‘From out of nowhere Fate came galloping towards Punjab crushing Pothohar beneath the horses’ hooves.’ She mourns that ‘at year’s end, a flourishing Punjab was cut down in its green age.’ The poem poignantly captures the rural landscape and the shattering of everyday life amid the metaphor of changing year and months: The Story of Punjab26 There in the high, broad fields Were the green and red-ripe leaves Someone threw a spark into the ready grain The hayricks smoldered within Then Chetar (the beginning of the new year) came —with flames red-blazing and the sharpening of steel The waters of the five rivers now ablaze with oil They fanned the flames. Look at the sport of destiny While they were cutting furrows in the land, the seeds fell from their hands While they sat at spinning wheels, their cotton flew to the ground Ladles fell from pots Ropes were lost in the well Turbans were knocked from heads And bangles were smashed right on their wrists The belts on the spinning wheels snapped along with their cogs And the bullocks smashed along with the seats on their circling waterwheels.

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

13 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

14

NONICA DATTA

There is complete disillusionment with political parties and the state: Deer died leaping And the peacocks, dancing How long can a tree survive? How long the shade of a tree? From its very roots, the slugs eat away at it Who can I go and ask? Who can I ask anything to?

Invoking folk legends: What is this whistling wind which whirls around What stories we told one another— And the travellers lost their way.27

Again, she mocks the ruler: O king, reigning over the land— This is the month of Vaisakh (the month of early spring). Ashes are blowing on the face of the new century O king, reigning over the land— What sort Jeth (summer) has come? No sky above our heads, no earth beneath our feet. O king, reigning over the land— The month of Haar (rain) has come What’s the use of talking?; The fields have been eaten by the hedges. O king, reigning over the land What sort of a Savon (monsoon) has come? We invited it in—this fate Now, who can stop it?

Amrita Pritam transcends the usual blame game of indicting political leaders and parties, and holds ‘fate’ responsible for the shattering of everyday life. By so doing, she not only expresses the helplessness of Punjab, but also makes a powerful statement about how Punjab was not responsible for its vivisection and the ensuing violence. Surely, for her Punjab was not communalized in its day-to-day life.True to the spirit of the Punjabi qissa, she repeatedly expresses her intimate attachment to Punjab’s metaphorical and physical presence devoid of religious acrimony. In the poem ‘Divided’, she conjures up the image of a ‘common motherland’, and mourns the fracturing of the rural Punjabi landscape. Written for her friend Sajjad Haider in Lahore, the poet laments the loss of her neighbour, who was separated from her owing to Partition:

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

14 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

15

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Divided28 You were driving away and away With your families, And your bag and baggage, Because our common motherland Has been dissected. ‘One’, they say, ‘is Pakistan’, ‘The other’, they tell us, ‘is Hindustan’. ... Beautiful neighbour! The Punjab was a single body The five rivers its blood-vessels, And the overflowing waters of those rivers The common blood. Today that body has been torn apart How will the blood pass Through the broken limbs! The skies under which I played kabbadi with your brothers, Joined the pageants with them, Sang Heer-Ranjha, Recited poems by Bulle Shah, Hymns from Guru Nanak, And listened to the folk songs of Mirza-Sahiban. Punjab is an ancient land Older than History itself It was once under foreign rule But now when we rule ourselves It stands divided.

Further: The compound where You spun the wheels together, And with the rhythm of folk dance Sang the songs of the common soil, We cannot walk there anymore.

Amrita Pritam invokes many historically constructed pasts that have been embodied in the qissa tradition, as well as in the cultural festivities, including

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

15 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

16

NONICA DATTA

Qadamon-ka-mela, Basant-ka-mela, Chiraghon-ka-mela and Bhadra-kali-ka-mela celebrated in and around Lahore. During Muharram, there was also substantial participation by Hindus.29 These festivals symbolized shared cultures and multiple pasts embedded in the everyday life and dreams of Punjabis. More specifically, in her invocation of everyday one finds the influence of the well-known mediaeval Urdu poet Jawan, who composed the songs of twelve months.Translated into various dialects, their well-known rendering was in Punjabi by Hashim, the court poet of Ranjit Singh.30 The poet describes the agony of a wife parting from her spouse who is starting on a journey to Central Asia, a metaphor of estrangement that continually permeates Amrita Pritam’s poetry. In addition, her narratives are critical of the threat posed by the religiously exclusive languages to Punjab’s literary cultures. Interestingly, the Sufi saints she invokes are often devoid of their religious identity.31 Amrita Pritam constructs a powerful critique of assertive religious identities. In her poem ‘Frenzy’, religion is likened to a serpent’s bite: Frenzy32 When religion goes to people’s heads— Steel is sharpened People’s tongues grow cruel The tongues of love grow dull Veins flowing with red blood turn blue At the black snake’s bite. From their hiding places behind every bush Poisonous snakes come slithering out to bite People walking on their way And lips once beautiful to kiss begin to foam. Vultures gather, their beaks tearing at the bodies They don’t care if it’s the daughter or the daughter-in-law of the house.

The poet condemns the politics of religious conversion and re-conversion promoted by shuddhi and sangathan, tabligh and tanzim: Sheep of every flock coming upon strangers Force scraps of flesh into their mouths Or threads upon their necks. They drag them into their own folds. They gain merit, they gain virtue. They serve up their good deeds to their religions They raise the flag high In bright daylight and in the pitch-darkness of night Steel is sharpened. Innocent children

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

16 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

17

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Delicate women and strong young men Are sacrificed at the altar of this passion. The frenzy of religion goes to people’s heads.

In many scholarly works, Partition is a defining moment in shaping and strengthening communitarian consciousness.‘Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus,’ argues Gyanendra Pandey,‘were all redefined by the process of Partition’ (2001: 18).33 Likewise, according to feminist writers, Partition subordinated ‘other identities’—gender, class, caste, region—to an exclusive religious community.34 And yet, as Amrita Pritam’s life story suggests, not all Punjabis identified with the notion of a monolithic religious community in 1947. Women’s experiences, in particular, were varied, multiple, fragmented, and historical.35 Amrita Pritam’s experience of Partition impels her to invoke a shared culture of cultural symbols and language, and to transgress and ultimately transcend the languages of religious and communal mobilization. In the process, she defines her selfhood and endeavours, to use E. M. Forster’s expression, ‘to connect’ with kainaat (universe), and to establish an independent relationship between the self and universe. ‘My whole life is a struggle, a study. Amrita Pritam is the name of a journey, from a small I to a big I; from word to meaning; from boundary to boundless.’36

PINJAR: A FINAL TESTIMONY Pinjar (Skeleton), a novel on which a film has recently been made, is the most compelling account of Amrita Pritam’s experience of Partition. It serves as an enduring archive on inter-community relations in Punjab, and a Punjabi woman’s ambivalent relationship with ‘colonialism’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘communalism’. Pinjar is, I would say, Amrita Pritam’s testimony to the partition of Punjab. At the centre of the story is Pooru, a survivor. Rashida, a Muslim of the neighbouring village, abducts her much before Partition. Pooru’s abduction illustrates patriarchal and religio-communitarian anxieties (Pritam 1987: 6). Her parents’ refusal to accept her, after the abduction, suggests ways in which religiously-informed identities hardened barriers over the issues of women’s ‘honour’ and ‘purity’. Ironically, this point has been misread by a Hindu right-wing writer, Balbir K. Punj, in a recent article on the film Pinjar, where he absolves her parents of patriarchal control, and attributes their unwillingness to accept her to the fear of retribution from Muslim neighbours.37 According to him, ‘the behaviour of Pooru’s parents isn’t out of place and aptly reflects a fear of Muslims inbuilt in the mind of Hindus in those days’. He juxtaposes the image of a cowardly Hindu with that of an aggressive Muslim. And, locating Pooru’s abduction ‘in the backdrop of the [Muslim] League’s

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

17 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

18

NONICA DATTA

poisonous exhortations against the kafirs’, he writes that ‘the entire village, overwhelmingly Muslim, approves of the abduction and forced marriage. It does give us a peep into those troubled times’ (Punj 2003: 66–68). Punj clearly inserts his own prejudice into Amrita Pritam’s nuanced narrative. Contrary to Punj’s interpretation, Pooru’s travails are by no means those of a ‘minority’ Hindu in the Muslim-dominated area of undivided Punjab. Her plight is that of a woman with a fluid identity caught in the crossfire of communal frenzy. Pritam, in fact, dilutes the stereotype of the Muslim as the Other, which had become the centrepiece of colonial and Hindu communitarian narratives in Punjab. For instance, she resists labelling Rashida as a ‘Mussalman abductor’, and, without justifying his action, offers a context for his having abducted Pooru. Here she highlights the economic reality of rural Punjab: for long, Pooru’s Hindu sahukar family had exploited Rashida’s family of indebted Shaikh cultivators. Pooru eventually transcends her bitter experience, becomes emotionally attached to her ‘abductor’, and overcomes her prejudice. She marries Rashida, acquires the name Hamida, but still maintains her fluid identity: ‘She was neither one nor the other’ (Pritam 1987: 7–8, 11). This is in sharp contrast to Punj’s reading which constantly harps on Hamida’s ‘encaged identity’. For sure, Pinjar recognizes the difference between Hindus and Muslims, and yet it suggests that Punjabi society was not polarized along communal lines alone. Punj, however, wrongly makes much of Pooru’s abduction and conversion to Islam, interpreting it as a ploy to ‘obliterate Pooru’s Hindu identity’ (Punj 2003: 68). Amrita Pritam underscores the impermeability of communitarian identities, and ways in which gender erodes the barriers of religion and communitarian boundaries. For instance, Hamida and the low-caste Kammo transcend the bounds of religious communities to maintain their intimate friendship. Indeed, it is Amrita’s own commitment to the idea of transcending religious difference that inspires her to juxtapose and to contrast religiously aggressive identities with individual and culturally defined ones. The entry of a mad woman in the narrative stirs up the anxieties of masculinized and communalized groups. Her nakedness is a metaphor for her non-religious identity. It causes alarm, even though she harms no one. Amrita Pritam introduces a note of irony here. A communally divided society marginalizes the non-sectarian identity as ‘mad, alarming and a source of terror.’ The mad woman becomes pregnant, a further comment on a brutalized society. Ultimately, she dies giving birth to a boy. Was this the death of an individual’s identity? The mad woman was conjured up from Amrita’s own experience of having seen her in a Sheikhupura village, in the very land of Waris Shah, just before Partition. ‘She was walking in the dust of Sheikhupura like dust itself’, she remembers (Pritam 1996: 34).38 Surely, Amrita had captured the tone of the times, for during the Partition violence the ‘rational’ voice of a mad woman was reported in the Tribune. ‘In an atmosphere of choking

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

18 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

19

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

communal madness in Multan, the only person talking sense on the road was a mentally-deranged woman, who was shouting near District Police HQs: ‘Oh God what has happened to these mad Hindus and Muslims! Why are they quarrelling and fighting like dogs?’ (The Tribune 1947). Hamida adopts the mad woman’s child. Herein lay the rub. A panchayat of Hindus believes: ‘The mad woman was a Hindu. The Muslims have grabbed a Hindu child. Under the very noses of Hindus, they have converted a Hindu child into a Muslim.’ ‘Are we sure that the mad woman was a Hindu?’ asks one. ‘With my own eyes I saw the sacred ‘Om’ tattooed on her left arm,’ asserts another. Hindu elders of the village snatch the child from Hamida, ‘purify’ it, and give it to the water-carrier’s wife for his upbringing.The boy on the brink of death is thrown back into Hamida’s home. This is a powerful statement on the dominance of aggressive religious assertions and their impact on social relations before Partition. In the final part of the story, Hamida refuses to return with her natal family, which had once ostracized her, to India, and decides to stay on in Pakistan. She belongs neither to India nor to Pakistan. In a way, Hamida and Amrita are orphaned daughters ‘both of and in history’.39 Hamida’s inner being, amid the venomous assertions of monolithic religious formations, is split during the most tumultuous times in the subcontinent’s history.The newly defined India and the resurgent Hindu community fail to bind her. ‘My home is now in Pakistan.’ ‘“Whether one is a Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whosoever reaches her destination, she: carries along my soul also”, Pooru said to herself and made a last vow by closing her eyes’ (Pritam 1987: 50). Ironically, Punj interprets Pooru/Hamida’s decision to stay back in Pakistan as being shaped by her virulent Muslim identity. As he puts it: If Pooru’s religious sensitivity, cultural moorings and family ties could alter within such a short time, say a year, is it unnatural for some of those converted for generations or centuries to disown their pre-Islamic past, hate it and eventually work for its destruction and turn into votaries of a fundamentalist Islamic state? (Punj 2003: 68).

In short, he interprets Pooru’s abduction and conversion, and then her turning her back on her parents as a sign of a convert’s Muslim consciousness and identity. By so doing, he makes a larger point about the ‘change of religion bringing about change of nationality’. As the fear of ‘abduction’ and ‘conversion’ were at the heart of the Hindu communitarian anxiety, Punj interprets Pooru’s identity through the prism of these two prejudices rooted in a Hindu’s anxiety about Partition. As a Hindutva protagonist, he has unfortunately drawn Pinjar into the ambit of the Hindutva discourse, and has completely distorted the meaning of Pinjar and the conviction of its author.

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

19 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

20

NONICA DATTA

Amrita shows how Pooru/Hamida defies patriarchal and territorial boundaries, and effectively uses her agency to critique the reality of Partition by choosing to stay on in Pakistan. Indeed, the issue of abduction is central to Amrita’s concerns, but with a difference. She situates it within the framework of Hindu identity and patriarchal anxiety. Her worldview contrasts with the chauvinist perspective that interprets abduction as an act of Muslim depravity and aggression, and targets the entire Muslim community for its culpability. Pooru/Hamida’s refusal to succumb to the state policy of recovering abducted women in 1947,40 on the basis of their religious identification, resonates with the attitude of those women who resisted being ‘recovered’, and legitimized their crossreligious relationships (Butalia 1998: 147; Menon 1998). Though her abduction predates Partition, her resistance to a return to her natal family after Partition makes a larger point about the attempts made by some women to secure citizenship by acting autonomously of religious community and state. While reflecting on her abduction, ‘a sense of resentment surged in Hamida’s mind. When it happened to her, religion had become an insurmountable obstacle; neither her parents nor her in-laws-to-be had been willing to accept her. And now, the same religion had become so accommodating!’ (Pritam 1987: 39).41 In times when religious identity became a brutal blueprint of territorial boundaries and nationalism, Amrita and her female protagonist critique the elision of religious community with ‘nation’, highlight patriarchal hypocrisy and challenge nationalist obsessions. In many ways, Pinjar is the story of a woman’s liminal position in the face of hardening religious and national boundaries. Pooru/Hamida is a shining example of that liminality.Yet, she emerges as an active agent in shaping her destiny. Amrita shows that an abducted and raped woman is not a mere victim; her pain and anguish can be a source of powerful energy for her new identity. It is difficult not to read Pinjar as an autobiographical novel.

SUMMING UP Amrita Pritam’s emotional history takes us away from the familiar realm of elite manoeuvres and high politics to the world of life histories and Partition. Her narratives do, to some extent, resonate with recent historical perspectives, which sensitize us to the problem of the ‘wide chasm between the historians’ apprehension of 1947 and what we might call a more popular, survivors’ account of it—between history and memory’ (Pandey 2001: 6). Such historiographical interventions underscore alternative discourses and ‘non-disciplinary accounts of 1947’ (ibid.: 204). Amrita’s narratives identify with a different kind of ‘national’ past, a different notion

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

20 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

21

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

of creative community, subjectivity and citizenry (ibid.: 18). And yet, her account, though that of a survivor’s, does not ‘assert a heroic sense of community in the face of all inherited senses of belonging and home’.42 In many ways, she offers a different perspective on Partition, violence and community. Her narratives do suggest that survivors’ accounts cannot be reduced to Partition as ‘violence’ alone.43 In fact, survivors’ recollections of Partition contain multiple narratives, stories and meanings. Above all, survivors’ accounts of 1947 form part of their life histories.44 Defying the image of essentialized religious communities, Amrita Pritam’s life history offers a variegated and creative experience of an individual with a ‘community’ forged around a complex weave of popular cultural norms and literary traditions of Punjab. She identifies with multiple alternative strands and spaces in Punjab’s vibrant culture and history, and her perspective differs from those women and men who remained strongly entrenched in patriarchal and religio-communitarian solidarities. This paper has tried to demonstrate how, despite the extent to which the politics of religious identity generated familial, communitarian, regional, and national anxieties, there were still possibilities of creativity, liberation, transgression, and transcendence in pre- and post-Partition Punjab. Amrita’s life history reveals that many cultural identities and subjectivities existed along with religiously strident ones.45 Loosely defined and expressed in a variety of ways, they often harked back to precolonial narratives and traditions for their sustenance, in times when efforts were made in several quarters to eliminate these. And yet, unlike religious solidarities, such cultural identities did not acquire wider political dimensions or territorial identifications.They were often fragile and fragmented in contrast to strident and sharp religious collectivities. Amrita Pritam’s idea of cultural community and identity testifies to a plurality in Punjab that was exemplified in cultural symbols, motifs, and landscapes. Partition liberated her from the bounds of her religious community, and helped her strengthen her fluid identity and subjectivity. Her life history problematizes the experience and consciousness of a ‘refugee’, a Partition victim. Clearly, she does not identify with national borders, which are political constructs and imagined projections of territorial power. For her, Partition was a destructive but also a creative moment. She comes into her own, even though she feels rootless, separated from her lover and her homeland. In short, Amrita offers an alternative voice in history. In many ways, her life history constitutes a counter-narrative to dominant histories of 1947 and it serves as an alternative archive of Partition (Burton 2003: 134). Significantly, her relationship with her own religious community remains ambivalent, distant, conflictive. Amrita Pritam’s life history informs us that a refugee’s anguish is not necessarily rendered into a communalized consciousness, for it gave her the poetic sensibility to compose an ode to her undivided Punjab.

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

21 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

22

NONICA DATTA

NOTES * I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Amrita Pritam for sharing with me her life history over the years. Most of the translations in this paper are my own; including the interviews where Amrita spoke in Punjabi and Hindustani. 1. The translation is from Pritam (2001: 120). The Sufis had named their place of meditation as Hujra, where the meditation of many years vibrates and vitalizes the place. 2. I have explored this theme in A Daughter’s Testimony and Punjab’s Partition (forthcoming); and ‘Partition Memories: A Daughter’s Testimony’ (2001). 3. His shrine in Dera Ghazi Khan was a ‘resort of Hindus and Musalman mendicants’. See Sharif (1972: 143). 4. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 10 January 2000. 5. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 12 January 2001. 6. See note 5. 7. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 4 January 2001. 8. See note 4. 9. See note 7. 10. See note 7. 11. See note 7. 12. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 10 May 2001. 13. Translated from Punjabi by Arlene Zide and Amrita Pritam. See also Pritam (2001: 8–9). 14. See note 5. 15. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 16 July 2001. 16. According to Richard Eaton, ‘Shrines like that of Baba Farid made a universal culture available to local groups, enabling such groups to transcend their local microcosms,’ (Eaton: 2003: 280). Indeed, the appeal of Baba Farid was not lost to diverse local people in twentieth-century Punjab. 17. Gazetteer of the Lahore District, 1883–84, Calcutta, n.d., pp. 49, 50, 52. 18. See note 16, p. 54. 19. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 12 December 2002. 20. On Bulle Shah, see Shackle (2002: 57). 21. For an alternative and somewhat limited perspective solely within the framework of Islamic tradition, see Mir (1995). On Sufism grounded not in theology, but in experience, see Qureshi (1973: 25). 22. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 22 January 2000. 23. Translated from Punjabi by Arlene Zide and Amrita Pritam. See also Pritam (2001: 13–14). 24. One of the nineteenth-century poets, Mian Qadir Yar (1803–1892) composed a beautiful qissa of Sohni-Mahival, in which he identified the river Chenab as a river of love (Kohli 1993: 112). 25. Translated from Punjabi by Arlene Zide and Amrita Pritam. See also Pritam (2001: 12–13). 26. Translated from Punjabi by Arlene Zide and Amrita Pritam. See also Pritam (2001: 10). 27. In explanation, Amrita Pritam adds: ‘Folk legends say that if you tell your stories during the day, travellers will lose their way.’ 28. ‘Divided’ (1947), see Mathur and Kulasrestha (1976: 35–36).

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

22 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

23

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

29. See Punjab District Gazetteers,Vol. XXXA, Lahore district with maps (Lahore, 1916), pp. 84–85. See also Latif (1892: 146, 268–69, 272). For their appeal to Hindus and Muslims alike, see Walker (1894: 30, 78). 30. Gazetteer of the Lahore District, 1883–84, p. 55. 31. According to David Gilmartin, the pirs or sajjada nashins provided the vanguard of religious support for Pakistan in the 1940s. Amrita Pritam does not underscore the changing role that the Sufis and their shrines played in twentieth-century Punjabi society and polity. Instead, she celebrates their universal language that transcends religious boundaries. Sensitivities of Punjabis like Amrita Pritam seem to escape Gilmartin’s scholarly understanding of twentieth-century Punjab’s society and polity (see Gilmartin 1979, 1989). 32. Translated from Punjabi by Arlene Zide and Amrita Pritam. See also Singh (1992: 101). 33. Though Pandey makes an important point about Partition as a critical moment in the redefinition of religious identities, it needs emphasizing that this process predates Partition. It is important to focus on the pre-history of Partition and to explore how religious identities were formed historically. After all, the Arya Samaj, the Singh Sabha and the Muslim Anjumans, followed by the Hindu Sabha, the Akali Dal, and the Muslim League, set the stage for the dominance of religious identity over other collectivities during Partition. 34. See Butalia (1998: 361); Khan et al. (1994: 5); and Menon and Bhasin (1998: 257). 35. This point is somewhat undermined in the gendered readings of Partition which represent women’s experiences as unproblematically homogeneous. For instance, see Menon and Bhasin (1998) and Butalia (1998). 36. Interviews with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 12 May 2001, 10 January 2002. 37. Balbir Punj considers Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s film and Amrita Pritam’s book, Pinjar to be the same. In fact, they are at crucial variance. 38. Interview with Amrita Pritam, New Delhi, 29 August 2000. 39. I borrow the phrase from Antoinette Burton’s reading of Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (Burton 2003: 135). 40. A programme for the recovery of abducted women was undertaken jointly by India and Pakistan on 6 December 1947. Known as the Central Recovery Operation, it sought to ‘recover’ any woman who was seen to be in the company of a man of the other religion after 1 March 1947 (Butalia 1998: 143–44; Menon and Bhasin 1998: 123, 256). 41. Elsewhere, Amrita Pritam writes about the irony of the situation in 1947: ‘Pooru was abducted much before Partition by a personal enemy, and her parents refused to accept her. This was one event, but during the time of Partition, there were many episodes like this taking place from home to home. Ironically, by this time, parents were looking for their abducted daughters,’ (Pritam 1999: 24). 42. Here, her account appears to differ from Gyanendra Pandey’s reading. According to Pandey, ‘the undying valour of the community’ is a theme that recurs very commonly and ‘most forcefully’ in the recollections of the survivors of 1947 (2001: 189). 43. On the relationship between violence and community in survivors’ accounts of Partition, see Pandey (2001: 175). 44. This aspect is somewhat missing in Gyanendra Pandey’s pioneering work. 45. In several historical works, fluid identities appear to be transformed into monolithic ones in the colonial period. Seldom is a point made by historians about the co-existence of multiple identities, fragmented identities, and the need for their radical historicization.

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

23 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

24

NONICA DATTA

REFERENCES Arora, Indu, ‘Waking Gods’, Amrita Pritam: A Living Legend (Chandigarh: India Inter-Continental Cultural Association, 1995). Burton, Antoinette, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998). Datta, Nonica, ‘Partition Memories: A Daughter’s Testimony’, in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakazato (eds), The Unfinished Agenda: Nation Building in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 17–48. ———, A Daughter’s Testimony and Punjab’s Partition (forthcoming). Eaton, Richard, ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid’, in India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Gilmartin, David, ‘Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab’, Modern Asian Studies, 13(3), 1979: 485–517. ———, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). Grewal, J. S., ‘The World of Waris’, in Sudhir Chandra (ed.), Social Transformation and Creative Imagination (New Delhi: Allied, 1984). Khan, Nighat Said, Rubina Saigol and Afiya Shehrbano Zia, ‘Introduction’, in Locating the Self: Perspectives on Women and Multiple Identities (Lahore: ASR Publications, 1994). Kohli, Surinder Singh, History of Punjabi Literature (Delhi: National Book Shop, 1993). Latif, Syad Muhammad, Lahore: Its History, Architectural Remains and Antiquities, with an Account of its Modern Institutions, Inhabitants, their Trade, Customs, & c. (Lahore: New Imperial Press, 1892). Mathur, Ramesh and Mahendra Kulasrestha (eds), Writings on India’s Partition (Delhi: Simant, 1976). Matringe, Denis, ‘Krsnaite and Nath Elements in the Poetry of the Eighteenth-century Panjabi Sufi Bulhe Sah’, in R. S. McGreggor (ed.), Devotional Literature in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Menon, Ritu, ‘Reproducing the Legitimate Community: Secularity, Sexuality and the State in Postpartition India’, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 1998). Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). Mir, Mustansir, ‘Teaching of Two Punjabi Sufi Poets’, in Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (ed.), Religions of India in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Nain, Shahira, ‘An Interview with Amrita Pritam’, Amrita Pritam: A Living Legend (Chandigarh: India Inter-Continental Cultural Association, 1995). Oberoi, H., ‘From Ritual to Counter-Ritual: Rethinking the Hindu–Sikh Question, 1884–1915’, in Joseph T. O’Connell, Milton Israel and Willard G. Oxtoby (eds), Sikh History and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990). Pandey, Gyanendra, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pritam, Amrita, The Skeleton and that Man, originally published in 1950, trans. Khushwant Singh (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987). ———, Life and Times (Delhi: Vikas, 1989). ———, ‘Words’, A Slice of Life: Selected Works (Delhi: Vikas, 1990).

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

24 Black

8/8/2007, 8:58 AM

25

TRANSCENDING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Pritam, Amrita, Deewaron ke Saaye Mein (Delhi: Rajpal, 1996). ———, Raseedi Ticket (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1998). ———, Aksharon ke Saaye: Atmakatha (Delhi: Rajpal, 1999). ———, ‘Mitti ka Muqaddar’, in Dusre Adam ki Beti (Delhi: Rajpal, 2000). ———, Shadows of Words (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2001). Punj, Balbir K., ‘Do Skeletons Have a Soul’, Outlook, 10 November 2003. Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husain, ‘Projecting Sufi Thought in an Appropriate Context’, in L. F. Rushbrook Williams (ed.), Sufi Studies: East and West (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973). Sekhon, Sant Singh, A History of Panjabi Literature, Vol. 2 (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1996), pp. 132–49. Shackle, Christopher, ‘Some Observations on the Evolution of the Modern Standard Punjabi’, in J. T. O’Connell, Milton Israel and Willard Gurdon Oxtoby (eds), Sikh History and Religion in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988). ———, ‘Beyond Turk and Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance’, in David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Delhi: India Research Press, 2002). Sharif, Jafar, Islam in India or the Qanun-i-Islam, revised edition by W. Crooke (Delhi: Oriental Reprint, 1972), first edition 1921. Singh, Khushwant (ed.), Amrita Pritam: Selected Poems (Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith, 1992). The Tribune, ‘Mad Woman Talks Sense’, 14 March 1947. Walker, G. C., Gazetteer of the Lahore District, 1893–94 (Lahore, 1894).

01_Roy & Bhatia~chap-1.pmd

25 Black

8/8/2007, 8:59 AM

26

NICOLA MOONEY

2 Of Love, Martyrdom, and (In)Subordination: Sikh Experiences of Partition in the Films Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha

NICOLA MOONEY

This paper examines two Partition-themed feature films, Shaheed-e-Mohabbat (Martyr of Love, dir. Manoj Punj, 1999) and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Mutiny: A Love Story, dir. Anil Sharma, 2001). Both purport in their very titles to reflect on a central concern of love. But both also, necessarily, articulate the violent conflicts of boundary, homeland, and nation, which are contingent on South Asian communal relations. In this context, the films frame questions of migration and citizenship, subjectivity and belonging. I explore these issues from a Sikh perspective: I argue that these films must be interpreted in a way that recognizes the role of Partition violence, the creation of borders, forcible migration, and regional dislocation in the ongoing construction of Sikh subjectivity and ethnic experience. I begin with a brief history of Partition, and then cursorily discuss Partition fiction, giving particular attention to ethnographic strategies in approaching Partition. I then present a narrative analysis of the plots of both films. In the final section, I compare the testimony and fiction of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, relating the positions of each to an anthropological reading of Sikh identity. In conclusion, I suggest that the partitioned Sikh subject is permanently bound and dislocated within Indian constructions of citizenship and nation, as represented in these filmic narratives of love, migration, and loss.

PARTITION MAKES THE NATION1 The national narratives of India and Pakistan celebrate independence from colonial rule, unity within the nation-state, and bounded separations from each other, while

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

26 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

27

obscuring the sadly commonplace knowledge that each was born in blood. Recent estimates suggest that 200,000–250,000 deaths (Khosla, cited in Das 1995: 59), or perhaps 500,000–1,000,000 (Menon and Bhasin 1998: 35) occurred as a result of the 1947 Partition.2 Untold deaths occurred in the communal mass slaughter which has prominently featured in Partition memory and memorialization. Many also died as a result of infectious diseases and malnutrition as refugees, as Partition caused the largest migration known in human history, with an estimated eight to ten million people moving across the new border (ibid.), for the most part forcibly. Of these survivors, perhaps 100,000 were raped or abducted women (Das 1995: 59). A central thematic of tragedy thus must also be recognized in Indian national origins, as Dipankar Gupta has noted: ‘While the rest of India were jubilantly celebrating with Jawaharlal Nehru their midnight tryst with destiny ... Punjab in the North West and Bengal in the East were torn apart by the partition and engulfed by bloodshed, pillage and violence’ (1993: 16). Imaginings of the colonial independence struggle and the unified but diverse postcolonial state render the history of India as the biography of the emergent nation-state, a historiography in which the story of Partition, and the accompanying Hindu–Muslim and Muslim–Sikh riots of 1946–47, is both minimized and obscured (Pandey 1992: 29). Urvashi Butalia has noted the nonexistence of institutional memorializations and state historical recognition of Partition (2000: 286). Indeed, it was possible just a decade ago, in a volume in the Oxford History of India series, to state that ‘1947 is more important to the historian searching for tidy demarcations than a deeply critical point of division in the Indian experience—not just in the realm of traditions, ideas, life-styles and the land’s basic economic and social structures and problems, but in government and politics, too’ (Brown 1994: 318).This ‘view from the top’ of nationalist delight at India’s freedom from the British, read against the need to preserve the fragmentary national unity which remained after 1947, arrives at a curiously amnesiac and strangely silent history of Partition. The painful events of Partition cannot be reconciled with the objectivity that the (modernist) historical project demands, and thus few histories describe the impacts and meanings of Partition for the Punjabis who lived through it (Butalia 2000: 275). Similarly, rehabilitation was prematurely assessed. Early histories of Partition and its aftermaths, such as Keller (1975) and Randhawa (1963), suggested that Partition refugees were adapting well to their new lives and for the most part had reconciled past traumas. The context of such early assessments may relate to the comparative political stability associated with the Nehru dynasty, which was essentially in continuous power since Independence, and the ‘honeymoon’ appeal of India’s freedom from colonial rule. Economic growth was also characteristic of this period: in Punjab, summary accounts of refugee rehabilitation date from the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when Green Revolution agricultural reforms contributed greatly

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

27 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

28

NICOLA MOONEY

to the region’s prosperity, despite more immediate difficulties with food production in the region as a result of land redistribution and loss of riparian resources. In the 1980s, the Punjabi situation became volatile all over again, as the region’s Sikhs became the object of a process—and perhaps a programmatic—of linguistic, economic and religious marginalization. This minoritization was often read and represented as resonant with the prior traumas of religious identity that had occurred at Partition. More broadly, a flurry of academic and commemorative activity in the years preceding and following the fiftieth anniversary of Independence in 1997 (see, for instance, Butalia 2000; Gupta 1993; Kamra 2002; Menon and Bhasin 1998; and Pandey 1992) suggest that the events of Partition are still painfully resonant and increasingly of nationally significant meaning. The consequences of Partition are still being felt in Indian society, as evidenced by the continued importance of communal relations in politics, daily life, and artistic representation. According to Sunil Khilnani, Partition has become a ‘recurring motif’ in the subcontinent, both ‘a fearful spectre in the cultural memory and a perpetual challenge to the territorial authority of the successor states’ (2003: 29).The ‘spectre’ of Partition has contributed to ‘hardening of positions and … outrage’ (Kamra 2002: 305) between India and Pakistan, as well as to their softening. In many ways, Partition lies outside of history, in the realm of the mythic: ‘It was a creation-narrative, an epic founding myth, of sheer agony over religion’ (Larson 1995: 191). Anderson (1991) has described the simultaneous processes of memory and forgetting in the development of national consciousness, and in the act of constructing and affirming national affiliations. Remembering Partition has become a symbolic act of memory and forgetting, the actualities of the event largely forgotten, while an unsettling sense of them lingers, like a word ‘on the tip of the tongue’, as a reminder of the paramount importance of national unity. Loyalty to the new nation may be fostered in the remembrance of Partition: ‘among national memories, sorrows have greater value than victories, for they impose duties and demand common effort’ (Renan 1882). But equally, Partition contributes to differences of history and identity in India. Butalia (2000) has observed that pasts and presents (or, more recent pasts) intersect and merge in Partition narratives, evidenced particularly among Sikhs by the telescoping of accounts of 1984 and 1947.3 Indeed, Sikhs are highly aware of the slights and traumas of their history. For many Sikhs, constructions of and affiliations with the Indian national identity seem scarcely possible (Mooney 2003, forthcoming). The political and historical circumstances of the birth of the nation demand that identity attend instead to religion, community, and ethnicity. This situation became entrenched in 1984, the events of which have a vast series of profound and uncomfortable meanings:‘... people [were] separated overnight ... friends became enemies, homes became strange places, strange places now had to be claimed as home, a line was drawn to mark a border, and boundaries began to find reflection

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

28 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

29

in people’s lives and minds’ (Butalia 2000: 285). In these circumstances, it is helpful to understand memory, as Michael Lambek has suggested, as a form of moral practice: memory makes ‘intersubjective and dialogical’ (1996: 239) claims to the past, which are embedded in and contribute to the framing of contemporary meanings. Remembering is thus a symbolic practice (ibid.), the narrativization of which ensures continuity (however partial and painful) when memory is no longer a matter of experience (Anderson 1991; Nora 1989). The testimonials of Partition survivors and the witness of others affected by Partition’s memory are differentiated as traumatized and non-traumatized accounts by Sukeshi Kamra (2002); such a distinction continues into the present with regard to newly-recovered testimonials and newly-imagined fictions of the events.

HISTORY, TESTIMONY, AND FICTION IN REPRESENTING PARTITION Despite the violence of national beginnings, Partition narratives recorded in oral histories (e.g. Bright 1948; Butalia 2000; Corruccini and Kaul 1990; Nanda 1948; Singh 1973) are frequently characterized by retellings of normative harmony and even loving relations among Sikh, Hindu and Muslim communities. Partition testimony often emphasizes elements of compassionate life-saving assistance rendered across communal lines, rather unexpectedly in the remembering of an event that historians characterize as traumatic in its pronounced and bitter communalism. It might similarly be argued that the horrendous violence that accompanied Partition is not a prominent feature of Partition narratives (although such silences can have multiple, sometimes culpable meanings). Additionally, wherever blame for the horrors of Partition is assigned, it tends to be attributed to abstract entities like ‘the government’ rather than to individuals of particular religious communities. This emphasis on prior and apparently enduring ideals of communal harmony may be read as an attempt by survivors to render anomalous and extraordinary the hatefulness of Partition. Moreover, the selectiveness of memory and forgetting are psychological strategies that permit everyday life to continue. An alternate reading of the thematic of love in Partition accounts might suggest that acts of inter-communal assistance and histories of communal harmony become anomalous after Partition and are necessarily identified in Partition narratives in recognition of new demands for definitive prioritizations of community identification. I have argued elsewhere (Mooney 2003, forthcoming) that Punjabi Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus, unused to thinking of themselves in primarily religious terms prior to Partition, were fixed in its events into privileged religious categorizations that intersected and demanded religious exclusivity from members of a formerly

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

29 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

30

NICOLA MOONEY

unified Punjabiyat. Butalia (2000: 285) has also noted this privileging, aptly referring to it as a partitioning of the mind. Among the greatest tragedies of Partition is that it imposed an inherently communal birthright on the new nation. The events and their attendant histories, the rememberings and forgettings, have required that affiliations and claims of identity be assessed in newly-prioritized, newly-particularized, and newly-fixed ways, so that at the very moment in which India gained freedom as a nation, individual Indians could only espouse their national identity in religiously identified and qualified terms. Fictional representations of Partition, whether literary or filmic, seem more likely to meditate on the violence of national birth and regional dismemberment than testimonial narratives. Partition fiction has been perhaps the most markedly engaged form of memorialization; witnessing the power that the event still holds over the national psyche, while hinting also at the psychological salve which may be associated with apparently mythic accounts. Kamra states that ‘fiction is the form in which many painful subjects are first raised for consideration’ (2002: 2), suggesting that Partition fiction may be particularly appropriate to treatments of communal violence. Fictionalized accounts remain the most frequent means of memorializing the horrors of Partition. Owning and resolving the traumatic history of the event may be psychologically easier through purportedly literary means as such narratives feature people and pain which we may imagine as less than real. Kamra has remarked that fictionalized literature on Partition and actual witness are difficult to distinguish, as literature like testimonial is replete with ‘images of raped women, orphaned children, refugee camps, blood-thirsty mobs of men, women throwing themselves into wells, miles and miles of refugee columns … and burning villages everywhere’ (ibid.: 1), although she is careful to note that while motivated by the same sense of narrative urgency, fictional accounts tend to be ‘more self-conscious and crafted’ (ibid.: 115). A number of Indian authors have grappled with Partition as a watershed event for national and individual subjects. I mention here merely some of the best-known works of Partition fiction. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan remains one of the most emotive and best known Partition novels. It has in the past decade been cinematized, as have several other Partition novels, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (The Skeleton), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (Darkness), and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man (also published as Cracking India, and released with the film title 1947: Earth); meanwhile Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines deals with the Partition of Bengal. Recently, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers and Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters set forth moving accounts of Punjabi women’s lives in the context of Partition and independence. These works are joined by short stories: Sa’adat Hasan Manto has contributed several volumes of highly emotive tales of Partition, and Sahni We Have Arrived in Amritsar and Other Stories. Despite the growing literatures on Partition, Gyanendra Pandey

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

30 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

31

has cautioned that ‘there is no consensus among us about the nature of Partition. We have no means of representing such tragic loss, nor of pinning down—or rather, owning—responsibility for it’; historiographers, journalists, and filmmakers, ‘consciously or otherwise … have represented Partition and all that went with it as an aberration’ (1992: 33). From this ineffable point of departure, Menon and Bhasin, taking their cues from JamesYoung’s work on the Holocaust, suggest that we might understand Partition best precisely through ‘its many representations: political, social, historical, testimonial, literary, documentary, even communal’ (1998: xi). Similarly, Urvashi Butalia cites Young to note that fictions ‘are part of the truth in any particular version’ (2000: 11). The narrative framework of Partition fiction seeks to represent the violent events of 1947 as aberrant in order that the nation may be triumphally returned to its Nehruvian vision (of unity in diversity); this is the master narrative of Partition history. But other testimonials are also apparent. For Sikhs, Partition has multiple meanings: more than a moment of profound communal unrest, it forced the division and relocation of Indian Sikhs (and Hindus and Muslims), and the loss of ancestral lands and properties; sundered the five rivers of Punjab in legal, territorial, and irrigational senses; and separated Sikhs from many historic and local gurdwaras. In many cases, Partition marked the ultimate separation as family members were lost in the violence. This extraordinarily traumatic event resulted in a new sense of community closure and the fixing of Punjabi religious communities according to newly formulated and firm boundaries. Although a fluctuating and evolving dynamic between a Sikh self and Muslim and Hindu others is readily apparent in Punjabi history, Partition crystallized these notions such that those who had formerly been Punjabis became Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims. In the next section of this paper, I read two Partition films as commentaries on the Sikh position in contemporary India. I describe how, in Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, the partitioned subject is restored to an Indian home and nation by violence, while Partition erects impenetrable borders and destroys all possibility of homecoming in Shaheed-e-Mohabbat. But I begin with ethnography.

TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF PARTITION CINEMA Anthropology has largely been about the interrogation and interpretation of the cultural experiences of real people, not fictional characters, and it must be conceded that an ethnographic methodology regarding literary and visual texts is far from established. At the least, the broad cultural and symbolic codes mediated in film and literature may be likened to folkloric and mythic frameworks that are well within the anthropological purview. Beyond this, ethnographers have analysed varied

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

31 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

32

NICOLA MOONEY

popular cultural practices and discourses relating to media (for example, Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995; Dwyer and Pinney 2001), including audience interpretations of film and television (Derné 2000; Mankekar 1999); ritualistic aspects of media viewing (Mankekar 2002); cinema as a mediator of class identity (Agarwal 2002; Dickey 1993); films as moral codes and arbiters (Derné 2000; Mankekar 1999); films as political texts (Dirks 2001; Vasudevan 2001); films as sites for globalization and localization (Appadurai 1996); intersections of popular culture and everyday life (Uberoi 2001); fan behaviours (Dickey 2001); media production in cross-cultural contexts (Ganti 2002); the material cultures of media (Manuel 1993; Pinney 2002); the intertextual mediation of media (Dwyer 2001); and the media-makers themselves (Dwyer 2001). Still other anthropologists have argued for a greater focus on narrative, thus making connections between ethnography and literary analysis (for instance, Daniel and Peck 1996). Anthropology gives broad consideration to the cultural production and consumption of media texts in order to understand ‘how media are embedded in people’s lives’ as well as how producers and consumers are embedded ‘in discursive universes, political situations, economic circumstances, national settings, historical moments, and transnational flows’ in situations of modernity (Ginsburg et al. 2002: 2). But ethnographic consideration must also be given to the content of films and literature. This suggestion speaks to disciplinary concerns with mythic narrative structures and their local interpretations, which may be normative and intentional or resistant and contestatory, as well as to the pervasive nature of mass media and its diverse meanings in locations across the (post)modern world. In describing the movement of cultural formations across national boundaries, Arjun Appadurai offers the notion of ‘mediascapes’, narrativizations of lived and imagined global social worlds, which respond to dislocation even as they imagine the places of home. It is significant to this paper that mediascapes are alternately exploited by nation-states and struggled over by state and nation, all the while negotiating past displacements and future yearnings (Appadurai 1996: 35–39). My own fieldwork was oriented neither to film nor to Partition. However, in focusing my field conversations among an urban, educated and transnational middle class, the importance of film as an element of popular cultural discourse was significant. Film-viewing is a common leisure activity among the Indian middle classes, and filmic themes are frequently discussed, often with regard to moral understandings (Derné 2000). Doing ethnographic fieldwork on newly-urban and transnational lives among middle-class Indian Sikhs in 1998 and 1999, I noted that films were a frequent topic of discussion, particularly in the younger generations, who sometimes referred me to certain films in illustration of a particular social or historical point. Filmic narratives provided a convenient set of metaphors to describe or emphasize

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

32 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

33

particular social situations and mores; in effect, film scripts may become cultural or life scripts. These forms of poesis become a shorthand for explanation, but may also convey situations which are otherwise veiled or omitted in pain or silence. In an interview during my early fieldwork in 1998, Amardeep Kaur suggested that I watch the film Maachis (dir. Gulzar, 1996) if I wanted to understand what being a Sikh meant to her, and what the 1980s had been like for Sikh youth. Watching the film upon returning from fieldwork, I found that I could only speculate at Amardeep’s hint towards more deeply meaningful and perhaps unvoicable experiences; even had such meanings found expression, my authority over their articulation would have been questionable. Silences, omissions, and elisions in narrative can have multiple meanings; for instance, Butalia (2000) has suggested that silence is a strategy for dealing with admissions of violence, which might otherwise force themselves to be voiced. In my experience, where comfortably established Sikh families were reluctant to discuss historical and political traumas, and I was reluctant to invite upon them the pain of such probing, fictional and filmic Partition narratives have been helpful in my developing an understanding of the social and symbolic importance of traumatic events. More recently, many Sikhs that I know have urged me to watch other films which meditate on the nature of the historical traumas they have witnessed as a community: Pinjar (dir. Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, 2003; based on the Partition novel by Amrita Pritam), Hawayein (dir. Ammtoje Mann, 2003; focused on the antiSikh pogroms of 1984 and their aftermath), and Des Hoya Pardes (dir. Manoj Punj, 2005; dealing with the impacts of 1984 on rural families and youths). Silences and deferrals to popular cultural representations can also—as I think common among the Sikhs I know—refer to messy identities, fuzzy loyalties, and inherent difficulties in their articulation. I am thus convinced that film can contribute to an ethnographic understanding of the central importance of social history, community memory, and shared trauma to Sikh identity. In the course of my fieldwork, I was fortunate to watch Shaheed-e-Mohabbat twice with extended Jat Sikh families.Yet, although I participated in these viewings, my observations were curiously few. The first time I watched Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, in a box at the local cinema, I myself was transfixed by its narrative, and moved to the point of tears, so much so that I found it difficult to watch for and attend to the reactions of those around me. Leaving the cinema, we were collectively lost for words, left only with rhetorical and apparently clichéd responses to the powerful story we had just witnessed. Broaching my admiration for the cinematic realism of the film, the family readily discussed their particular likes, agreeing that the film deserved the critical praise it was receiving in the regional press (such as The Tribune, Chandigarh) as heralding a new era of acclaim in Punjabi cinema. The film’s representation of Partition was scarcely mentioned, other than in a repeated and resigned lament from the family patriarch, Balwant Singh, himself a Partition

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

33 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

34

NICOLA MOONEY

survivor, who observed: ‘I simply wonder how we lived through those times.’ Later, in a brief and rare Partition-focused conversation, he told me that he had found the film’s portrayal accurate and profoundly moving. Several months later, I joined a younger family to watch the film on television a second time. It had been widely advertised as a television premiere, and that evening’s viewing had been much anticipated: not only was the film’s star a family favourite, and the film’s soundtrack cassette in frequent play at home, but the family’s daughter had already viewed the film in the theatre and pronounced a positive opinion. Crowded around the dining table, we watched the small screen sitting atop the fridge in rapt and silent attention. When the film was over, once again little was offered in the way of responses to the film’s Partition narrative, although the comments made were perhaps a little more casual, responding appreciatively to the film’s representation of the rural Punjabi experience and the film’s representation of its central Jat Sikh character as a deeply moral man. Clearly Shaheed-e-Mohabbat was an important film to these Jat Sikh families: schedules were rearranged to accommodate its viewing, and grave attention was paid through its duration. Little vocal response, however, was apparently undertaken towards its content. The film could be understood and discussed—to the extent that it was—without recourse to particular historical traumas, and the viewers were convinced of its veracity. The ethnographic object, in both viewing instances, was perhaps to be found less in people’s responses to the film and more in the wider mediated framework that had been constructed about the film. Reading (or viewing) Partition texts ethnographically demands that we be attuned to the circumstances of their cultural production as well as their consumption. The Sikh imprimatur is clearly evidenced in Shaheed-e-Mohabbat: the film is a Sikh project, developed, produced and directed as a piece of regional cinema with a narrative told from a Sikh point of view. It is based on a true story, and was previously cinematised in Pakistan (The Tribune, Chandigarh 17 April 1999). Historical narratives of Partition which feature very similar events can indeed be found.4 Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, while starring a Sikh lead actor, is more clearly a Bollywood production. As such, it is more concerned with nationalism, which we see in its jingoistic plot and bold antiPakistan sentiment. The film is a nationalist text, part of the ‘lexicon of common sense’ which declares Partition as ‘the originary moment to which tensions within India and between India and Pakistan can be traced,’ (Kamra 2002: 303). Significantly, on the one occasion on which I was able to view parts of Gadar: Ek Prem Katha with Sikhs, the family with whom I watched it chatted through much of the film, which they had seen before, but commented repeatedly on their four-year-old son’s particular admiration for Sunny Deol. It seemed the film was taken not as a serious historical narrative but rather as a Bollywood star vehicle for a reasonably wellliked Punjabi actor.5 Indeed, continuing to set aside the discrepant demands of truth and fiction, it might be asserted that Shaheed-e-Mohabbat ultimately presents a

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

34 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

35

Sikh narrative of Partition, and Gadar a Hindu one. An ethnographic reading of Partition texts, as I argued at the beginning of this section, also demands a consideration of their content. Before proceeding with filmic analysis, it is necessary to say a few words on the connections between gender and identity as normatively related in Punjab, and as revealed in Partition testimony. Importantly, several recent projects have undertaken a gendered history of Partition (notably Butalia 2000; and Menon and Bhasin 1998). That the violence of Partition was particularly gendered is linked in this historiography to central cultural frameworks of honour and purity (Das 1995; Kamra 2002). These concepts, which normatively inform Punjabi kinship and gender relations such that men’s honour is constituted in women’s shame (Mooney 2003, forthcoming), shape the nation and its identity (Das 1995). Indeed, the South Asian nations have been described as ‘brotherhoods’ concerned with the protection of women (van der Veer 1999: 85). In this context, women’s bodies become sites of national struggle and sexual violence: Partition narratives are replete with raped, abducted and martyred women, all of whom challenged national honour by representing national shame; meanwhile, horrific narratives of ‘honourable death’ (Menon and Bhasin 1998) conceal men’s complicity in acts of sexual violence (Butalia 2000). Furthermore, given gendered Punjabi codes concerning the voicing of honour and shame, many women survivors of Partition have been denied the therapeutics of testimony and remembrance. In this context, women’s bodies, with their ‘potential of confusing sharp [communal] divisions’ in mothering innately ‘dishonourable’ children, ‘bear permanent witness to the violence of Partition’ (Das 1995: 56), as well as to its gendering. This is further evidenced in agreements to exchange abducted women6 but not forcibly converted men (Kamra 2002: 137); in refusing to acknowledge the agency of raped and abducted women, yet other forms of gendered violence are enacted. I turn now to a deeper consideration of the content and interpretation of the two Partition films chosen for scrutiny.

LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION— SHAHEED-E-MOHABBAT AND GADAR: EK PREM KATHA Shaheed-e-Mohabbat is the story of a Sikh martyr. I offer here a fairly extended descriptive analysis because its narrative documents communal positionings around Punjab’s partition with some nuance, and it reflects Partition testimony with accuracy, adding another fictionalized narrative to our means of representing Partition. Moreover, as I shall argue, it is a text indicative of post-1947 Sikh alienation in India. As a Punjabi film, however, it is not as widely known (nor as readily available as Gadar). The film opens with a qawwali being sung at a ceremony which we learn is

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

35 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

36

NICOLA MOONEY

being held in the memory of Boota Singh, who is honoured by all Lahoris. A young man who has not attended the annual commemoration before asks why a Sikh is buried in a Muslim graveyard;7 he is told that Boota is being commemorated as a great lover whose love surpassed such distinctions.This conceit then allows the narration of Boota Singh’s story. We learn that Boota, who had served with the British in Burma, returned to his village in Jalandhar after the war with the intention of returning to farming— thus establishing his caste as Jat—so that he might marry and raise a family. Boota is depicted against the tranquil and timeless agricultural landscape of Punjab, happily travelling the paths home to his village.When he arrives, in an unlikely but prophetic scene, his taaya (father’s elder brother) fails to recognize him. Boota, who seems to be in his forties, is advised against marrying for he is too old and there are no suitable girls in the village. When he leaves, the taaya reassures his sons that Boota will die a bachelor and they will inherit his land. This suspect, inverted presentation of a critical familial relationship hints that normative village and kin relations have been suspended. Meanwhile, we are introduced to the figure of Ramzani, the village ‘simpleton’ or fool, who although Muslim in name visits each of the village’s shrines—largely in pursuit of prasad—and is beloved of both the granthi and the pandit. Ramzani is initially seen at the gurdwara, where the granthi tells him that in his devotion to all faiths he would have been beloved of Guru Nanak. Sadly, we are to learn that Ramzani represents the uncomplicated and unified Punjab that cannot move into the post-1947 era. Boota returns to his home, where he meets Ramzani, who helps him to clean up. That Ramzani becomes Boota’s fast friend associates the latter with ideals of communal harmony that are not to be maintained. We see Boota take up farming, and begin to save his earnings in order to have the local vichola find him a wife in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. This process is likely to take several years as Boota has only Rs 500 and the vichola’s expenses are Rs 2,000. Soon the narrator informs us that independence (not Partition) was to interfere with Boota’s goal. A largely non-graphic sequence depicting a generalized violence and its impact on village life is given, although none of the violence is ‘personal’ to particular villagers. The village panchayat decides that its Muslim ‘brothers’ must move to refugee camps for their own protection until the violence dies down, and they entrust to Boota the task of their secure delivery. This task takes on a religious connotation, when the entire assembly rises to respond ‘Sat Sri Akal’ to the granthi’s invocation ‘Jo Bole So Nihal’. In the only instance in which we witness Boota use violence, he repels a number of attackers from his Muslim charges. Shortly after Boota discharges his duty and returns to the village, we witness his rescue of a young Muslim girl. Abducted by a group of men after her family lagged behind their kafila, the girl flees her would-be rapists and dropping to Boota’s feet pleads ‘Sardarji mujhe bachao’ (Sikh Sir, please save me). Boota challenges his co-villagers with Sikh doctrine, but they refuse to see their actions as a matter of Sikh morality, instead

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

36 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

37

demanding that as they are all bachelors in need of a woman, he must buy the right to save her. Boota, unable to meet their demand of Rs 25,000, agrees to pay his entire savings of Rs 1,800 for the girl’s honour. The men accompany Boota and the girl to his home, where he gives them his money. In the gathering darkness, he tells the girl that there is food in his kitchen and that she will be safe behind his locked doors; he leaves to get drunk at the village bar—the first time that we see him do so—while the girl’s abductors brag about the number of people they’ve killed on the Partition trains. In the next several scenes, the film settles into a more pleasant course of plot as Zainab and Boota become acquainted. Importantly, Zainab positions herself as Boota’s wife according to regional cultural codes: we witness Zainab insisting that she do the ‘women’s work’ of cooking, bantering with Boota over sleeping arrangements, delighting in a gift of new clothing from Boota, and trying on a golden necklace that she discovers while tidying her clothes into Boota’s trunk. More critically, Zainab overhears Boota tell the vichola why he no longer has the money for a wife. The vichola responds that Boota should make Zainab his mistress as he will now probably never be able to afford to get married, but Boota sticks to his assertion that he’ll return Zainab to her parents when things have calmed down. Meanwhile, Boota’s taaya visits and asks Boota for his mother’s gold necklace in order that he might marry off his daughter, unless Boota has other plans for it; Boota replies not, but finds the necklace missing when he goes to retrieve it. He later tells Zainab that he is distraught to have lost the one possession which tied him to his mother. Zainab returns the necklace to Boota, telling him that he should take better care of his mother’s gift, and alerting him to his uncle’s plot to take over his land; she advises him that he needs a wife to look after these interests as his own family has no concern for him. Unfortunately, Boota’s taaya continues to plot against him, and with greater urgency. He enlists the support of the village elders, complaining that Boota has a girl living with him and that the resulting gossip is threatening the marriage of his daughter. Boota is told to take Zainab to the refugee camp, which he does. When they arrive, Boota tells Zainab that he has arranged her marriage to a Muslim boy from his village who will take her safely to her parents, and presents his mother’s necklace as a gift. Zainab is enraged at Boota’s assertion of parental duty over her, and refuses to marry or indeed to be left at the camp. Back in the village, the sarpanch decides that the village women must ask Zainab if she is willing to marry Boota, to which she happily agrees. We witness their marriage, and in a telescoped narrative that dramatizes a song sequence, we witness Zainab’s pregnancy and the birth of their daughter. The re-establishment of normative village, kin and gender relations is, however, short-lived. Two refugee Sikhs approach Ramzani as he departs from the mandir, challenging his right to remain in the village when they have lost their homes elsewhere;

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

37 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

38

NICOLA MOONEY

recognizing his simple nature, they offer him kheer to lure him to the fields.The pandit, realizing what is about to transpire, alerts Boota, who prevents Ramzani from being beaten. Boota declares that Ramzani is not Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, but is the blood and soul of the entire village, and Zainab, who has followed, lures Ramzani home with the promise of gajarella. An armed mob gathers to follow the small family— the ‘ragtag’ existence of which testifies to outmoded ideals—and the same Sikh who demanded money from Boota to save Zainab thrusts a sword into Ramzani in front of Boota’s house. A weeping Boota and the Sikh and Hindu priests are the only mourners at Ramzani’s funeral, and only Zainab remains to recite the prayers. In these few pathetic scenes, the tone of the film vastly changes; the further horrors of Partition, which previously barely touched Boota’s life, are about to be unleashed. In the next scene, Boota’s taaya hears on the radio news of governmental plans to exchange abducted women between India and Pakistan, and excitedly listens to the request that people with any knowledge of such women contact the local police. In the meantime, Boota visits the village moneylender to borrow money to purchase a new bullock cart and some gifts for his family. While he is away to town to make these purchases, his taaya alerts two policemen of Zainab’s whereabouts. In a sorrowful repeat of her earlier abduction, she is dragged from the courtyard in front of her crying infant, all the while screaming her declaration that she is being taken from her house, her country, and her baby, and that she has stayed in India of her own volition. Her pleas have no effect, and none of the villagers come to her aid. In a gesture of villainy, Boota’s taaya smugly runs his fingers along his mustache. Unbeknownst to Boota, on the journey home he had driven his bullock cart past a weeping Zainab in the back of the police jeep. Boota returns to find the granthi and pandit in his courtyard, along with his taaya-taayi who apprise him of the situation (without admitting culpability).The taaya tells Boota that Zainab had been detained illegally and was to be deported. Boota replies that the entire village witnessed their marriage and that his child must not be separated from her mother, snatches his daughter from taayi, and leaves in search of Zainab. At the local camp, he is told that she has been sent to Delhi. In a poignant scene, as Boota approaches the refugee camp, Zainab spots him from afar and runs towards him, only to be stopped by the three feet of barbed wire fence between them. The fence—formed from a single piece of wire laid in coils—is symbolic of their separation but also of the mixed identity of their child, and although adults cannot pass through it, Boota and Zainab are able to pass their daughter back and forth in this no-man’s land between nations and religious communities. Boota assures Zainab that with faith, they will be reunited as a family. In a moving sequence set to a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song on the inscrutability of love, Boota makes the rounds of social workers and politicians, clutching his child, waiting on doorsteps, and sleeping in office corridors waiting for meetings, filling

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

38 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

39

out form after form, continually rebuffed, and ultimately unsuccessful in having Zainab released. Zainab alerts Boota that she is to be sent to her parents in a village near Lahore and instructs him to come and find her after she is deported. Upon Zainab’s arrival in her village, we witness a Hindu girl, Sita, being forced to leave Pakistan under similar distraught circumstances. Meanwhile, Zainab’s father refuses to open the door to the police who bring Zainab home, telling them that his daughter is dead, killed before his very eyes in the riots, turning to his pleading wife and warning her that her daughter has surely been defiled in her two years with the kafirs. Zainab pleads to see their faces just once before returning to India, thinking this a choice open to her. Her mother runs to the door, throws it open, and Zainab’s father snatches her inside. Boota, needing cash to pursue Zainab, returns to his village and sells his land, despite being counselled that his land is like a mother and should not be sold. Boota replies ‘my mother is dead.’ Destiny and identity are transformed in this remark: Boota’s future now lies outside of his village, and his links to land and ancestry are severed. Over the course of another emotive song, we witness Boota travelling to Pakistan where Zainab is anxiously trapped in her parents’ house. When Boota arrives at the village, he stops at a dhaba for milk for his daughter. The proprietor refuses to take payment from a member of the baraat, thus Boota learns that Zainab is to be married that day. After an exchange on their respective kin (and religious) rights over Zainab, her father hits Boota with a lathi, and tells his men to beat him and drag him to the village pond. Meanwhile, the marriage is hastily conducted; we see Zainab, who has heard the voice of her sardarji, being restrained by several women in an enclosed room while her mother sits beside her and tells the priest outside that Zainab has given consent to the marriage. In a repeated image of sundered destinies, Zainab’s palanquin is carried away past Boota who lies beaten by the pond. The police drag Boota off and charge him with illegally entering Pakistan; in court, he pleads to the judge that his family was divided by the division of India and Pakistan, that his baby is declared Indian and her mother Pakistani but he can call neither his home. This position is characteristic of Sikhs, who failed to be awarded Khalistan by the British in independent India. It recalls Manto’s short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’,8 which provides a blunt, caustic metaphor for the madness of Partition, the national and territorial vacuum into which Sikhs were thrust by it, and thus the Sikh political situation as perceived by many Sikhs after 1947 (to 1984 and beyond). At this point, Boota Singh has tragically become Ramzani, the fool, his innocent (and inherently wise) belief in inter-communal harmony and the innate worth of all Punjabi faiths sadly outmoded, his simple trust in humanity dangerously misplaced. Setting aside this analysis for the moment, we must conclude the story of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh.

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

39 Black

8/8/2007, 2:32 PM

40

NICOLA MOONEY

To the sympathetic judge’s request for witnesses to Boota’s claim that Zainab married him of her own free will, Boota offers Zainab. At home, Zainab’s father asks her if she will return with Boota, and when Zainab replies ‘yes,’ that her second marriage is a sin, he threatens her with the deaths of her parents, herself, Boota and her child should she acknowledge Boota in court.The threat is effective, for almost inexplicably—given the portrayal of Zainab and Boota’s love that the film has previously developed—Zainab tearfully denies in court that she was married to Boota in India, and indeed denies that she knows him at all, thus also denying her daughter.9 This incredulity speaks to the generalized impossibility of explanation of both events and associations in the aftermath of Partition. The Partition cannot be explained, it can only be described; but while witness is all that remains, it too is summoned by trauma. The judge tells Boota that he must leave for India tomorrow, but Boota declares that he has no such home to which he can return. After spending the night roaming about the district with his daughter, to a song bidding goodbye to Zainab’s village, lamenting the home that might have been, he arrives in the morning at the local train station. But Boota cannot go home, so clutching his daughter, he leaps to his death in front of an approaching train. His wife’s denial underscores the impossibilities of homecoming and the transcendence of religious categories after Partition. A crowd gathers around Boota’s corpse. Both miraculously and symbolically, Boota’s daughter is unharmed. Someone who watched the court proceedings recognizes Boota’s body. A note to Zainab is found on Boota’s body; it absolves her failure to recognize him, but requests that they—for he had expected that his daughter would also die—be buried in her village so that she might put flowers on their grave. A man in the crowd—whom we recognize as the narrator of Boota’s story—is moved by Boota’s great display of love towards his ‘faithless’ wife, and urges his companions to fulfil Boota’s last wishes. They take up the body and carry it in procession towards Zainab’s village, exclaiming in unison Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh Zindabad (Glory to the martyr of love, Boota Singh). As they reach the village, however, a mob led by Zainab’s father orders them to remove the body as no kafirs can be buried there. Boota’s anonymous defender replies that he was no infidel, and that his religion knew only love. The police, intervening, caution that the villagers will not respect Boota’s grave and argue that Boota would be better buried in Lahore, and the procession moves off.This scene returns us to the present.The narrator still sits at Boota’s tomb, and although night has fallen, people continue to pay their respects. We learn that the citizens of Lahore created a trust in memory of Boota Singh, in order that his grave could be preserved and commemorated, as well as to bring up his daughter. In the final scene, Boota’s daughter, now a woman, presents her new husband to Boota’s grave and asks for her father’s blessings that her husband might love her as much as her father loved her mother.

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

40 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

41

I will also recount the story of Gadar, in considerably less detail, before proceeding to a brief comparison of these filmic narratives. In its initial narration—the unpeopled visuals of which focus on Indian Parliament, suggesting the magnificence of state—Gadar frames the Partition as a story of Hindu displacement and Muslim culpability; we are told that hundreds of thousands of Hindu families lost their homes, land, and country, and that Muslims began the carnage by sending trains of Hindu (and Sikh) corpses to India. Meanwhile, we watch a Sikh family leaving its village: the parents giving poison vials to their daughters in the event of their capture. Unlike Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, Gadar essentially opens amid Partition’s violence. Its protagonist, Tara Singh, is witnessed taking part in a murderous rampage; his parents and sisters— the family we have just witnessed—have been killed fleeing Pakistan, and Tara acts in vengeance. The film then cuts away to the introduction of Gadar’s heroine: we witness an elite Amritsari Muslim family—Muslim League supporters—being assisted by the army in escaping an attacking mob, although at the train station, their daughter is separated from them. Dragged beneath the crowd, and knocked unconscious, she awakens in darkness and wanders the station. A mob of men chase her, but she is saved by Tara, who draws his hand across his sword and, proclaiming her a Sikh, applies a sindoor of blood to Sakina. This act of protection clearly invokes both marriage and religious conversion. As the pair drives away, silent in their own traumas, we are presented with a flashback sequence, which explains their apparent association.We learn that mere months ago, Sakina was a student at an elite college to which truck-driver Tara delivered supplies, where they struck an unlikely acquaintance in a common appreciation for music. A deeper affection between the pair is hinted at in a scene staged at the end of the school year when Tara presents Sakina with a miniature of the Taj Mahal; she, having no gift for him, responds with a rose. Once again in the ‘present’ of Partition, with the Taj Mahal—dropped by Sakina and retrieved by Tara—miniature resting on the truck’s dashboard,Tara brings Sakina to his home, assuring her of safety. He proves this the next day by singlehandedly fighting off a crowd of men intent on seizing Sakina while defending her. One of his opponents observes, ‘Jat paagal ho gaya—sab marenge’ (the Jat has gone crazy, all will die); finally, a single roar from Tara causes the remaining men to flee. Not only does this display of strength illustrate the observation that ‘the fist-fight is an assertion by the Hindu male of his masculinity, and a demonstration of his ability to protect his womenfolk’ (Lal 1998: 230), it also speaks to stereotypical understandings of Jat Sikhs as potentially violent. As well, it conjures the Sikh aphorisms ‘savaa lakh se ek larraoon’ (one will fight against one hundred and twenty five thousand) and ‘chiriyaan nu baaz banaaoon’ (sparrows will be made into hawks), attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, which guided the Sikh defence of Punjab—and its Hindus— against Mughal persecutions.

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

41 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

42

NICOLA MOONEY

Although Tara promises to deliver Sakina to her parents, a number of scenes— including one in which Sakina finds the rose she had given Tara pressed in the pages of his journal, and a charming scene in which she helps to tie his turban—establish her relief from trauma and her growing reluctance to leave. Making good on his promise, he drives Sakina to the border, where she admits her affections for Tara. In the ensuing scenes, we witness their marriage ceremonies, the birth of their son Charanjeet, and Sakina’s apparent adjustment to village life. This happy interlude ends one Holi, when Sakina spots a photograph of her father in a newspaper cutting. Overjoyed, Sakina arranges to call them. Her father, Ashraf Khan, insists that she should travel to Lahore, but arranges to have Tara and Charanjeet’s visas thwarted. After Sakina’s tearful departure from India and reunion with her natal family, we learn that Khan10 hopes to use Sakina to further his political career by presenting her as having fled her ‘torturous’ life as a forcibly kept woman in India and then marrying her off to his advantage.This narrative device exemplifies linkages between women, honour and the nation. Sakina, like Zainab, has little recourse against her father’s designs, although she voices rather more resistance. In another stereotype, we witness Tara’s Jat jid (obstinacy) in pursuing Sakina. He arrives in Pakistan with his brother and son, and after a number of heated and highly nationalist exchanges with Khan and his followers, a scene is contrived in which Khan demands that Tara publicly declare his conversion to Islam and his intention to live in Pakistan if he wishes to reunite his family. Tara does so, but is faced with further provocation when Khan then asks him to declare Islam Zindabad, then Pakistan Zindabad (which Tara does), and finally Hindustan Murdabad, which Tara refuses to do.The national postures contrived in this scene are ultimately settled in violence: in the highly improbable remainder of the film, in which Tara’s small family flees, and repeatedly repels the pursuit of the army from jeeps, tanks, and helicopters in typical masala style.The violence culminates in Khan accidentally shooting his daughter. Then, as she lies in a coma, her parents hang back as Tara prays at her side and Charanjeet sings the refrain from the song that the film has repeatedly associated with the family’s happy moments.11 The song rouses Sakina, who wakes shouting her son’s name. Reconciliation is finally achieved as Khan asks Tara’s forgiveness, which Tara magnanimously declares unnecessary. Khan insists that in his political greed, he had forgotten humanity, the greatest religion of all. The final words are given to Khan’s insane nephew who— echoing Ramzani in another nod to the symbolism of ‘Toba Tek Singh’—had lived in Pakistan as if he were still supporting the Indian National Congress and its freedom movement. He declares that his fufar (father’s sister’s husband) is right, that the world exists due to humanity and love, and then recites a saying of Gandhi’s in Sanskrit. As the film credits roll, a triumphant Tara returns to his village with his family amid great fanfare.

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

42 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

43

Although both films feature Sikh male protagonists who marry Muslim women separated from their refugee families in Partition’s violence, ideas of love, home, boundary and nation are very differently constituted and reconciled in each. Shaheede-Mohabbat presents a mimetic series of radical and compounding displacements and losses, each concurring with known Partition accounts, while Gadar unrealistically imagines the triumphal overcoming of national difference in Pakistani admissions of guilt. Given these films’ initial characterizations, Partition ostensibly should have fewer grievous effects on Boota than on Tara. Boota, whose village remained in India, has neither parents nor siblings to avenge, while Tara’s parents and sisters were killed while travelling from Pakistan to India. But as Boota’s story reveals, there is no easy postcolonial homecoming. As Partition experiences are gendered experiences (Butalia 2000; Das 1995; and Menon and Bhasin 1998), the gendered Partition subject must be linked to national narratives and regional identifications. So frequently do women martyrs— killed or otherwise sacrified for family izzat—appear that a reader of Partition testimony might imagine martyrdom, so typically a male domain,12 the purview of women. However, as my reading of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat suggests, men—and their bodies—also suffered violations of honour in Partition, although the honour of their deaths is less certain. Both films present conventional narratives of dishonour, as well as narrative subversions. In its portrayal of the death of Tara’s sisters, Gadar presents a conventional narrative of honourable death, but in permitting Sakina’s reunion with both natal and conjugal families, such notions are overturned. While Shaheed-e-Mohabbat presents a typically gendered narrative in its characterization of Zainab, it is particularly interesting in intersecting masculinity and (dis)honour. Boota Singh’s male martyrdom inverts the normative moral order in which women bear the burden of, and the responsibility of assuaging, family dishonour. This narrative structure may be related to the position of the post-Partition Sikh: while privileged by gender in his own community, Boota’s national position is dishonourably marginal and subaltern. Interestingly, gender in both films intersects religion; who is Sikh and who is Muslim—conventionally matters of birth or fate—become gender-linked. Sakina and Zainab are religiously mutable figures: although Muslim, in marriage they become (at least temporarily) Sikhs in association with their religiously-fixed husbands. Both films present love stories between Sikh men and Muslim women. However, only the fictional Gadar permits a positive resolution of Sikh–Muslim difference. Shaheed-e-Mohabbat is not only a tragedy of lost love, but also a recognizably true Partition narrative. The narrative of Boota Singh is one of displacement and loss of identity. Loving rapprochement is not possible here, other than in the apparent restoration of communal harmony signified by the championing of Boota’s life and story by unknown Lahoris. In this sense only, Shaheed-e-Mohabbat presents a

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

43 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

44

NICOLA MOONEY

transcendent narrative. Gadar’s nationally triumphalist narrative is also transcendent in unexpected ways. According to the Punjabi University’s Punjabi–English Dictionary, Gadar variously means ‘mutiny, rebellion, revolt, uprising, tumult, disturbance, chaos’. This title is relevant to the film in (at least) three ways. First, it reflects the general disturbance of the times, and second, the chaos Tara Singh creates in rescuing his wife (and Indian honour). A more subtle reading of its meaning positions Gadar against testimonial convention: love can be restored, loss overcome, displacement mitigated. Gadar asserts, perhaps improbably, that ‘ordinary, peaceable people’ can be ‘forced to confront the violence within themselves’ (Butalia 2000: 271) and restored to normative loyalties and sentiments. In terms of transcendence, Gadar is a narrative parallel of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, although the happy reunion of the former cannot rival the tragic conclusion of the latter.

SIKH SUBJECTIVITIES AND PARTITION NARRATIVES: SOME CONCLUSIONS I now turn to a brief examination of the discrepant meanings of Sikh identification in Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. As independence established artificial states (Das 1995: 58), national affiliations were subject to negotiations and contestations which were not tidily settled with Partition.We might here reinterpret Nandy’s observation that Indian cinema is ‘a battle over categories’ (Nandy 1998: 13–14), which are in his analysis global and Indian, to suggest alternate categorizations: Indian and subaltern, Hindu and Sikh. As I suggested earlier, both testimonial and literary evidence can be found for a heightening of ethnic perceptions and a deepening entrenchment of ethnic categories in the wake of Partition. A moment of profound disruption in the moral order, Partition’s dislocating effects continue to be remarked upon in the Punjabi psyche. Hindus—majority members of the Indian nation— might perhaps more easily reconcile the painful parturition of 1947, while for Sikhs, the nation’s birth represents not only forcible migrations and irreparable losses, but the (re)iteration of permanent minority status.13 My interpretation of Sikh positionings in these Partition films is that the Sikh subject must be heroically and triumphally subsumed in the Indian nation-state (Gadar), or be vehemently cast aside (Shaheed-e-Mohabbat). Between centre and margin, there is no middle ground. Critically, the fate of the partitioned subject in each case depends on the ability to repatriate to India his Muslim wife.Tara makes Sakina both Sikh and Indian, restoring her to his home and a position of religious and national honour. Zainab affectionately calls her husband sardarji but ultimately cannot recognize nor reconcile this difference; she remains Muslim and becomes Pakistani. Boota, displaced from home, is also cast from the nation; he does not return to India, and is memorialized only in

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

44 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

45

Pakistan. Although Sikh theology intends to overcome distinctions between Hindus and Muslims, this position becomes untenable in 1947. Boota remains in what Kamra (2002) has called the ‘liminal phase’ of trauma, grieving the loss of love and home in common with Hindu and Muslim others, and also in a marginalized space beyond the nation which only Sikhs occupy. My brief ethnography of Sikh responses to Sikh subjectifications in these films is telling. The testimonial value of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat is more than an appreciation of its historical truth. It is more importantly a recognition of its portrayal of the partitioned Sikh, at home in neither Punjab nor India, effectively stateless regardless of citizenship. Gadar presents a glorious Sikh defence of national honour, but also slights ‘real’ histories of Sikh contributions to the nation: ‘gadar’ is a well-known term referring to the Gadar Party, an organization of transnational Indians, many of whom were Sikhs, who raised funds towards a rebellion in support of the Indian independence movement during the early twentieth century. In addition, gadar is the term by which the 1857 Mutiny is discussed. Thus the term speaks to Sikh contributions to the national independence movement.14 The film Gadar, meanwhile, speaks to continued Sikh defence of the nation, in keeping with a Hindu-centric ideology in which Sikhs are merely a protectionist sect within the Hindu fold.15 The mutiny or insubordination of the film’s title is thus rendered subordination. From a Jat Sikh perspective, it is significant that Gadar not only enlists a Sikh subject in defending the nation’s honour, but a specifically Jat Sikh subject. Jat Sikhs pride themselves on their military contributions to the nation, but at the same time are perhaps the most politically disaffected Sikhs in India. For many Jat Sikhs, the Indian nation is experienced as a set of limits on community pride and progress (Mooney 2003). Tara himself invokes Jat stereotypes, presenting himself to Sakina as a rustic and lowly ‘yamla Jat’, yet threatening her father’s entourage with legendary and overwhelming Sikh violence, ‘je Jat bigar gaya’ (if the Jat goes bad…). Although Boota is also a Jat,Tara is more visibly Sikh, often wearing a turban,16 and significantly, in the film’s opening mob scenes, also has a beard.17 It is thus recognizably a Sikh who returns the nation to glory. These portrayals amplify Sikh subjection to the nation, as well as further gendering our heroes: Tara is hypermasculine, defending wife and nation, while Boota becomes the emasculated counterpart of the colonized male. This paper has considered homes and displacements, loves and losses, nations and subjects in two filmic narratives of Partition.The (gendered) violence and forcible migrations of 1947 disrupted communal relations as well as Sikh subjectivities. I have argued that the ethnographically supported and historically truthful narrative of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat articulates painful histories, national dislocations, and losses of love, home, and subjectivity as central themes of postcolonial Sikh identity, while Gadar seeks to reinscribe Sikh subjection to a nationalist narrative. Despite this, neither nationalist nor non-traumatized readings of Partition are possible for Sikhs, who

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

45 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

46

NICOLA MOONEY

were politically and socio-economically marginalized by Indian independence, and for whom Partition is interpolated with the more recent, widespread, and widelyarticulated traumas of the 1980s. In keeping with the wisdom that no monolithic reading—whether based in historical narrative or fiction—of Partition is possible (for instance, Kamra 2002; Menon and Bhasin 1998), these films demonstrate contemporary contestations of subjectification and belonging, resistances and subordinations, constructing nationalist positions for Sikhs even as they underscore their impossibility. Such narratives testify to the continued significance of Partition’s disruptive legacy of forcible migrations, new borders, and lost homes, lives, and loves.

NOTES 1. This heading is inspired by Dipankar Gupta’s assertion that ‘Partition makes the nation-state’ (1996:20). 2. All figures cited include the disturbances in India and the former West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). 3. Significantly, the works on Partition by Butalia and Das (both in 1995) were encouraged by their social work among Sikh victims of the 1984 massacres. 4. One such tragic story is, for instance, found in Prakash Tandon’s Punjabi Century (1968: 253). 5. Deol is of course a Sikh, and is the elder son of Dharmendra, the highly popular Bollywood star of the 1980s and 1990s. 6. Women were exchanged between India and Pakistan according to the provisions of the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Ordinance and the later Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act of 1949. 7. Muslim ‘blame’ and the Indian derivation of the film is more subtly established when the young man asks why it is that the Muslims who at Partition attacked Sikhs and their homes would remember. 8. In this short story, Manto describes the transfer, on a religious and consequently national basis, of institutionalized mentally ill patients following Partition. One elderly Sikh, who is referred to by the name of his village, Toba Tek Singh, demands to know on which side of the border his village has been assigned. The officials are both unable and unwilling to assist him. He wanders off unaided, and the next morning, as described in Manto’s closing line: ‘There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.’ 9. While Zainab’s failure to assert her love for Boota is not a positive characterization, particularly according to Western and feminist standards, it is appropriate to prevailing Partition-era gender and kinship codes. 10. In a dastardly but typecast portrayal by Amrish Puri. 11. In this song, Udd ja kale kaawaan, the lover calls for their foreign love to return home in order to share a life together, and might be interpreted as a broader commentary on Indian–Pakistani relations. 12. Das (1995: 63) points out that mythic Rajput narratives informed these women’s collective death. It is possible that Sikh (and perhaps Muslim) notions of religious martyrdom also were

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

46 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

47

influential in such practices, for it is certainly true that Sikh accounts of martyrdom are frequently masculinist. Indeed for some more militant Sikhs, Indian independence simply marked a bloody transfer of power from one colonial power to another. However, this movement is also noted to have inspired, among some Sikhs, later Khalistani efforts such as the Babbar Khalsa (Mahmood 1996: 111). This position was recently—although perhaps inadvertently—reiterated by India’s Supreme Court (The Tribune, Chandigarh, 11 August 2005, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/ 20050811/nation.htm). Brian Keith Axel has noted that elsewhere ‘the turban … and its inherent significations of belonging … [do] not disrupt any loyalty to the modern nation-state’ (2001: 220). Many Sikhs consider the dissociation of beard and turban objectionable.

REFERENCES Agarwal, Supriya, ‘Muslim Women’s Identity: On the Margins of the Nation’, Jasbir Jai and Sudha Rai (eds), Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian Cinema (Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2002), pp. 86–93. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991, first published in 1983). Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Appadurai, Arjun and Carol Breckenridge (eds), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Axel, Brian Keith, The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation and the Formation of a Sikh ‘Diaspora’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Baldwin, Shauna Singh, What the Body Remembers (Toronto: Knopf/Vintage Canada, 1999). Bright, J. S., Scandals of a Refugee Camp (New Delhi: Hind Union Press, 1948). Brown, Judith M., Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994). Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Corruccini, Robert S. and Samvit S. Kaul, Halla: Demographic Consequences of the Partition of the Punjab, 1947 (New York: University Press of America, 1990). Daniel, E. Valentine and Jeffrey M. Peck (eds), Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 1996). Das, Veena, ‘Our Work to Cry, Your Work to Listen’, in her (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 344–98. ———, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Derné, Steve, Movies, Masculinity, and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000). Dickey, Sarah, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ———, ‘Opposing Faces: Film Star Fan Clubs and the Construction of Class Identities in South India’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 212–46.

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

47 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

48

NICOLA MOONEY

Dirks, Nicholas, ‘The Home and the Nation: Consuming Culture and Politics in Roja’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 161–85. Dwyer, Rachel,‘Shooting Stars:The Indian Film Magazine, Stardust’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 247–85. Dwyer, Rachel and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Ganti, Tejaswini, ‘“And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood’, in Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 2002), pp. 281–300. Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 2002). Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). Gupta, Dipankar,‘The Indian Diaspora of 1947:The Political and Ethnic Consequences of the Partition with Special Reference to Delhi’, in Milton Israel and N. K. Wagle (eds), Ethnicity, Identity, Migration: The South Asian Context (Toronto: Centre for South Asian Studies, 1993), pp. 15–42. ———, The Context of Ethnicity: Sikh Identity in Comparative Perspective (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Kamra, Sukeshi, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002). Kapur, Manju, Difficult Daughters (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998). Keller, Stephen L., Uprooting and Social Change: The Role of Refugees in Development (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1975). Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India (Toronto: Penguin, 2003, first published in 1997). Lal,Vinay, ‘The Impossibility of the Outsider in Modern Hindi Film’, in Ashis Nandy (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema (London: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 228–59. Lambek, Michael, ‘The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice’, in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 235–54. Larson, Gerald James, India’s Agony over Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Mankekar, Purnima, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). ———, ‘Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India’, in Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila AbuLughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 2002), pp. 134–51. Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, Kingdom’s End and Other Stories, translated from Urdu by Khalid Hasan (Penguin Books: New Delhi, 1987). ———, Best of Manto, translated from Urdu by Jai Ratan (Vanguard Books: Lahore, 1990). ———, Partition: Sketches and Stories, translated from Urdu by Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Viking, 1991). Manuel, Peter, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

48 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

OF LOVE, MARTYRDOM, AND (IN)SUBORDINATION

49

Mooney, Nicola, ‘The Construction of Sikh Identity in the Wake of Partition’ (paper presented at the South Asian Graduate Studies Symposium, University of Toronto/South Asian Studies Department, 1997). ———, Good Families, Good Fortunes: Ethnicity and Modernity among an Urban Jat Sikh Middle Class (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2003). ———, Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity among Jat Sikhs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). Nanda, J., Punjab Uprooted: A Survey of the Punjab Riots and Rehabilitation Problems (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1948). Nandy, Ashis, The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema (London: Zed Books, 1998). Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26, 1989: 7–24. Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘In Defense of the Fragment Writing about Hindu–Muslim Riots in India Today’, Representations, 37, 1992: 27–55. Pinney, Cristopher, ‘The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Or, What Happens When Peasants “Get Hold” of Images’, in Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 2002), pp. 355–69. Pritam, Amrita, The Skeleton and That Man (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1987). Punjabi–English Dictionary, compiled by Gurmukh Singh, edited by S.S. Joshi and Mukhtiar Singh Gill (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1994). Randhawa, M. S., Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Bombay: New Jack Printing Works, 1963). Renan, Ernest, What is a Nation? Translated by Charles Taylor from the 1882 original (Toronto: The Tapir Press, 1996). Sahni, Bhisham, Tamas (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988). ———, We Have Arrived in Amritsar and Other Stories (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1990). Schectman, Joseph B., The Refugee in the World: Displacement and Integration (NewYork: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1963). Sidhwa, Bapsi, Cracking India, previously published as Ice-Candy Man [1988] (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991). Singh, Khushdeva, Love is Stronger than Hate: A Remembrance of 1947 (Patiala: Guru Nanak Mission, 1973). Singh, Khushwant, Train to Pakistan (New York: Grove Press, 1956). Tandon, Prakash, Punjabi Century (Berkeley: UCLA Press, 1968). Uberoi, Patricia, ‘Imagining the Family: An Ethnography of Viewing Hum Aapke Hain Kaun…!’ in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 309–52. van der Veer, Peter, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Vasudevan, Ravi S., ‘Bombay and its Public’, in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 186–211. Vernant, Jacques, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1953). Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

02_Roy & Bhatia~chap-2.pmd

49 Black

8/8/2007, 9:05 AM

50

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

3 The Diminished Man: Partition and ‘Transcendental Homelessness’*

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

A deep melancholy and ambivalence surrounds Indian independence; inextricably bound to its attainment in 1947 is the violence that occurred with the Partition. The experience of this violence casts a pall over the post-colonial experience, so much so that for many the memory of it is doubly fraught—not only does it recall past suffering, it emblematizes present discontent as well. The felt inadequacy of the actuality of independence to the hopes it had kindled comes to take on the proportions of a full-scale civilizational crisis. In endeavouring to work through the memory of Partition violence, therefore, some Indian writers have taken recourse to an ancient epic imaginaire, particularly that of the Mahabharata—that tangled skein of narrative whose date, place, and purpose of composition seem destined to remain forever enigmatic. The enigmatic character of the Mahabharata is compounded by the dark mystery of its content, the narrative’s near complete lack of moral orientation. Thus, it seems peculiarly suited as a guide from India’s long past to its uncertain present.The epic relates the dissolution of human bonds, contestations over territory, and a massive and senseless loss of human life. Like the postcolonial present, at the Mahabharata’s narrative core lies an unredeemable act of violence against civility, brotherhood, and women. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s (b.1934) Bengali novella Arjun1 views the unfolding of Indian modernity through the lens of the epic, simultaneously invoking and distancing itself from the Mahabharata’s epic universe. It is not, as might be expected, nostalgic for the epic past. Rather, set between the late-1940s and 1970 and narrating the story of refugee families settled in a colony, the novella alludes to the Mahabharata only in the most oblique and tangential manner. The novella seems to summon the past to bear witness to the present instead of giving voice to a longing for a romanticized Time before time. On the one hand, the text traces the ‘fall’ from epic magnificence.

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

50 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

51

THE DIMINISHED MAN

On the other, Gangopadhyay’s Arjun affirms this fall as a fall into the enabling possibilities of mod-ernity and modern individuality. The character Arjun, from whom the novella takes its title, faces the predicament of subjectivity, and unlike his epic prototype, he constitutes the problematic individual of which Lukács speaks. In the epic, the hero Arjuna2 is essentially what he was at its beginning—there is no shift in his consciousness. He is an embodiment of certain virtues of the community, and this is so even when he is on his solitary journeys gathering divine weapons and royal allies.This is because Arjuna undergoes no ‘education’. In re-situating the epic in the present, Gangopadhyay tracks how modernity has altered man’s relationship with the community and thus reconstituted the structure of humanity. In so doing, he novelistically instantiates Lukács’ argument about the relationship between epic and novel as a form. In this sense the novella conflates the Partition with the coming of modernity itself. At the same time, Gangopadhyay’s deliberate and sustained invocation of the epic past serves as a comment on the modernity that has come. It is a modernity predicated upon an unmastered past where individuals compulsively re-enact a past of which they are only dimly aware. The first section of this paper examines the novella in light of the epic, tracing Gangopadhyay’s use of allusions from the epic. It focuses on the manner in which the characters consistently fail to comprehend the past, which is condemning them to repetition. The second section builds on the first to study the dilemmas of the Partition’s dislocated and dispossessed subject. The concluding section examines the dilemmas of another migrant subject—the woman.

ARJUN IN A DIVIDED MAHA-BHARATA The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. —Georg Lukács (1971: 56)

Arjun’s dates of composition (July 1970) and publication (October 1971) are momentous. The novel was written on the eve of another mass political struggle in South Asia—the Bangladesh liberation war. This struggle, when it ended in December 1971, left what had once been a unified British India split three ways. (As a human tragedy the Bangladesh War equals or surpasses the Partition with 3 million casualties, at least 200,000 women and girls raped, and 10 million persons, mainly Hindus, displaced.) Gangopadhyay’s dedication of the novella ‘To the freedom fighters of Bangladesh’ makes the connection explicit. East Pakistan’s freedom

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

51 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

52

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

struggle and its eventual split from Pakistan twenty-four years after the Partition retrospectively called into question the rationale behind the earlier partition at least to the extent that it demonstrated conclusively that religion alone was an insufficient basis of national identity. Of course, this does not mean that the antiPartition position of the Congress was finally being endorsed by Bengali-speaking Muslims. The liberation struggle in Bangladesh neither explicitly rejected the twonation theory nor called for reintegration with West Bengal. Although at the time of writing and publishing Arjun, East Pakistan’s split from Pakistan was still but a distant prospect, the possibility of another fragmentation in the political geography of the subcontinent stirred memories of the 1947 Partition. Structured in the form of a bildungsroman, Gangopadhyay’s Arjun is set between the late 1940s and 1970. Its storyline spreads over twenty-six years—the life of its eponymous hero—although the narrative per se covers only about two months. These two months are demarcated by the two failed attempts on Arjun’s life. Interrupted by occasional first-person accounts by Arjun, omniscient third-person narration is used through most of the book. This technique allows for extensive exploration of the community—the residents of the refugee colony where Arjun has come to live. Clearly, Gangopadhyay is keen to draw out in all its complexity their group solidarity as well as the later dispersions of interest and the fault lines in their unity. Arjun’s first-person narrations come in the form of dramatic monologues where he reflects upon his earlier life and the contrast between it and his present surroundings. They suggest his growing alienation from the community in which he was raised. The hero of the novella is Arjun Roychowdhury. Born a few years before 1947, he spends the first eleven years of his life in his native village in Faridpur district in East Pakistan. Eventually, in the mid-1950s, following fresh outbreaks of communal violence, he migrates to India together with his mother Shanti and older brother Somnath. In Calcutta, they spend their first few weeks on the platforms of the Sealdah Railway Station before settling down, along with other migrant families, on a vacant piece of land on the outskirts of the city.This vacant lot—owned by a certain Datta family—is christened Deshopran Colony by its new (and illegal) inhabitants.There the migrants spend the next fifteen years in a state of constant insecurity. Unable to cope with the pain of leaving his homeland and the difficulty of the urban life they have come to live, Arjun’s brother Somnath gradually loses his sanity and dies. By contrast, Arjun adapts to his circumstances and manages to become an educated city-dweller, pursuing a career in chemistry. For the uneducated youth of Deshopran Colony unemployment is a continual threat, leading some men to enter into the unskilled labour sector, and some young women to choose prostitution. Taking advantage of the general discontent growing among these young men, an entrepreneur Kewal Singh patronizes them to further his plans to extend his factory located on the edge of the colony. Befriending the resident pugilist Dibya and his gang, Singh

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

52 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

53

THE DIMINISHED MAN

secures their assurance of support towards evicting five of the families in the colony so that he can secure their land.When Arjun opposes the plan, one of Singh’s henchmen makes an attempt on his life. At this point, when Arjun is recovering from the attack two new characters are introduced—Arjun’s research supervisor and friend Abaneesh Mukherjee and his sister Shukla. Meanwhile hiring Dibya and a handful of other unemployed colony youth in his factory, Kewal Singh cunningly proceeds with his plans for expanding his business.Trusting Singh as their benefactor, the young men try to persuade the five families to fall in with his schemes and vacate the land. This leads to the schisms among the residents, and particularly, in a decline in Dibya and Arjun’s friendship. Unwilling to confront Arjun directly, Dibya satisfies his wrath by raping Labanya—a young woman from the colony attracted to Arjun. With the five families remaining obdurate, Singh abandons his attempts at persuasion and takes recourse to arson one night.The following morning he proceeds to consolidate his claim by building a wall around his newly-acquired territory. Arjun, finding the government and law enforcement ineffective, decides to dismantle the wall with the help of a small group of colony residents. Kewal Singh and his recruits—Dibya and other young men from the colony, Ratan, Sambhu, Nitai—resist them and, in the violence that ensues, Arjun is seriously injured. Recovering at the hospital he learns that his ‘guide’ Abaneesh has intervened and by generating media-attention compelled the government to register the land in the residents’ names. This marks the refugees’ final realization of Indian citizenship. This news and Shukla’s delicate admission of love rejuvenate Arjun. As a composite character, Gangopadhyay’s Arjun blends qualities from all the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata. Like Sahadeva, he has a flair for learning. Like Arjuna, he has a good aim and is a self-described ‘archer’ (Gangopadhyay 1995: 53). His final violent encounter with Dibya is reminiscent of the Bheema–Duryodhana encounter at Kurukshetra (both the novella’s Arjun and Mahabharata’s Bheema strike their opponent on the thigh). It is arson that forces Arjun and his mother and brother to leave their homeland—the novella specifically mentions the famous ‘house of lac’ in connection with the burning down of their village home soon after his father’s death (ibid.: 23). Also, concentrating on a target—the eye of a falcon in a picture on a calendar in Shukla’s room—Arjun tells Shukla that he sees ‘Nothing except the eye of the bird’ (ibid.: 74), an answer identical to that Arjuna famously gave to his teacher Dronacharya’s identical query. Finally, just before the clash with Kewal Singh and his party (the Kauravas), Arjun, like his epic namesake, is overcome with reluctance towards attacking the other colony-men whom he considers his kinsmen. Dibya, like Arjun, is another composite character. He combines the traits of the Kaurava brothers in his growing rivalry with Arjun and his violation of Labanya for her impertinence. However, he most closely resembles Karna.This parallel is underscored when, on the eve of the confrontation, Arjun’s mother Shanti approaches

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

53 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

54

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

Dibya discreetly, requesting that he resolve his differences with Arjun, just as Kunti had done on the eve of the battle at Kurukshetra. She reminds him that the two of them are like brothers and that she has been a sort of proxy mother to him; further, she attempts to extract a promise that he will not harm Arjun. Finally, Arjun’s mentor and friend Abaneesh—whose name means ‘the lord of the world’ and who intervenes to resolve the crisis in the colony, and to whose sister, Shukla, Arjun is attracted— is the novella’s Krishna. Correspondences between other characters in the novella and the epic seem almost coincidental. Like Draupadi, Labanya, whose feelings for Arjun remain unreciprocated, is molested by Dibya before a crowd of his associates. Her grandfather, popularly called Nishi Thakurda (grandfather), blinded by the colonial police for his nationalist activities, is clearly the novella’s Dhritarashtra. (The naming of Labanya’s father as Biswanath, meaning ‘lord of the world’, who runs a laundry, adds a touch of irony.) Apart from the obvious parallels in the struggle over land, there are also more subtle ones, such as the novel’s five homes in place of the Pandava’s request for five villages, or the faithful dog that follows Arjun’s elder brother Somnath around. But Gangopadhyay’s Arjun, although named after the invincible archer and hero of the Mahabharata, is a much lesser man than his namesake. No prince cheated of his kingdom, the novel’s Arjun is an ordinary young man living in conditions imposed by the political and historical vicissitudes of a ‘split maha-Bharata’.3 His world is shrunken and to occupy it he must accommodate himself to scarcity and discontent. Gangopadhyay dramatizes this contrast when he has the young Arjun, migrating to India, grow ecstatic when given some rice, two eggplants and two potatoes as alms. Excited at what he has received that day, he returns home and from the other side of the door says to his mother ‘Look what I brought for you today’ (Gangopadhyay 1995: 27) echoing Yudhishthira’s famous announcement to Kunti after the Pandavas’ triumphal return with Draupadi whom Arjuna had won at her swayamvar ceremony.The distance between the world of the epic and the twentieth century of the novel is compassed by the divide between these two objects of desire—a beautiful and worthy princess versus rice, eggplants, and potatoes. Similarly, when Arjun plays darts the parallel with the epic hero’s great feats of archery again marks the smallness and frivolity of the present. And finally, the atrophying of the world is marked manifestly by the absence of the mythic communion between the humans and the celestials of the Mahabharata. The gods have long since departed from the world of Arjun and thus no divine assistance reaches Labanya when Dibya violates her, nor is omniscient counsel available to Arjun when he vacillates before the ‘battle’ with Kewal Singh’s party. But beyond this rather obvious point, the romantic wistfulness for the time when gods and men dwelt together is redoubled in Gangopadhyay’s

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

54 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

55

THE DIMINISHED MAN

novella by his portrayal not of modernity per se but of post-Partition Indian modernity in particular. While the parallels with the epic are obvious to the attentive reader, the characters remain locked in place, nescient of the presence of the epic past.Their echoing of epic utterances in new and changed circumstances seems cruelly ironic. The characters in the novella live scripted lives, and not only do they not know this but the metaphysical ground of that script is lacking in the new setting leaving them doomed to wander the narrative landscape repeating uncomprehended fragments of the past. Only once is the characters’ lack of awareness broken.This comes when Shukla laughs at Arjun’s response about targeting the bird’s eye and tells him that it reminds her of something else. She suggests that it is a text, but refrains from naming it. Selecting the Mahabharata as his subtext, Gangopadhyay figuratively gathers together the long past of the Indian subcontinent. But the dramatic irony is that most of the characters remain unaware of that past. Only by coming to terms with it, by understanding its movement and their place in it, can they comprehend their present circumstances. To truly inaugurate a new postcolonial society would require this. Instead, the characters simply echo the past, signalling that the past for them remains unmastered. Rehearsing it over and over again, the characters enact a kind of repetition compulsion. They cannot become agents of history, but rather, they seem marionettes who know neither who is pulling the strings nor indeed that they are history’s puppets. The text thus becomes a series of these unconscious compulsions, and the accumulated references to the Mahabharata add up to nothing except for a body of stray allusions. Gangopadhyay’s repeat performance of the Mahabharata is bereft of epic splendour, seeking as it does a new more prosaic democratic aesthetic. And the Arjun– Shukla relationship is a good example of this. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna could successfully aspire to Krishna’s sister Subhadra because after all both were from royal families, whereas in the novella, Arjun and Abaneesh’s sister Shukla reach out to one another across a gaping class divide. Similarly, Arjun’s predicament in the face of the approaching confrontation with Dibya and the others expresses a deeper concern for physical suffering. For unlike Arjuna encountering his kin at Kurukshetra, Arjun has no blood ties with his adversaries—yet they represent a larger family of the oppressed that Arjun has entered into. Similarly, it is not in the name of a (status quo-ist) philosophy of predestination or of the futility of human action that Arjun is urged into battle. It is, rather, the sight of blood on his brother’s pet dog that propels him into fighting to change the oppressive conditions of his fellow migrants’ lives. In the absence of the gods and of divine guidance Arjun gains scope for genuine ethical agency.

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

55 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

56

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

ARJUN HOMELESS IN THE MODERN WORLD Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. —Amitav Ghosh (2001: 153)

The repeated scaling down of epic sublimity is at one level a metaphor for the impossibility of re-producing the epic-form in the modern age. Partition has fundamentally altered the world of the text. (Arjun’s relationship to the Mahabharata, unlike that of Don Quixote’s to the genre of medieval romances, is not one of parody.) Lukács, distinguishing between the epic and novel forms, points out that the two genres ‘differ from one another not by their authors’ fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted’ (1971: 56). In Arjun, among the many epochal social, political and economic transformations that have made possible the transition from the universe of the epic to that of the novel, one fundamental change is signalled by way of a synecdoche—the calendar advertising a foreign airline with a picture of a falcon in flight. It is a hyperliteralized image of the commodification of nature in modernity: it is not simply the photograph of a bird in flight; the bird has become something it never was before—an aesthetic object. Nature has been endowed with aesthetic value and is being deployed to sell a product.While the marketing of the product appears somewhat unusual—the aircraft as a soaring falcon, a bird of prey, instead of say, a swan— the image allows Gangopadhyay to not only indicate precisely the general brutality of the new times, but also to evoke the full subsumption of social relations to capital and, more concretely, to foreign capital. However, multinational capital digging its talons into small game has less of a direct impact on the everyday lives of the colony-residents than the profit-oriented schemes of the local Punjabi entrepreneur Kewal Singh.These raise the spectre of displacement for some of the refugee families.The choice of the Punjabi-Sikh industrialist is interesting given that the non-Bengali commercial community in Calcutta is dominated largely by Marwaris. The use of a Punjabi condenses the image of the Partition with the new capitalism, for the novel makes clear that in the intervening twenty-plus years between the Partition and the present of the novel, Kewal Singh has emerged as a capitalist—the owner of a plywood factory. He has succeeded in the only way success is now to be had.The migrant families, on the other hand, have remained squatters.They are largely unemployed except for the few hired by Singh. Between the settlers and the capitalist there endures an existential conflict—the conflict between rapacious colonial capital and bare life. Singh not only enjoys the

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

56 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

57

THE DIMINISHED MAN

support of the original owners, the Dattas, but also that of the police, so that when he takes recourse to arson to evict the five squatter families, the law enforcement personnel choose to look the other way. It is the particular nature of the political state that not only does its coming into being in 1947 dispossess and displace millions but also that in the postcolonial period it is very largely under the control of the elite and thus unresponsive to the needs of the poor. It is only after Abaneesh Mukherjee intervenes and the press carries the story that the government is compelled to take action.The squatters are recognized as Indian citizens now that the state accepts their claim to the ownership of the land.4 If Arjun’s brother Somnath stands for truth and innocence, his insanity and early death suggest that neither of these have a place in mid-twentieth-century Bengal. For the refugees it is a quotidian hand-to-mouth struggle. Arjun survives only because he recognizes this fact. But this knowledge also denies his character the pathos that surrounds his brother. Wistful for the pre-Partition past, Somnath grieves the loss of his idyllic childhood spent in the vast open spaces of his village. He is one of those ‘deeply wounded people’ ‘who in a most organic way, are tied to a history and a place but who overwhelmed by a yet another more powerful history, must live out their days elsewhere’ (Naim 1999: 175–76). He suffers the painful severing of the umbilical cord with everything stable and ancestral. In the new post-Partition geography of the Indian subcontinent there is no place for him. The energies of the national movement, betrayed by the communalist politics that reached its terrible climax in the Partition, have dissipated into the dystopias of independent India and Pakistan. Growing up partly in undivided British India, it is the Partition that Somnath, in his insanity, repeatedly claims has been revoked. Their village home is never far off. It is for him a place of the familiar, of an accustomed way of life. Still there is no life there anymore. Of course, the very notion that modernity comes with Partition seems to be a misrecognition. For while it is true that South Asian modernity explodes in the postcolonial period on a mass scale, the complicity of the colonial past in creating that present—if not wholly culpable—can in no way be overlooked. The novel hints at this in its portrayal of Somnath’s idealization of village life, which, the reader is told, comes from one stricken with memory loss. Somnath simply does not remember, or at best, can only remember selectively. The opacity of the past is figured as the inaccessibility of genuine memories of the past. The hero Arjun, unlike his brother, vividly recollects his life in the village. He refrains from romanticizing it and, with the single exception of the delirium-like outburst in the hospital after he is injured the second time, he does not consider returning there. This is not only because it would be close to impossible but also because he believes that his life in the city, even as a refugee, constitutes a qualitative improvement over that possible in the village. Ties to one’s birthplace or ancestral

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

57 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

58

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

home have been rendered less affective, and are, at best, only ancillary to his desires and ambitions. As Arjun says: Judged by any standard, there’s no doubt that we are, in many ways, better off here than we had been in our home in East Bengal.… What’s there to lament? If Pakistan had not been created, if we still lived in the village, then, at the most, I would now be a teacher in the village school. Could I expect more than that? Who would have given me the opportunity to pursue higher studies? My father did not even have the means to buy my school textbooks! And if I received a scholarship, I would later have had to work in some Calcutta-Delhi like big city. Would I have ever returned to the village? Tell the truth Arjun, was your attachment to the village so deep that you would have given up all the conveniences of the city to return to the village? (Gangopadhyay 1995: 50–52)

Partition forced his move to the metropolis in a manner both violent and pitiless. And yet this brought with it possibilities otherwise inconceivable. It meant the opportunity to learn science and to see the world for what it is. Further, the memories of his childhood—the loss of his harmonica and the red-blue pencil, the theft of a favourite vest all of which he was instructed to bear in silence because the miscreants belonged to the majority community (Muslim), and finally, the burning down of his family home—illustrate that his life as a minority Hindu in East Pakistan dominated by fear was by no means enviable. He describes his loss rather hyperbolically, but no less poignantly, seeing it as part of a larger crisis: As a result of the Partition, numerous people have lost much. Some their lives, some their all. If I say that I have lost my pencil and the mouth organ it might sound absurd. But those two were my only riches. I have lost my red-blue-silver childhood dreams (ibid.: 17).

Arjun’s ease with his new surroundings, his successful educational career and consequently his prospects for upward social mobility, together with his general cosmopolitanism, set him apart from other colony-residents. His difference from them is marked even at the level of speech since he is the only resident of the colony who never uses the dialect of his East Bengal village. Instead, even in his first person narrations, he uses a very distinctly Calcutta patois.5 In a way, although he resides in the immigrant colony, he no longer belongs there. This is taken to a more literal level when towards the end of the book Arjun discusses with his mother the possibility of moving out of the colony. (Is his leaving Deshopran Colony a precursor to migrating out of India? Trying to forestall the conflict with Singh, his mother suggests that in order to further his education, he journey to England. There is, thus, the possibility that he might move from the formerly-colonized margins to the

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

58 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

59

THE DIMINISHED MAN

metropolitan centre.) If home is ‘the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries’ (Martin and Mohanty 2003: 90), then his residence in the colony is no home. There he faces attempts upon his very life. For an identical reason, his village, which he refers to, as is customarily done, as ‘desh’—meaning native land and usually overlaid with sentimentalism—might be his place of birth but is no home. For his part, Arjun’s rejection of the provincial idiom and its attendant localisms, in other words his ‘difference’, is a way of consciously separating himself from both his past (the village) and his community (the residents of the colony).6 Thus, through re-education of the self, possibilities may be opened up but these exist for the individual and not for the community as a whole. Arjun’s distancing himself from co-migrants is an area riddled with ambiguity. On the one hand, there is his reaction to Abaneesh’s wife Maya’s comment on the recent wave of East Pakistani migrants at the railway station in Sealdah. One morning, accompanying Shukla and her family on their way to a picnic in Naihati, Arjun hears Maya say, ‘Again, so many refugees have arrived!’ Arjun reacts with: It was as if someone had suddenly punched me hard on the chest. My face turned pale, drained of blood. Looking around I found swarms of refugees crowding the platform—most of them peasants, labourers; a few were awake, most were still asleep. One sleeping woman looked just like Amaladi—whose mutilated body had been found in the jute fields. It was as if Amaladi had somehow regained her life and fled. Yet, so far I had not even noticed them. At one time, I’d lain on the platform, like them, beside mother. Today I was so absorbed in conversing with a beautiful young woman that I wasn’t even aware in the least of the hordes of people like me.They’d had homes, land-holdings. Now like beggars and orphans they were seeking charity. I’d found shelter, I’d been saved, so I no longer cared about them. Yet, it is we who complain about the indifference of the people of West Bengal (Gangopadhyay 1995: 58).

There is an immediate identification with the migrants, and at the same time recognition that his adjustment to circumstances requires a denial of his past.The reference to Amala, Arjun’s young, beautiful, and widowed co-villager, is particularly evocative, since it is the sight of her raped and severed body that set off Somnath’s fainting fits—marking the general deterioration of his sanity. It had been one of the first signs of the approaching violence that eventually compelled his family to leave forever their village home. Juxtaposed with the above is Arjun’s non-responsiveness to a fellow migrant from the east, Subimal. Owner of an aluminium factory, Subimal resides in a house befitting a ‘movie-star’ in an affluent neighbourhood in South Calcutta, and is clearly prosperous. Arjun’s narration nevertheless exposes in Subimal a degree of pretentiousness that extends beyond his expensive living room furnishings.

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

59 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

60

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

… In Subimal Babu’s house everyone spoke the bangal language. To outsiders they were punctilious Calcuttans but at home they were hard-core bangal. Not all their accents fell at the right places, listening to them it felt like they were learning a new language. In 1947 Subimal Babu and his family had ended their connections to eastern Bengal, they were able to bring much of their money—and then, their business here did well. But, their attachment to the land they left behind twentythree years ago was tremendous. In the course of the conversation he would often say, ‘There are so many geniuses among us bangal folk!’ As soon as he heard the name of any famous Bengali he would say, ‘Of course, isn’t he native to our place? From Bikrampur.…’ When he heard that I was from Faridpur, he came forth and almost embraced me. He said animatedly, ‘It’s a joy to open the heart to someone from one’s native place—’ But I couldn’t feel one with Subimal Babu and his family—I remained awkward throughout. It was a coincidence that we had both left behind our homes in Faridpur, but we’d nothing in common—a huge distance separated us. … I was his brother-in-law’s friend, a good student at Presidency College, so as his native countryman he wanted to hug me; would he extend the same to those sleeping on the platforms of Sealdah Station? (Gangopadhyay 1995: 58–59)

The emotional attachment which Subimal claims he bears to his ‘native place’ is manifestly disingenuous. Needless to say, what separates Subimal from Arjun is the fact of class. It is class that makes Subimal a ‘foreigner’ to the intense struggle for survival Arjun has endured, and it makes dialogue between them literally impossible. However much Subimal might claim to identify with the people from eastern Bengal by speaking the regional dialect, and by reminiscing about physical geography, theirs is a world he cannot enter because he has not participated in the unfolding of its history. Arjun’s empathy for the displaced peasants and labourers at Sealdah Station is replaced here with a sharp critical note when he adds that the migrant elite have only sighed over the loss of creature comforts—hilsa and date palm gur (molasses)— and not the sufferings of the dispossessed. Further, Arjun’s distracted silence while Subimal continues to gush about his homeland itself censors middle-class romanticizing of pre-migration life: ... what’s there in West Bengal? Show me a river worth its name! In our East Bengal there were so many expansive rivers. Living next to such vastness, the human heart too grows generous. The thought of the Padma, Meghna still sends shivers in me, just look, I have goose bumps (ibid.: 59).

Yet, despite his alienation from Subimal and his identification with the squatters at Sealdah Station, Arjun is aware that, ultimately, the railway platform is not a place to which he can, or would even want to, return.

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

60 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

61

THE DIMINISHED MAN

On a literal level Arjun’s homelessness is suggested by his repeated changes in living quarters: from his home in the village, to temporary shelters on the way out of East Pakistan, to railway platforms of Bongan and later Sealdah, to Deshopran Colony, to somewhere outside the colony, and perhaps eventually to England. In Gangopadhyay’s novel Purba-Paschim (East-West, 1988–89) too, Hareet Mandal, an underclass Partition migrant, is displaced from his native village to Netaji Colony (the forcibly occupied land in Kashipur);7 from there to Coopers’ Camp; and then pushed out of West Bengal to a camp in Charbetia; then to Kurud Camp; to Sonagora Camp; to Subhash Colony; to Morichjhanpi island in the Sundarbans. His destination following the massacre on the island is not mentioned. The Bengali words for displaced peoples—‘chhinnamul’ (literally ‘torn roots’, and ‘udbastu’ (‘uprooted’) seem inadequate in these contexts because not only has the Partition uprooted Arjun (and Hareet) but it also refuses to allow the displaced to put down roots anywhere else. However, Arjun’s restlessness does not stem from the loss of a physical dwelling place. While Somnath can draw comfort from believing that returning to the village would restore his home and the old life he loved, there is no simple solution for Arjun. His homelessness is altogether different and more intractable. It is an ontological condition.There seems to be a fundamental deficiency within—perhaps an absence of meaning. And in the awareness of this lack, Arjun is radically alone. But it is this that has brought on the project of subjectivity. Arjun claims that there is no place for him in the other space that he inhabits— the elite world of Shukla.When she visits him in the hospital towards the end of the novel, he tells her, ‘I am too far-off from your world—that’s why I don’t want to bother you.You have such a beautiful life, I don’t exactly have a place in it—I know that’ (Gangopadhyay 1995: 108). Shukla’s ‘beautiful life’ has less to do with her finances than it does with her general joie de vivre (although, undoubtedly it is her family’s wealth that makes her lifestyle possible). Her camaraderie seems to be the only diversion from the growing resentments and violence that beleaguer Arjun in the colony. Although both Shukla and Subimal are of the professional class, Arjun’s sense of not belonging where Shukla is concerned cannot be compared with his alienation from Subimal.Whereas Arjun’s rejection of the parvenu world of Subimal is marked by disdain, his inability to find a place in Shukla’s is a melancholy fact. If Arjun remains indifferent to the other spaces of community available to him, it is the distance that Shukla maintains, despite her cordiality, which keeps him apart. Her remoteness is crystallized not only in his mention of her being ‘a very faraway person’, but also in his comparing her with the Taj Mahal. (The resonances of beauty and love, as well as the suggestion of the coldness of marble, are difficult to miss.) On a symbolic level, Shukla represents an ideal, an ideal seemingly within reach, but always eluding his grasp—she escapes Arjun’s attempt to hold her hand with a graceful pirouette. And this inaccessibility makes her all the more precious and

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

61 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

62

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

deepens Arjun’s longing for her. (By contrast, his co-migrant Labanya, plain, a mediocre student at best and attracted to him, poses no challenge. She exemplifies the mundane and Arjun disregards her.) Attended by confidence and refinement, Shukla represents a certain fullness of life, while remaining almost delightfully indifferent to the fact of money. If Arjun’s search for a home is a metaphor for a quest for a certain metaphysical something—it is perhaps for this exuberance of life. And Shukla, whose name variously means ‘light’,‘bright’,‘clean’,‘pure’ embodies that unbounded joy of life and is, therefore, the author of meaning. If there is any antidote to Arjun’s crisis, it is, needless to say, Shukla’s love. At the end of the novella, immediately after she subtly confides her sentiments towards him, he exultantly asserts: Ah, to be alive is such bliss! Still, people want to die, kill others! Nurse, please help me sit up higher! There’s no pain in my chest any more—my head’s clear— I’ll certainly live! I’ll live! I love living. They wanted to kill me, but I’ll not die. Since childhood I’ve had several close brushes with death. I could’ve died at any point on that unbearable journey out of the village. When the two men in Khulna grabbed mother, or on the Bongan station platform where some of the boys my age died of cholera in quick succession—or even after coming to the colony… Twice they attempted to kill me. They won’t succeed, they’ll never succeed. I’ll live. I’ll certainly live (Gangopadhyay 1995: 109–10).

Just before this, Arjun hears of the government’s intervention in the problems of the colony, and while he is relieved, the note of joy so prominent in the above passage is absent there.These above three paragraphs provide the strongest reaffirmation of life and, in a way, embody the spirit of the difficult struggle of those dislocated and dispossessed by the political division of the subcontinent. Arjun’s repetitions of ‘I’ll live’ are at one level forced. And yet, the narrative has demanded this response even as it shows the near impossibility of passing through the ordeals that give it force.

CONCLUSION Gangopadhyay draws upon the epic past to narrate the history of the present. By setting his scene in the aftermath of the Partition he insists that the new is both supremely modern and yet wholly dominated by an unmastered past. Even with its epic backdrop, the social-realist mode of Arjun accompanied by Gangopadhyay’s minimalist style evokes both the complexity and the harshness of migrant life. This paper, following the main plot of the novel, has focused on the story of Arjun. One issue given some acknowledgement in the novella, although not

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

62 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

63

THE DIMINISHED MAN

developed with as much detail as the life of Arjun, is the gendering of the experience of displacement. In addition to the instances of intimate violence that may constitute reasons for emigration (Amala) and those that occur during the process of migration (anonymous young women), Gangopadhyay, through the stories of two young colony-women, Labanya and Purnima, offers an insight into the difficult struggles of dislocated and dispossessed women. For many Bengali migrant women, Partition transformed the gendered division of social space by compelling them to become wage-earners in order to resuscitate the family economically.Thus, Labanya dreams of someday securing a position as a school teacher, which, she feels, will bestow on her the social esteem she craves. But whereas for Arjun success comes through higher studies, for Labanya power failures and the trauma of rape stand in the way of her graduation and prospects for a better life.8 Her efforts and resolve to ‘... pass this time. I have to’, as she prepares to take the B.Sc. examination a second time, are thwarted by Dibya. Psychologically destabilized by the violence to which she has been subjected, her delirium centres on death and on the destruction of the site of the violent act—her body: ‘Kill me, kill me, why didn’t you just kill me?’ and ‘I am dead, indeed. All around me is Hell. Oh, my body burns! Ma, my body is ablaze!’ (Gangopadhyay 1995: 91). After she recovers from the initial shock, she refrains from speaking.The similarities between Labanya’s situation and Arjun’s—they both strive to rise above their present conditions, both are attacked in the colony—and the contrasts in the respective outcomes—his success/her failure, his loquaciousness/her silence, his celebration of life/her death-wish—are elicited with precision. With the exception of Arjun’s scholarly merits, the differences in the way things unfold for Labanya and Arjun are crossed by lines of gender. Purnima, like Arjun, is the provider for her family, but is compelled to keep her work secret, and seems deserving only of Arjun’s pity and disgust. She is employed in the flesh trade. Labanya and Purnima must contend with displacement, privation like Arjun and Dibya, and then, some more. By bringing their sufferings into relief Gangopadhyay marks how for Partition’s underclass women victims, the prospect of home—a zone of safety, security, comfort, and happiness—seems much, much further away.9

NOTES * This paper was written under the auspices of the Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award from James Madison University. I thank the editors of Partitioned Lives for their careful reading and comments on the paper. I also thank Spencer Leonard for his suggestions for improvement. 1. The novella was first published in 1971. All page numbers refer to the 1995 edition.Translations from the text are mine.

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

63 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

64

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

2. In case of the names from the Mahabharata, I have retained the Sanskrit spelling using ‘a’ at the end of the name. This is most importantly to distinguish the epic’s Arjuna from the novella’s Arjun. 3. This phrase is used by Jyotirmoyee Devi in the preface to her novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga to describe partitioned India. 4. On the other hand, the refusal of the state to intercede may be suggested as a positive sign, of the vitality of Indian democracy, instead of it’s functioning simply as a paternalistic state. 5. Although the narration is mostly in standard Bengali, Gangopadhyay navigates between multiple linguistic registers deploying the differences in ghoti (people from West Bengal) and bangal (originally from East Bengal) speech, as well as those between different economic classes. 6. Community is later identified with ‘national community’ when Arjun, pondering over whether it would be ethical to attack his opponents, extends a feeling of kinship towards Kewal Singh because he, like Arjun himself, ‘is from the same country’ (Gangopadhyay 1995: 103). 7. The story of Hareet Mandal and his cohorts’ forcible occupation, or jabardakhal, of a vacant plot of land in Kashipur owned by the Sarkars bears resemblance to the story of the Deshopran Colony residents in Arjun. Like the Dattas in Arjun, the Sarkars too are in the process of conducting negotiations with a Punjabi cardboard factory owner for sale of the land when the refugees settle there. 8. While educated elite women like Amala’s sister, Kamala, have found employment as college professors, there are very few choices for underclass women. 9. For a discussion of other forms of women’s homelessness after Partition, see my essay ‘Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes: Partition, Women and Homelessness’ (2005).

REFERENCES Gangopadhyay, Sunil, Arjun (Kolkata: Ananda, 1995, first published in 1971). ———, Purba-Paschim, in 2 vols (Kolkata: Ananda, 1988–89). Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Jyotirmoyee Devi, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga, in Jyotirmoyee Debir Rachana Samkalan, vol. 1, edited by Subir Roychowdhury and Abhijit Sen (Kolkata: Jadavpur University School of Women’s Studies and Dey’s Publishing, 1991). Lukács, Georg, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). Martin, Biddy and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘What’s Home Got to Do with It?’ in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Mookerjea-Leonard, Debali, ‘Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes: Partition,Women and Homelessness’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(2), 2005: 141–54. Naim, C. M., Ambiguities of Heritage (Karachi: City Press, 1999).

03_Roy & Bhatia~chap-3.pmd

64 Black

8/8/2007, 9:08 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

65

4 Constructing Post-Partition Bengali Cultural Identity Through Films

SOMDATTA MANDAL

Partition of a country can either be the outcome of a full war or be caused by the warlike disposition of two groups and their animal brutality proceeding hand in hand with pernicious politics—for example, the Partition of the Bengal and Punjab provinces of India in 1947. None could deny that Partition was an act of political expediency, yet at the time there were few who had any real inkling of the very worst in human behaviour that would arise from the uprooting of millions of people on apparently sectarian grounds.This, perhaps, was the greatest component in the cost of Indian independence, and the most palpable evidence of the truth in Mahatma Gandhi’s warning that Independence would not be an end in itself.Whether there was a political stance behind it or whether a greater catastrophe could have been prevented by it—these issues concern politicians and intellectuals. But for the huge number of people in both Bengal and Punjab, this was not a theory to be discussed. It was ground reality, a direct physical experience—the pain and wound very difficult to heal. As Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin comment: By the time the migrations were finally over, about eight million people had crossed the newly created boundaries of Punjab and Bengal, carrying with them memories of a kind of violence that the three communities had visited upon each other that was unmatched in scale, brutality and intensity (1993: WS 3).

Comparisons have often been made between Bengal and Punjab and how the latter has coped much better with the people rehabilitated fully. But the fact remains that in Punjab, unlike Bengal, it was a one-time exchange of population. Also, this massive influx of refugees and uprootedness was not reflected in Bengali literature to that extent that the Punjabi experience was in Hindi and Urdu literature.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

65 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

66

SOMDATTA MANDAL

Mushirul Hasan, a well-known subaltern historian of Partition, has stated that history cannot capture the complexity of such an experience; one has to look for creative writing (Hasan 2006: xiii). If that is the case, then questions may be raised as to why there are more literary documents helping us to understand the Punjab of 1947 and so few elaborating on the suffering of Bengalis on either side of the border. There is no answer to why the so-called socially conscious writers of Bengal, who had composed stories, plays, poems and songs on the Bengal famine, either kept silent or were apathetic towards the issue of the Partition. Most of the creative artists were part of the leftist movement in Bengal.Yet it is strange that in order to understand the trauma of Partition we have to primarily rely on personal reminiscences than on fiction per se. If there is such a dearth of creative writing, the situation may perhaps be cinematically depicted. However, when the film director has to depend on others, and when these other people believe in the commercial viability of their investments; when the viewer considers film to be primarily a source of entertainment and not a socially committed art form, then it is quite natural that he would not want to see the depiction of the trauma and angst of Partition on the silver screen. Besides, before Pather Panchali, Bengali cinema has primarily remained busy with the depiction of personal happiness or tragedy of middle-class people, unwilling to be bothered with collective or social crises in a big way. There was another disadvantage for the film director. After the Partition, the stream of refugees pouring into the country probably did not let them enjoy the tranquillity of mind required to depict such a crude reality on the screen. Also, having got used to avoiding harsh reality for a long time and depicting make-believe reality in their productions, they thought it best to avoid it altogether. This paper deals with films on the partition of Bengal, produced both in West Bengal and in Bangladesh, made by directors who did not believe in the runof-the-mill commercial productions of the time. Unlike the more big-budget commercial productions with Bollywood stars cast in leading roles that portray the partition of Punjab, most of these films are portrayed in the neo-realist style and remain silent about the direct representation of political issues. Instead, they talk about the trauma and resettlement angst that torment the lives of ordinary people and avoid conflict as a theme to be explored. Thus, most Bengali films shift the field of Partition studies from the actual political division or communal violence to the transformation of society post Partition. They can be called migration studies at their complex best, capturing both the loss and the opportunity in the world of the migrant; the one lamented, the other seized with both hands to forge a new life. They stress the aspect of renewal, of new beginnings. Considering the huge number of films churned out by the Indian film industry each year, one notices a general apathy on the part of filmmakers towards making films on the Partition of India and its aftermath. Cameraman-director Nemai Ghosh’s

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

66 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

67

Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1951) can be called an exception in this context. Depicting the physical pain and crisis, Chinnamul is about the Partition of Bengal and the flow of refugees from East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) into India. Based on a story by Swarnakamal Bhattacharya, it begins in a peaceful village in East Bengal where Hindus and Muslims, farmers and artisans, live in a spirit of amity. Gobinda and Sumati are about to have a child, but the Partition forces the Hindus to leave their ancestral village and head for Calcutta. Devoid of any location or shelter on this side of the divided country, they eke out their daily lives in temporary shelters in and around Sealdah railway station. Along with millions of refugees, this family has to face untold misery in the big city, the injustice of social and political realities. But the struggle for existence never stops. Giving it a documentary feel, two particular scenes of this film are often quoted by viewers and critics alike.The first one is a non-actor elderly woman who refuses to let go of her home’s door-post and shouts out in the local Bangal dialect, ‘Jamu na, ami sosurer bhita chaira jamu na’ (‘I will not go, leaving my in-laws’ house behind.’). Many years later, when M. S. Sathyu depicts the plight and reaction of a similar elderly woman in his film Garam Hawa, it seems Ghosh’s endeavour has been underestimated. The second memorable scene that sought realism by enacting it through no professional actor is that of the crowded train journey to Calcutta. Though it does not have the blood and gore that signifies Khushwant’s Singh’s Train to Pakistan, the film highlighted for the first time the seriousness of the refugee problem that came along as an appendage with the newly independent nation. Chinnamul captured the tragedy of a dismembered state. Employing innovative idioms juxtaposed intelligently with documentary footage, the film managed to convey the gruesome, gory terror that was unleashed, without even a single shot actually showing any violence! Though the Russian filmmaker and theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin had praised the film and tried his level best to publicize it, the film didn’t do well and the filmmaker was compelled to seek his fortune elsewhere; he never made another film. Ghosh himself had very definite ideas of what exactly he wanted to do: I wanted to project the miseries of the refugees after the partition and also to expose the selfish motives of the politicians who were behind the partition. The Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) movement helped me to understand the actual reality. Had I not been associated with this movement, I would not have been aware of the human beings around me. This awareness prompted me to make the film Chinnamul, which is regarded by some as a political film. I did not deliberately include politics, but it could not be separated from life either. I took the camera out of the studios into the open, to bring out the truth which shaped this film. I also used artists from IPTA, some of them without previous acting experience, because I thought it could lend an air of authenticity to the film.1

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

67 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

68

SOMDATTA MANDAL

Dipendu Chakrabarti laments that the historical evaluation of Chinnamul vis-à-vis the Partition of Bengal is still incomplete (Chakrabarti 2002: 182). He succinctly points out that though people tend to believe that neo-realism in Bangla films only began with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the first attempt to experiment with neorealism in Indian cinema is actually seen in Chinnamul. He argues that though the Ray master-piece possessed all the basic characteristics that Zavatini defines for an ideal neo-realist film, it lacked one fundamental aspect, and that is contemporaneity or the ‘Today, to day, to-day’ formula (ibid.: 182, translation mine). Also, Ray never gave importance to the theme of Partition in any of his films. It was left to Ritwik Ghatak later to explore it. Ghatak, who started his illustrious career by making an on-screen appearance in Chinnamul, as well as working behind the camera as an assistant to Nemai Ghosh, was to demand with characteristic candour, ‘Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul has started a new era. Have we been able to proceed further in our consciousness?’2 While the films Refugee (1959) directed by Shantipriya Mukherjee or Rajen Tarafdar’s Palanka (The Four-Poster Bed, 1976) have now faded into oblivion, Ritwik Ghatak is the only director whose films and worldview have become synonymous with the Partition. Dispossessed himself, his anger, angst, frustration, discontent and probably even his indomitable creativity—all took source from it. As an important actor in and commentator upon Bengali culture, his films represent an influential and decidedly unique viewpoint of post-Independence Bengal. Unique, because in his films he pointedly explored the fallout of the Partition of India on Bengali society, and influential, because his films set a standard for newly emerging ‘alternative’ or ‘parallel’ cinema directors. As Erin O’Donnell (2005) rightly points out, the majority of Ghatak’s films are narratives that focus on the post-Independence Bengali family and community, with a sustained critique of the emerging petitbourgeois in Bengal, specifically in the urban environment of Calcutta. In this context, he utilizes a melodramatic style and mood novel to Indian cinema. He was outspoken concerning India’s independence and partition, and in response to an interviewer’s question regarding what personal truth had inspired his films, stories and plays, Ghatak replied: Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independence—which is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently towards this and have tried to portray different aspects of this [in my films] (2002: 92).

With three significant films produced in three successive years, namely Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1962), Ritwik Ghatak entered the scene with poignant pictures of human distress—not just the pangs of separation that caused so much hardship but also the long-term effects on the mind.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

68 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

69

Though the central focus of each of these three films is different, Ghatak himself liked to string them together, considering it as a sort of trilogy. Beginning with the issue of Partition, the problems and pain of migration and rootlessness, he depicted utopian and dystopian visions of ‘homeland’ in an independent Bengal in film after film.Whereas Nemai Ghosh wanted to capture the physical aspects of the problems of Partition and hence began his film in East Bengal, Ghatak’s films may be considered to be the continuation of that process of rootlessness. In them, the physical aspects of the Partition are already over and hence we get neither the depiction of streams of refugees nor do we see the moments of actual desertion of the ‘home’ or the torture and insult meted out to them. Ghatak wanted to capture the plight of the daily haemorrhages before the scab was formed. At least this is the impression we get from his words. In other words, stated a bit crudely, if Chinnamul is considered to be a contemporary testament of the partition of Bengal, Ghatak’s films can be termed as a continuous picture of mental tension. Continuous because the wound never heals—even if the physical wound heals up, the mental wound does not.Thus there is no physical presence of the Partition in his films. Instead his characters continuously bear the trauma and pain of losing their homeland—this is their mission; they roam around in search of new homes, of stability. In Ghatak’s trilogy, therefore, the issue of Partition and the pain and anguish of turning refugees work at various levels. In an interview he discussed the common thread of union in these three films and stated: Against my intention the films Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekha formed my trilogy. When I started Meghe Dhaka Tara, I never spoke of political unification. Even now I don’t think of it because history will not alter and I won’t venture to do this impossible task. The cultural segregation caused by politics and economics was a thing to which I never reconciled myself as I always thought in terms of cultural integration. This very theme of cultural integration forms the theme in all three films (Bhattacharya and Dasgupta 2003: 67).

If we are asked to choose a single film which captures the trauma and tragedy of the Bengal partition with unmatched power and sensitivity, we choose, without question, Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star/The Star Veiled by Clouds). Hailed as an unqualified masterpiece, it is a seminal depiction of the existential dilemma of the Indian lower-middle class, where the sacrifice of one good, meek, dutiful daughter ensures the survival of the rest of the family. Without explicitly mentioning the Partition, the events of this classic film take place in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta and concern an impoverished genteel Hindu bhadralok family and the problems they face because of the Partition. Reversing the roles of traditional patriarchy where the elder brother Shankar should have taken on the

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

69 Black

8/8/2007, 2:33 PM

70

SOMDATTA MANDAL

responsibilities of the family, Ghatak depicts how Neeta, the eldest daughter of this uprooted family, in a stifling, desperate environment, turns into the breadwinner and ultimately sacrifices her life. The central concern of the woman is not limited to negotiating the relationship between the home and the world. Like other refugee women, she fights for food and shelter, for peace, for all issues that concern them as citizens, not only as women. In fact, Neeta has become the deathless symbol of Partition itself and the uprooted woman’s struggle against it. After fulfilling her mission, when she at last succumbs to tuberculosis, her piercing cry,‘I want to live’, sums up the essence of all displacements, exodus and partitions. Apart from the bangal/ghoti divide, another significant aspect of Meghe Dhaka Tara was the establishment of the image of the new woman, the one who worked shoulder to shoulder with the men in order to earn her daily bread. The film had opened with Neeta halting to pull at her torn slipper on her way to work. The closing shot completes the circle. This time, it is not Neeta, but an anonymous girl who takes Neeta’s place to bear the burden and feed her refugee family. She falters because her slipper is torn. But the message is clear—thousands of such Neetas changed the socio-cultural pattern of middle-class Bengali life from the 1950s onwards. This sociological change in Bengal was so immense that Satyajit Ray, the director accused of not being affected by the Partition at all, made his film Mahanagar (The Great City, 1963) three years later on the same predicament. One also sees the city of Calcutta as a kind of leitmotif in the tragedy of these refugees.To Ghatak, Calcutta symbolized corruption, degradation and decay. It was a city that inflicted violence on those who had come to live here, as Ghatak had, by force of historical circumstance: the Partition. His films therefore reflect a Calcutta he loved to hate and hated to love. Beginning with his film Nagarik (Citizen, 1952) on to Meghe Dhaka Tara and later, Subarnarekha, Calcutta is portrayed as a victimizer of people. He also showed the city as the helpless victim—of refugees pouring in by the thousands, of skyrocketing poverty, and of squalor, which turned the city into a huge drain flowing with blood, waste, and desperation.Thus, through his films one discovers a Calcutta of discontent, a Calcutta of hate, a Calcutta of despair, degradation and dehumanization. It finally boils down to a Calcutta of anger, of seething fury and therefore, ironically, a Calcutta of passion, a city that goes on living, loving, and hoping. In Komal Gandhar (E Flat, 1961), a film that Ghatak made immediately after Meghe Dhaka Tara, all the middle-class protagonists suffer from the anguish of separation from their home on the other side of the border. The film is about a committed theatre group that reaches out to the people in the countryside, bringing them genuine works of art. Though they suffer drawbacks in collecting funds for their theatrical productions, there is no financial crisis in the personal or family lives of Brigu or Anasua or the other members of their group.They do not suffer the

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

70 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

71

physical crises of the Partition, but carry in their minds a deep sense of rootlessness, a longing for the ‘homeland’ on the other side of the border. The film showcases Ghatak’s experimentation with the medium while he seems to have tried to do away with the method of storytelling. It carries the nostalgia of the IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) days, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI)— of comradeship, of hopes, of faith and trust on which the movement had developed but failed. It also bears that determination to fight for that faith even in a hostile environment. Emphasizing the syncretic culture of undivided Bengal is the chorus literally crying out ‘Dohai Ali’ (‘Mercy, Ali’) in gradually increased speed as the camera simulates the movement of a train hurtling forward towards the end of the railway tracks that are closed to acknowledge the presence of the new country— Pakistan. In this memorable sequence Ghatak, using a wide-angle lens, has focused on the lovers standing and staring at the buffers at the terminal railway tracks beyond which flows the river dividing Bengal. A snatch of an old folksong is then heard: Aey paar Paddaa O paar Paddaa/Moddi khaaney chaur Tahar moddhey bosey achen/Shibo Saudagor (On this bank is the river Padma/On the other bank is the Padma too And an island lies between them/Where lives Lord Shiva/The trader-great).

Laughter and tears are good companions in this moving film that makes nonsense of the artificial geographic borders and manufactured history. A common heritage of language, music and customs brings people together and the machinations of demented politicians forcibly divide them along with the land where they have their roots. The members of the theatrical troupe in Komal Gandhar form a new kind of ‘alternate’ or ‘surrogate’ family, not of the typically Bengali extended family kind. Here rootlessness is not depicted in reality but in a metaphorical sense. Also, as Partha Chatterjee states, the film, for all its adolescent preoccupation with the idea of mother and motherland, and at the same time, the authentic poetic connection between the two, is also a loving tribute to the nation-building energies that went into the activities of the IPTA which was, before it was sabotaged from within by the CPI, an organization of idealists who had a purity of purpose and dreamt of building a contented, egalitarian India.Yet, in spite of all that, Komal Gandhar cannot be termed as a Partition film in the true sense of the term (Chatterjee 2003). In Subarnarekha (1962), Ghatak restated the theme of traditional roots savaged by an imposed political decision. With the Partition serving as a backdrop, the film is, ‘about rational elements like history, war and its aftermath, mass displacement and loss of an old habitat and hence roots on the one hand, and irrational entities like destiny and fate that are not supposed to, but do affect human beings and their conduct to alter their lives irreversibly on the other’(ibid.). One of Ghatak’s most

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

71 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

72

SOMDATTA MANDAL

complex films, it moves beyond the immediate problems thrown up by the Partition: namely, unemployment, urban distribution, collapsing family ties. The storyline is as follows: Ishwar Chakravarti comes after Partition as a refugee from East Bengal to live with his fellow sufferers in Navajeevan Colony, a settlement for the displaced on the outskirts of Calcutta.With him is his little sister Sita, and an orphan, Abhiram, whom he has accepted as his little foster brother. Ishwar gets a job managing an iron foundry by the river Subarnarekha in Bihar. Haraprasad, the schoolmaster who has nurtured the new home of his fellow unfortunates, accuses Ishwar of being a coward and for thinking only of his own welfare and not that of the others around him. We are therefore plunged into the heart of a moral tale that can only end in tragedy. The post-Independence optimism gives way to harsh realities. Sita spends her life caring for her unmarried brother until she grows into a young woman and falls in love with Abhiram. Ishwar is determined to find a proper high-caste Hindu husband for Sita and demands that she never see Abhiram again. He proceeds to arrange her marriage, yet Sita, determined to marry Abhiram, escapes with him to Calcutta on her wedding night. Once again living in a bustee (slum), the newly married couple has a child, Binu, and Abhiram finds work as a bus driver. One day, he accidentally runs over a child and an angry mob kills him. Sita is forced to earn money for herself and Binu. She begins to sing for paid customers, and thus unwittingly becomes a prostitute. One night, Ishwar, on a business trip to Calcutta, visits Sita in a drunken stupor to avail of her services, not realizing that this prostitute is his sister. The film ends on a tragic note with Sita cutting her own throat to escape the shame, and Binu is placed in the care of Ishwar who, though devastated, attempts to move on for the sake of his nephew. The film carries sequences of superb visualizations of the tragedy of the uprooted and the displaced, the daring handling of melodramatic situations, and the passionate invocation of slokas from the sacred Hindu texts. The final scene, heart-breaking and of surpassing beauty with Ishwar and Binu walking towards a craggy landscape with the horizon far in the background, accompanied by choral chanting of the ‘charai beti’ mantra on the soundtrack, in search of a new life, ‘sums up the forced political and hence historical displacement of millions, in our own times and earlier, people whose only crime was that they had sought a little peace, dignity and happiness in their lives’ (ibid.). Some critics accuse Ghatak of being oversentimental about ‘desh’ or ‘homeland’. With him, they feel, the experience of Partition remained imprisoned in nostalgia, never a noble emotion, however painful its portrayal may be. According to Iraban Basu Roy: Partition was Ritwik’s own passion but that passion did not get any creative inspiration or language in his films. Not that he was not aware of rootlessness; but whenever it came to representation of collective tragedy that surpassed personal

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

72 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

73

pain, it seemed that Ritwik withdrew his passion.... So Partition remained loosely attached to his films, never turning into the central motif. That the Partition was not of a particular moment, but had long drawn effects on the personal and collective consciousness is understood in a film like Shyam Benegal’s Mammo; this extended influence is missing in Ritwik’s films. Except for a few stray moments, there is no permanent depiction of the pain, harassment and nightmare of the Partition in his films. Like Bengali fiction, Ritwik’s films too just make stray references to it. On the other hand, like many other ‘myths’ about Ritwik, a baseless myth about the Partition also got created (2005: 184, translation mine).

Madhabi Mukherjee, the actress who played the role of Sita in Subarnarekha, once told her interviewers that when the film was being made she was too young to ascertain fully the intensity and depth of Ghatak’s personal feelings about the Partition. But she mentions that at times Ghatak used to say,‘Lambu (‘tall one’, meaning Satyajit Ray) never experienced Partition’. She also emphasizes the fact that even in a traumatic film like Subarnarekha, Ghatak, the tragic bard of Partition, ends on a note of redemptive hope. In an interview published in The Statesman, commemorating forty years of the making of the film, Mukherjee says: No matter how deep the tragedy is, how intense the suffering, this filmmaker refused to end on a totally negative note. Remember the last phase of Subarnarekha where the child is pulling his uncle to take him to the land of butterflies and beauty? Or the unforgettable lines of Tagore: ‘Joi hok manusher, oi nabajataker, oi chirajibiter’ (‘Glory be to man, to the newborn, to the eternal’) with which the film ends? Partition was indeed the single most traumatic experience for him, but Ritwikda did not stop there. He did not conform to any particular discipline. However, he was steadfast in one aspect—he refused to accept the defeat and degeneration of human beings as final. He hoped against hope (2002).

In the afterword to an anthology of Bengal partition stories, Debjani Sengupta (2003) states that a major difference between the narratives of the East and the West lie in their treatment of time. Many of the stories from Bengal treat Partition not as historical time, ‘the past’, but also as real time, ‘the present’. For the people of the two Bengals, Partition did not end in 1947 and the terrible cost of the Partition is to be seen even now. So some of the stories do not talk of Partition at all, except in very indirect ways. They are allusive and instead of exploding, unfold bit by bit. The movement of refugees that still continues today is another significant aspect of Bengal’s partition that has shaped its narratives. This gives rise to a sub-genre of Bengali fiction and cinema that according to Sengupta: … may be called ‘colony fiction’ for want of a better name. Films, short stories, novels, plays belonging to this genre explore the life of people living in refugee

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

73 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

74

SOMDATTA MANDAL

colonies that grew like mushrooms in and around the urban centers in West Bengal. In these colony narratives, both of the film and the fiction, displacement and dispossession are the dominant themes.These stories are set after 1947 but partition features indirectly in these narratives through the lives and experiences of the refugees. Their daily fight for existence, their pain and loss are in a large way a comment on the Partition. These representations, springing as they do from the life of the colony, also show how marginal people can help to create alternative ‘notions of legitimacy and citizenship’ that challenge ‘new orthodoxies’. The marginalization of the colony inhabitants from the mainstream, their fight for social and economic equality, the food movement of 1965 that brought a large number of refugees into active politics have given new strength to left-wing politics in Bengal (2003: 190–91).

In Bengali literature as well as in films therefore, Partition is often seen in metaphysical terms—the hurt is not in the body but in the mind, the soul. Madness is not a trope in these stories, rather, it is nostalgia and a constant dazed search to know how and why and wherefore. In a seminar address regarding his own cinema, Buddhadeb Dasgupta once stated: For me, making a film is not just another job to be done. It is a mode of expression. It enables the continuous search of the inner self through the extension of reality. The focus is more on the socio-political context where there are more questions than answers. There is a continuous striving—not so much pursuit as search (1995: 20).

Dasgupta’s Tahader Katha (Their Story, 1992), is founded on the realities of the last eight years of colonialism and the first three years of independence in a partitioned India, or, more precisely, a partitioned Bengal, for the former East Bengal had become East Pakistan. Shibnath Mukherjee, the protagonist, had been typical of so many Bengalis of his generation—high caste, an intellectual and a terrorist. He had a master’s degree and had dedicated himself to the freedom movement, which, in Bengal particularly, was considerably more violent (or at least less Gandhian) than in most other parts of India. For the killing of a policeman—the nightmare reality of which continues to haunt his consciousness throughout his remaining years— he was sent to the infamous Andaman Islands penal colony. After eight years of his sentence, however, India became independent, and while many political prisoners were set free, Shibnath was transferred to a mental asylum for three years.The film opens after his release from that institution as he travels, after eleven years of alienation from history, back to his home and family. Unfortunately, Shibnath fails to adapt to life on the outside, becomes alienated from his wife and former friends and associates, kills a travelling conjurer and is returned to custody.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

74 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

75

Based on a short story by Kamal Kumar Majumdar, the apparent simplicity of the narrative actually points to the characters’ radical misunderstanding of their roles in history. Shibnath, albeit apprehensive and suffering quite consciously the emotional and intellectual wounds—and to a lesser extent, the physical ones— inflicted upon him during his eleven years of incarceration, hopes that things are much the same as they had been when he was taken away. On the other hand, his wife and friends hope that he will simply fit into the changed lives that they have come to take for granted. The kernel of the tragedy, as John Hood rightly says, lies in the fact that neither side anticipates the effect of an eleven-year absence, especially one as cruel as that endured by Shibnath, on an attempt at rehabilitation (Hood 2005). One of the film’s main aims is to examine the gulf between husband and wife. Another major indication that Shibnath’s dream has turned sour is his friend from eleven years back, Bipin Gupta. It is Bipin who brings the East Bengali Shibnath to the home in West Bengal that he has never seen, and it was Bipin, as we learn, who offered assistance to his family while Shibnath was in jail. It is also Bipin who will try to do everything possible to get Shibnath back on his feet again. And yet Bipin is by no means a simple good-natured man whose wish is nothing more than the welfare of his friend. He wants to entice his friend back into teaching, and tries to whet his appetite for that profession by talk of land that is being set aside for Shibnath’s own school. Shibnath’s refusal angers Bipin: Shibnath: What will become of my dreams? The people of Taherpur are still waiting for me. Bipin: No one is waiting for anyone, Shibnath.

But no one takes the trouble of asking Shibnath what his dreams actually are, and the gap between him and Bipin is made evident by Bipin’s impatience: Shibnath: Don’t you have any dreams, Bipin? Bipin (angrily): Stop talking nonsense, Shibnath!

Shibnath’s reaction to Bipin’s scheme is quite perceptive: ‘Eleven years is a very long time. One forgets almost everything. You were released only after two months.’ And later he reminds Bipin,‘They let you out because you confessed, while Mohitosh and I rotted there for so many years.’ Tahader Katha should not be viewed as a film that seeks to define true madness, for it is in no way a psychological polemic. Whether Shibnath is clinically sane or otherwise is not the film’s point. The point is that Shibnath is an intense idealist, a dreamer and a stickler for truth and sincerity, who does not fit into a society which has started to establish itself before his coming to it. Undoubtedly, there is a great gap

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

75 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

76

SOMDATTA MANDAL

in his empirical understanding of the new order, a gap that might lend circumstantial credibility to thoughts of his mental deficiency. He needs to be told by Bipin that there is no such thing as East Bengal any more and that his native village of Taherpur is now in a foreign country. He also needs to be told that he has a son. Hemangini tells him of the riots that accompanied Partition, of the burning of houses and the forced dislocation of millions. But Shibnath wonders whether he is better off being ‘free’. He is able to perceive that the significant question is not what is wrong with himself, but what is wrong with the world. Hood categorically states: ‘The film thus candidly attributes shame, not pride, to the beneficiaries of the freedom movement. The genuine idealists of nationalism, represented by Shibnath and Mohitosh, become fringe-dwellers or are put away’ (2005: 114). However it would be a mistake to see the film too much in this historical light, for it is not so much a film about nationalism as it is a film about human suffering set against a nationalist background. What is prominent is the pain and the torment of people cut off, inexplicably, from one another—the woman who cannot know her husband, the children who want to love their father and continually find obstacles in the way of their affection, and the man who can find no rational perspective in his life nor a meaningful direction to the hearts of his wife and children. The film thus remains ... the story of Shibnath’s tragedy of alienation, an alienation made all the more stark by its apparent continuity with his brutal incarceration, and made all the more heart-rending by its consequent tearing at the natural bonds that tie a man to his family. The nationalist element of the film is really incidental to this human tragedy, drawing it beyond the bounds of its 1950s setting (ibid.: 115).

I In East Bengal (called East Pakistan after the division), 1947 and its consequences were far-reaching. In the years following the Partition the rise of the Bhasha Andolan among students and the intelligentsia was an important way in which a national identity was forged.The demand to make Bangla an official language resulted in the rise of a ‘new linguistic nationalism’. The claim that Bangla gave the people of East Pakistan a separate cultural identity (different from that of West Pakistan where Urdu was the national language) culminated in the War of Independence in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. Many critics consider these two events as crucial to the development of Bangladesh’s literature and a great deal of Bangladesh’s literary narratives are coloured with an awareness of these political issues. But interestingly, though the traumatic events of the Partition have produced literary works that are unforgettable, Bangladeshi contributions towards the genre of Partition films are insignificant.The fledgling film industry in that country might be one of the reasons.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

76 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

77

Or maybe, like their fellow sufferers on this side of the border, they wanted to remain silent. Surya Dighal Bari (House by the Sun/The Ominous House, 1979), a debut venture by co-directors Masiuddin Shaker and Sheikh Niamat Ali, was probably the first Bangladeshi film to depict any incident related to the Partition. Based on a novel by Abu Ishaque, it is set in East Bengal at a time when the great famine, communal riots, and separation had deeply affected everybody. The main story of the novel dates around the years of World War II and independence from the British but takes on a local and personal colour when it focuses on the plight of a widow and her children who live at one end of a village.The village landlord, who has a covetous eye on the property and also a lustful one on the widow, tries to evict the family from the house on the grounds that it is haunted. The rest of the story shows how Jaigoon, the widow, and her children fight the village for the right to live in their house. So where does the Partition feature in such a story, one might ask. If we look into the socio-political context of the novel, we get the contemporary picture of the historic famine of 1943, the black days of the riots of 1946 and the Partition of 1947, but these serve to make it more realistic and lively. The only other memorable entry from Bangladesh is Chitra Nadir Pare (Quiet Flows the River Chitra, 1999) scripted and directed by Tanvir Mokammel. Portraying the ongoing nature of migration and its problems, the brief storyline of the film is as follows. After the partition of India in 1947, Sashikanta’s family, like millions of other Hindu families of East Pakistan, faced the dilemma of whether or not to migrate from the land that had been their home for centuries. But Sashikanta Sengupta, an eccentric lawyer, stubbornly refuses to leave his motherland.The widower Sashikanta has two children, Minoti and Bidyut and Anuprova Devi is an affectionate old aunt who lives with the family.The family lives in a house on the banks of the river Chitra in Narail. Some Muslim neighbours eye Sashikanta’s house, but the family refuses to migrate.The film begins with a sequence in an afternoon of 1947 when Sashikanta’s children Minoti and Bidyut and the neighbouring Muslim children are shown playing beside the river Chitra. Minoti and Bidyut are particularly close to Badal, Salma and Nazma, the children of a next-door Muslim family. Minoti and Badal gradually become more than friends. The children grow up. Badal goes to Dhaka University. Those were the days of the 1960s when the atmosphere of universities was charged with political radicalism. Badal gets involved in anti-military student movement and while participating in a demonstration for democracy, gets killed by police firing. Sashikanta’s brother Nidhukanta is an idealist doctor who lives in their ancestral village on the other side of the Chitra river. During the 1964 Hindu–Muslim riot, his widowed daughter gets raped. She commits suicide by drowning herself in the river. Nidhukanta’s family migrates to India. In the meantime, all these untoward incidents happening around him affect Sashikanta’s failing health. He suffers a stroke and passes away. Minoti and Anuprova finally leave for the border en route to Kolkata.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

77 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

78

SOMDATTA MANDAL

Chitra Nadir Pare essentially portrays the ongoing nature of uprootedness and migration along with all its manifest problems: the politics and advantages taken during the exchange of property on both sides of the border; the breaking of camaraderie between Hindu and Muslim families; the way Bidyut lives in cramped surroundings in Kolkata; how people take advantage of reservation policies. Mokammal also emphasizes how mere border crossing does not once and for all solve the problem. Migration from Bangladesh continues unabated till date and the enormity of this problem is amply authenticated by various surveys and media reports. For example, according to the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR)—a US-based international watchdog on refugee problems, at least 5,000 Bangladeshi Hindus and other minorities fled to India between October and December 2001 to escape violence that followed the national elections in Bangladesh.The figure could even be as high as 20,000. Most Hindu asylum-seekers went to West Bengal and Tripura while others went to Assam and Meghalaya, the report observed.

II Nearly half a century after Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul, the new century witnessed another excellent rendition of the Bengal Partition through Supriyo Sen’s documentary, Way Back Home (2002). The two-hour documentary, which the director calls a ‘non-fiction’ is divided into two parts—Way Back Home and Imaginary Homeland, and is dedicated to the minorities and refugees of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It traces not only a physical journey from Kolkata to Barisal but examines the emotional journey to a life that refuses to die. Born into a family of East Bengal refugees in Kolkata, Sen listened to stories about his mother’s village in Barisal, the people she had left behind and the painful memories of being exiled after the Partition. The stories bred in him a deep urge to undertake a personal journey to the land of his dreams. Without any written script, it was a mere journey to one’s roots with the camera in tow. He narrates: On the eve of independence violent communal riots broke out in the country. Millions died and those who were lucky enough to survive started identifying themselves by their religious beliefs. The atmosphere of hatred reached its peak when in 1950 the biggest massacre in East Pakistan took place in Barisal. Around 6,50,000 people were trying to flee the country and on the way they were looted, killed and abducted. My parents left everything and reached Kolkata as refugees. They were dumped on a platform of the Sealdah station … it was a bitter struggle for existence in a heartless city (Sen 2003).

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

78 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

79

Thus, the story does not follow any logical pattern; instead it grows out of bits and pieces of recollections. The protagonists of this film are the elderly couple (the parents of the filmmaker himself) as they board first a bus and then a launch to rediscover their lost world. They meet people at every point, recall near and dear ones left behind. Particularly striking is the wife’s recollection of a sister who has refused to leave her roots fifty years ago and had been virtually abandoned by her relatives because she married a Muslim. But the emotional bonds survive fifty years later.The woman who returns to her ancestral home at Barisal in 2003 makes anxious enquiries about her and discovers she is dead but has left behind a family that is equally attached to the memories of the past. Swapan Mullick, the noted film and theatre critic, was all praises for this film: That Supriyo Sen, a young man who belongs to the following generation, can capture the emotional state with such conviction, depth and credibility is something of a miracle. It makes Way Back Home one of the best things to have appeared on the Bengali film scene for a long time (2003: 7).

Mullick of course points out that he thought the parallel that Sen drew between the fundamentalism that divided people then along religious lines and the communal carnage in Gujarat was unnecessary and perhaps overdrawn. Another critic, Ranabir Lahiri believes that nostalgia emerges as an ambivalent motif in partition narratives and Sen’s documentary is ‘truly an extended exercise in nostalgia, an attempt to recapture the oneness, both real and constructed’ (Lahiri 2003). The desire to recreate ‘a mythology of origins’, framed within a larger narrative of loss, originates in a subjectivity that is firmly enmeshed in a privileged Hindu middle-class position which determines the choice of narrative strategies.The Bengali name of Sen’s documentary is taken from Jibanananda Das’s only too familiar line ‘Abar ashibo phirey, dhansiritir tirey’ (‘I will come back again on the banks of the Dhansiri River’), not merely for lyrical effect. The words are emotionally wired into the Bengali psyche. They awaken a stubborn wish to relive that social, political, and cultural space which has once been the poet’s own.The promise of a journey back home suggests, at one level, a desire for connectedness to one’s roots and at another, an obscure deathwish. Sen’s documentary reactivates the same collective wish by mixing it up with history, nostalgia, and contemporary reality. Lahiri also describes Way Back Home as a visual act of rescue, an exercise in retrieving the whole landscape. In this it participates in the dominant discourse in Bengal on Partition, which is deeply entrenched in a Hindu middle-class location. It elaborately recreates the place of its origin in sensuous terms—its seasons, rivers, paddy fields, Durga Puja and the countless minor festivals.This rootedness is of course achieved by forcing the larger community of the Muslim masses to the margin. Only occasionally do they come into the picture.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

79 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

80

SOMDATTA MANDAL

Their real presence and historical role are to be felt more through narrative gaps and ruptures. Sen himself also emphasizes the human interest of this documentary and shows how the personal story becomes part and parcel of social history: The partition was not just about the Nehrus and the Jinnahs. It was about people like my parents who had to forget their own identity and remain dissolved in the claustrophobic atmosphere of this city. They needed a passport to go back home and nothing could be more painful than this (2003).

III In this paper I have tried to focus on the significance of the development of the post-Partition Bengali cultural identity as expressed though Bengali films and documentaries made during the past fifty years. In this process I have had to take recourse to offering synopses of most of the films because their diversity cannot be generalized under a single statement. Also, a significant trait of the Bengali films under consideration is that almost none of them have focused the attention of the viewers on the politics of the Hindu–Muslim leadership or on the policies of British imperialism. Yet the manner in which they have depicted the harsh realities as the outcome of such political moves is significant. Since we do not have the direct depiction of violence as in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (1956) or Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998), which contain brutal scenes of communal carnage, sensationalism, and nationalism as depicted in Anil Sharma’s film Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), or the love-hate relationship between the Hindus and the Muslims as shown in the film Pinjar (2003), Bengal Partition films might initially seem a damp squib for the uninitiated viewer. This is because they do not conform to the stereotypical images of violence, bloodshed, carnage, mayhem, rootlessness, and migration that are always associated with any division of a country. But the scar is deeper and is reflected in the state of the mind.

FILMS ON THE PARTITION OF BENGAL Chinnamul (1951): Dir. Nemai Ghosh Refugee (1959): Dir. Shantipriya Mukherjee Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960): Dir. Ritwik Ghatak Komal Gandhar (1961): Dir. Ritwik Ghatak Subarnarekha (1962): Dir. Ritwik Ghatak Bipasha (1962): Dir. Agradoot Nabarag (1971): Dir. Bimal Basu Titas Ekti Nadir Nam (1973): Dir. Ritwik Ghatak

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

80 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

POST-PARTITION BENGALI CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH FILMS

81

Palanka (1976): Dir. Rajen Tarafdar Surya Dighal Bari (1979): Dir. Masiuddin Shaker and Sheikh Niamat Ali Tahader Katha (1992): Dir. Buddhadeb Dasgupta Chitra Nadir Pare (1999): Dir. Tanvir Mokammel Way Back Home: A Documentary (2002): Dir. Supriyo Sen

NOTES 1. Nemai Ghosh’s comments were quoted in www.dhool.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t= 4412 and also in www.fiff.ch/fiffbdd/fiche_film.php?ddfilm=288&lang=fr 2. See note 1.

REFERENCES Basu Roy, Iraban, ‘Deshbhaag o Ritwik Ghatak-er Cinema’ (Partition and the Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak), Nillohit, March 2005: 177–84. Bhattacharya, Sandipan and Sibaditya Dasgupta (eds), Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face (Calcutta: Cine Central, 2003). Chakrabarti, Dipendu, ‘Desh-Bibhag O Bangla Challachitre Neo-Realism’, in Somdatta Mandal and Sukla Hazra (eds), Banga-Bibhag: Samajik, Sanskritik o Rajnaitik Pratiphalan (The Partition of Bengal: Social, Cultural and Political Reflections) (Madhyamgram:Vivekananda College, 2002). Chatterjee, Partha, ‘The Relentless Tragedy of Ritwik’, Himal South Asian, November 2003, http:// www.himalmag.com/2003/november/essay.htm Dasgupta, Buddhadeb, ‘Cinema as Expression’, Indian Journal of American Studies, 25(2), 1995: 20–22. Ghatak, Ritwik, Cinema and I (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust, 1987). ———, Rows and Rows of Fences: Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull, 2002). Hasan, Mushirul, ‘Foreword’ in Bashabi Fraser (ed.), Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (London, New York: Anthem Press, 2006), pp. xiii–xvii. Hood, John W., The Films of Buddhadeb Dasgupta (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005). Lahiri, Ranabir, ‘The Split’, 8th Day: The Sunday Statesman Magazine, 23 November 2003. Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and Abduction of Women During Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 April 1993: WS2–12. Mukherjee, Madhabi, Interview with Madhabi Mukherjee by Subhoranjan Dasgupta and Aparajita Dhar, The Statesman, 14 July, 2002. Mullick, Swapan, ‘Love and Longing in a Lost World’, The Statesman (Kolkata), 21 February 2003. O’Donnell, Erin, ‘“Woman” and “Homeland” in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films: Constructing PostIndependence Bengali Cultural Identity’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 47, 2005, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archieve/jc47.2005/ghatak/text.html Sengupta, Debjani (ed.), Afterword in Mapmaking: Partition Stories from 2 Bengals (New Delhi: Srishti Publishers & Distributors, 2003), pp. 185–97. The Statesman, ‘The Journey Back Home’, Kolkata, 11 February 2003.

04_Roy & Bhatia~chap-4.pmd

81 Black

8/8/2007, 9:24 AM

82

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

5 Writing Partition: Trauma and Testimony in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

When we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world. —Amitav Ghosh (2001)

In his essay, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Derrida asserts that ‘Literature serves as real testimony.... It is a fiction of testimony more than a testimony in which the witness swears to tell the truth’ (2000: 19). It is fiction, as Derrida suggests, which opens the possibility for ‘truthful’ testimony. ‘Truthful’ testimony is one that announces its own inability to tell the truth. Such testimony recognizes, within its own terms, the stability of the ‘I’, emerging as a ‘fiction of testimony’, an allegory that tells the story of its own failure. As much as testimony may assume the autobiographical voice that writes about a singular experience, it is fiction that opens up the creative space in which the ‘I’ is able to write as an ‘I’. It does so, however, within the ‘idyllic law of the story’, that is, within the freedom of using fiction’s creative license to create the illusion of an ‘I’ who is able to fully bear witness to the unimaginable and unnameable. Fiction performs its own inherent failure. Through an examination of Lenny’s autobiographical account in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, this paper considers the tenuous relationship between trauma, witness, and testimony in the riven discourse of historical fiction about the Partition. Central to this discussion is a consideration of the question of the experience of the Partition as that which remains, resides, and endures (Derrida 2000) well beyond the empirical, historical event tied to the temporal pole of 1945 or thereabouts. Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel Train to Pakistan depicts a haunting image of a ghostlike train from Pakistan pulling into the station at Mano Majra, a small frontier village known for its railroads. The train arrives with a ‘full load of corpses’. Over the past fifty years, this disturbing image of the train to India (or Pakistan) has

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

82 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

83

WRITING PARTITION

become one of the most prevailing images of the violence of the Partition. Versions of Singh’s literary image continue to haunt testimonial accounts and other works of fiction that are centred on the Partition. Within these texts, the image of the train functions both as a way of attempting to describe the violence of the Partition in the present tense, as well as a memory aimed at preserving the Partition as a past that cannot be fully reconstituted in the present. Indeed, the compelling presence of this image in literature and testimonial accounts signifies that the Partition is not exclusively a historical event, but also a collective violence that suggests its status as a historical, and not merely personal, trauma. For it is in this use of a literary image in order to depict the violence of the Partition that the historical fact of the Partition begins to exist in tension with the collective memory of violence. Out of this tension arises the imperative to consider the collective and individual impact of the violence of the Partition in relation to its historical significance. Doing so opens the space in which the meaning of the Partition may be rearticulated as separate from an empirical discourse without denying the historical fact of its occurrence. It is within the questioning of the meaning of the Partition as tethered to, but also separate from, an empirical discourse that trauma theory becomes particularly useful in thinking about the import of history upon the individual. Trauma theory questions, in the most general sense, the relationship between consciousness, experience, and memory as it arises out of a bodily threat. This theory offers us a way of investigating the difficult question of how to talk about trauma as it emerges out of the obligation to remember an event that remains trapped within a past never fully experienced in the present. Thinking about the historical event of the Partition and trauma theory together involves considering in particular the effect and meaning of the Partition upon the individual as a violence that puts the self radically into question in terms the conceptual status of time, experience, and memory. Doing so does not deny the historical fact of the occurrence of the Partition, but rather considers how history returns to the individual in complex relationships to time, experience, and memory, and subsequently how such relationships constitute broader conceptions of individual and national identity. Reading trauma theory together with postcolonial and historical discourses about the Partition pushes the historical event of the Partition beyond its empirical dimension and into questions of the relationship between testimony, literature, and history. Ultimately at stake in thinking about trauma theory and the Partition is the possibility of reading literature about the Partition as testimony to the Partition as a historical trauma. Trauma theory is concerned with trauma as that which irreparably fractures a formerly ‘whole’ self as well as with the question of surviving trauma and its particular psychological impact (Caruth 1996: 10–11). In both cases, the relationship between the self and experience is put into question by an overwhelming threat to

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

83 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

84

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

the mind or body, or to both. Freud’s work on traumatic neuroses and temporality in Beyond the Pleasure Principle considers the role of consciousness in relation to experience and memory. He asserts that consciousness, developed as a protective barrier against stimuli, organizes perceptions in relation to a linear conception of time (Freud 1961: 26–39). For Freud, individual trauma, arising out of a violent threat to the body, is understood to be a surprise to the mind, a breach of consciousness in which only a belated understanding is perhaps possible (Caruth 1996: 11, 92).1 As a breach of consciousness, trauma is also a breach of time that occurs as a rupture whose force is enacted through the repetition of nightmares.This structure of belatedness, of what Freud calls ‘deferred action’, prevents consciousness from being able to experience fully the event of the trauma in the present.Trauma therefore becomes a rupture in the mind’s perception of time insofar as the traumatic event moves directly into the space of memory without first being experienced in the present. Memory of that which, properly speaking, cannot be entirely experienced in the present, is refigured through the repetition of traumatic nightmares. In their attempt to return to the original scene of the trauma in order to experience it in the present, traumatic repetitions are always gesturing towards trauma as a kind of impossibility. Trauma in this regard becomes an absent presence that, in fracturing consciousness, remains trapped within a past unable to ever be completely retrieved and possessed in memory. Cathy Caruth’s critical encounter (1996) with Freud radically engages questions of language and history in relation to trauma and the obligation of memory. Through a close analysis of the story of Tancred and the fort/da game in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Caruth asserts that trauma remains as an enigmatic absence trapped within an ‘immemorial past’, unable to be known in the present.To be traumatized is however, as Caruth argues, not simply to be overcome by a specific event, but also to be incessantly trapped within the very repetition of the traumatic nightmares and flashbacks that point toward trauma’s inherently enigmatic absence. To be traumatized, as Caruth continues to assert, is to also carry an impossible history that, by its very nature, can never be fully possessed even in memory.Trauma theory also opens up, as Caruth asserts, the question of what it means to have survived a traumatic event. What traumatic repetitions enact, then, is both the inability to experience and therefore bear witness to the traumatic event in the present, as well as the continuous attempt to understand the meaning of one’s survival. To understand individual trauma in terms of the relationship between the self, experience, and survival is, according to Freud in Moses and Monotheism, to be already engaged with the question of history and its return to the individual.2 It is important to recognize that notions of historical trauma or generational trauma are not to be understood as necessarily a kind of parallel or collective counterpart to individual trauma. Rather, the theory of individual trauma presupposes the historical

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

84 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

85

WRITING PARTITION

and generational import of trauma. Put otherwise, the impossibility of trauma cannot be separated from the obligation of memory as it emerges out of the relationship between collective history and its return to the individual. The question of what it means to survive a traumatic event becomes, with particular regard to the Partition, the question of what it means to carry forth a history in the constitution of identity as it arises out of fractured relationships to time, memory, and testimony. It is within this questioning that the imperative to remember the Partition precisely as that which cannot be fully possessed in memory—as a traumatic event that reaches beyond the historical fact of its occurrence—becomes most poignant. Indeed, this paradox of remembering that which cannot, properly speaking, be remembered, reaches beyond the question of what it means to survive a traumatic event; it asks how we talk about and testify to that which cannot be adequately accounted for within language. To think together the Partition and trauma theory is also necessarily to engage the status of the Partition as a historical trauma within the problem of language. Insofar as the traumatic event remains within a past unable to be accessed as an experienced present through memory, language fails to account for the event of the trauma in the present tense. By its very nature, trauma takes away the possibility of witness because one cannot witness what one cannot experience in the present. As such, the question of how to talk about trauma becomes a question of how to refer to trauma when language cannot account for the traumatic event in the present. It is within the tension between the problem of language and the obligation of memory that fiction opens up the possibility of witness. Although fiction affords its writer and reader a certain creative freedom in which trauma may be quickly assumed (for example, through the referential function of metaphor), the particular purchase of fiction is in its failure to account for and refer to trauma, given its creative freedom. In its inherent failure, fiction enacts the impossibility of trauma and in so doing, makes witness possible. For what is witnessed is not the trauma in the present, but instead the impossibility of trauma as an assembled presence. It is only within this impossibility and within the recognition of the inherent failure of language that fiction is able to emerge as testimony. Novels such as Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1991 Cracking India break open the literary space in which fiction has the potential to become testimony. Both novels place the event of the Partition as the centre around which the narrative revolves.The historical reality of the Partition therefore haunts the texts as a referent that necessarily questions the fictional status of the novels. Sidhwa’s novel, insofar as it is narrated in the first person, raises questions about the status of fiction as it arises out of the difficult problem of writing about the violence of the Partition from the first-person voice. As the title itself suggests, Cracking India is about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Set in the city of Lahore, the novel is narrated by a

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

85 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

86

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

young girl named Lenny who is aged five at the beginning and ten at the novel’s close. With her polio-stricken right leg, Lenny moves about her city and between her family’s houses, observing the actions of those around her with solicitous eyes and a seemingly youthful narrative. As rising political tensions give way to mob riots, fires, and violent murders, Lenny’s narrative about her family shifts its focus to her observations of Lahore as it is consumed by violence. Lenny and her family, however, are Parsi and are considered to be safe from the violence largely initiated by and directed toward Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.The co-incidence of Lenny’s eighth birthday and the creation of the new nation of Pakistan in one narrative moment inscribes the moment in which Lenny’s narrative begins to consider what it means to have survived the Partition. She does so in terms of her newly-possessed Pakistani identity, for it is her newly-assigned Pakistani identity that affirms her status as a survivor of the Partition. What at first seems to be about a young girl’s autobiographical experience during the time of the Partition becomes, as the novel progresses, a narrative about Lenny’s attempt to ascribe meaning to the Partition both as a historical event and as a trauma. It is within this narrative shift that Lenny’s role as narrator is most poignantly complicated by her inability to fully experience and witness the Partition as a trauma. Whereas Lenny’s narrative is often characterized by innocent eyes that lack worldly experience, her youthful first-person narrative is interrupted by what seems to be an older voice attempting to remember the time of the Partition. Interestingly, these moments of narrative interruption occur during the instances in which Lenny attempts to tell about the violence tearing through her city’s streets and houses. At stake in these narrative interruptions is the notion that only within the failure of fiction is testimony to the trauma of the Partition most poignantly voiced. Cracking India thus commences with Lenny’s astute assertion that ‘My world is compressed’ (Sidhwa 1991: 11). Followed by a guided tour of a small section of an affluent neighbourhood in the city of Lahore, Lenny’s claim to a compressed world initially seems to be geographically motivated. As Lenny traverses through Warris Road, Queens Road, and Jail Road, and locates the houses of her Electric-aunt and Godmother, it becomes clear that this guided tour is actually the search for refuge ‘from the perplexing unrealities of my home on Warris Road’ (ibid.). Lenny’s narrative quickly shifts its focus to her polio-stricken right leg and provides no direct reference for the ‘perplexing unrealities’. Unable to walk properly, Lenny is forced to undergo multiple surgeries in which her foot is broken and recast into a functional position. Occurring in a series of repetitions, Lenny’s right leg and foot is cast into the landscape of her body as ‘pathetically thin, wrinkled … gratifyingly abnormal— and far from banal’ (ibid.: 24). Lenny fears that the surgeries will completely reshape her foot and therefore transform her otherwise unique identity. Scholarship about Cracking India argues that Lenny’s broken body allegorically embodies the breaking

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

86 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

87

WRITING PARTITION

of Pakistan from India and tells the story of a broken nation as well as the story of a new nation born out of a violent divide. What is important about Lenny’s body, however, is not simply that it becomes a figure for the Partition, but that it is the very thing which opens her world to the ‘perplexing unrealities’ of her home and her city—an opening that will eventually locate her compressed world within the trauma of the Partition. Lenny begins her narrative about the surgeries by locating the hospital ‘[s]omewhere in the uncharted wastes of space beyond’ the borders of her compressed world (Sidhwa 1991: 13). At first seeming to be an oasis of escape, the Mayo Hospital quickly comes into focus as the space inside which Lenny’s lack of autonomy over what is about to happen to her body becomes a palpable fear. Although it is unclear how many surgeries Lenny has endured, her narrative reveals her distinct familiarity with the hospital. Feelings of suffocation fill Lenny as she is strapped to the wooden operation table: I lie on a wooden table. I know it is the same hospital. I have been lured unsuspecting to the table but I get a whiff of something frightening. I hate the smell with all my heart, and my heart pounding I try to get off the table. Hands hold me. […] My hands are pinned down. I can’t move my legs. I realize they are strapped. Hands hold my head. “No! No! Help me. Mummy! Mummy, help me!” I shout, panicked. She too is aligned with them. ‘I’m suffocating,’ I scream. ‘I can’t breathe.’ There is an unbearable weight on my chest. I moan and cry (ibid.: 15).

Although Lenny’s feeling of suffocation literally begins with the anaesthesia, her suffocating fear comes out of her sudden realization that her screams are silent in the ears of those who surround her. It is this fear of forced isolation and of helplessness that fractures Lenny’s conception of time: I am held captive by the brutal smell. It has vaporized into a milky cloud. I float round and round and up and down and fall horrendous distances without landing anywhere, fighting for my life’s breath. I am abandoned in that suffocating cloud. I moan and my ghoulish voice turns me into something despicable and eerie and deserving of the terrible punishment. But where am I? How long will the horror last? Days and years with no end in sight.... It must have ended (ibid.: 15–16).

As the ‘brutal smell’ holds Lenny ‘captive’, she becomes a disembodied prisoner of the ‘milky cloud’ of the vaporized smell. Suffocated and trapped by her fall, Lenny’s voice becomes a ‘ghoulish’ foreign presence that ‘turns me into something despicable and eerie’. Lenny’s initial screams against the ‘frightening muzzle’ are unable to rescue her from the imminent surgery and usher her into a fight for her ‘life’s breath’. Having lost the fight, Lenny’s voice becomes a dead voice whose haunting presence is severed from her body.This ‘ghoulish voice’ rearticulates Lenny

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

87 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

88

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

into an indefinable ‘something’ that is unrecognizable to herself. Indeed, this ‘something’ that Lenny has become cannot be named and instead remains as a disembodied presence. Lenny therefore emerges as a disembodied presence whose seemingly aimless floatation is interrupted by a fall through ‘horrendous distances’. It is important to note that the actual surgery is, for Lenny, a missed experience, for she can only say, ‘It must have ended’ because ‘I switch awake to maddening pain, sitting up in my mother’s bed crying’ (Sidhwa 1991: 16). Lenny’s narrative never accounts for the surgery itself because she has, evidently, been anaesthetized, cut off from sensation and perception. With only a plaster cast signifying the end of surgery, the event of Lenny’s surgery remains trapped within a past that was never experienced in the present.The event of Lenny’s surgery becomes a temporal fracture that rearticulates her conception of time in terms of the ‘horrendous distances’ of her fall that lack any landing. These distances, that lack an end, reconstitute Lenny’s sense of finite time, of days and years, as suddenly endless. Following the claim of ‘Days and years with no end in sight’, the ellipses grammatically enact Lenny’s claim to a suddenly endless time. For it is in the ellipses that Lenny’s sense of days and years become endless despite their implicitly finite reference. The ellipses not only linguistically mark time as endless, they also mark the very absence of landing in Lenny’s unconscious fall through ‘horrendous distances’. Like the days and years, the endless distance of Lenny’s fall remains suspended within a fractured time, and forces the event of Lenny’s absent surgery into her nightmares. Allowed to return to her Electric-aunt’s house once she is healed, Lenny is exposed to her older cousin’s recent hernia scar. In a strange scene of sexual curiosity that suggests sexual abuse, Lenny’s cousin shows her his hernia scar: ‘Let me show you my scar,’ he offers, unbuttoning his fly and exposing me to the glamorous spectacle of a stitched scar and a handful of genitals. He too has clever fingers. ‘You can touch it,’ he offers. His expression is disarming, gallant. I touch the fine scar and gingerly hold the genitals he transfers to my palm. We both study them. ‘I am also having my tonsils removed,’ he says. I hand back his genitals and look at his neck. I visualize a red, scalloped scar running from ear to ear. It is a premonition (ibid.: 29–30).

After Cousin mentions the anticipated removal of his tonsils, Lenny’s imagining of scars as a kind of violence arises with an arresting force as she hands back her cousin’s genitals. In keeping with the time of the novel, Lenny does not yet know that the scar she envisions running across her cousin’s neck will later materialize into the discovery of the Masseur’s—one of her Ayah’s lovers—mutilated body as

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

88 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

89

WRITING PARTITION

it falls out of a ‘swollen gunnysack’ (ibid.: 185–86). Lenny’s claim to know that her visualization of the scar is a ‘premonition’ suggests its status of being spoken from a place of a memory. The ‘I’ who claims the premonition is not the five-year old Lenny, but rather an older Lenny who returns to this scene in memory and speaks about the envisioned scar as a presence of the violence of the Partition. Lenny’s vision of violence, however, arises out of a particular sexual encounter with her cousin. Approximately five years older than Lenny, Lenny’s cousin manipulates her curiosity for the hernia scar in order to expose and ‘study’ his genitals. Although the language of the scene is not overtly sexual, the scene becomes highly sexually charged in the contrast between what seems to be Lenny’s youthful, unknowing curiosity about her cousin’s body and his manipulation of the hernia scar as a means of underscoring Lenny’s curiosity with his sexual desire. Lenny’s ‘premonition’ is therefore not only one of the violence of the Partition but also of what will later be revealed as her explicit sexual abuse. At stake, then, in this first sexual scene between Lenny and her cousin is not only the presence of a different first-person voice, but also an intersection between sexuality and violence. This questions the impact of the Partition as a trauma not only in terms of Lenny’s role as witness, but also in terms of Lenny’s individual traumas. During the same night of her first sexual encounter with her cousin, Lenny has a series of two dreams that she claims connects her ‘to the pain of others’: That night I have the first nightmare that connects me to the pain of others. Far away I hear a siren. Tee-too! Tee-too! it goes, alarming my heart. The nocturnal throb and shrieking grow louder, closing in, coming now from the compound of the Salvation Army next door. Its tin-sheet gates open a crack to let out a long khaki caterpillar. Centipedal legs marching, marching, it curves, and as it approaches Electric-aunt’s gate it metamorphoses into a single German soldier on a motorcycle. Roaring up the drive the engine stops, as I know it must, outside Electric-aunt’s doorstep. The siren’s tee-too tee-too is now deafening. My heart pounds at the brutality of the sound. The soldier, his cap and uniform immaculate, dismounts. Carefully removing black gloves from his white hands, he comes to get me. Why does my stomach sink all the way to hell even now? I had my own stock of Indian bogeymen. Choorails, witches with turned-about feet who ate the hearts and livers of straying children. Bears lurking, ready to pounce if I did not finish my pudding. The zoo lion. No one taught me to fear an immaculate Nazi soldier. Yet here he was, in nightmare after nightmare, coming to get me on his motorcycle (Sidhwa 1991: 31).

The compelling presence of the immaculate Nazi soldier as he arises out of the image of the ‘long, khaki caterpillar’ does not necessarily represent a parallel between the experience of the Holocaust and of the Partition. The presence of the

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

89 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

90

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

Nazi soldier offers a kind of historical referent for what seems to be Lenny’s inexplicable fear. Embedded within a historical and traumatic framework, the Nazi soldier necessarily functions as a referent for the Holocaust. What the Nazi soldier embodies, in this narrative moment, is the anticipated and imminent death that his arrival insinuates. The significance of Lenny’s nightmare emerges, however, in the questioning of the fear that arises in the presence of the Nazi soldier. Lenny’s fear is, despite its intense presence, without any referent. That Lenny cannot answer why her stomach sinks in terms of her own particular cultural experience with ‘Indian bogeymen’, ultimately speaks to the incommensurable relationship between the fear she experiences and the experience of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. It is precisely Lenny’s recognition that nothing within the realm of her particular cultural experience has taught her to fear the Nazi soldier that crystallizes her fear as a singular experience. Insofar as Lenny never empirically experienced the Holocaust, her fear cannot necessarily be said to arise out of a place of an experienced past. Catalysed by the sight of the Nazi soldier, her fear arises out of an unknown experience, out of a historical and traumatic memory that she cannot possess as her own. As much as the Nazi soldier is a referent for the Holocaust, it is, for Lenny, a fractured referent that ultimately does not connect her to the particular history of the Holocaust. It does, however, connect her to the trauma of the Holocaust, to the unlocatable fear that bears a historical referent. What is compelling about the presence of the Nazi soldier and Lenny’s fear is its suggestion of history returning to the individual as an unknowable, unlocatable trauma ingrained in a collective memory that cannot be entirely possessed by an individual. In its complication of the relationship between the Holocaust and Lenny—a young girl who attempts to tell about the Partition—this nightmare implicitly suggests the status of the Partition as a historical trauma. For what the nightmare anticipates is that Lenny’s fear will soon bear its own historical referent as it emerges out of the particular event of the Partition.This anticipation is threaded, as the presence of the Nazi soldier implicates, into the Holocaust, a historical event that already carries with it the status of being a historical trauma.3 The anticipation of the ungraspable magnitude of the Partition is, however, complicated by the narrative fracture between the presence of two different firstperson voices. Lenny’s narrative about her nightmare with the Nazi soldier begins with her claim that it is the ‘first nightmare’. The knowledge of this nightmare as the ‘first nightmare’ logically anticipates more nightmares, and therefore can only be known as such retrospectively. Lenny’s claim that the nightmare connects her to the pain of others suggests a universal meaning and significance that has been ascribed to the nightmare after the fact of its first occurrence. As such, the ‘I’ who announces that ‘That night I have the first nightmare that connects me to the pain of others’, is not the five-year-old Lenny who dreams of the Nazi soldier before the Partition

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

90 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

91

WRITING PARTITION

‘happens’.This ‘I’, however, belongs to an older Lenny, the Lenny who survives the Partition and speaks about her nightmare in the present from a place of memory. In the narrative shift to the description of the nightmare, the ‘I’ who narrates the details of the Nazi soldier approaching is the voice of the younger Lenny, the Lenny whose first nightmare follows a disturbing sexual encounter with her cousin. It is this younger Lenny who speaks about the nightmare in the present from the present. Distinguished from each other by time, the two first-person voices are not two different people, but are rather two first-person voices spoken by the same Lenny.The younger Lenny is therefore the Lenny within the time of the novel, that is, within the time of the events as they unfold according to the historical chronology of the Partition. The older Lenny is the Lenny who survives the Partition and returns to the events of the younger Lenny’s narrative from a place of memory. Although the two different first-person voices are distinguished from each other by time, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, they exist in tension with each other, at once separated and joined by the inability to tell about the imminent death inherent within nightmare in the present as an experienced presence. In the moment that the Nazi soldier is about to capture Lenny, the narrative shifts once again, moving out of the action of the dream and into a questioning marked by the time of the ‘even now’. Lenny’s anticipated capture and imminent death by the Nazi soldier remains empirically absent, indicated as a presence only within the unknowable fear. Always gesturing towards the memory of an imminent death that never, properly speaking, happens, Lenny’s fear suspends the imminent death of the nightmare as a kind of absent presence that haunts both her consciousness and her unconscious. For Lenny’s encounter with the Nazi soldier is but a nightmare, and therefore does not exist, within consciousness, as an experienced present. Lenny’s nightmare is thus its own absence, known only through the repetition that reaches beyond the temporal difference between the two first-person voices.The ‘even now’ of Lenny’s questioning implies a chronological remove from the first occurrence of the nightmare, itself suggesting the nightmare’s relentless repetition. The ‘I’ who questions her fear in relation to ‘Indian bogeymen’ is the older Lenny, once again speaking from a place of memory.Yet, it is also the younger Lenny, speaking from the time of the novel about the nightmare and about a fear that she can never fully know in the present. For it is the very fact of the empirical absence of the imminent death signalled in the nightmare, and of the status of the nightmare as that which was never experienced within consciousness, that makes it impossible to account for, in the first-person voice, the nightmare as an experienced present. As such, the two ‘I’s who speak about the nightmare and from the action of the nightmare can never clearly be separated by temporality; they are both bound to the nightmare and the imminent death as a memory that cannot be known. The younger Lenny and the older Lenny are at once distinguished from each other by the time inherent

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

91 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

92

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

within the repetition of the nightmare, and joined and conflated by the very status of the nightmare, and thus of the imminent death, as an absent experience. Trapped within the repetition of the first nightmare, Lenny’s narrative moves into a description of her second nightmare that is assumed to connect her ‘to the pain of others’. Announcing the nightmare as a memory from the past of her childhood, the ‘I’ who begins the narrative is presumed to be the older Lenny: I recall another childhood nightmare from the past. Children lie in a warehouse. Mother and Ayah move about me solicitously. The atmosphere is businesslike and relaxed. Godmother sits by my bed smiling indulgently as men in uniforms quietly slice off a child’s arm here, a leg there. She strokes my head as they dismember me. I feel no pain. Only an abysmal sense of loss—and a chilling horror that no one is concerned by what’s happening (Sidhwa 1991: 31).

As the narrative shifts into the action of the nightmare, so too does the narrative voice shift into the present tense. In describing the action of the nightmare in the present tense, the narrative shift seems to move from the voice of the older Lenny to that of the younger Lenny. Insofar as the voice of the younger Lenny is the voice that narrates the events of the novel as they unfold within the time of the novel, the younger Lenny is therefore the voice of Lenny’s childhood. As such, the ‘I’ who describes the nightmare in the present tense is, at first glance, the voice of the younger Lenny, seeming to affirm the temporal claim of the nightmare as part of the past of her childhood. Like the nightmare with the Nazi soldier, however, the temporal claim of this nightmare is complicated by its very status as a nightmare, by the fact of it never having been experienced, within consciousness, in the present. Lenny’s nightmare can thus only be accessed through memory and remains as a past for both the younger Lenny and the older Lenny. The ‘I’ who talks about the action within the warehouse is not exclusively the voice of the younger Lenny, but rather both first-person voices existing in tension with each other as the nightmare is talked about in the present tense. That the nightmare is talked about in this way despite not having been known as an experienced presence, suggests that the nightmare remains as a kind of absent presence known as such through Lenny’s claim of its connection ‘to the pain of others’. Although Lenny does not directly claim that the second nightmare connects her ‘to the pain of others’, its meaning as such is inferred from the fact that the narrative about the nightmare literally follows, without transition, Lenny’s first nightmare about the Nazi soldier. Structurally, therefore, the nightmare about the warehouse acts as the second nightmare which connects Lenny ‘to the pain of others’, despite the possibility of its having occurred during a different time. Ironic in the status of the second nightmare as that which also connects Lenny to others’ pain is

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

92 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

93

WRITING PARTITION

the disturbing and explicit absence of pain in the dream: ‘I feel no pain’, Lenny announces as she is dismembered by men in uniforms that recall the image of the Nazi soldier in his immaculate uniform. In both dreams, ‘pain’ is absent, but here in the second nightmare pain is made present in the claim to its absence. Whereas the atmosphere of the first nightmare is marked by a growing and uncontrollable fear, the atmosphere of the second nightmare is ‘businesslike and relaxed’, recalling the calm of the nurses and doctor as they surrounded Lenny during one of her surgeries. Lenny’s absence of pain during her own dismembering is not so much the literal absence of pain, but rather the suggestion of her disembodiment from the action of her dismemberment. Yet, the scene of Lenny’s dismemberment, in evoking the image of her futile screams against the surgery, bears a referent to her corrective surgeries. Unlike the first nightmare, this second nightmare becomes a disturbing exaggeration of her experiences in the Mayo Hospital. As Lenny is dismembered, she becomes disembodied, unable to experience her dismembering. What prevails, in the moment of Lenny’s dismemberment, is the disembodied absence of pain that gestures towards Lenny’s inability to know the dismembering and thus the nightmare as a conscious experience. This is not to suggest that Lenny must experience and acknowledge physical pain in order for her to be connected ‘to the pain of others’. Rather, what is collective and therefore connective about the pain of Lenny’s opening claim is the feeling of the ‘abysmal sense of loss—and a chilling horror that no one is concerned by what’s happening’. Together with Godmother’s indulgent smile that masks the knowledge of what is happening inside the warehouse, the ‘businesslike and relaxed’ atmosphere of the second nightmare anticipates the ‘chilling horror’. As in her first nightmare, Lenny fears an imminent death that is neither prevented nor completely realized. Although the first nightmare does not have the explicit action of violence of the second nightmare, it is contained by Lenny’s unknowable fear that disrupts her relationship to the historical referent of the Nazi soldier. Lenny’s second nightmare, however, bears a referent to her surgical experiences, but remains similarly trapped by her inability to experience the dismembering that is her imminent death. Common to both nightmares is the missed experience of the primary event that, for Lenny, is posed as the threat of imminent death. Out of these missed experiences arises the temporal complication of speaking about the imminent death in present tense in the first-person voice. Both nightmares are therefore marked by a traumatic event, and as such become traumatic nightmares caught within a continuous repetition that affirms, in the moment of Lenny’s failure to know ‘Why my stomach sinks all the way to hell even now’, their status as traumatic nightmares. The nightmares can only be indicated as a presence in the very fear that arises out of a memory that Lenny cannot entirely own. What is therefore at stake in these two narratives is their status as traumatic nightmares that bear both individual and

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

93 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

94

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

historical referents. For it is their status as such that questions not only the relationship between memory and experience, but also the problem of actually talking about the trauma. The ‘I’ who narrates the nightmares can be read as either the younger Lenny or the older Lenny, or the simultaneous presence of both firstperson voices. This demonstrates the very problem of accounting for the traumatic event in the present as a trauma.The most poignant purchase of Lenny’s nightmares, however, is that they intertwine history and the individual in a manner that allows us to investigate the Partition as a historical trauma. Indeed, the image of Lenny’s dismembering recalls her surgeries, but it also anticipates the violent separation of Pakistan from India as a dismembering violence.That it is Lenny who is dismembered in the nightmare, the same Lenny for whom the Nazi soldier crystallizes an unknowable fear, suggests that the Partition will become its own historical trauma haunted by the ‘abysmal sense of loss—and a chilling horror that no one’s concerned by what’s happening’. Especially compelling, then, about the opening pages of Sidhwa’s Cracking India is that, although there is no explicit mention of the Partition or of the rising political tension, Lenny’s dreams anticipate the Partition as a historical trauma already bound to memory. It is not until Lenny accompanies her family to a town hall meeting, commencing shortly after the nationwide radio announcement of the end of the Second World War, that she first hears of the threat of Partition: ‘No one knows which way the wind will blow.... There may be not one but two—or even three— new nations!’ (Sidhwa 1991: 46). From the point of view of time and narrative, this anticipation implicates the first-person voice of the narrative as always already the older Lenny attempting to return—through the voice of the younger Lenny—to the past of the Partition in an effort to rearticulate it as an integrated experience. Herein lies the particular place of fiction in the relationship between trauma and the individual. Fiction affords its writer and reader a certain creative freedom that allows us to imagine the past as a presence. Such an imagining makes possible the first-person voice from which the past is addressed as an experience presence in the present. Although the very nature of trauma troubles even the creative freedom of fiction, it is this imagining of the past in the present that opens the space in which the question of talking about trauma and the obligation of memory becomes a question of testimony. Inherent within testimony is the first-person voice that is assumed to announce a certain, undeniable truth about a singular and irreplaceable experience.Testimony is, thus, privileged precisely because it is presumed to assert its own truth value. Yet testimony to traumatic events is always already complicated by the fact of it arising out of a place of memory. Testimony to traumatic events is therefore complicated, in the manner of a traumatic event, by the inability to assert the singularity of an experience in the precise moment of its occurrence.The work of the opening pages of Cracking India is to open the fictional space in which the

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

94 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

95

WRITING PARTITION

relationship between memory and experience is examined in terms of Lenny’s individual traumatic nightmares. Yet it is the very questioning of Lenny’s individual trauma that becomes the questioning of the Partition as a historical trauma, and more broadly, a questioning of the impact of history and its return to the individual. With this as its opening kernel, the novel moves into its most moving and disturbing depictions of violence whose images haunt its readers beyond the narrative. In so doing, the novel most poignantly interconnects Lenny’s individual trauma with the Partition as a historical trauma. Testimony to the Partition as a historical trauma becomes possible in this interconnectedness between Lenny and the Partition, the very space that asks about the meaning of history and the impact of its return to the individual. As the novel explicitly moves into depictions of the violence of the Partition, Lenny’s ‘perplexing unrealities’ extend beyond her home and into the streets where Sikh and Muslim mobs are fighting. What was only talk about the concern over dividing the country in the town hall meeting becomes the ‘chant of slogans’ as mobs fight over territory and religious identity. Falling asleep to the ‘“tee-too, teetoo” of the dread siren’ that evokes the ‘brutal’ siren of her nightmare with Nazi soldier, Lenny once again discovers herself inside the warehouse of her nightmare: I am back in the factory filled with children lying on their backs on beds. Godmother sits by me, looking composed, as competent soldiers move about hammering nails into our hands and feet. The room fills with the hopeless moans of crucified children—and with their collective sighs as they breathe in and out, with an eerie horrifying insistence (Sidhwa 1991: 142).

With ‘hopeless moans’ that recall Lenny’s moans of resistance to her surgery, the ‘crucified children’ call out with ‘an eerie horrifying insistence’ that is reminiscent of Lenny’s disembodied ‘something’ that becomes ‘eerie’ during her surgery. Now in a factory, the dismembered children of Lenny’s nightmare in the warehouse become the ‘crucified children’.This second version of Lenny’s warehouse nightmare collapses Lenny’s surgery with the first version of the nightmare and thus becomes a repetition of the fear and violence implicit within the first version. The most disturbing impact of this version of the warehouse nightmare begins to emerge in moment that Lenny awakens to the ‘distant, pulsating sound’ of mob violence (ibid.: 142). Suddenly a posse of sweating English tummies, wearing only khaki shorts, socks, and boots, runs up in the lane directly below us. And on their heels a mob of Sikhs […] A naked child, twitching on a spear struck between her shoulders, is waved like a flag: her screamless mouth agape, she is staring straight up at me. A crimson fury blinds me. I want to dive into the bestial creature clawing entrails,

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

95 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

96

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

plucking eyes, tearing limbs, gouging hearts, smashing brains: but the creature has too many stony hearts, too many sightless eyes, deaf eyes, mindless brains and tons of entwined entrails ... (Sidhwa 1991: 144).

In the street below her home, Lenny’s imagining of ‘crucified children’ materializes in the violent reality of the naked child. In being ‘waved like a flag’, the image of the speared child radically challenges an otherwise assumed religious understanding of a crucified body. Speared ‘between her shoulders’, the child’s body is at once violently joined and divided by the spear itself. The spearing of the child violently enacts the Partition between Pakistan and India. As she is ‘waved like a flag’, the child also becomes the embodiment of a national symbol, and of two nations joined together by a violent divide. In the chaotic confrontation between two mobs, it is unclear which mob carries the bodied flag. Seeming to belong to both mobs, the naked child also embodies the image of the birth of the new nation Pakistan as it is born out of this violent divide. Blinded with a ‘crimson fury’, Lenny is unable to see the ‘naked child’ as a traumatic violence.What Lenny sees instead is ‘her screamless mouth agape’ and the perception that the child is staring directly at her. Seeming to scream out with the ‘eerie horrifying insistence’ from her nightmare, the child’s silence most loudly calls out to Lenny. Lenny desperately wants, in turn, to enact violence upon the ‘bestial creature’ that may be the mob or perhaps even the child itself, and somehow take control over the violence. Defeated by the creature’s ‘sightless eyes’, Lenny fails, in this moment, to make her violent fantasy a reality. It is not until Lenny is at home that she turns her violent fantasy into a reality: In a rush I collect the dolls long abandoned in bottom drawers and toy chest and climb stools to retrieve them from the dusty tops of old cupboards.... China, cloth and celluloid dolls variously stuffed, sized and coloured. Black golliwogs, British baby dolls with pink complexions, Indian adult dolls covered in white cloth, their faces painted on.... I examine the sari- and dhoti-clad Indian dolls. They are unreal, their exaggerated faces too obviously painted, their bodies too fragile. I select a large lifelike doll with a china face and blinking blue eyes and coarse black curls. It has a sturdy, well-stuffed cloth body and a substantial feel. I hold it upside down and pull its pink legs apart. The knees and thighs bend unnaturally, but the stitching at the centre stays intact.... Adi and I pull the doll’s legs, stretching it in a fierce tug-of-war, until making a wrenching sound it suddenly splits.We stagger off balance.The cloth skin is ripped right up to its armpits spilling chunks of grayish and coiled brown coir and the innards that make its eyes blink and make it squawk ‘Ma-ma.’ I examine the doll’s

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

96 Black

8/8/2007, 12:17 PM

97

WRITING PARTITION

spilled insides and, holding them in my hands, collapse on the bed sobbing (Sidhwa 1991: 147–48).

In her fury to collect all her dolls, Lenny fixes her attention upon the adult Indian dolls. Lenny is dissatisfied by their exaggerated and fragile image and chooses instead a doll with an ambiguous national identity and sturdy, lifelike body.With the help of her younger brother Adi, Lenny succeeds in ripping apart the legs and in splitting the doll’s body. With its legs ripped apart and its body split in half, spilling its ‘insides’, the mutilated doll becomes an image of the dismembered children from Lenny’s warehouse nightmare, the naked child speared in the middle of her shoulders, and the image of the ‘bestial creature’ after having been gouged at by Lenny’s violent fantasy. Lenny’s ‘crimson fury’ turns the doll into a collective image that represents the violence of her nightmares, the violence of the mob riots, and her violent fantasies. What Lenny acts out is not simply her violent fantasy of gouging the ‘bestial creature’, but more complexly, her attempt to experience the trauma of the violence in the present. In this respect, this scene becomes a collective repetition of Lenny’s multiple traumas. For what the doll ultimately represents is Lenny herself and the traumatic impact of the collapse between Lenny’s individual trauma from the surgery and the trauma of the Partition. As Lenny is also dismembered and crucified in her nightmares, so too does she belong to the image of the naked child as she is metamorphosed from the ‘crucified children’. As a repetition of Lenny’s multiple traumas, Lenny’s dismembering and splitting of her doll becomes her attempt to experience and grasp the violence of her surgery and of the Partition. It becomes Lenny’s attempt to understand and assign meaning to the violence of the Partition. It is here, within Lenny’s attempt to experience the violence as a presence, that the doll becomes as much as a representation of Lenny as it is of the naked child and the crucified children from her dreams. In order for Lenny to grasp the violence as a trauma, she must become, at once, the aggressor and the victim. Ultimately, however, Lenny’s attempt to recreate the violence as a trauma fails, producing only ‘grayish chunks of cotton’ rather than clawed entrails and torn limbs. Trapped within the failure of this traumatic repetition, Lenny is bound to memories of nightmares of dismembered children, a ‘naked child’ with a ‘screamless mouth agape’, and a ‘bestial creature’ with ‘too many sightless eyes’. Lenny’s failure, however, emerges as the one of the novel’s most profound moments of testimony to the Partition as a historical trauma. In its furydriven collapse into Lenny’s individual traumas and the trauma of the violence of the Partition, this scene opens the fictional space in which the question of history and its return to the individual is answered in Lenny’s attempt to partition herself as well as in the image of the doll that comes to represent the nation.Testimony arises in the moment that Lenny fails to comprehend her multiple traumas in the present.

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

97 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

98

JENNIFER YUSIN AND DEEPIKA BAHRI

It is in this failure that testimony asserts its inherent impossibility to account for the trauma in the present, and therefore becomes testimony to the traumatic history of the Partition.

NOTES 1. Here we have borrowed Caruth’s term from the first chapter of Unclaimed Experience, ‘Unclaimed Experience:Trauma and the Possibility of History’ where she studies Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1967) in a discussion of the return of trauma as it arises out of Freud’s notion of latency and deferred action. Freud asserts, in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the effects of the experience of trauma are apparent only after the traumatic event. ‘The experience of trauma’, Caruth asserts, ‘the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself’ (1996: 17). 2. Freud claims that the history of the Jews is a traumatic history arising out of the murder of Moses during his return to Canaan from Egypt. After the murder, the Jews took on a second leader, also named Moses. The second Moses eventually became the figure for the first Moses who was murdered. Freud argues that Jewish monotheism arises out of the belated trauma of the murder of the first Moses and subsequent assimilation of the second Moses. Freud continues to claim that the passing on of monotheism through the generations becomes a history of what it means to have been chosen by God as those who will pass on monotheism. 3. For scholarship about the Holocaust as a historical trauma, see Dominck LaCapra, Lawrence L. Langer, and Shoshana Felman.

REFERENCES Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Derrida, Jacques, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961). ———, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Sidhwa, Bapsi, Cracking India (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991).

05_Roy & Bhatia~chap-5.pmd

98 Black

8/8/2007, 9:14 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

99

6 Partition and Post-Partition Acts of Fiction: Narrating Painful Histories

SUKESHI KAMRA

In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin offers the following often cited comment on history and its writing: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (1955: 256). The statement draws its power from Benjamin’s rethinking of history, and the work of history, in the context of a fascist Germany and its texts. At the same time, it is not inapplicable to other histories that force a radical questioning of the very notion that we occupy and further a culture of civility. The partition of India in 1947 has to be one such historical event and experience.1 The very first attempt to engage this nightmarish moment, outside of journalism of course, was made by literary culture. In the last few decades, much of this literature has been brought to our attention and has been the subject of critical debate. In this piece I hope to contribute to discussions on the intersection between history and literature that Partition texts inhabit by focusing on three writers of Urdu literature, writers who have wrestled with the cultural blow that Partition dealt.2 Problems of cultural dispossession and traces of its history in the present of which they write inform their re-describing of post-1947 history as an emergent history. Partition’s erasure in Indian historiography has in no small way contributed to the sense many survivors have of a history that does not include or represent them.3 Published in October 1948, Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Siyah Hashye offers an early sense of the violation that the genocide of 1947 posed for him.Whatever else it is or was, Partition here is measured in painful detail after painful detail that describe a totally shaken voice, shaken in its faith in the vision of progressive history that had been, till the 1940s, practically synonymous with the Indian struggle to end colonial rule. It appears additionally informed by a crisis of belief in the practice of literature itself. The impossibility of the realpolitik, the shock and disbelief in the face of its happening, inform the entirely descriptive and deliberately intransitive writing.

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

99 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

100

SUKESHI KAMRA

Consider the following representative piece: ‘Rioters brought the running train to a halt. People belonging to the other community were pulled out and slaughtered with swords and bullets’ (Hasan 1995: 97). The will to meaning, that irreducible interest of narrative itself, is refused in this piece as much as it is invited by the very fact of the skeletal plot: surely ‘rioters’ inadequately contains the brutality described in the second sentence and this non-communally inflected term is meant to stand in a disjunctive relationship with a violence that is genocidal (‘other community’) as surely as the sense of a collective and active subject of the first sentence is replaced in the second by an indefinite and generalized scene of victimage. Historically available rationales are absent: the term ‘rioters’ refuses communalism as surely as it renders nationalism irrelevant, the two most politically prominent discourses by which this difficult historical moment was managed. It equally refuses the temptation to seek the consolation offered by metaphysical explanations and the relief offered, at the time, by that most favoured of commonplace explanations—the discourse of insanity.4 A journalistic spareness redeployed in literary text describes one writer’s attempt to negotiate his occupation of the ground of an impossible condition. Clearly, language is itself recognized here as a casualty of this encounter with the unthinkable. And it is not in the words themselves but in the deliberately catachrestic turning of the headline into literary text that Manto ‘speaks’ the impossible condition facing him as a writer:5 on the one hand, there is the perceived urgency of memorializing what Said has so memorably described as ‘the messier precincts of “life” and historical experience’ (2000: xviii). Here, it is about as messy as it can get—India’s own encounter with the unthinkable in human behaviour. On the other hand, there is the sense that existing frameworks are incommensurate with historical experience itself. To borrow language from Elaine Scarry, what is at issue here is the ‘knowability of the world’, a knowability that is arguably dependent, as she suggests it is, on ‘its susceptibility to representation’ (Scarry 1985: 3). Bringing that which is beyond language—partly because this experience makes language seem ‘too quick and cavalier’ (ibid.) and partly because ‘it is no longer possible to feel at home inside it [language]’ (Leaman 2003: 251)—within the purview of language was no doubt that much more difficult and keen for Manto, for whom a lasting effect of Partition appears to have been a dispossession of culture and language. ‘When I sat down to write,’ he states, ‘I found my mind in a confused state. However much I tried, I could not separate India from Pakistan or Pakistan from India. My mind was invaded by the same puzzling questions again and again, will the literature of Pakistan be different? If so, how? Who has the claim to what was written in undivided India? Will that be divided as well?’ (Manto quoted in Memon 1980: 29).6 Culture itself appears to have been turned by this historical event from a given to an ungraspable concept.

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

100 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

101

Other writers, too, appear to have been profoundly impacted by the sudden knowledge that a cultural vivisection was required by the political one and not a consequence of it. Intizar Husain, for instance, states: For me this entire event was a complex and convoluted human tragedy which raised many other kinds of questions and doubts. Here we have two great traditions, that of the Hindus and that of the Muslims. In the Hindu religious tradition the values of constancy, peace, patience and forbearance were deeply ingrained. I pondered with amazement what kind of new man had emerged from this culture and appeared on the scene in 1947. And where was our own Muslim religious tradition carrying us? (1983: 161)

A virtual erasure of Partition’s social consequences, psychological upheaval, emotional devastation, and physical violence and degradation has meant that such questions have been informed by a sense of urgency for some writers. As always already implicated in a politics associated with a struggle between dominant and counter-history, memory and counter-memory, narrative and counternarrative of nation, one might expect Partition texts to draw on the potential offered by intertextuality to locate terms and conceptual apparatus in their own attempt to grapple with a difficult history. A text that has emerged as a foundational partition text is Manto’s Toba Tek Singh. Published in 1953 in Savera, it is a text that much recent writing on Partition literature acknowledges, debates, describes, and interrogates.7 It has also given rise to other textual productions,8 including a title (Kitne Toba Tek Singh by Bhisham Sahni) and a poem by Gulzar, entitled ‘Toba Tek Singh’. Manto’s story, Gulzar’s 1970s’ poem of the same name, and a text by Joginder Paul, Sleepwalkers (that I will argue relates intertextually with Manto’s text) undertake to write a counter-history, one that answers the question: what would the present look like if we chose to remember Partition in the same way that we have chosen to remember the end of colonial India? To begin, one could ask: what is it that Manto’s Toba Tek Singh does as a Partition text? In a classic gesture of disavowal of dominant commonplaces in a hyperterritorial time, this short story stretches the semantic limits of a site traditionally associated with the principle of deterritorializing, the mental institution, so that it includes within its spatial and linguistic economies a refusal of the state-mandated principle of territorialism. Inmates express a refusal of nation and its logic as for instance is made manifest in the narratorial comment: ... they did not know a thing about its actual location [Pakistan] and its boundaries. That is why all the inmates of the asylum who weren’t completely insane were thoroughly confused about whether they were in Hindustan or Pakistan. If they were in Hindustan, then where was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan,

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

101 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

102

SUKESHI KAMRA

then how was it possible that only a short while ago they had been in Hindustan, when they had not moved from the place at all? (Manto 2001: 65)

Clearly, the notion of nation is experienced by them as illogical.9 This, along with the text’s announcing of its political project in the opening sentence—‘Two or three years after the Partition, it occurred to the governments of Hindustan and Pakistan that, just as they had exchanged civilian prisoners, they should exchange the lunatics confined in the asylums as well. In other words, Muslim lunatics interned in the asylums of Hindustan should be sent to Pakistan, and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics confined in the asylums in Pakistan should be handed over to Hindustan’ (ibid.: 64)—has led to agreement that Toba Tek Singh is primarily an allegory that plays on a received understanding of rational and irrational. Thus, the insane exchange places with the sane, the asylum with the state and its apparatuses in this text. However, if we direct attention to that which occupies the majority of the text —describing bodily and linguistic behaviours of inmates—we find other equally compelling interests, not necessarily at odds with an overtly political one. There is the much commented on rupturing of language in the separating out of word from meaning in a classic instance of nonsense verse, for instance. Thus it is not just the figure of Bishan Singh that has extraordinary symbolic value but the refrain with which he responds when asked his opinion about the partitioning of India. ‘Opar di gurgur di annexe di bay dhiana di mung di daal of the government of Pakistan’ (ibid.: 66), changes, the narrator informs us, to ‘of the Toba Tek Singh government’ (ibid.), while the pre-political version reads ‘Opar di gurgur di annexe di bay dhiana di mung di daal of the laltain’ (ibid.). This is not the only place in which the issue of language is raised. It is raised more pointedly as an issue of trust in language’s capacity to engage in any meaningful way with the historical world, as for instance in the narrator’s representation of the inmates’ perplexity over the meaning of nation. It appears also in the opening reference to juridical language, here a language of force that betrays the very public whose rights it is meant to house. The somatic is of course everywhere in this text, a fact that is somewhat predicted by the text’s choice of the mental institution. After all, the place most closely associated with somatic behaviours disassociated from the rational self, behaviours that the text spends much time describing, has to be the asylum. Interestingly, the asylum is not offered as an already radically-irrationalized and distressed space. On the contrary, the institution is presented as an institution—manifesting signs of an accretion of functions and state-sponsored racial policies, for instance.10 This is to say, it is invested with a particular social economy that derives from a history of bureaucratic rule as much as from its subversions (the narrator informs us that it is utilized by the powerful to provide shelter from the law). Describing Partition’s effects through describing

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

102 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

103

forms of affect takes up much narratorial space. One inmate, we are told, suddenly insists on living in a tree. As the narrator reports it, he says: ‘I want to live in neither Hindustan nor Pakistan ... I’d rather live on this tree’ (Manto 2001: 65 [ellipses in original]). ‘A sudden change’ in another inmate, we are informed, ‘was manifested by the fact that he took off all his clothes, handed them over to the guards, and began to race around stark naked’ (ibid.), while a third who ‘bathed some fifteen or sixteen times a day, abruptly gave up this habit’ (ibid.). Probably the most memorable image of somatic distress, that acts simultaneously to allegorically express resistance of the newly-required territorial mentality, is of Bishan Singh’s performance of a refusal of the logic of nation at the very moment of its realization as an exchange of inmates: Just before sunrise, a sky rending cry emerged from the gullet of Bishan Singh, who till then had stood still and unmoving. Several officials came running to the spot and found the man who had stood on his legs, day and night for fifteen years, was lying on his face. Over here, behind identical wires lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of land that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh (ibid.: 70).

Because of its symbolic intensity, this scene encourages an overlooking of the critical scene preceding it, in which there is a far less restrained description of affect. ‘On a severely cold day’, we are told, ‘police lorries packed with Hindu and Sikh lunatics proceeded toward the border under police escort’ (ibid.: 69), where the exchange of lunatics proceeds to take place. What follows, as described by the narrator, places Bishan Singh’s act within a context, making it much less anomalous: It was indeed a hard job getting the men out of the lorries and handing them over to the officials on the other side. Some just refused to budge from their place. Those who agreed to come out were difficult to manage, as they ran off in all directions. The naked ones among them tore off their clothes as soon as they were made to put them on. If one called names, another burst into song. While some fought, others cried and wailed. It was difficult to hear anything in the fracas. Female lunatics made their own noises. And the cold was so severe that it made one’s teeth chatter (ibid.: 70).

The narratorial comment that follows,‘The majority of the lunatics were against this change.This is because they could not make out why they were being uprooted’ (ibid.), suggests that affect here is not to be attributed to forms of insanity but to the rupture forced on inmates. The text further suggests that catastrophic experience is only decipherable or nameable in its traces—traces here being somatic and psychological shifts, perceptible only as deviations from established patterns of behaviour (even Bishan Singh’s final gesture—of falling to the ground—is pointedly

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

103 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

104

SUKESHI KAMRA

located in a variation from the [his] norm). In sum, indeterminacy of language and body circulate in and throughout the text. So what is it that this text does as a Partition text? In tracing Partition’s impact on the body and language, Manto describes the troping of territorialism as a requirement of the ideology of nationalism. As Das notes of the newly formed states of India and Pakistan in 1947,‘It is not enough that the new nations have a name or a territory. This name has to be inscribed on another territory, the body’ (Das 1995: 185). The devastating silencing of other forms of language and social expression as much as of a language that describes the ‘cost’ (of the body in pain, lost in this instance to the rhetoric of independence) to which 1947 was witness is surely specified by the nonsense language and non-sense forms of affect that are the twin concerns of Toba Tek Singh. The ‘striking dumb’ of language itself thus forms part of the terror: not only does it signal the loss of sociality itself but ensures that physical brutality, torture, and its many forms, remain outside of the purview of narrative, and hence of history.11 Toba Tek Singh aims also to have predictive value. It predicts an arrest of the future, and thus of history (by this stage in the development of an anticolonial rhetoric of nationalism assumed to be the progress of the nation through homogenous, empty time).12 The narrative ends, almost overdeterminedly, in at once that most marked and indeterminate of spaces—Wagah—and that too with an arrest of the only action there is in the short story, with Bishan Singh/Toba Tek Singh occupying no-man’sland. In arresting the future and the hoped for progressive narrative of nation, the text also refuses all forms of transformative knowledge, local and universal, that could redeem the historical moment of its violence.13 Finally, difficult to miss is Manto’s engaging of rhetorical strategies typical of (western) literature of the uncanny. Apart from the metonymic power of the text’s location (mental institution), borders and boundaries at the moment of their turn from homely to unhomely traverse the text. Thus, Wagah appears at the moment of its turn from a common Punjabi town to boundary, the body appears at the moment of its turn from habitual to radical affect, and even Bishan Singh’s nonsense verse appears at the moment of its turn from ‘daal of di laltain’ to ‘government of Pakistan and Hindustan’ or ‘government of Toba Tek Singh’, a use of language that messes with the usual distinction between an irrational and rational use of language. Bringing in the uncanny to identify or elucidate an ‘atmospheric’ with which the text of Toba Tek Singh engages in an attempt to articulate what precisely made Partition so ‘eerie’ an experience is done advisedly. Homi Bhabha’s (1994) appropriation of the conceptual apparatus of the uncanny, via Sigmund Freud and Hannah Arendt, remains problematic both for his claiming of the uncanny for the colonial and postcolonial episteme and for his partial employment of Freud’s nuanced deliberations on the uncanny as mode, trope and concept.14 Having said that, Bhabha’s use has some value for its identifying of a particular kind of psychological toll, whose

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

104 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

105

expression in colonialism’s texts is his interest. The ‘unhousing’ of the colonized is something that he encountered in his study of Frantz Fanon and which he develops into an assertion that the uncanny is in fact the trope in which multiple histories of the disavowal of cultural difference are written. In the colonial and postcolonial historical moment, the uncanny is thus a particularly powerful enunciatory site. The ‘eerieness’ that Manto describes in Toba Tek Singh resonates with the formulation provided by Bhabha. Judging by some of its texts, Partition was as much an epistemic rupture as, Bhabha argues (via Fanon), colonialism was: destruction of language, culture, and social organization are central concerns in Manto’s Partition narratives. Indian nationalism’s disavowal is thus of cultural difference itself, a disavowal historically recorded in Partition—the event.That is, Partition, as conceptual space and practice of disavowal of cultural difference, is where this unhomely history is inscribed. Bhabha’s politicizing of Freud’s psychoanalytic category limits the transfer of the uncanny to the notion of ‘unhousing’/dispossession that Freud locates as the conceptual centre of the uncanny. In this very limited, but nonetheless useful, sense, Toba Tek Singh indeed speaks conceptually of Partition and its victims as the place in which the homely moment (Independence) is revealed to be the unhomely, not its other, but its double. *** Gulzar’s concern in ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is with redescribing another moment in post1947 history as a continuation of an enunciative disorder.This is announced midway in the poem in lines that describe a history of splitting: ‘That partition was only the first one’ (15),‘There are some more—left still/Who are being divided, made into pieces’ (12–13) and a future imagined in the same terms: ‘There are some more partitions to be done’ (14). Repetition(s) of catastrophic history—of splitting—is the context in which this poem rereads, resituates, reconstitutes that other, first splitting.The forcible entry of Partition into the historical present is thus announced as the condition informing the present.The story the poem relates is of the status of Partition—that has changed from event to the subject of gossip. The poem opens with: ‘I’ve to go and meet Toba Tek Singh’s Bishan at Wagah!/I’m told he still stands on his swollen feet/Where Manto had left him’ (1–3), lines that establish stasis, arrested time, as the precondition to understanding the disordered present. While the nation has marked the passage of time,Wagah and Bishan Singh extend from the liminal past into the present. Thus, a literal haunting of the present by the past is part of the narrator’s knowledge, a story that remains unnarrated and whose narration forms the desire of the narrator. This desire is expressed in several places: ‘He is to be told’ (11),‘has to be informed’ (17),‘It’s to be told’ (24).The story, of the present, has as much to do with the nature of the past as it has to do with its erasure in the

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

105 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

106

SUKESHI KAMRA

present—as references to mutilated bodies and incomplete journeys insist. Consider the following: ‘It’s to be told that all the mad ones haven’t reached their destinations—/ There are many on that side/And many on this one (24–26) and ‘Lahna Singh, Wadhwa Singh, Bheen Amrit/Have arrived here butchered—/Their heads were looted with the luggage on the way behind’ (18–20). Signs of the present, then, in this text are entirely contained within the logic of a text published in the early 1950s—two of the more arresting images in Manto’s text that speak to the enunciative disorder of his present (1950s), mutilated body and language, are repeated in a different time and in its conclusion, the poem offers intertextuality as the very idiom of this marginalized history. This last is to say, if the poem begins with a narrator who turns the world of Manto’s narrative into the historical text, which is then subject to fictionalizing, it ends with the narrator disappearing into the now fictional landscape of his own utterance. The concluding lines of the poem read: ‘Toba Tek Singh’s Bishan beckons me often to say:/“Opad di gud gud di moong di dal di laltain di Hindustan te Pakistan di dur fitey munh”’ (28–29). Thus, the text ends with an assertion of the non-porousness of Partition. It gestures at a retreat into a community of survivors. This is a response to a shared, catastrophic experience that is not unique to Partition. Dominick LaCapra, for instance, addresses the dangers attending what he describes as a ‘cathected basis of identity’ (2001: 23), that makes of a traumatic experience a ‘founding trauma’, seeing in it an originary moment. The group imperative becomes, in his words, a ‘keeping faith with trauma’ (ibid.).15 By the end of the poem, Bishan Singh is an apocalyptic figure of an impossible metonymic power and his nonsense verse a cryptic comment on insanity as the place of transformation, capable of undoing the enunciative disorder of the present, or, at the very least, making it bearable. The third and final text I have chosen to bring into the discussion does not engage self-consciously with either of the two previously named texts but rather draws on an atmospheric that shares with the two other texts even though the point in history with which it deals is the much later 1980s. In Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers, it is a city that speaks the down-spiral of history that was set in motion by Partition. Karachi is, in this text, quite overtaken by a culture clash—between a group that continues to be identified in and by the term mohajir and the culture that, by contrast, ‘belongs’. Both the geographical degradation and the location of its history in Partition are described in the following narratorial statement: ‘Bombs kept exploding every other day in different areas, ours and theirs, precisely because even after four or five decades of physical co-existence, we have mentally been dwelling in our separate planets’ (Paul 1998: 50).There are the same reminders of devastated personal and collective geographies—bombed out areas, destroyed families—and of forms that mutilated language takes (in the very term that forces the burden of the history of Partition on those described by the term mohajir and, possibly, in

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

106 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

107

the catachresis that finds a reshaping or forcing of existing landscape to conform with quite another, remote one). In this, of course, Paul is textualizing the history of relocation and its particular reshaping of the social geography of Karachi. The narrator states, for instance, ‘The problem that the mohajirs in Karachi face is that they are compelled to be mohajirs in spite of being permanently resettled there’ (ibid.: 20). A devastated social economy, a city living under the constant threat of unpredictable forms and levels of violence is associated in the text, that is, with the particular reconstitution to which it was subject in the past, as a result of Partition— one that, at one point, had more than half the population marked as refugee.16 Another outcome of this flow of refugees, however, appears to have fascinated Paul more. In ‘On Writing Sleepwalkers’, he reveals his interest in the literalness of the attempt of the exiled, in Karachi, to fit an existing social geography into what is now available only as an imagined one.This he reads as a classic gesture of refusal of the historical process itself and, in describing it, himself preserves the strangeness that he, Paul, obviously associates with the dislocating process. He writes: On a visit to Karachi in the mid-eighties, I found I had come to a wonderland. All its people were walking, talking, or whatever, in deep sleep.What was most amazing was that the wonderland looked very familiar! There were so many Uttar Pradesh towns there, situated, I felt, even in the same geographical dimensions. As for the people—they spoke the chaste Urdu that reminds one of pre-Partition days when it was spoken more for aesthetic pleasure than for communicating with the people (1998: 112).

If we bring Scarry in again, an exilic ‘mentality’ does more than express nostalgia for the past in its layering of the present with the past (it is as mere nostalgia that firstgeneration immigrants in this text in fact see it). In Body in Pain, she describes the destruction of artefacts—including buildings—as the destruction of human thought itself. She writes:‘one does not in bombing Berlin destroy only objects, gestures, and thoughts that are culturally stipulated but objects, gestures and thoughts that are human, not Dresden buildings or German architecture but human shelter’ (1985: 61). In this reading, the response of the exiled to the traumatic process of forced relocation is to attempt an undoing of what was undone in and by the destruction of lived space, cultural practice, and history (here of Lucknow). Sleepwalkers stages something of a confrontation between these two approaches to a present that is also conceived of in terms of an enunciative disorder. On the one hand there is the hard political and social reality of inter-community violence and on the other a ‘strange’ space co-extensive with Deewane Maulvi Sahab. The continuity between the latter—both in terms of figure and space—and Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is quite remarkable. Deewane Maulvi Sahab appears to be the inheritor of Bishan’s state: he too is considered insane; his refusal, too, is to inhabit a place other

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

107 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

108

SUKESHI KAMRA

than his hometown, of Lucknow, from which he has been exiled. This (his) erasure of the historical while he is constantly surrounded by the historical (best remarked in the constant violence with which the city is beset), and the conjuncture formed by the co-existence of the historical with the fictional (a Karachi that is Lucknow) form the crux of the text. Thus, Deewane Maulvi Sahab inhabits the no-man’s-land that in Manto’s text is the Wagah border to which Bishan Singh lays claim. That is, the Lucknow-in-Karachi he inhabits is neither the geographical Lucknow nor its ‘essence’ disengaged and transported, as one of the characters in the text claims, but a Lucknow lost to Partition.17 What was an atmospheric approximating the uncanny in Manto’s text is turned spectral—as the history of Partition haunts Karachi18— and Lucknow-in-Karachi is that unhomely space, complete with its midnight life, that specifies Karachi’s psycho-social economy as the economy of the revenant. A particularly compelling articulation of the paradox of the revenant is the following by the narrator: In the dying hours of the night, when the silent lanes of Ameenabad are lit with the eerie glow of colourful lamps, people lying deep in sleep in the pitch dark of their homes roam about the bustling Chowk, as if it were day. In the beginning, Manwa Chowkidar would constantly bring his lathi on the road, wide-eyed with fear and astonishment, as he stared at the dazzle around him … The entire Chowk is deserted; who on Allah’s earth do I keep bumping into, in this dead silence … What was even stranger was that, within a few days, he actually began to see apparitions (Paul 1998: 13).

Thus layering the geography of a now fictional Lucknow over the historical Karachi is expressive of something more than nostalgia: it is a reclaiming or painstaking rebuilding of the very humanity that is denied. Deewane Maulvi Sahab is only an extension of this same logic, finding the confectionery of Lucknow in the Karachi markets, insisting that he inhabits Lucknow, and so on. The point is even made by the narrator, who distinguishes between mohajirs who are bound by rationality and Deewane Sahab, who is not, by describing their different relationship to language: While the other mohajirs have created another Lucknow in Karachi, Deewane Maulvi Sahab believes that he continues to live in the old Lucknow, just as before. At first, many of his friends tried to convince him that he had to come away from there. But even in the old Lucknow, whenever Deewane Maulvi Sahab had gone out of the city, he would be restless till the time he came back to it. No matter where he went, his journey was always from Lucknow to Lucknow (ibid.: 15).

The compensatory logic of insanity is, however, more fully associated with transformation, even if only of the individual, than it is in Gulzar’s poem. Paul plays with

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

108 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

109

the possibility of the transformative capacity of insanity in a number of ways. For instance, this space (Lucknow-in-Karachi) is protected for much of the narrative, put out of harm’s way one could say. Characters in the text regard the insane Deewane Maulvi Sahab with much affection and Ishaq Mirza in a moment of impatience with the mohajirs and their inhabiting of nostalgia is possessed of the desire to ‘forcibly inject a dose of madness into all the mohajirs who crave a visit to their lost homelands. Just a small prick—after which, liberated from the rigours of official doubts and queries, they would blissfully live in their original abodes’ (ibid.: 86). The conclusion to the narrative, however, complicates matters somewhat. First, the two spaces— the ‘real’ historical one of a war-torn Karachi and the construction to which it is subject by the mohajirs/Deewane Sahab—are brought into conflict. Needless to say, the former is invested with the power to disrupt the latter, which it does by destroying Deewane Maulvi Sahab’s family and threatening to restore the latter to sanity, a fact that is pointedly remarked on by the narrator when he says of Deewane Maulvi Sahab’s response to this latest loss: ‘He cried and he cried, so much that his sanity was restored’ (ibid.: 104). But then the text turns on this ending and returns Deewane Maulvi Sahab to insanity, who alters the narrative by which he has lived: if till then he had insisted he was living in Lucknow, had never left it, after this incident he describes himself as a temporary resident of Karachi, a visitor. ‘[He] innocently believed that he had been living in Lucknow all this while and had come to Karachi only recently on a short visit’ (ibid.: 106). If we return then to the question articulated at the beginning of this consideration of a strand of counter-history—one that situates meaning in an intertextual relationship with a specific Partition text—what would history look like if we factored Partition in the way we have Independence? Gulzar’s and Paul’s texts correctly situate Partition as an ongoing concern primarily of survivors. As mentioned earlier, in Sleepwalkers, first-generation Karachiites express impatience with what they read as a hindering nostalgia for the past, nothing more, on the part of the dislocated. Thus Deewane Sahab’s children, while marginal to the action of the text, are not so when it comes to opinion.The text certainly suggests that Partition’s long shadow is only as long as the generations who were its victims. This is an opinion that Husain too appears to hold—in his conversation with Memon he states that he thinks ‘the experience of 1947 is limited to our generation’ (Husain 1983: 171) and mentions that he does not find any evidence that the event has been significant for younger generations of Pakistanis. Certainly, the absence of the dominant culture in Gulzar’s palimpsestic text, let alone an interested one, and of an indifferent to hostile one in Sleepwalkers suggests the erasure of this history is the context from under which this counter-history cannot emerge.Yet, Partition as history that is subject to the trope of iteration is a significant comment in Gulzar’s poem, is predicted in Manto’s short story and informs the very social geography of Karachi in Sleepwalkers.19

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

109 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

110

SUKESHI KAMRA

If Manto’s Toba Tek Singh draws on something like the uncanny in its naming of the particular economy of the disordered present, the two later texts draw on something like the revenant to name the economy of a disordered present that is the past returned, but more grotesquely so, in its splitting and doubling of the first (or so the texts identify post-1947 civil violence).20 Whether one chooses to formulate the particular relationship between past and present imagined in spectrality the way Benjamin does (propelling us forward to struggle to gain justice for the victims of history, or as he puts it, fulfilling the compact we have with the past) or the way Derrida does (with his greater emphasis on the ways in which the present is haunted by the past), the point remains that both ways engage in a discussion of ethical uses of the past and both require a keeping faith with the victims of history. What these three Partition texts do—and they draw on the uncanny to the revenant to do so— is offer the somewhat despairing conclusion that this faith is theirs alone. The work of mourning, that is, remains to be done. Bishnupriya Ghosh suggests contemporary cosmopolitical novels display symptoms of ‘uncanny narration’ (2004: 124), by which she means that they have recourse to the vocabulary of the uncanny to signify ‘the incommensurability of the other’s idiom’ (ibid.).The work uncanny narration does in these novels—by Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy among others—is to specify the limits of ‘literary realism’, bring ‘genres into crisis’ (ibid.: 124–25) and in general force a dialogue ‘about the political costs, debts, and justice’ (ibid.: 125). It would be intriguing to consider what continuity may exist between some Partition texts, texts that engage in some of the same projects—of pointing out debt, and requiring justice on behalf of survivors—and in some of the same ways on the one hand, and a cosmopolitical literature on the other, that arguably bears the burden of this past (even if it is a past that continues to be haunted more by colonialism than by Partition, except when it considers the latter as part of the former).

NOTES 1. The discussion of Partition in this paper is of texts that write of the partition of the Punjab. The partition of Bengal, and the similarities and differences between the Partition experiences of the two distinct communities, was the subject of a special issue of Seminar (Bagchi and Dasgupta 2002). 2. Aijaz Ahmad writes about the distortion of the cultural scene in the Punjab and UP because of the increasing identification (starting at least in the 1940s) of Urdu as a Muslim and then Pakistani language. He also suggests that writers were the main casualty in this politicization of the cultural and the linguistic when he states: ‘During the first decade or so after the Partition, it was difficult to classify the different Urdu writers specifically as Indian or Pakistani. This was partly because the majority of them had pre-Partition careers which could not be so easily pigeonholed simply in accordance with the new territorial dispensation’ (Ahmad 1989: 27). Concerned also with considering the implications of the cultural reorganization of North

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

110 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

111

India, Arjun Mahey asks: ‘Why do we still write and think and talk, if we do, as if the Partition did not fundamentally rearrange the languages, and hence the meanings within which we conceive what it is to be an Indian (or a Hindu, or a Muslim, or whatever one perceives oneself to be)?’ (2001: 137). Muhammad Memon (1980) describes debates that took place within the literary circles of the newly-formed Pakistan, debates that appear to have been mobilised by radically different perceptions of Partition and what constituted a ‘Pakistani’ view of it. The number of comments that have been made recently regarding the erasure of Partition in Indian historiography is large. Among the more recent is the following by Ravikant: ‘Till recently, we as a nation, in fact, have been sleepwalking through these decades until an odd film or a novel, or the actuality of a riot awakens us to momentarily remember and refer back to the nightmare of Partition. The nation has grown up, ritually counting and celebrating birthdays— its own and of the great souls that won it the freedom—while systematically consigning the Partition to oblivion’ (1998: 160). It is hardly surprising that Partition and its erasure is a preoccupation of some literature. Gyanendra Pandey’s most recent comment, made in 2001— that echoes comments he made as early as 1994 in ‘The Prose of Otherness’—addresses the aporia of Partition in official culture and its texts when he asks: ‘Shall we continue to think of 1947 as a constitutional division, an agreed-upon partition of territories and assets? Or shall we face up to the enormity of the violence and the incredible acts of rape, torture and humiliation? Shall we call it “civil war”, recognizing the fact that there were well organized local forces on both sides and a concerted attempt to wipe out entire populations as enemies?’ (2001: 15). For a discussion of the positing of nationalism and communalism as the embattled ideologies to which Partition’s violence can be attributed, see the Introduction in Kamra (2002). The equally overdetermined place of the discourse of insanity has recently been the subject of much discussion. Comments of leaders such as Nehru at the time legitimised the discourse itself, investing it with much explanatory power at the same time as it revealed the collective sense of an absence of adequate explanation from within a rationalist framework. Thus, Pandey argues that speeches made by leaders such as Nehru and Gandhi are representative of the nationalist elite’s othering of the violence of Partition by labelling it irrational or describing it as ‘the work of the “backward”—people who were unfortunately ill-educated and insufficiently enlightened’ (1994: 195). More recently, Ravikant has made the same point, emphasising the extent to which the discourse of insanity was pressed into service in the press and elite culture (Ravikant and Saint 2001: xvii). Finally, Leslie Flemming (1979) and M. Asaduddin, two of the more prominent of Manto scholars, have commented on Manto’s unrelentingly materialist approach, most noted in his Partition texts. Asaduddin, for instance, writes: ‘He stares violence in the face and is too clear-sighted to seek refuge in the rhetorical consolation of spiritual redemption or healing as many of his fellow writers did’ (2003: 29). Catachresis, as trope, signals the deliberate misuse of convention that Manto engages in here. It is the inappropriateness of the convention to the context that conveys meaning and where a gauging of Manto’s intent is possible. In a recent article on Manto, Priyamvada Gopal suggests Manto’s Partition experience led him to rethink the practice of literature. She writes: ‘This dislocation and disorientation produce for him a series of questions on what to write, how to write, indeed, the very nature of writing and literature in this changing context’ (2001: 255). Arjun Mahey states that Toba Tek Singh first appeared in a collection entitled Phundne, published in Lahore in 1955 (2001: 148). Ravikant, Arjun Mahey, Veena Das and Ashis Nandy, and Gopal are a few of the many critics who have written on Manto recently and in the context of partition texts. Wadhawan and Flemming of course write on it as well, since their books are biographical studies.

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

111 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

112

SUKESHI KAMRA

8. Ravikant writes: ‘The Partition became a metaphor for the post-Independence communal divide.... In an ironical tribute to Manto, Bhisham Sahni titles his anthology of stories on communalism Kitne Toba Tek Singh’ (Ravikant and Saint 2001: xviii). 9. In his seminal work, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines nation as ‘an imagined political community’ (1991: 6). His choice of the term ‘imagined’, he suggests, derives from the fact that nations, and nationalism, have required the development of notions of collective identity that collapse geographical and other such distances (‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ [ibid.: 6]). 10. There are separate wards for Indians on the one hand and Anglo-Indian and European on the other. Racist attitudes are also described by the narrator, who states of the two Anglo-Indians in the asylum: ‘They would spend hours in secret confabulation about their changed status in the asylum’ (Manto 2001: 66) and even goes on to indicate the kinds of questions that preoccupied them: ‘Would the European Ward be there or done away with? Would they be served breakfast anymore? And, instead of Western-style bread, would they be forced to swallow the “bloody Indian chapatti?”’ (Manto 2001: 66). Waltraud Ernst, in a study of the development of the colonial asylum in India, suggests that such segregations were common in colonial asylums: ‘separate provisions for Europeans and Indians were made, even in the development of psychiatric services’ (1997: 175). 11. Das applauds Manto for his insistence on Partition as a kind of civilizational arrest and his identifying of the ‘mutilation of language’ (Das 1995: 184) as both sign and part of the terror that so many experienced. She adds, ‘I believe that this mutilation of language testifies to an essential truth about the annihilating violence and terror that people experienced during these riots, namely that as human understanding gives way, language is struck dumb. A relapse into a dumb condition is not only a sign of this period but is also a part of the terror itself. It is this fact—that violence annihilates language, that terror cannot be brought into the realm of the utterable’ (ibid.). Scarry writes of the body–language relationship in conditions of physical torture: ‘Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject’ (1985: 35). 12. I am borrowing, of course, from Benjamin, who in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ views with alarm the Social Democrat theory of history and its implicit faith in the concept of progress: ‘The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progress through a homogenous, empty time’ (1955: 261). 13. This, in Nandy and Das’ terms (1986), makes Manto’s work in general ‘authentic’. They suggest that there are three discursive categories of violence that are often employed in discussions of violence in modern India. These are: sacrifice, feud and vivisection (ibid.: 181). The violence of Partition has in fact invited all three rationalizing discourses, erroneously so, they argue.They suggest that violence associated with Partition is properly attributed to a breakdown of signification, one that occurs when an ‘unbridgeable chasm in understanding’ (ibid.: 189) occurs. Texts that thus link their representation of Partition’s violence with the breakdown of signification are for them ‘authentic’ Partition texts and texts that attempt to ‘reduce the violence to the language of feud’ are inauthentic (ibid.). 14. Much of the essay on the uncanny attempts to nuance the conceptual apparatus of the uncanny. Thus, Freud distinguishes between the places and meanings of the uncanny in ‘real’ life experiences and fictional texts—literature of the uncanny. He also provides many reasons and contexts in which one might experience the uncanny. The definition that he arrives at towards

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

112 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

113

the end of the essay, and that seems to satisfy him somewhat, is: ‘an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (1995: 149–50). This psychological explanation for an experience of the many forms of the uncanny Freud identifies in the essay is not an explanation that forms part of Bhabha’s discussion of the uncanny as a colonial and postcolonial trope. Bhabha’s interest in this 1994 piece was to describe colonial and postcolonial fictions (from the margins of metropolitan western culture) as the unhomely that interrupts the (desire for the) ‘normative’ space of European-derived cultures. In the process such fiction specifies normativity itself and points to the forms it takes. Some Partition literature can be seen to perform a similar function and exist in a similar relationship with a dominant culture more absorbed in and by the rhetoric of Independence. Dominick LaCapra writes: ‘Even extremely destructive and disorienting events, such as the Holocaust … may also give rise to what may be termed founding traumas—traumas that paradoxically become the valorized or intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or a group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity’ (2001: 23). Radha Kumar (2005) states that over half of the population of Karachi in the years immediately following Partition was refugee, mostly from East Punjab but also from other parts of North India (such as Uttar Pradesh).The actual number, as assessed by the Joint Refugee Council for Pakistan–Sind, by May 1948 was 700,000 and over half of this number settled in Karachi (Ansari 1997: 98). For a study of the social economy of Sind before, during and after Partition, see Ansari (1997). In a letter he is in the middle of composing, addressed to his maternal cousin, Hashim Ali, Ishaq Mirza (Deewane Maulvi Sahab’s son) complains about the fact that ‘Even after four or five decades of our migration from Lucknow and Malihabad, we continue to live there’ (Paul 1998: 45–46). As proof, he reports on the visit of one of his father’s friends from Lucknow whose astonishment Ishaq Mirza goes on to describe: ‘On the very first day of his stay the gentleman said, “Subahan Allah! Lucknow is actually here! And, having travelled all the way from Lucknow, I have only just reached Lucknow! Over there, we could never figure out where Lucknow had vanished from Lucknow”’ (ibid.). The link between an experience of the uncanny and the world of the spectral is key to Freud’s discussion of the uncanny. He writes: ‘Many people experience the feeling [uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’ (1995: 142). Idelber Avelar (2004) describes Derrida’s use of repetition, its connection with Freud’s notion of repetition, and the interconnectedness between repetition and the economy of the revenant in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx in ways that are useful for my particular reading of these three texts. According to Avelar, Derrida’s notion of repetition owes much to Freud’s notion of repetition as a trope identifying ‘the incessant inscription of a past that remains unresolved’ (ibid.: 86), a variation on the notion of return of the repressed. Avelar adds that Derrida theorizes ‘spectrality as the force of an insistent repetition’ and that the spectre is, for Derrida, the ‘embodiment of the law of iterability’ (ibid.). In his essay on the uncanny, Freud suggests that the double (hence doubling) was initially a felicitious trope, or, as he describes it, ‘wore a more friendly aspect’ (1995: 137), and was one that signalled ‘an assurance of immortality’ (ibid.: 136). This, he states, has been surmounted and ‘The “double” has become a thing of terror’ (ibid.: 137).

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

113 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

114

SUKESHI KAMRA

REFERENCES Ahmad, Aijaz, ‘Some Reflections on Urdu’, Seminar, 359, 1989: 23–27. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (New York: Verso, 1991). Ansari, Sarah, ‘Partition, Migration and Refugees: Responses to the Arrival of Muhajirs in Sind During 1947–48’, in D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 91–104. Asaduddin, M., ‘Introduction’, in Muhammad Umar Memon (ed.), Black Margins: Sa’adat Hasan Manto Stories, selected by M. Asaduddin (New Delhi: Katha Press, 2003), pp. 9–43. Avelar, Idelber, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Bagchi, Jasodhara and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (eds), special issue on ‘Porous Borders, Divided Selves’, Seminar, 510, February 2002. Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1955). Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Das,Veena, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Das, Veena and Ashis Nandy, ‘Violence, victimhood, and the language of silence’, in Veena Das (ed.), The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986) pp. 177–98. Ernst, Waltraud, ‘Idioms of Madness and Colonial Boundaries: The Case of the European and “Native” Mentally Ill in Early Nineteenth-Century British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39(1), 1997: 153–81. Flemming, Leslie, Another Lonely Voice: The Urdu Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Freud, Sigmund, ‘The “Uncanny”’, trans. Alix Strachey, in Sander L. Gilman (ed.), Psychological Writings and Letters (New York: Continuum, 1995), pp. 120–53. Ghosh, Bishnupriya, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004). Gopal, Priyamvada, ‘Bodies Inflicting Pain: Masculinity, Morality and Cultural Identity in Manto’s “Cold Meat”’, in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), pp. 242–68. Gulzar, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, trans. Anisur Rahman, in Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint (eds), Translating Partition (New Delhi: Katha, 2001), p. ix. Hasan, Khalid, ‘About the Book’, in Sadat Hasan Manto’s Partition: Sketches and Stories, trans. Khalid Hasan (Delhi: Viking, 1991), pp. x–xvi. Hasan, Mushirul, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, 2 vols (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1995). Husain, Intizar, A Conversation Between Intizar Husain and Muhammad Umar Memon on 14 July 1974, trans. from Urdu by Bruce R. Pray, Journal of South Asian Literature, 18(2), 1983: 153–86. Kamra, Sukeshi, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002). Kumar, Radha, Making Peace with Partition (Delhi: Penguin, 2005). LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

114 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

PARTITION AND POST-PARTITION ACTS OF FICTION

115

Leaman, Oliver, ‘The Holocaust and the Possibility of Art’, in Eve Gerrard and Geoffrey Scarre (eds), Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Pub., 2003), pp. 247–56. Mahey, Arjun, ‘Partition Narratives: Some Observations’, in Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint (eds), Translating Partition (New Delhi: Katha, 2001), pp. 135–58. Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, trans. M. Asaduddin, in Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint (eds), Translating Partition (New Delhi: Katha, 2001), pp. 63–72. Memon, Muhammad Umar, ‘Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain’, Modern Asian Studies, 14(3), 1980: 377–410. Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies, Vol. VIII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 188–221. ———, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Paul, Joginder, ‘On Writing Sleepwalkers’, in his Sleepwalkers, trans. Sunil Trivedi and Sukrita Paul Kumar, edited by Keerti Ramachandra (New Delhi: Katha, 1998), pp. 111–18. ———, Sleepwalkers, trans. Sunil Trivedi and Sukrita Paul Kumar, edited by Keerti Ramachandra (New Delhi: Katha, 1998). Ravikant, ‘Partition: Strategies of Oblivion, Ways of Remembering’, in Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint (eds), Translating Partition (New Delhi: Katha, 1998), pp. 159–74. Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint, ‘Introduction’, in Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint (eds), Translating Partition (New Delhi: Katha, 2001), pp. xi–xxx. Said, Edward, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Scarry, Elaine, Resisting Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). ———, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985). Wadhawan, Jagdish Chander, Manto Naama: The Life of Saadat Hasan Manto (Delhi: Roli Books, 1998).

06_Roy & Bhatia~chap-6.pmd

115 Black

8/8/2007, 9:18 AM

116

MANAS RAY

7 Growing Up Refugee*

MANAS RAY

INTRODUCTION: REFUGEES IN KOLKATA India’s case is unique in the history of the anticolonial struggle— the independence from British rule that came in 1947 after a long, popular and difficult nationalist movement also meant banishment from their homeland for a vast number of its people. The city that has been affected most by this sudden and vast traffic of people—by any estimate the biggest instance of human displacement— is Kolkata (earlier, Calcutta). The country was divided on religious lines and split at its two flanks—east and west—to form a new nation-state, Pakistan. In the western sector, the transfer of population—Hindus and Sikhs from West Pakistan and Muslims from Indian Punjab—was nearly total, immensely brutal but nonetheless a one-off affair. The eastern frontier, in contrast, was a protracted scenario of border-crossing, happening in regular spurts from 1946 and continuing for decades to come. According to a government report of 1981, as many as 8 million Hindus had by then crossed the national border of East Pakistan (subsequently, Bangladesh), more than half of whom settled in Calcutta and the adjoining districts of south and north 24 Parganas and Nadia. Muslims who lived in West Bengal also migrated to East Pakistan (though presumably not on this scale), victims likewise of violence and persecution. The refugees in present-day Kolkata are not a homogeneous group. About 60 per cent of those who came immediately before or after the Partition were uppercaste Hindus. A good portion were bhadralok, educated people with varying degrees of exposure to urban life and its different white-collar professions.The predominance among the refugees of peasants and various subaltern castes of different trades is a later phenomenon. The early migrants settled in and around Calcutta: some preferred to squeeze into the already-cramped quarters of the city; those without any means or connections

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

116 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

117

GROWING UP REFUGEE

struggled in the nightmarish conditions of the government transit camps; but a large number decided to rehabilitate themselves without waiting for state support. Thus came into being the squatters’ colonies, which subsequently would become the principal signposts of refugee presence. The government at once lauded such enterprising spirit (in an environment grossly at odds) and also actively opposed the initiative since the land where the squatters settled belonged either to the government or, more often, to private owners. The refugees did not give in to state pressure but also kept the doors open for negotiation. Over time the colonies have increased in number and spread, soaring from 119 in 1952 to nearly 2,000 at present, dotting virtually the whole of West Bengal. What was rural hinterland has become part of the urban sprawl of Kolkata that runs for more than thirty miles north-south denting deep into the surrounding districts. The Left very early on utilized the widespread frustration among the refugees about the lackadaisical rehabilitation initiatives of the local government. In the course of time, the refugee population would provide the Communist Party of India (CPI) with cadres and also some of its prominent leaders. In 1964, the party was split into two. The breakaway outfit, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), gained in strength and over the years became the principal bastion of the parliamentary Left. The Congress, after ruling West Bengal for the first two decades, started showing cracks due to factionalism and popular disenchantment. Together, these factors resulted in the electoral defeat of Congress in 1967. The party responded by replacing the old guard of the Independence-movement era with what it called ‘young turks’, a group of student leaders bent on recruiting local toughs to combat the challenge of Left advance. Meanwhile, the discontent among sharecroppers in the arid Naxalbari area at the foothills of North Bengal snowballed into a putative Maoist movement and took by storm the youth of Calcutta—especially those from a deprived, refugee background. For the next few years, between 1969 and 1973, the city became a site of bizarre fratricidal carnage, when the uncoordinated spontaneity and selfrighteous idealism of the extreme Left (popularly known as ‘Naxals’) matched the lethal violence of the state apparatus backed by professional killers under the patronage of the Congress. The CPI(M) fought both these forces and on occasions allegedly took help from one to neutralize the other. On an average day Calcutta was witness to more than fifty political murders. By the time the Emergency was proclaimed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, the extreme Left had already been wiped out of Calcutta, its cadres either eliminated or jailed. Once the Emergency was lifted in 1977 and elections declared, CPI(M) rode to power on the crest of popular anti-Emergency waves and formed an alliance of Left parliamentary parties—the Left Front—never to be ousted since. This is a record of sorts in the history of parliamentary Left coalitions.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

117 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

118

MANAS RAY

The refugees meanwhile have gained legal ownership to their land; the earlier bamboo-thatched huts of middle-class households have now given place to fairly respectable-looking structures.Today, after all these years of drumroll, the refugees present a sharply variegated scenario—from those powerfully entrenched in the bureaucracy and professions to the emaciated vendors at busy market areas or the near-pauper ragpickers in the eastern flanks of the city. For the educated bhadralok refugees, it has been a journey towards Kolkata’s protean civil society, while for the vast ranks of the poor refugees living in shabby conditions, electoral democracy has offered a political space and cultural confidence that the bhadralok resents but dares not challenge. The anguish of being dispossessed, however, has only on rare occasions been translated into open anti-Muslim aggression: a demonstration of the effectiveness of the Hindu nationalist hegemony that allows multiple possibilities, from downright hatred of Muslims to patronizing campaigns of Hindu–Muslim solidarity. This paper narrates the story of one of the early squatter colonies on the outskirts of Calcutta and tries to capture in an anecdotal mode the social and political developments within the bounds of the locality.

ON MEMORY AND LOCALITY What is the history of a nation after all but its stories? Numerous stories. Stories upon stories, like the many surfaces of a nation. —Alexander Kluge

The camels were coming.1 The lamp-posts had been erected for quite some time. We lads were waiting in all eagerness. A small public debate emerged around the phenomenon of electrification—how electricity was generated, who would switch on the lamps every evening, what would electricity mean to the locality. Gradually the posts were painted silver.Then one day someone came and put some inscrutable numbers on them, numbers that had no meaning for us. We felt closer to Calcutta. The camel finally arrived. One evening, at one particular moment of that long-awaited evening, light speared forth from the lamp-posts. Street lamps. For the pock-marked by-lanes, the bamboo-strip fences, and the tin and tile roofs, that was the virgin touch of an electric beam. But to our horror, the lights were everywhere save the post next to our house. It must be Sitanath’s cows. We had indeed noticed one of them banging its head on the post on its way home early that evening.The older boys agreed that this must be the reason. Inside the bulb apparently there was a thin filament, which must have

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

118 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

119

GROWING UP REFUGEE

severed.We nodded our heads. Nikhil took the initiative. He rushed with a bamboo to Sitanath’s house. He would kill that cow, and maybe also its master. We knew Sitanath as a vaid, though no one really saw him practising medicine. In fact, he was the milkman of the locality. Sitanath loved his cows, screamed in their defence, was inconsolable when one of them died. If he was unhappy with any of them, he berated her by comparing her with his no-good son, Uttam. Then again Sitanath was not your ordinary milkman next door. When called at some meeting at the residence of the well-heeled Congressman Bidhubabu across the main road, after a meticulous scrubbing, he would squawk along in his shiny pump shoes, attired in starched and ironed dhoti-panjabi. Squatting on our red cemented floor on turgid summer afternoons I have heard him reminiscing about his school days in Noakhali and about Dhaka, where he went to get admitted to a college. If the fruit-laden mango tree started thumping our tin roof with increased tempo, he would lazily get up, apprehending an approaching storm, and walk towards the patch of land where we played and his cows grazed. Today Nikhil would not spare Sitanath. Shaking his fists at times, armed with a bamboo stick, a brick and of course blasphemous invectives aimed at the ancestors, he made several charges towards Sitanath’s house. Sitanath valiantly fended off the bamboo sticks and all the rest. Those who had come to wallow in the excitement of tonight’s caper were soon getting nervous—so intense was the encounter. At some point, elders had to intervene. The night deepened, the locality hushed, spots of virgin light lingered on privileged spaces, but the expanse in front of our house remained in the same darkness. The older boys were not prepared to give up so easily. Stealthily, late at night, they climbed up the mango tree to our roof with a pile of stones. Stones rained on Sitanath’s cowshed. First there was a languid mooing. Stones kept falling, with rising intensity. Soon there was loud mooing from all over the shed. The cows started jumping in panic. The boys jumped off the tree and fled. Meanwhile Sitanath flew out of his house, armed with a stick. He went straight into Nikhil’s house, just opposite the lane; he had no doubt who the miscreant could be. But where was Nikhil, after all? Unfortunately for him, he was in the toilet. Those days our toilets used to be in the far corner of the houses, tucked behind thick trees. He came out of the bush, hearing all the noise. Nikhil’s mama had had enough. His claims to innocence unheeded, Nikhil was thrashed mercilessly. Pacified, Sitanath returned home. But not Nikhil. He howled, howled deep into the night: I was crapping, had nothing to do with all this, but I was pounced upon! This is only because I am an orphan! The Muslims have chopped off my parents, and now you bash me! Go on, why don’t you bash me even more …?

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

119 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

120

MANAS RAY

Nikhil had come to our locality much later than us, in the early 1960s, bundled off from an orphanage in Barrackpore. He was a bit of an exotic for us: the tough guy amongst us, the fullback of our football team. His kicks would make the bewildering ball climb the sky far beyond the stretch of our field. For us, the younger lot, he was our pride. We did not expect Nikhil to howl like this. It created strange feelings in us. That night we forgot all about the lamp-post. *** This paper presents an overlay of two narratives: the story of my growing up as a refugee boy and the story of the locality’s own growth from a piece of wasteland outside Calcutta to what it is now, a fully-integrated part of Kolkata’s postcolonial landscape. Using an anecdotal approach, it narrates micro-histories of how belonging and locality formed the identities of the inhabitants of this refugee colony over the last five decades. I conduct the journey in roughly three phases: the 1950s and 1960s is the time of the formation and shaping up of the community (‘Community’); the first half of the 1970s marked the outbreak of unprecedented political violence, something that would have deep repercussions on the life of the community (‘Violence’); and finally, the slow beginnings of developmental activities from the mid-1970s, a process that would be accelerated with the coming of the Left Front government to power in 1977 (‘Government’).

COMMUNITY 1 Bijoygarh, the first refugee settlement of divided (West) Bengal, functioned as the epicentre for the formation of squatters’ colonies in the adjoining areas, among them Netaji Nagar (Chakrabarti 1990: 36–37; Dutta 2001). As a military camp during the Second World War, Bijoygarh had the initial advantage of a ready infrastructure of some kind. Close on the heels of Bijoygarh came Netaji Nagar. I was born in 1954 at Netaji Nagar. By the time I was five or six the colony was already ten years old. Netaji Nagar celebrates 26 January 1950 (the Republic Day of India) as the colony’s birth-date.2 A committee was formed under the leadership of a handful of men of some recognition, mostly teachers and lawyers.The word was spread amongst the refugees floating in and around Calcutta (and known to the committee members) that if they could take the risk and pay a one-off fee of Rs 15 to the colony committee, they

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

120 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

121

GROWING UP REFUGEE

were welcome to live in Netaji Nagar. The condition for residency was that one must have a room in an allotted plot (of mostly 3 kathas) and a hearth. It was a wasteland of mostly marshy patches, shrub and wild growth, crisscrossed with ditches. People came from different districts of what was East Bengal through different networks, with the result that right from the beginning there was a parity of background among the inhabitants.The vast majority of those who came were middle-class people with some urban exposure. Those who did not fall in this bracket—fishermen, carpenters, hut-builders, masons, barbers—tended to concentrate in two adjacent wards lying at one end of the locality. My early memories of these places are of lanes full of children, large families and houses bursting with tenants. In retrospect, it seems amazing how little I knew of that world, how subtle and comprehensive was the process of normalization of divisions. If Calcutta invested us with its terrors, we did the same to the people we thought were peripheral, terrors we were so familiar with. In the course of time, the female folk of these families would provide us with our domestic help. The internal boundaries settled, we felt comfortable with our habitat. The landowners’ goons would come regularly towards the evening or even far into the night. There was an informal information network of mostly young boys to signal their arrival. Men resisted as women blew the conch. By all accounts, the fights were seldom bloody. Throughout this period and subsequently, the government maintained an ambiguous attitude towards the refugees; in a way, the vagaries that marked the pragmatics of colonial administration continued.3 A boys’ school was set up in active confrontation with the police. Approximately a year later, a separate girls’ school came. Local people were desperate for these schools, to give the community the moral sanction it badly needed. Along with the schools came the clubs and their regular staging of plays. The main one had close links with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural platform of the undivided CPI. The emerging public sphere had many layers. Formal democratic protocols and Left-wing attitudes resided side by side with traditional ethos and practices, making any such divide problematic. They blended, overlapped or at times simply existed separately. The colony committee, elected by the vote of one member (almost always a male) of every household, negotiated land disputes amongst neighbours, took charge of such activities as constructing unpaved roads or cleaning the ponds and organized medical help during an emergency. In the process, the committee helped shape the modes of interaction among neighbours; the aim was to foster a kind of governmentality with clearly understood norms and responsibilities. Gradually, the space became a place, a certain relational and contextual affair endowed with a complex phenomenological quality.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

121 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

122

MANAS RAY

2 Different stories of different families who came from different places—incomplete and mythified stories—stories that were transacted, modified and at times contested. The Muslims were a constant presence in those stories but only in the figure of the eternal peasant—hard-working, obliging, happy with his marginality, a part of the Hindu domestic imagery. No space was allowed to their rituals, their universe of beliefs. Neither did the middle-class Muslim ever figure in these stories. I remember my grandmother reminiscing: Whenever some repair work was necessary in the house, I always employed our Muslim peasants, and never the Hindus. And after a good day’s work, I used to treat them to a hearty meal. I asked them to clean up the place under the jackfruit tree and lay out banana leaves. Then I served them food in person. They would be mighty pleased.The meal over, they cleaned the place with cow-dung, while I took a dip in our pond.

Stories upon stories—the sense of place took on a nostalgic aura, a nostalgia for the present. The landscape was a landscape of nostalgia. The shadowy hijal tree next to the water-hyacinth pond was the hijal of desher bari, the village home on the other side of the border. It offered a telos, a meaning beyond the play of the merely accidental. The displacement was bearable. Deaths were bewailed loudly and collectively:‘Thakuma, tumi baigun bhaja khaiya gela na, thakuma’ (Granny, you couldn’t eat the fried eggplant you wanted to), as the women rolled all over the floor where the dead body lay. As late as the 1960s, most of the houses were constructed of bamboo with tiled, tin or asbestos tops. Local accounts confirm that ours was the first house which had anything to do with bricks—thin brick walls with a tin top. Ours was the rich man’s house: ‘baroloker bari’. Barolok meant bricks.

3 The place used to be infested with ghosts and their stories would be deployed variously. Ghosts and jackals. The colony inhabitants appeared more perturbed by jackals than by ghosts, holding the existence of jackals as a sign of modernity’s betrayal. ‘We remain in the same darkness’, the residents despaired. The jackals would however depart long before electricity arrived. Once during Shoni puja at a neighbour’s courtyard, a poltergeist caused havoc. The puja had just begun; suddenly stones began to rain down on the side of the yard facing a derelict film warehouse, the godown. The men rushed out towards the

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

122 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

123

GROWING UP REFUGEE

godown, while the women restrained us, the kids, and took us inside. Nothing could be found, nobody was seen.The puja started again. After a little while, stones fell again and with more vehemence. The men went to the godown and stationed themselves at strategic places. But the stones kept falling. The puja had to be cut short. The film godown was the citadel of all kinds of ghosts. The story went around that Choton’s mother had noticed somebody cooking late at night on top of the palm trees bordering her house.The palm trees were within the perimeter of the godown. One evening Choton climbed one of those trees. He saw something strange and fell down unconscious. Regaining consciousness, he kept saying, ‘The ghost has come, the ghost has come!’ The trees were cut down the next day. In less than a month’s time, the boundary of Choton’s house moved to include the land where the trees had stood. The main road among many other things signified a different language—the road that took us to a land of a different language, where our vernacular was a taboo. In fact, we lived in three orbits of dialect. First, the dialect of our family, where we were the unadulterated inhabitants of our own East Bengal district—Chattogram, Barishal, Noakhali or Dhaka; second, the particular synthetic lilt of Netaji Nagar, where we were East Bengalis and our language hegemonized by the Dhaka dialect; and, third, as office-goers and in the heart of Calcutta, our Dhaka-influenced dialect yielding to the standard version of Calcutta Bengali. English words had a sparkler effect—words that came to us not so much for their meaning but as mere sparkles. My friend Khudu suddenly picked on the word dictionary, which he pronounced, part deliberately, ‘disk-ke-nari’. He would at times go round and round Mangal, the gharami who worked with bamboos at one end of the ground where we loitered, and rhyme: ‘Mangal’s disk-ke-nari, Mangal’s neck in the noose’. Once I found Shyamal plucking leaves from the small community garden in a vacant plot. I asked him to stop.‘Why shouldn’t I pluck? Is this London?’ Be it the English language or be it London, for us the ultimate metaphor was Calcutta where all that was remote, unknown and cherished, converged.We decontextualized Calcutta just as Calcutta decontextualized us.

4 Every evening around five, Dutta barir jethima (the lady of the Dutta household) would come to our house, carrying the falling sun on her back. Her white widow’s dress looked reddish yellow from a surplus of rust in the water and the absence of detergent. My granny would see her slowly approaching, but wouldn’t bother to

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

123 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

124

MANAS RAY

make room for her. She came, climbed the three steps to our house, pulled up a flat stool and sat on our verandah, next to my granny. They talked, irregularly: of sciatica, of her uncaring nephew who was her sole heir, of the eggplant field that had separated their house from ours in East Bengal, of the sharing of mango yield among our four households there, of the gigantic fish that was caught one evening but which slipped back into the pond, never to be traced again, and of similar events, places and people determinedly lost. My mother made tea for them which she served in large black marble bowls. They slurped the tea noisily. Jethima was always a shade too eager to please my granny which the latter was in no hurry to reciprocate. Jethima was childless, a fact Granny explained as partly due to her self-seeking nature. ‘Pampered women don’t bear children’, she used to say. One afternoon Jethima called out for my mother as she essayed up our steps. She took my mother inside, hurriedly untied the knot at the border of her sari with tentative fingers and gave my mother three hundred rupees. Her crumpled face looked serious. Apparently, she got this money from the government as compensation for the property she had left behind in East Bengal. ‘But it should have been much more!’ my mother said to her. ‘That fellow is a thief!’ she said, referring to her nephew, but it didn’t seem to bother her much. She asked my mother to keep a hundred rupees apart for her satkar (funeral rites) and with the remaining money buy her favourite sweet cake, a mouchak, every afternoon to go with her tea. My mother reluctantly agreed. ‘How much for one?’ ‘Four annas’. ‘How long it will last!’ She was evidently pleased. ‘Long enough … 800 days …!’ My mother sounded peeved. ‘Are you angry?’ Jethima smiled like a child. ‘No … you can eat’, my mother moved out of the room. From then on, a mouchak used to be served to Jethima along with her regular quota of tea. Jethima arrived religiously at five. The two ladies barely talked to each other. Jethima held the old saucer next to her mouth; her toothless mouth suckled the juicy, burnt-brown sweet inside, bit by bit. One day, on eye contact, she held out the sweet to me and asked, ‘Like to have?’ I flitted into the room and watched from inside the dried drips of paint at the ends of the window, the red verandah with black border broken at the edge. ‘Chunni magi!’ (Greedy harlot!) My granny roared mutely, her one hand stretched onto her half-folded legs. ‘What utterings in front of kids!’ My mother muttered her disapproval.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

124 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

125

GROWING UP REFUGEE

Jethima said nothing. She continued eating the mouchak, drank her glass of water, and got up with difficulty. ‘See you, Chabi’, she said to my mother like every other day and opened the wicket gate. Then after a few steps on the road, she stopped. Her hands rested on her thighs, her stooped torso waved up a little. ‘I don’t feed off anybody, I too can say a few things …’, she said fairly loudly, gaze held towards the front. After a long pause, she sighed to my mother: ‘See you, didi’.4 Her torso stooped again as she started walking. Jethima did not last the full 800 days; my granny died even earlier.

5 Childhood was the time of peeping—peeping, and all kinds of holes: peeping between the legs as my granny snored in her afternoon siesta, peeping at the pickle jar through the rusty, torn iron-net of the kitchen cupboard, or peeping out through the hole under the bamboo fence of our primary school at the world upside down. We would occasionally slip out of that hole, run as fast as our legs could carry us. The next day at school was a long twenty hours away! There were other kind of holes, those made by thieves to enter into the house through the clay base of the walls. In Bengali the act is called ‘sindh kata’, but for a long time I knew the act as ‘singh kata’ (to dig hole with horns) and conjured up grotesque images of thieves as men with horns.Those events were indeed grotesque in what followed if the thieves were caught, which very often was the case. Thiefbashing was a system all of its own—merciless, nightlong. The initial alarms, the rushing of local men from different directions, the manner in which they would cordon off the thieves, the early interrogations, tentative cuffs, the slow start of bashing, the gagging of the men with pieces of cloth when the elders left them to the local youth, the carnival of brutality where everyone must have his turn. The fiesta ended in the ceremony of handing over the men to the cops and their officious boss early in the morning, by when the bodies of the victims drooped, a few teeth were missing, a damaged eyeball staring from the depth of the socket. But often they remained, magically, with unimpaired faculty of speech, which broke into a howl the moment the police were spotted, ‘Sir, look what have they done to me….’ Mostly they would die before the cops came, or on the way to the police station. Those who survived would at times be seen back on the job a few months later. After the police van left, the place wore a forlorn look. A few torn pieces of cloth, couple of broken incisors or molars and the inevitable blood stains. Someone among the revellers might then be looking for a missing slipper. Suddenly

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

125 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

126

MANAS RAY

someone might realize he was still grabbing a tuft of hair in his closed fist, brush off the hair and scurry homeward in revulsion. I would develop a ghastly intoxication with the spot where the bashing took place, usually at some intersection of lanes. I would go back to it several times in the next couple of days but inevitably return with a slimy, salted taste in my mouth. I could not understand what made these men risk their lives and, crucially, the torture, all for a few old blankets (these events would occur mostly in the winter), talcum powder, a few saris, trousers, shirts, a transistor set maybe and, if in luck, a few gold trinkets. I could not understand why in the story that would be spun next day, the thieves did not have a place, only direction: from the other side of the silted gutter, or from the paddy fields way beyond our locality, someone would say vaguely. I could not understand why the women and elderly who lamented to my mother ‘It’s too ghastly for the eyes, didi’ also, and inevitably, urged the youth to teach the men a good lesson next time. I could not understand why the man who plunged into our local pool to save a drowning child and then, jumping on a wayside rickshaw, rode to the local hospital ignoring the blustering afternoon heat would also champion such monstrosity. The valiant expression of our insecurity was never seriously challenged; the collective brutality of the community was beyond the pale of its Marxist wisdom. Dhaneshda could recognize one of the nocturnal visitors among the plumbers who had come to install a tubewell in his house:‘Well … have you given up? … How can a human possibly teach you a lesson?’ Not far away, his youthful wife might be busy pouring boiling water from the cooked rice. Big headed, buck toothed, bigeyed Dhaneshda would take a moment’s look at her with hooded eyes as he climbed down from the mound of freshly dug earth, spitting sharply between the gap in his teeth. He was getting late for office. The next couple of evenings would bring an inexplicable sense of fear and I wouldn’t dare to go out in the dark. The scene of the hellish bashing started resembling an abstruse hydra-headed pustule, harrowing and enticing at the same time. In the pale glow of the moon-sliver on the dhutra bush amidst the barking of dogs and braying of jackals, the dark night would look like a crevice from mystery books. I would start becoming an outsider to myself.

6 Amidst all this, something importantly different happened to me. I was in class four. One of my mamas who lived with us for his studies got a job after completing his degree. He was posted to distant Andhra Pradesh. From the very first month, he started sending money to my mother: twenty rupees. I had to join an

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

126 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

127

GROWING UP REFUGEE

English medium school, he thought; it had to begin somewhere. The dark nights of thieves and lantern remained as before but the days changed dramatically. It was a new world of hardcover textbooks neat in brown jackets, no slapping around, no slate pencils but proper pencils and proper copy books, stories of Jesus, progress report at month’s end. I felt excited but also a little divorced from my ambience. There was an urgent need to rechristen the one who has strayed; I acquired a new nom-de-plume. The sobriquet saheb had already been bestowed on my elder brother for his pale skin. Soon I was being referred to as ‘Horlicks!’, enunciated in the stylized way of advertisement jingles. English overwhelmed us—in denial and engagement.‘Kakru, what’s the name of your school again?’ Everyone ready for a gust of laughter. Kakru does not disappoint: ‘Karo-paro-maro-tion’ (he used to go to the local corporation school). Before the riotous gambol could get over it would be my turn, some other question. The imperious saheb school with the wide gateway hardly offered anything beyond the formal. No nooks, no slip-outs.There was a huge lawn with flowerbeds at the borders. Madhusree of olive complexion and chiselled features at times would take me up on the swing. Together we would traverse the sky cocooned in the strong smell of starched frocks. Madhusree of dazzling white sports shoes with long laces neatly done, of long, slender legs, thin lips and curly hair. She was the quiet type. In the late afternoons, I would sometimes journey to Madhusree’s imposing house, meandering past Manohardadu’s shop of jars full of S biscuits, candy sticks and marbles, past Majumderbabu’s ration shop, past the common tubewell of the locality, the potter’s workshop with huge mounds of clay, the violet of water-lilies in the wayside ponds, the long closed gate of the Laskar residence near the main road. When I finally reached her place, Madhusree would be playing badminton with her brother. In that bright, airy house with a grand piano in the wide foyer, music would reverberate from every corner. Everyone would look composed and serene. Her father with drooping eyes would stare at the fading light. Once, in his younger days, he had stumped Don Bradman for a duck. Madhusree’s mother would give me caramel custard to eat, her brother would show me his stamp collection, and she her colourful storybooks. Amidst the elegance and understated splendour, a sense of insecurity would creep up on me. I felt sure that once her father was out of his stupor, he would start yelling. I would conjure up scenes of adult altercations with Madhusree; would tell my folks, they own a tea garden in Darjeeling. In less than a year Mama returned to Calcutta, his eyes and legs swollen. He was admitted to a public hospital. The name of Dr Chetri made its rounds in the family

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

127 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

128

MANAS RAY

for a while. One early morning—when doctors had given up all hope—my father woke up with a fright seeing a patch of bright white light and called Mama by his name, ‘Khokan, Khokan!’ Mama died, I returned to local school. Once out of St Mary’s, I gradually stopped visiting Madhusree. My memory of her would carry no melancholia; it wouldn’t dim either. Largely, my sojourn to St Mary’s was an aberration. In those days, the local school and the community were indivisible.The school was the most potent source of imaginative mapping for the locality. The press for education (shiksha) was enormous and to counter its constant discursive presence, we boys took up different comportments. Education of course brought the ability to attain economic security and, accompanying it, the ability to cope with moral vices. Our neighbour, Jyothisbabu, used to yell at his two daughters almost compulsively as he entered his courtyard on return from the morning bazaar: ‘Swapna read, Ratna read. Keep reading, read out loud! … What’s the matter, why did the reading stop? … I’m going to pounce on you like hell!’ Loud threats like this would occasionally pierce the night. The locality in the late evenings would take on the proportions of a factory, the shiksha factory, with loud readings—rendered in a variety of styles— emanating from different houses. Shiksha would help us win recognition from Calcutta of our bhadralok status, something we thought we rightfully deserved but were deprived of. More importantly, it would demarcate us from the subaltern people of our locality, few of whose children could complete their schooling.

7 My father was active in the West Bengal Headmasters’ Association, a Congress outfit, and used to come home late. If for some reason I happened to be awake, he obliged me at times with oranges and almost always with stories—stories of other times and places. Stories of bravery and humanism, of Arjun’s laksha-bhed, of the Titanic, of Casablanca, stories of historic figures: Newton, Napoleon, Ashok. Of all the shadowy figures of conquest, Nelson bothered me the most. ‘Read and you will know’, was apparently what Nelson’s grandmother, who raised him, used to tell young Nelson every time he had a query—a sermon my father would often use on me as an invocation to the world of knowledge. I knew most of the stories; there was no surprise. But the pleasure of listening and repetition was welcome to my tired eyes. The image of the poor juggler in a remote French village, displaying his feat as Mother Mary descended from her altar and rubbed the sweat away from his exhausted body, enveloped my world with a sense of distant goodness as I glided into cosy sleep. Late at night, amidst the tired barking of the dogs, the waft of distant kirtan, a sliver of moonlight on my bed, the juggler used to reappear between

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

128 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

129

GROWING UP REFUGEE

my sleep and awakening, but not in the way my father described him. He appeared as our Nobi—our nasal Nobi—tall, parrot-nosed, dark tan, sparse goatee, soft voice, eyes of a saint.We did not know where Nobi lived, but saw him hustling from one house to another, washing clothes, shredding ripe coconut, sweeping courtyards. He was the community’s handyman, a daytime figure. He had a funny gait. His legs dangled a bit as he walked. All this, plus his nasal voice: he was our ideal source for fun. ‘Nobi, nachoto!’ (Dance for us, Nobi!) He would flick his arms and legs, bend and twist his body briskly but say, ‘Will tell your folks, okay!’ One day Nobi went mad. Raving mad. The elders of the locality took him away. Nobi never returned; neither did Mother Mary. I never managed to read the piece by Anatole France— perhaps as an act of penance for all the bullying done to this man of innocence. Mornings came with a fright—the squashed, half-eaten orange under my pillow! ‘I’ve to slog daylong like a genie; on top of that, all this farce!’ my mother used to fly into a rage, take the pillow-cover and the bedsheet off and throw them on the floor pointedly. ‘What will you understand?’ my father would say with a helpless smile, wiping the milk and puffed rice that stuck around his mouth from his justfinished breakfast. Towards the mid-1960s, and for a long while, my father’s salary from the school became irregular. The family gained some notoriety from a photo that appeared in the newspaper of my father and his colleagues on hunger strike next to the locked gate of the school. My didi had completed her B.A. degree by then and, as one more enactment of the much repeated refugee allegory, she took up a job as a junior stenographer in a government office. Marriage proposals were put on the backburner; her job came handy in stabilizing the listing boat that was our family. On the day she joined work, didi—like many other womenfolk of our locality—in starched and pressed printed saris, purse strapped on her shoulder, was about to set off. Mother paused for a moment—she was prepared yet somewhat out of her wits—blessed her thrice and went through the gesture of mock spitting once on her forehead, a ritual to ward off evil, normally reserved for special occasions. Father accompanied didi to her office, a long red colonial building, number 3 Government Place in the city centre. He returned after a couple of hours holding a green coconut in his hand, much to the embarrassment of my sister. Like other graduate refugee women, didi did not have much problem in conversing in the standard Calcutta dialect. It was a question of manners, of honour—they did not have the latitude that a male refugee enjoyed in this aspect. Soon enough didi created her own space in the office. My dada did not fare well in his Intermediate Science. After a few days of drawing sketches of balloon vendors and moping about contemplating suicide, he all of a sudden joined the Air Force without letting anyone know in the family. The news caused some ruckus. Father, consulting his Congressmen friends, gave his verdict:

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

129 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

130

MANAS RAY

‘No risk, no gain!’ After getting thrashed in the border skirmish with China, we were then preparing for a round with Pakistan. Dada vowed to mother that he wouldn’t ever touch a cigarette, stashed the sandalwood-smeared holy flower petals in his new rexine suitcase and set off for the railway station in a taxi. As the taxi turned the next corner, mother realized that the tiffin carrier was left behind in the hubbub. Dowryda sprinted behind the taxi, tiffin carrier in hand and returned soon. Mother and grandma got into another of their interminable squabbles. The bickering continued intermittently even after others came back after seeing dada off at the station. Both were lamenting in self-defence without any apparent rationale. With father’s arrival the spat took another turn. The wrangles between father and grandma did not create any disquiet in me; on the contrary, I felt the stirrings of a dormant pleasure more like the rumbles of distant shelling. There was quite a gathering in our house that day. Uncles and cousins, they all came. Gradually the petty squabble morphed into a discourse of social history. Annals of our post-Partition trajectory were laid bare. Was it correct to come and settle in Netaji Nagar from the dank rented dwelling in Central Calcutta? My dada must have crossed Khurda Road Junction by then, and been moving farther away. The question startled me somewhat. It had never occurred to me that Netaji Nagar was one choice out of many.We did hear of desher bari all the time but it only bolstered the feeling that Netaji Nagar was indeed our only home.We kids like our elders wore the badge of refugee all right but in every nook and cranny of our being was Netaji Nagar.The nephew of my father, Keshab, agreed with my grandma—the daughter of a dipti—all the way, ‘I will not let my Swopu grow up in Bijoygarh. I will extract every drop of refugee colony blood from his veins. You just see.’ He kept his vow—they soon shifted to a rented residence in Central Calcutta. Swopu was started on a new chapter.

8 The combined earnings of dada and didi not only shielded us from economic hardship, they brought the drift of modernity to our home. The bookshelf was lined with thick coloured papers bought at G. C. Laha’s; small curios were put on display. Didi came home one day with a large packet containing a Bombay Dyeing bedcover with temple-sculpture prints and some colourful drapery. Mother during her afternoon recesses dragged her old Singer machine on to the middle of the floor and started stitching curtains, her looking-glasses on her nose, wetting the broken end of the thread on her tongue to make it pointed for ease of entry into the eye of the needle— all the time thinking of the ‘interior decoration’ of father’s uncle’s flat next to Indira cinema in the heart of south Calcutta.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

130 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

131

GROWING UP REFUGEE

The curtains were in place, the bedspread covered the bed. It did not last. The ambush was unstoppable. The curtains were slashed by a shaving blade. Mother virtually performed the last rites on the inhabitants of this spooky haunt—and for no known reason blamed it all on father. Father smiled benevolently at mother’s ire—kids everywhere are the same these days. As the communists will make headway, all sense of morality and justice will go down the drain. Mother again dragged out the Singer onto the middle of the floor, mended the curtains, folded them into a tin trunk and made new curtains out of didi’s faded old saris. One afternoon, mother almost threw up everything she had for lunch a little while earlier. The bedspread was splattered with fresh human excreta, wrapped in yam leaves and chucked in through the window. Paresh had just managed to escape. Ma loudly invoked the gods to hasten his death, adding: ‘They call themselves Brahmins! All the no-good namasudras from Noakhali have settled here, preening as Brahmins!’

9 Following in Father’s footsteps, Dowryda was also a Congressman. But he had to be a few steps ahead. He was the Congressman ‘original’ much before the party was split into the old and the new. Dowryda was with the ‘original’ because whatever was original was authentic. Trails of that line of thought stopped at Gandhi. Dowryda had two icons—Mahatma Gandhi and Dilip Kumar.5 And only one addiction: lottery. He came to this family as a one-and-a-half year old. That was in 1943, the year of the great Bengal famine. His was the cow-tender family. His mother came to sell him at the village market: five rupees. The father had already hung himself by then. Granny purchased him—that’s how the name Dowry. The mother came free. Dowryda accompanied father to school. He called himself the ‘caretaker’ and never a peon or an orderly. He was besotted by the idea of being a member of bhadralokdom, perhaps the reason for his attachment to ‘original’ Congress. He never tired of explaining to my mother how important he was to the city’s bigwigs and that the city was not your two-anna-bit refugee colony. Mother used to hand over hot chapati smeared with a thin layer of cream and ask him to stop jabbering. He would change track, this time to the lottery and how he missed the elusive number by a whisker at every go. On holidays Granny was entitled to a hundred ‘pumps’ from the tubewell. She used to savour this share of the dividend on her five-rupee investment by massaging her well-oiled hair with chubby palms under the cascading water, purring all the

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

131 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

132

MANAS RAY

while: ‘May the gods bless you, my son … may they.’ The chanting used to spur Dowryda to whoop ‘Lord be praised!’ with every downward stroke, maybe to earn twice the amount of blessings to double the investment for his next life. If Dowryda ever stopped before the entitled number, granny used to squall: ‘Swine, didn’t I pay for you in hard cash!’ Dowryda disappeared one day. We came to know that he had left for Bombay with Manuda’s brother Junglee (so named by the locality after the Hindi film by the same name). Even after a week, there was no trace of Dowryda. Father’s sizzling fizzled out. Mother stopped griping. Granny also fell quiet after a while of ravaging Hindi filmdom and ‘who knows where that monkey has taken him!’ Dowryda’s mother became busy consoling everybody, ‘Not to worry, he will come back eventually’. And to my father: ‘Dada, when he does, give him an earful … you do!’ Father was ready with the dispensation. When he heard of Dowryda’s return, he climbed down the three steps of our verandah, adjusting the knots of his lungi. Dowryda, in printed shirt, came forward, head bowed down as if receiving benediction. Father shook his head violently by grabbing his unruly mop. But the slapping stopped after the first one. ‘Did you buy him? Who are you to slap him?’ Grandma rescued Dowryda from my father.Tear-streaks like glycerine drops glistened on his cheek. Grandma dragged Dowryda to the tubewell. Shoving his head under the spout, she started pumping it herself that day.

10 There was not much to read save those large volumes of Greenwich Encyclopaedia, which looked rather out of place in our sparse room. And like every other item in the house that had crossed the border and survived, this too had its own story. In fact, these moth-eaten and seldom-used volumes had a special place in the family’s history. They were caught in the convulsions of the Partition, inscribed in an image and described to me so many times that it had almost become part of my growing up— the image of my parents crossing the border during those blood-crazed days, leaving everything behind save my mother’s sewing machine and my father’s bundle of encyclopaedia volumes. Sewing machine and encyclopaedia—two perfect images of domesticity and enlightenment that we acquired from the British, now left to negotiate with the brutality of political geography.6 The few other things that could be recouped to grace our new household—like my mother’s wedding cot, a mirror (original Belgian glass, mother never tired of reminding us), a kitchen cupboard, a bookshelf where the encyclopaedia volumes were eventually housed—came much later.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

132 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

133

GROWING UP REFUGEE

Apart from these encyclopaedia volumes, there were numerous English grammar and composition books, given as ‘specimen’ copies to my father. My father held Nesfield’s grammar book with the respect due to an original, but thought that the one by P. K. De Sarkar was more useful. He tried hard to put into our heads a delight in the way English works. He used to read out Bengali passages from the book for us to translate. Quite a few of them were written by the author himself, mostly in the remembrance mode. As my father read them aloud: ‘There was a mango tree in the courtyard of our village home’, he sobbed, then cleared his nose with his gamcha that he normally used to wave the mosquitoes away. One day P. K. De Sarkar came to visit my father. He was old, thin, with short, curly receding hair. He had thick glasses with a red sandalwood coloured frame and hands that trembled. My father showed him my translations. He nodded his head, approved of my handwriting and asked me the spelling of ‘barber’. He was the first celebrity I met in person. Impaled by the gaze of shiksha, tired of rebellion and lacking other options, I taught myself to struggle through the entries of my choice from the old, motheaten encyclopaedia volumes—the early medieval towns of Europe, the rumbustious conquest of America, Benaras of labyrinthine lanes, sundials, the history of the locomotive. Many a time have I visited the bordering areas of Bengal and Bihar, carried by an engine of some other time.The zombie fresh air, the drone of logging, the rustle of pine and deodar. An unbecoming sense of not belonging begins to get the better of me.

VIOLENCE 11 Local frictions, rivalries, and divides notwithstanding, the main theme of the 1950s and the 1960s was one of social harmony. All this changed radically, almost over-night, in 1970. I remember very precisely the first day of violence at Netaji Nagar. It was one afternoon in September, shortly before my exams—the pre-test for the finals. My mother was in puja. I was trying to solve the previous years’ test papers, waiting to be served food. I heard some footfalls, strange noises coming from outside. I peeped out of the window. Some twenty people marching quietly. They carried knives, pipe guns, spears and iron rods.Their looks signalled that they were on a mission. They were brisk and soft and soon went out of sight. We had heard of the fights between Naxals and the Congress for quite some time then. They took place on the other side of the main road, away from our locality and did

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

133 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

134

MANAS RAY

not affect us much. We belonged to a different political terrain. I was not overly concerned about what I had seen that afternoon. Hours later, towards evening, the news rolled back in whispers that four young men, apparently Naxals, had attacked our locality with bombs and guns from the Naktala-side. The men were cordoned off in the vast stretches of empty land that lay there. They were overpowered and the leader of our side took out his small knife and slit their throats. Within days of this event, the locality took on the aspect of a siege. CRP (Central Reserve Police) raids became common. How quickly people got used to this new reality! How quickly the entire locality took on a combative look! The fight was between the CPI(M) and the Congress, but it was translated into a fight between the two localities.

12 We were not unused to politics. Since childhood I had seen small rallies of local people streaming down the lane, men chanting slogans in unison, the boys at the front followed by the senior of the lot, his palms held at the back, his gaze fixed to the sky like the defiant terrorist Khudiram approaching the British noose. So often in our high-school days, we had gushed out in a team ignoring the scornful looks of older teachers, shouting in unison slogans of gigantic simplicity: Amar naam, tomar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam (‘My name, your name, Vietnam, Vietnam’; naam being the Bengali word for ‘name’). I didn’t exactly know where Vietnam was on the map. It didn’t matter, for Vietnam was everywhere, a libidinal expanse, a name-place where blood flowed to announce the death of a world order. What was happening now, however, was very different. That day the CRP men came pretty early. I ran out of our house, unnoticed. My school-leaving exam was not far. If I were arrested, I argued to myself, I would lose a whole year. We started off as a group of three. Gradually others trickled in and we became a group of six. Boys and women banged the lamp-posts to indicate the direction of CRP movement. We followed the sound and navigated our way. I hadn’t been in such a situation before. This was a lack I needed to fill. We could hear footfalls from various directions. We were taking our chances. We reached the main road and took an oncoming bus out of the area. We returned much later and discovered that all our efforts had been in vain. Apparently, the CRP had come, made a round and left in about ten minutes. On this occasion they never got off the van. As I neared our house, I saw my mother waiting at the end of our lane. On other occasions when I was late getting back home in the evening, I used to find her at the

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

134 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

135

GROWING UP REFUGEE

gate ready to blow up into a rage. But today it was different; she didn’t look at me, merely entered the gate and quietly told my father that she could not take this dance with death anymore. She looked distraught, pale. At night, my father came to me and caressed my back with his palm. He had been in and out of British jails; the present leaders would surely respect that, he mused. The next day I was arrested, unceremoniously. On return from Jadavpur lock-up, I was bundled off to a relative’s place at New Alipore, a nouveau-riche locality in Calcutta those days. The strongly-built, nicely-curved houses, the spacious rooms, huge radiogram in the lounge, boys and girls looking neat on spanking bicycles, young women gracefully attractive—all this found a lulling resonance with my adolescence. I took it as my true ambience. I was brought back home the night before my school-leaving exam. The next morning I started off early to Bapuji Nagar School to take my exam. When the bus reached a large playground outside Netaji Nagar, I saw a crowd in one corner. I peeped out of the window to see four headless bodies lying in a pool of blood. I had finally entered adulthood.

13 The English department of Presidency College those days was unmistakably an elite bastion. I did not belong. My friends were from other faculties. For the first time, I became conscious of my background. Daughters of the D. K. Sens—the city’s commercial aristocracy once nurtured by the British—remained alien to me. Political correctness was yet to come, and they had no time for me. On my part, I was busy hiding my inadequacies, expressed mostly through various means of subaltern bravado. Caught between desire and deprivation, I at times used to see one of them at the turn of the staircase, drinking water from the tap. Head bent. Her lips did not touch the multicoloured plastic cup. A hanky flickered between her fingers. The gentle movement of her throat as water gargled down. She shook the glass dry, neatly tucked it into her bag and went away. Later in their lives, they would talk ‘discourse’, teach English in Denver, do Cultural Studies, expose the politics of English, in the same breath support a New York cabbie strike and talk about a tenure-track position in Philadelphia; but first they would have got married to their eligible Indrapratims: biophysics, postdoc, Sussex.... Our names were different. My inhibitions. Their elegance. Our mutual deprivations. Back at Netaji Nagar, one had to keep track of the changing geography of safety. The road that might be safe today was not so the next day. My entry to college was marked by one significant personal disappearance: the main road. Our narrow but deep spatial home needed a boundary to be real. And this was the main road.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

135 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

136

MANAS RAY

It wasn’t the kind of boundary that contrasted us, immediately, with what we were not. Rather, it was like an endless ribbon stretching through a tapestry beyond our immediate domain to a remoteness of dreams, messiness, and what we threateningly knew as ‘reality’. As Calcutta came close, the main road receded.

14 As our days became nights, the nights in their turn woke up to their many crevices. Strange stories started circulating about the nocturnal adventures of those who, risking their lives, protected us from marauders of the rival localities. Locallymade grenades and other arms were stored in bushy corners of the house courtyards, without the knowledge of the occupants. Boys climbed to the top of coconut trees and stuck there, as the CRP men patrolled the area with torches. If a coconut dropped at odd hours without any notice, we became suspicious. Nights were full of the sound of footfalls, whispers and brisk running. The story went that on one occasion Kanu fell from a tall coconut tree unhurt, his body finely balanced on his chopper that dug deep into the ground. The shaping of the community as a combat zone had profound effects on its social structure, particularly in terms of collective guardianship. Netaji Nagar was reduced to little more than a political habitat. Its precious social capital haemorrhaged in every direction and the locality struggled to retain something of itself. Familiar people suddenly became strangers. Khoka, who lived a couple of houses away from ours, stopped going to college one day. He was found pacing up and down our lane in the afternoon heat, holding an old umbrella with a cane handle. He did not respond to greetings, did not bother to recognize any one. One day on seeing me, he stopped. He looked pensive as an iguana and said softly: ‘When aroused, a husband is a husband—earning or not doesn’t matter.’ He started walking again. The rumour made the rounds that Harimohan was made to do sit-ups holding his ears by the night guards in broad daylight. Apparently, he was found raping a girl of class four. This was stunning. Some witnessed it, everyone heard about it, but no one—even today—is willing to talk about it. Harimohan was the headmaster of our primary school. He was tall, dark and willowy. When he wanted to beat us, which he did quite often, very casually he would take a strip of bamboo out of the bera and beat us. There was no use complaining. He was an organic part of the community, respected by elders and feared by us. I remember an incident of one stormy morning. In those days rain was rainier, storm stormier. On that particular occasion, when the storm had subsided, news reached us that our school had apparently been blown away. We rushed out to find that it was all a shambles. The tin roof, the moth-eaten wooden poles, the

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

136 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

137

GROWING UP REFUGEE

blackboards all lay scattered and abandoned. And in the midst of the debris sat Harimohan on a bench, stoned and listless. The bad words that we had engraved on the benches and the stones thrown on the tin roof in the evening hours as acts of shadow rebellion and compulsive mischief remained mute and unnoticed witnesses to nature’s fury. The striped shirt of Harimohan was familiar, so were the slippers made of tyre, but his look was unfathomable.We kids did not know how to negotiate this new figure of Harimohan. One kind of fear was challenged by another, new kind—the fear of uncertainty, of confronting the ravaged look of someone we believed to be indomitable. Our locality had its own refugees, the political activists ousted from our rival localities. We looked after our political guests well. One day a few of them disappeared. After that, the CRP started coming with men in masks.The underground hospital was discovered, the arms factory and the different hideouts. Netaji Nagar gradually bore a desolate look. The CRP would visit our locality less often and the killings became infrequent. In course of time, it was no more all that unsafe to sit next to the window in the bus and be seen from the roads.

15 Towards the end of my college life, my father fell critically ill. Renal failure, the two words every member of the family knew and dreaded. He returned after four months in the hospital, but was never the same again. He lived for two more years. My contribution to the sagging family finances became urgent and I found myself offering private tuitions, almost endlessly. I was mindless about the job and only the monthly payment interested me. On one occasion when I visited a student during Bijoya Dashami, the father came up to me and in the guise of doing kolakoli, whispered the three words, ‘Tomar-ta kal hobe’ (You will be paid tomorrow), from one side of my head to another, as he pressed his mouth close to my left ear, then right and back to the left again. The words were relayed with such finesse that I was willing to believe that the ritual was designed to serve such a purpose. The day my father died, my mother cried for a long time. Towards the evening, as the dead body was placed in our courtyard and preparations were underway for the funeral, I remember her lying on the bed, mute from weakness, her one leg bent at the knee, the foot pressing the other leg stretched straight as she rolled gently from one side to another, the kantha she had embroidered for her grandson wrapped on her hand rubbing her face. She tossed her head at times and sighed deeply as if it was an early end, as if it was the end of the road. Her sari with green border (which would soon be replaced by stark white thaan for the rest of her life); her skin radiant; her lips dry, purple-pink; the thin, sparse down around her mouth

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

137 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

138

MANAS RAY

sprightly in oblivious rebellion. Her body looked like a scroll. The nagging tapestry of poverty; her mother-in-law who as the daughter of a dipti of colonial times considered herself superior in status and who widowed at the age of eighteen with two children would live for sixty years more, cautious and boastful of the nittygritty of her widowhood; all the children my mother bore; the Partition; the house set on fire as she rushed out with her three children, the younger two on her either arm, the eldest clinging to her sari from the back, she moving towards her parents’ place through a locality sporadically burning under a crimson sky rent by cries of bigots; the first couple of years immediately after the Partition in a dingy tenement house in north Calcutta which she had to share with other relatives, also refugees; the early years at Netaji Nagar amidst strange looking insects, preying jackals, snakes, and dark nights; the journey to collect drinking water from the deep tubewell that Adhikaribabu had bored for the new locality, a good ten minutes walk from our home, while I hammocked in her belly; camaraderie with neighbouring women with whom she would at times spend hours chatting, sitting in the courtyard in the late afternoon sun; my father’s gastronomic whims: ‘Look Chabi, what have I got!’ as he poured out the tiny, jumping fishes late at night and which she then had to dress and cook though not without a whimper; the pestering demands of my father after her day’s chores (he was a headmaster, he used to say); the hand that slapped me, stiff and with cracks. As my father’s body burnt and the robust bones rattled, Calcutta seemed to recede into the distance. Within days, I knew I had to give up my job and try somewhere else, in some other city. I was actually running away from the smell of the pyre. Standing next to the thick granite boundary-wall of ‘up-campus’ Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, faced with an empty drone and a torrential space that stretched beyond the airport, I sensed a new beginning.

16 People coming from East Bengal carried their ‘homes’ on their back. They saw the landscape grow as part of their settling down.The landscape we created and the dialects we spoke were the only traces to our history. We kids were brought up in the midst of that landscape: it had a sensual density that made us ignore the rest of the world, other ways of living, other refugees who struggled in similar yet different ways in the dingy quarters of the city. Harmony, haphazardness, curves, bends, the dialects, the proverbs, stories of our roots: all this gave the place its nativity, a structure of feeling and we were serenely, mirthfully cocooned in it. We acquired our significance, our place in the world, from a Calcutta eternally trespassing, eternally kept in abeyance. In retrospect, what Appadurai (1997) calls ‘the locality

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

138 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

139

GROWING UP REFUGEE

constituting’ exercise seemed in our case a drive to prevent, if not obliterate, ‘the contingency-awareness’ (Chakrabarty 1996: 2143) of the Partition, that is, the fear of the aleatory, the sense that home—no matter how ancient and blessed by ancestors—can be tossed away overnight. The violence of the 1970s demolished all that, all our ‘home-work’, and the contingency-awareness once again occupied centrestage. The routes of these two experiences of violence were different as were the causes. But once again people would see the disruption as a ‘monstrously irrational aberration’ (ibid.: 2144) from what was taken as almost a natural order. An air of conspiracy filled the place— forces greater than us seemingly conspired to deprive us of our ‘dwelling’. We celebrated our victimhood in whispers, stories of those killed, the efforts gone into making ‘our’ pipe-guns and grenades. Ironically, for the first time, we also felt ‘inside’ history. The years of violence were a great watershed.Those who returned to the locality after the violence subsided and those who had continued living there, we all lost our ‘dwelling’, at least the way we knew it. Calcutta was our destiny; there was no room for opaqueness.

GOVERNMENT 17 Ironically enough, the 1970s were also the time of sustained developmental efforts. For the first time, the government emerged from its veil of ambiguity and took us seriously.The World Bank entered in the form of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA): roads were metalled, an underground drainage system constructed, the primary schools moved into their new buildings, lamp-posts were seen in remote narrow lanes, the locality was given its first post office. The developmental efforts accelerated once the Left Front came to power in 1977. Given the tradition and structure of the CPI(M) a refugee colony like Netaji Nagar (located as it was at the interface between the city and outsiders) played a crucial mediating role between the party’s urban and rural policy in the early days of the Left Front government. Netaji Nagar was particularly fortunate in this regard since the local leader Prasanta Sur was in charge of the Ministry of Urban Development for the first ten years of the Front rule. People who left the locality came back and quite a few of the young party activists were rewarded with government jobs. Overall, the economic standard of the locality has gone up, since the school-goers of the 1960s and 1970s have joined the job market, and families now have more than one earning member.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

139 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

140

MANAS RAY

I left Netaji Nagar in 1978 to do my Masters in New Delhi. Since then, I visit my ancestral house every now and then and have stayed there for different stretches of time. When I visit the place, a strangeness overcomes me. It is quite a differentiated place now. This is in almost every respect: in terms of space (those who live in apartment houses vis-à-vis those who do not) as well as in terms of time-scale with which people operate (those who have a strong nostalgia for the past and those who have very little appreciation of it). In terms of language too, the place is no longer a homogeneous entity (apart from those who speak the dialect and those who do not, there are also those who do not speak Bengali at all). Class-wise, the differences are most keenly felt between those who have ‘made it’ and those who haven’t. And if this is so among neighbours, it is equally true within the same family. As Netaji Nagar became more complex, literate, urban, it lost its distinctiveness and, along with it, the founding myths. The households have become self-sufficient and the infrastructure of the locality is at par with the rest of Kolkata.This has eaten deep into the roots of the once-valued colony solidarity. Local people want to enjoy the fruits of development but do not want to participate in the social life of the locality. More important perhaps is the new orientation: what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls ‘the telos of a result’ (1996: 135)—modernity’s web of product and purpose— has now been built into the life-world of local people. They have moved away from the colony committee, once the nodal point of sociality, which in its turn has taken on an increasingly bureaucratic role and become a surveillance centre for the party apparatus. As part of the broader scenario of West Bengal, the local schools, once the nodal point of community’s moral posturing, have disintegrated. Sending children to such schools is beneath people’s dignity. Private institutions, mostly ‘Englishmedium’, have mushroomed and school buses from far quarters of the city are seen in the locality. During this period, the local people have gained legal ownership of their land. In 1989, we were given a lease of ninety-nine years by the government. Ten years later, in 1999, the right to sell off our land was granted to us with a far-reaching impact on the local landscape. Real estate sharks have moved in, creating new networks of power and money in the locality. After retaining a village-like look for four decades, Netaji Nagar since the early 1990s has suddenly started growing tall. New constructions spring up every day. The advent of apartment modernity looks complete and as a corollary to the process, new people from different parts of the city are coming in. It is no longer unusual to hear languages of other parts of India being spoken at market places, bus stops and telephone booths. Even Netaji Nagar has gone ‘multicultural’. With pastoral governmental care reaching our locality from the mid-1970s in the form of developmental activities, the community had already been bureaucratized. Now, acquiring legal title to land, we have been thrown into the maelstrom

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

140 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

141

GROWING UP REFUGEE

of contemporaneity, the contemporary face of postcolonial urbanity: one of gadget shops with fancy names, corporation vats with bulging, unyielding bellies, ‘Sugar and Spice’ and other confectioneries, ‘joint entrance’, tutorial classes, godheads, STD booths, even cybercafés. Catching up with Kolkata has also meant becoming translocal. The process has mapped the political space of all colonies that came up close to the partition, Netaji Nagar being no exception. Very early on a civic association was formed, since most of those who settled here had the language of political processes, the link-line with the language of the state. The struggle with the state was to become part of it, not to question it headon. The demand was not to overhaul the state apparatus, but to be included within its fold. Once that demand was satisfied substantially in terms of developmental activities—legally and otherwise—people felt no intrinsic need for the posturings of the Left.The earlier sense of politics has lost much of its appeal as the community is being thoroughly included within the folds of the larger civil society and our bhadralok status vindicated. Today the Left draws its rhetorical force from an act of remembrance: it asks not to forget the early days of hardship and the achievement of the colony people and contrasts the role of the Left with the neglect of the Congress regime. Understandably, this does not evoke the desired response from young people, who did not witness much of this; more importantly, such claims provide no answers to their present problems. The vacuum is addressed by another brand of politics—a politics of memory that gestures at the treatment meted out to the Hindus by the Muslims in undivided Bengal. Those born after the Partition are more eager to subscribe to this thesis of the past—a past bereft of memories is the ideal ground for state-sponsored nostalgia. And between these fraught acts of collective remembrance/forgetfulness is the electronic public sphere attributing the locality a virtual identity. Recently Netaji Nagar held its annual entertainment evening. Such occasions no longer attract a crowd. Not good enough for the main community ground, not even for the relatively smaller school ground, it was held in the main cross-section of roads to gain some visibility. The artistes were no longer from the locality, but hired prominent personalities of the city. The spectators, the few that there were, consisted mostly of the domestic help and their children. But it would be utterly wrong to think no one else was watching, for everyone was watching. They were watching from their bedrooms or drawing-rooms on the small screen cabled by the local operator.The community of Netaji Nagar today is largely a virtual community, a virtual locality. The charming fluidity of nostalgia is the charm of an internal space, one that colours a void with diverse shades of light. The trope of the traveller of the nonmodern, however, looks pitiable in a scenario of uncontrollable postcolonial urbanity. I aspire to representational stability, my own emplacement to bridge my present

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

141 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

142

MANAS RAY

with the past of Netaji Nagar. Others who live there have lived through the slow process of oblivion. More than ever before, Netaji Nagar today is an open chapter; it is no more the locality of one kind of people with one kind of past. On the contrary, it is a living crisscross of many lines, the web of intricate connections not unfurled to the occasional visitor. Memory, even as memory of changing space, does not live in a void but in relations: not only to other micrological memories but of necessity to that other broad scenario of history as memory, the governmental site monitoring our self-understanding of the social—a point that remains largely unaddressed in this paper. The recent spate of academic interest in the Partition of India takes place at a point of time in Bengali national life when the word ‘displacement’ has become more of a euphemism for betterment, evoking as it does the luxuriating prospect of professional Bengali diaspora in the West, and not so much the sad plight of millions ousted from their erstwhile home. The melancholia that had set in with the Partition only deepened as Bengal’s economy dwindled and its status in national politics waned. The bhadralok class of today’s Kolkata is immersed, it seems irredeemably, into a retro-celebration of its past achievements, cornered and lonely in the face of the swelling demands for democracy by the subaltern classes. The alienation of the bhadralok is a bridge between the bhadralok’s two selves: the ‘local’ and the diasporic.The diasporic bhadralok recognizes this but does not acknowledge it, since spelling out his alienation in his ‘chosen’ land will deprive him of all justifications for having emigrated. The ‘local’ bhadralok on the other hand sees in his diasporic ‘other’ the self that has risked ‘death’ and hence is the ‘master’. He expresses this crisis in either complete surrender or vehement rejection of his ‘other’— more often, the two together—while both the selves are caught in the fossilized ‘taste’ culture of yesteryears. Written in it is the lost project of the Bengali bhadralok’s modernity that he had once framed for himself and to which he is umbilically attached. In this context, the history of the uprooted, who had once staked their claim for the city’s bhadralokdom they thought they rightfully deserved but were deprived of, acquires a special poignancy. The present paper tries to capture some shades of that story of struggle, to convey a sense of the ‘compelling, contradictory, and pernicious’. The desire to understand is an attempt to recapture what one has lost. * In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. —Ben Okri, Famished Road

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

142 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

143

GROWING UP REFUGEE

GLOSSARY Anna Arjun’s laksha-bhed

Bera Bhadralok

Bijoya Dashami Dada Desher bari Dhoti-panjabi Dhutra

Didi Dipti Gamcha Gharami Hijal

Jethima ‘Joint entrance’ Katha Kantha Kirtan Kolakoli

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

In the old coinage, no longer in use, sixteen annas make a rupee. An episode from the Mahabharata. Dronacharya, the guru of archery, asked young Arjun to aim at a bird sitting on a tree. Arjun said that he could see only the bird and nothing else. Asked again, Arjun replied that he saw only one eye of the bird. The guru meets his perfect disciple. Fence or wall made by knitting bamboo strips. The educated Hindu Bengali middle class which looks upon itself as the standard-bearer of Bengali modernity. The term derives its charge from its antonym, chotolok (literally the small people)—the illiterate, uncivilized class. Festivity that follows after the immersion of the idol of Goddess Durga, marks the last day of Durga Puja. Elder brother. Village home (here it has the added connotation of the home left behind on the other side of the national border). Traditional attire of Bengali bhadralok. A wild bushy plant with long slender white or violet flowers and small, round thorny fruit known for its mild narcotic property. Elder sister. Corrupted form of ‘Deputy Magistrate’. A thin piece of cloth, usually coloured and striped, used as a towel. One who builds huts of bamboo and tiles professionally. A tree associated with the East Bengal (now Bangladesh) landscape and immortalized by the poet Jibanananda Das. Scientific name: Barringtonia acutangula. Wife of father’s elder brother. Admission exam for medical and engineering colleges in West Bengal. A unit of measurement. Sixty kathas make an acre. Old clothes stitched together and embroidered; used more like either a nappy or a quilt. Singing in praise of God, at times in narrative form. Mutual embrace between two male relatives.

143 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

144

MANAS RAY

Lungi Mama Mouchak

A piece of long cloth wrapped around the waist, like a sarong. Maternal uncle. Literal meaning, beehive. Here the name of a juicy sweet, now not so much in vogue. Agrarian caste of lower order. District in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, the storm-centre of communal violence between Muslims and lower-caste Hindus prompting Gandhi’s famous peace mission in 1946. Worship. Education, in the broad sense. Worship of the god Shoni, or Saturn. In popular belief, Shoni’s displeasure can cause deep distress. White cloth without coloured border, the traditional dress of Bengali widows. Country doctor, usually practitioner of herbal medicine.

Namasudra Noakhali

Puja Shiksha Shoni puja Thaan Vaid

NOTES * This is a slightly modified version of my article in History Workshop Journal (issue 53, 2002). I acknowledge the following for editorial assistance at different stages of the draft: Prabir Basu, Shinjini Chatterjee, Anna Davin, Regina Ganter, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Anindita Sengupta, and Andrew Whitehead. I interviewed more than fifty people of Netaji Nagar and its surrounding areas. The list is too long to be reproduced here. However, special mention must be made of the following: Anjan Chakraborty, Manik Sarkar, Malay Bhattacharya, and Swapan Dey. The paper would not have been possible without the intellectual encouragement of Asok Sen. I dedicate the piece to him and to my didi, Anjali Sarkar, my meghe dhaka tara. 1. The reference to camels is from one of the most famous campaigns in the history of advertising. It has to do with a brand of cigarettes called Camel. One fine morning, on a huge, empty billboard at an important crossing in Manhattan, came a small picture of a lone camel at one corner. The next day there were two of them, then four, and so on till the whole board was teeming with camels. People had no clue what this meant. Then one day the board was painted white again and in the middle were the words, in bold, ‘The Camels Are Coming’. The next day, finally, came the picture of the Camel cigarette packet and the mystery was solved. 2. For a detailed account of refugee in-flow in the immediate years after the Partition, see Jhuma Chakrabarti (1995: 43–46). See also Joya Chatterji (2001). As per official estimate, a total of 4.26 million refugees migrated from East Pakistan to West Bengal between 1946 and 1962 (Chatterji 2001: 102–103). 3. Jhuma Chakrabarti and Joya Chatterji have documented in detail the ambiguity of both the state and Central governments towards Bengali refugees. See Chakrabarti (1995: Chapters 3 and 4) and Chatterji (2001: 74–110). 4. Didi means elder sister; but is used affectionately here by a lady much older than my mother.

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

144 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

145

GROWING UP REFUGEE

5. Dilip Kumar was a famous Hindi film star of the 1950s and 1960s. 6. I borrow the phrase ‘brutality of political geography’ from Urvashi Butalia: ‘[The Partition’s] simple, brutal political geography infused and divided us still’ (1996: 16).

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun,‘The Production of Locality’, in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Butalia, Urvashi, ‘Blood’, Granta, 57, 1996: 16. Chakrabarti, Jhuma, The Refugee Problem in West Bengal: 1947–1955 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Calcutta, 1995). Chakrabarti, Prafulla, The Marginal Man (Calcutta: Lumiere Books, 1990). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ’Remembered Villages’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31(32), 1996: 2143. ———, ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’, Public Culture, 11(1), 1999: 135. Chatterji, Joya, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–50’, in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Dutta, Debabrata, Bijoygarh: Ekti Udbastu Upanibesh (Kolkata: Progressive Publishers, 2001).

07_Roy & Bhatia~chap-7.pmd

145 Black

8/8/2007, 9:23 AM

146

SHUCHI KOTHARI AND RITA KOTHARI

8 Crossing the Border in Opposite Directions: Two Partition Narratives

SHUCHI KOTHARI AND RITA KOTHARI

In 1947–48 two sixteen-year-old boys—one Hindu, the other Muslim—each made an irrevocable journey. One went from Delhi in the newly independent state of India, crossing the border for Karachi in another new state, Pakistan, while the other moved from Shikarpur in Sindh, Pakistan to a new life in India. The two boys, Z (Muslim) and M (Hindu), are now both retired men in their seventies. The coincidence of these two unwilling migrants of similar age crossing borders at almost the same time is not the only reason that they come together in this paper. Partition studies in India and Pakistan seldom look at the simultaneity of movement from both sides. This article employs a relatively fresh approach in the field by looking at concurrent movements in opposite directions. The two-way border-crossing of Partition requires methodologies that develop perspectives that are mobile and Janus-faced. In 1947–48, the border dividing India and Pakistan witnessed a mass exodus of reluctant migrants from both nations. It should be possible to identify many cases of similarities in age, gender and experiences and undertake a study of simultaneity in Partition experiences on both sides of the border. These experiences are marked by particular points of origin and specific trajectories of migration and settlement. Z was part of the movement of approximately 1.3 million Muslims to Pakistan. He belonged to the large numbers of urban, Urdu speakers from Delhi and UP who would soon be known in Pakistan as mohajirs. A word that designated migrant status effectively became an ethnic category in the 1951 census in Pakistan. M was one of approximately 1.4 million displaced Hindus who left the province of Sindh for India. What brings Z and M together in our narrative is the historical irony of their ultimate connection through the same family. They are both closely related to the authors of this piece, through whom their experiences are now mediated. Shuchi

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

146 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

CROSSING THE BORDER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

147

Kothari is Z’s Hindu daughter-in-law. Rita Kothari (daughter of M) is married to Shuchi’s brother.Two Partition experiences articulate with each other in the Kothari family. As a result of the choices their children made, M and Z’s experiences encounter each other even as a larger, political history posits them as ‘oppositional’. Though Z and M have never met, a dialogue has been generated through their stories as told to us. By juxtaposing their testimonials we seek to break away from the privileging of either the Hindu or the Muslim experience. While Rita’s interview with her father now forms part of a larger project on Sindhi identity in postcolonial India, its original impetus lies in Rita’s quest to understand her own ambivalence toward her hyphenated Sindhi-Gujarati identity. Her position as a diasporic descendant of Sindhi refugees in Gujarat has at different times spelt exclusion and inclusion. At the same time, Shuchi has had to face a measure of alienation and negotiate the communal divide when she married a Pakistani-British Muslim. In an effort to put into relief the initial opposition of Z’s family to her marriage to their son, Shuchi has attempted to understand how the experience of Partition has shaped the family’s view of communal relations. The trauma of Partition continues to haunt religious, ethnic and cultural discourses of displaced South Asians. When Rita and Shuchi shared their respective interviews with each other, what came across glaringly was how Partition still continues to manifest itself in big and small ways. Its legacies travel far and impinge upon its ‘victims’ in ways invisible to its chief actors and those around and after them. What also emerges from the similar yet divergent stories of Z and M is the specificity of each Partition experience. While contributions by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin provide nuanced accounts of refugees, Partition scholarship largely focuses on the Punjabi experience. Often subsumed under a Partition discourse that is frequently insensitive to heterogeneity, Partition narratives seldom analyse the role class, gender and ethnicity play in understanding the traumatic experience of such massive and violent displacement. We hope that our interviews with M and Z tease out some of these differences. To do so, we asked them similar questions. The fragments of memory that formed their answers are used to reconstruct parallel histories. Rita’s interview with M was conducted in Sindhi in Mumbai in June 2001. Shuchi’s interview with Z was conducted in English in London in July 2001. We began by asking them both about their early experiences. One of M’s early memories goes back to his school days: M: I vividly remember going from the first to the eighth standard and also visits to the tikaana (temple) listening to kathas with my mother. I remember helping with household chores. My mother had only me because her eldest son had gone on to live on his own. The second son was also away in Karachi most of the time. I was

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

147 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

148

SHUCHI KOTHARI AND RITA KOTHARI

the only one left, and hence I had the responsibility of looking after her and studying. Cleaning and running of the house, everything was my job.

Education in M’s middle-class mercantile home was never a priority, whereas Z benefited from a tradition of teachers. Z: My father always thought that educating his children was the most important thing since we didn’t have any other property. He provided us with plenty of opportunities—magazines, we used to write little stories—we had also set up a library at home that we used to run as four brothers.That was the kind of childhood I had. My father was a teacher in a private Islamic school and so was my maternal grandfather, an educationist who was also driven by the same feeling that Muslims were living in a deprived state and not doing enough for themselves and the only way forward was to up the educational facilities and standards. He founded Shwebia College in Agra.

For M the memory of school is marked by tragic wistfulness since he could not continue his education after Partition. The day he found a lock outside his school the reality of leaving Sindh fully dawned on him.What he did not realize was that the doors to education had closed on him forever. M: Had Partition not taken place, I would have had our property in Sindh, I would have had education. I was an exemplary student, I don’t think I ever stood second in class, all the way up to the eighth standard. Had I been able to continue that way, my life would have been something else, perhaps. Who knows, I may well have ended up as an educated officer or whatever. But the way, suddenly, Hindustan– Pakistan took place and I had to leave school without even taking my school certificate, it became impossible to go back to education. I did not have any economic or other means of resuming my education. I remember spotting a friend of mine as a Ticket Collector at Boribund Station and I felt very bad about my wanderings.

As soon as he came to India, M began to fend for himself and his mother by peddling small consumer goods in trains, and hawking sweets, combs and fruits on pavements. He then graduated to becoming a small-time businessman. On the other hand, Z’s family left India for Pakistan but did not take him and his elder brother with them.The boys were left behind to finish their school term in Aligarh University. Z’s father, who after losing his teaching job sold his last piece of furniture to educate his children, was surely not going to let Partition get in the way of his children’s education. Z and his brother received their school certification in Aligarh in 1948 and then left for Karachi. Recalling the years before Partition, Z and M’s varied responses to the turbulent times they lived in reflect their different yet distinct sense of being members of minority groups.

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

148 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

CROSSING THE BORDER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

149

Z: I attended some of those prayer meetings in Delhi, but there was always that fear that you were a minority. You were a Muslim. You hope people don’t recognize you if something goes wrong. This fear was a part of the Muslim consciousness at that time. When the Muslim League was strong in 1944, they held one of their conferences in our school. We as young boys were volunteered into doing odd jobs for the conference—in little uniforms carrying things back and forth. I saw Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liyakat Ali Khan first hand.While we knew something important was going on, the significance was lost on us. This was the 1944 conference in which the Pakistan Resolution was passed. Even when I was in Lahore studying medicine, I was too young. And then later I was so consumed with the idea of getting out of college, start earning money and pull the family up that I didn’t become a part of any political movement or harbour any active political thought.

M had also felt that as a Hindu he was a minority in Pakistan but his minority status manifested itself in forms of self-assertion rather than self-effacement. M: When I was in Sindh, as a young boy, I was highly involved in the activities of the RSS and considered myself committed to the cause of Hindutva. It had been communicated to us that Hindus ought to be prepared for their safety. I was asked, ‘M, what would you like to do?’ One of the options was to make tiger-claws, sharp and ferocious, the kind that Shivaji used on Afzal Khan. I had opted for it and started making about five to seven every day. My commitment to the RSS gradually became more and more serious, from a trainee I graduated to being one of the leaders of the main branch. I lived in the aura of Hindutva, or should I say, infected by it. Day and night we had been told that Hindutva had been destroyed.

Z on the other hand, claims no involvement in dominant political movements of his time. Z: While I was aware of what was happening I can’t say I had political consciousness or great interest in whether this was right or not. I was a slow grower as one might say. I think all of us were caught in the events rather than being objective.We swam with the tide, or rather, we didn’t swim, we were taken with the tide.

It was only the fear of a Muslim attack that kept M’s energies anchored to the RSS and its anti-Muslim ideology. He clearly states that he does not remember any instances of personally experienced communal violence. M: We felt that Muslims might attack the shakha or our swayamsewaks anytime and we needed to look after ourselves. At times Muslim boys would jump over the fence and we faced them with our lathis. I have learnt since to look after myself and not rely on somebody else to protect me. I owe that courage to my days in the RSS.

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

149 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

150

SHUCHI KOTHARI AND RITA KOTHARI

At the same time, M admits that his journey from Sindh to India was free of any explicit incidents of violence. M: It must be said that all the Sindhis from Sindh I have met so far in India in the last fifty years—none, but none has mentioned any loss of human life in his or her family. It is clear that the Sindhi Muslims had not been violent against the Hindu Sindhis. When people talk about violence/rapes/murders—all that was not in Sindh but in Punjab, Peshawar, Baluchistan. The peace and dignity of the Sindhi Muslims must be acknowledged.There were a few cases of robbery and hooliganism, but I don’t give that much importance.

On the other hand, Z’s reference to the ‘troubles in Delhi’ belies a greater sense of anxiety. Z: Our main concern was where our relatives were, who used to live in such and such place.We knew where the trouble had happened and some of the families had been killed. Yes, some of the families I knew—our relatives, they had been completely decimated in the Karol Bagh area and other places. We knew they had been killed. And some were saved and were in refugee camps in the old fort area.

M’s journey from Shikarpur to Karachi and then on to Bombay, and Z’s journey from Agra to Bombay and then on to Karachi intersect at the city of Hyderabad, Sindh. Z: We had heard people were being thrown out of trains. If they found some ruddy alien, they would throw them out of the train.Yes, it was Hindus throwing Muslims out in UP. The incidents were perhaps small in number but they terrified us. By the time my brother and I left Aligarh to go to Karachi (1948) things had calmed down but the fear remained. After all, it was a train full of migrants. Every time the train stopped for any reason, you’d be frightened. At the border the local police came around, unnecessarily asked all of us to get off the train. We were made to sit on the platform. Harassment techniques. I was only sixteen, and my brother seventeen. We were so frightened then, not streetwise at all.

In his description of the train journey from Delhi to the new Pakistan, Z remembers feeling a sense of relief in Hyderabad. Z: First of all we arrived in Hyderabad, Sindh. It looked so different. People were dressed differently for a start. They were Sindhis with turbans on their heads and big shalwars. It was a culture shock with different language too. Felt like you were in a foreign land. But it was an open country, with wide, open spaces, the desert, shining sun. You suddenly felt relieved. You had no cause for fear any more, you were near the end of your journey. From Hyderabad we had to change to the main train which took us to Karachi.

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

150 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

CROSSING THE BORDER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

151

For Z the unfamiliar ceases to be intimidating once he realizes that he has arrived as a Muslim in a land of Muslims. Hyderabad signals the end of a journey, a journey marked by fear and insecurity. On the other hand, for M, Hyderabad was barely the beginning of a long journey.While Hyderabad signals relief for Z, it marks peril for M. M: Once my mother decided to move, I began planning various things. Even at that young age, I knew that things had to be disposed of at cheap rates. After all, how many things could we carry? I took out utensils, beds and spread them outside the house to sell. Muslims bought them at throwaway prices. I thought we may well come back, some kind of compromise may take place. Muslims in the neighbourhood appeared friendly and told my mother, ‘You are leaving Pakistan, but we pray that you come back.’ They saw us off as we got into a tonga. We quietly came to the station with our few remaining things with us. A Hindu coolie would put our things in the train from one side, while a Muslim kept removing them from the other side.When the train started, we realized that we did not have any belongings. We were empty-handed save a bag that contained a couple of clothes. My mother kept yelling at every station but the train wouldn’t stop. When we reached the Hyderabad station, there came a few young men from the Muslim League. My mother complained to them, ‘Our belongings are gone, please do something about it.’They asked her, ‘What did you have with you?’ Once she told them, they laughed and told her, ‘Thank your God, woman, you still have your son with you. He too will be gone.’

Though Hyderabad evokes antithetical emotions in the memories of Z and M, the accompanying details of train stations, platforms, coolies and luggage, are iconic in both journeys.Trains have since been highly charged signifiers in narrative, print and visual representations of Partition and communal violence. The two boys finally made this journey to reach their new destinations. In the process, they traded their homes, their language, and their identities. Z became a mohajir, while M became a sharnarthi (refugee).1 M was an official refugee and lived in a relief camp in Maharashtra for at least a year. M: When we came to the land of Hindustan, we were sent to a refugee camp near Ahmednagar in a special train.We were given free food, clothes, soap, for sometime. Later on, an order was issued that the camp had to be shut down. We had to go to Vithalwadi near Kalyan. We left once again. Once again we had free clothes, free electricity for almost a year. In the meanwhile, proud Sindhis who felt that the free facilities would not last forever and in any case, they could not live off them anymore, began looking for employment. I was one of them.

While M was struggling as an official sharnarthi in Kalyan, Z was a mohajir in difficult circumstances in Karachi.

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

151 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

152

SHUCHI KOTHARI AND RITA KOTHARI

Z: Our social identity was lost and we were living in very crowded situations as refugees but not official refugees; we didn’t have a home. We were sharing a home with others, living with strangers in a congested atmosphere. People who grabbed properties that were left by Hindus were all right. Or people who came with money—they were okay, but people like us—we shared the accommodation with our maternal family for a very long time until my father settled in his job and paid off loans. Once that happened he started renting a place of his own and we became independent as a family. We were shocked by the situation, these ramshackle government quarters were built in the middle of a desert, without water.You had to fetch water from a fair distance, and the open verandahs inside and out meant that there was sand everywhere. They were about thirty odd people living in that place which had two rooms and one toilet. Really awful.

In the immediate years after Partition, Z sought refuge in education, the only means by which he could have saved his family from abject poverty and also perhaps get out of Pakistan, a country that he would struggle to call home. Despite penury, Z’s father insisted that Z and his elder brother continue with their education. Z missed the deadline for application to Karachi medical college, so enrolled in a medical college in Lahore. Z: The first two years were financially very difficult. We gave tuitions to junior students to make ends meet in Lahore. I remember tutoring the children of a timber merchant. I couldn’t admit this to my friends so when they went for sports, I sneaked out and went to earn some money. That devil of a man never paid me on time, and when he did, he gave me bits and bobs in small coppers. I would buy food and make tea on our petromax lamp. I’d get milk in the early morning. These days I remember these things with pleasant nostalgia but in those days it was hard work, and I used to feel miserable. The next year improved since I got a scholarship.

While Z equipped himself for an upwardly mobile life through education, M and other refugees from Vithalwadi camp were asked to relocate in yet another camp in Maharashtra. His brother, who had left Sindh before him, now joined M and his mother in Ahmednagar.The two brothers felt miserable about their condition and decided to assuage their anger by killing a Muslim. M: We had been wanting to do this for a long time, but were bonded in the earlier camp. In Ahmednagar we could get out and carry out our project! Don’t forget we had freshly emerged from the philosophy of Hindutva, my brother was not unlike me in this respect. We took huge knives with us one day and set out to kill at least one Muslim (Laughs). We saw a Muslim-looking tongawallah and went and sat in his tonga thinking he would be the one we’d kill. He turned out to be a very kind person, so we got off and decided to look for a scoundrel Muslim! We began

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

152 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

CROSSING THE BORDER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

153

walking up and down the vegetable market. Some Marathas saw us and realized we were up to something, so they pulled us up.We got scared and fled. Over the years as we got more and more involved in business, we moved away from such feelings of anger and indignation. We didn’t forget them, just moved away far from them.

Ostensibly it seems that this is where the simultaneity of their diasporic experiences ends. But the sudden disruption of Partition continued to manifest itself in their lives in ways that simply did not allow either man to rest and settle in one place. In Z’s case, after leaving Delhi, he lived in Agra, Aligarh, Karachi, Lahore, Karachi, Aden (South Yemen), and in the United Kingdom, in Walsall, Ilkley, and London. Z: You never settle down where you go, even if you are a willing migrant. In my case we had to leave India, we had to leave Aden (after the coup in 1967). I could have gone back to Pakistan after Aden, but I was alienated from it for many years. While England meant further isolation, it also allowed for more opportunities to grow. We have seen people turn semi-English or semi-that, but inside them, they always think we are birds of passage. Ultimately there is a sentimentality about it. ‘We’ll go back,’ they all feel. But for me, there is no ‘back home’. I isolated myself intellectually from life there, and then my main concern is the next generation. It’s a middle-class phenomenon—you want your children to do well.You want to live your frustrations and aspirations through your children and hope they will have in their life what you missed out on....

Although M does not refer to his alienation, financial vicissitudes led to many abortive attempts to settle in one place. After his days at the refugee camp, M moved on to Amritsar, where he lived at the mercy of his elder brother. Deeply unhappy, he fell seriously ill. He then moved to Pune to live with his sister and brother-inlaw. He worked as a shop assistant in his brother-in-law’s crockery shop. Six years after Partition, M still felt dependent. M: I was tired of my needs and also family and relatives. I wanted to escape from the world. I must tell you what I did one day. I met a group of mendicants and asked them to take me along. They said even they needed to depend on worldly people for alms. ‘Go back, child, to your own world. Yours is a better life.’

After Pune, M moved to Bombay, then to Ahmedabad, and then back to Bombay where he currently lives. More than half a century after Partition, and many struggles later, both men have very different attitudes to their land of origin. Z: This business of nostalgia I keep mentioning is part of that. You think, God, your link is there (India), your language is there, and the people you loved are

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

153 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

154

SHUCHI KOTHARI AND RITA KOTHARI

buried there—there is something about that language that calls you back in that sense, although it is not real.You carry that bit of Indianness with you, and that will probably die with you. Many memories of my childhood in India keep returning to me while I am commuting in the Tube. I never used to think of those things— maybe it’s a sign of old age. M: As of now, I have no intense desire to visit Sindh. Whom do I know there now? I have no friends, no relatives. I will meet only Muslims, and after all I have seen and experienced Sindh. I know that Sindhi Muslims and Hindu Sindhis in Pakistan have not had an acrimonious relationship. However, Punjabi Muslims have been very hostile and unfair to Sindhi Muslims, and I consider that wrong. Sindhi Muslims are fighting for their rights, and they have my support and best wishes. If something comes up in that connection, and I am called upon by my Sindhi Muslim brothers to participate or lead, I would be more than happy to go to Sindh.

While M’s ‘unsentimental’ admission that he has no desire to go to Sindh may be read in the light of a particular pragmatism that informs most businessmen, he can afford that attitude because he has been able to ‘assimilate’ in India in a manner that is denied to a British-Pakistani in England. It must also be mentioned that the Sindhi ‘assimilation’ has drawn a veil over the ruptures in the identities of many Indians. A measure of alienation as an immigrant in Britain marks Z’s nostalgia for pre-Partition India. While he speaks about the loss of language as a source of pain, M remains rather matter-of-fact while explaining the erasure of his mother tongue. M: There has been injustice to the Sindhi identity, Sindhi dignity. It happened and it is over. Sindhis do not have a linguistic state today, but they were given a chance to rehabilitate (through the wishes of Gandhi and Nehru) in Adipur, Kutch. That was late in the day, the desire to live together had gone. Everybody had scattered in different directions and begun their livelihood afresh. There was no need left to unite. People had settled down with labour and effort. After all, people cannot live only by sentiments, there are circumstantial reasons why people settle down anywhere. If your family and business is in Madras for instance, you are not likely to feel motivated to go to Adipur or Gandhidham. Yes, the Sindhi generations of today do not speak or study in Sindhi. But really speaking there is no progress, no possibilities in Sindhi—no law, no judiciary. There is no meaning to the Sindhi language. I know there are Sindhi activists who shout slogans to preserve the Sindhi language, although their children go to English-medium schools.

What makes Z take note of a ‘loss’ that seems to M to be a waste of time? What are the parameters of loss and violence that make two individuals respond so differently? Are these individuals carrying the collective tales of their respective communities, one educated and bourgeois professional and the other hard-core mercantile? While it might be possible to engage in a psycho-social analysis of our

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

154 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

CROSSING THE BORDER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS

155

two testimonies, the nuances of this mohajir and this Sindhi’s memories cannot simply be placed as representative of community histories. Experiences shape subjectivities, but personalities also shape the way those experiences are understood. Though we are present as authors, we have restrained our intervention so that the two voices of our subjects are not unduly ‘manipulated’ by our editorial voice. Writing up interviews is always an act of translation. Our respective relationships with a father and a father-in-law inevitably mediate these accounts of the past. But by juxtaposing the memories of Z and M we encourage the reader to compare the two boys’ Partition journeys to begin to consider how a space might be opened up in which histories of this displacement are not defined simply by the losses of either Hindus or Muslims on different sides of the border. For studies of Partition, one cannot have a discourse of the border without crossing that border from both sides to listen to the ‘other’.

NOTE 1. It is interesting that while sharnarthi was a term used to describe Sindhi and Punjabi refugees, the word disappeared from post-Partition discourse, whereas the word mohajir became descriptive of an ethnic identity and is still used to describe Urdu-speaking Muslims in Pakistan.

REFERENCE Kothari, Rita, The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007).

08_Roy & Bhatia~chap-8.pmd

155 Black

8/8/2007, 9:26 AM

156

PIPPA VIRDEE

9 Partition in Transition: Comparative Analysis of Migration in Ludhiana and Lyallpur

PIPPA VIRDEE

A future student of history would wonder how hundreds of thousands of people suddenly made up their mind to abandon their homes and belongings forever without even hope of crossing the border, let alone the certainty of rehabilitation later. The woeful tale of the stampede and orgy that followed in the wake of the partition of the country would be forgotten in course of time, but while memory serves, tears would always burst whenever the tragedy is recalled (Dhiman 1962: 24–25).

When Independence celebrations were taking place in New Delhi and Karachi, the regions of Punjab and Bengal were the scenes of massive murder and uprooting. What followed the departure of the British was one of the biggest migrations in the twentieth century. An estimated 12–14 million people crossed the borders between India and Pakistan.This was the result of unprecedented levels of communal violence, which contained elements both of spontaneity and planned ethnic cleansing. The dislocation was at its peak in the Punjab between August and December 1947. It was estimated by the Indian government that by June 1948, 5.5 million non-Muslims and 5.8 million Muslims crossed the border in Punjab (GoI 1948: 50). In Bengal, while a considerable number of people migrated (an estimated 1.2 million), the process was much more prolonged, spanning years rather than months.1 Recent scholarship has begun to uncover the human experiences of the migration process. There is a growing awareness of its gendered and class dimensions.2 This has brought out not only the differential migrant experiences, but also the conflicts between the state and individuals. It has now been established, for example, that the process of state construction and legitimization involved the forcible repatriation

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

156 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

157

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

of abducted female migrants. Little is known about why urban migrants, who unlike agriculturalists were not directed by the state, settled where they did.3 Was this because of former business contacts, or family connections in a locality? Did they follow the lead of relatives who had already completed their journeys in a kind of chain migration? Was it purely chance, arriving at the ‘wrong’ railway station, that ended their migration? This paper addresses some of these questions in a series of individual accounts of migration based on research in Ludhiana and Lyallpur (Virdee 2004). These two localities provide a comparative dimension to experiences of migration in East and West Punjab. Both Ludhiana and Lyallpur experienced rapid growth in the post-Partition period, which in part can be attributed to the refugee influx. However, there were patterns of migration between them even during the colonial era when the canal colonies were constructed. This pattern of migration in turn influenced the Partition-related movements. This study will add insights into the hitherto unexplored area of the influence of pre-existing family and business ties in post-1947 migration settlement patterns. Before turning to this, there is some consideration of state responses to the large-scale migration prompted by the partition of the Punjab.

MASS MIGRATION AND THE STATE RESPONSE Despite warning signs of violence-related migration in Noakhali (October 1946), Punjab (March 1947) and Bihar (November 1947), which contained elements of ethnic cleansing, neither the Indian nor Pakistani governments really anticipated the mass migration. Until September 1947, the governments were unable to accept the reality that a mass transfer of population was necessary. Jinnah had envisaged a Pakistan that had non-Muslims; indeed the Muslim League leadership vowed to protect the minorities in Pakistan and thus prevent a mass exodus (Singh 1962: 9). However, once the violence reached uncontrollable levels and chaos engulfed the Punjab region, the two new dominions had to accept the exchange of populations. It was first noted on 7 September 1947 at the Emergency Committee meeting between India and Pakistan, that the movement of people was their first priority (ibid.: 11–12). Both governments had vowed to cooperate and to use all resources available to them to provide safety for migrants. The ineffectual Punjab Boundary Force (PBF), which comprised Indian and Pakistani troops under a British Commander, Major General Rees, was wound up. The Punjab governments set up the Liaison Agency to oversee the evacuation of refugees. It was headed jointly by two Chief Liaison Officers (CLO) based in Lahore and Amritsar. Each district also had a District Liaison Officer (DLO) who relayed

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

157 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

158

PIPPA VIRDEE

information to the CLO about ground activities regarding the status of refugees and evacuation plans.This agency, along with the Military Evacuation Organization (MEO), was responsible for the movement of people across the borders of the Punjab. The CLO determined the priorities for the movement of evacuees. This decision was based on the reports provided by the district officers, who were working in the field, and in consultation with a priority board (Rai 1965: 78). In the immediate aftermath of Partition, the Indian government was on average shifting 50,000 Hindus and Sikhs a day (GoI 1948: 52). All modes of transport were used—railways, motor trucks, foot convoys and aircraft. Generally, large foot convoys were utilized by rural migrants as they could transport their cattle and bullock carts, whereas trains were easier for evacuating urban migrants. Compelling images of Partition remain the foot convoys, kafilas, which stretched over many miles, and the trains with their compartments and roofs packed with refugees.4 The kafilas, like the trains, were the target of attacks by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, even though they were assisted by the military. Table 9.1 shows that the MEO managed to assist in the evacuation of the majority of people by the end of November 1947. The figures in the table are not the final totals as there were still pockets of people who were stranded. In addition to the modes of transport, there were about 30,000 people who were evacuated by air from West Punjab. By 26 November 1947, the MEO’s task of evacuating people was nearly complete, with the exception of some pockets of people in remote areas, abducted women, converted people and scheduled caste refugees who still required their assistance (Singh 1962: 108–109). It is clear from the table that the majority of people travelled by foot convoys. There were four main road routes which were used for the movement of evacuees. The Balloki Route (Lyallpur to Ludhiana) was initially used for non-Muslims from Lyallpur and was later also used for the evacuation of Muslims from India to Pakistan, while the Sulaimanke Route (Fazilka to Delhi) was reserved for non-Muslims from Pakistan to India. The Dera Baba Nanak Route (Sialkot to Gurdaspur) and the TABLE 9.1 Evacuation Figures: Total up to 22 November 1947 Mode of Travel

Non-Muslims

Muslims

Total

By motor transport By rail On foot Total

349,834 849,500 1,014,000 2,213,334

215,690 943,720 2,385,165 3,544,575

565,524 1,793,220 3,399,165 5,757,909

Source: Weekly Reports on Refugees, 23 November 1947, Liaison Agency Files, LVII/26/ 45, Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh.

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

158 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

159

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

Amritsar Route (Sheikupura to Amritsar) was used by both sets of migrants with arrangements made to avoid potential clashes between Muslims and non-Muslims (ibid.: 39). In reality, this was not always possible. The quote below from a refugee who recalls the moment when Muslim and non-Muslim kaflas crossed each other near Wagah, illustrates that sometimes the refugees’ shared suffering was able to overcome hostility. They stopped where they were, and we stopped where we were.They were Muslim and we were non-Muslims. And no one spoke. We went on looking at each other. They had left their homes and friends behind, and so had we. But there was a strange kind of kinship, this kinship of sorrow. We were all refugees. We both had been broken on the wreck of history (Whitehead 2000).

Upon arrival, the refugees sought shelter in any makeshift accommodation that was available to them. Schools and colleges were closed until the end of February 1948 so that the buildings could be used as temporary shelter. Students were enlisted to assist the running of the camps. Other temporary camps had to be erected in order to cope with this mass of refugees. While there were camps all over the Punjab, there were also so-called ‘concentration camps’, like the Walton Camp in Lahore and the Kurukshetra Camp in present-day Haryana, which were focal points for the movement of people. Such camps were responsible for housing as many as 300,000 people at any one time (GoI 1948: 56).These facilities had to be improvised rapidly to accommodate the unanticipated tide of refugees.

LYALLPUR Conditions in Lyallpur district were relatively peaceful until the end of September. The Sikh Jat farmers in particular were reluctant to abandon their fertile fields. One of the first major incidents in the district was a mass attack on Tandlianwala. On 26 August, a Muslim mob attacked a gurdwara situated just outside the town. The gurdwara was packed with refugees who had sought shelter there. A few days later the town of Tandlianwala was attacked by a large mob. Khosla’s findings suggest that over two thousand people died, with many young girls being kidnapped.5 Balwant Singh Anand, who was working in Lyallpur at the time, notes in his recollections that the attack on Tandlianwala really frightened people and made them leave their houses. Anand suggests that this was the beginning of people congregating in groups to seek sanctuary in local gurdwaras and camps in Lyallpur (1961: 23). The first incident to take place in Lyallpur town was on 3 September during a public meeting organized at the Clock Tower by the Deputy Commissioner (DC).

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

159 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

160

PIPPA VIRDEE

He began by praising the residents for maintaining peace and goodwill in the town (Anand 1961: 24–25). However, a Sikh was stabbed at the meeting.The proceedings were immediately suspended, but the incident acted as a catalyst for further stabbings and lootings (Khosla 1989: 169). This level of violence was relatively mild compared to what was being witnessed elsewhere in the Punjab. This in part explains why the Hindus and Sikhs were reluctant to migrate. Their decision to leave was based on the advice of both the Sikh leader, Master Tara Singh and the West Punjab Governor, Sir Francis Mudie. On 5 September, Mudie wrote to Jinnah: I am telling everyone that I do not care how the Sikhs get across the border: the great thing is to get rid of them as soon as possible. There is still little sign of the three lakh Sikhs in Lyallpur moving, but in the end they too will have to go (ibid.).

The following day Mudie himself came to Lyallpur and told the DC that all nonMuslims should be evacuated. Ratten Singh, who migrated from Lyallpur, recalls Master Tara Singh and Giani Kartar Singh going to Samundri and asking the Sikhs to leave. They felt compelled to follow these instructions.They knew they were leaving for good and took as many belongings as they could on a gadda (horse cart).While travelling, his niece developed a fever and died. They headed for Balloki Head where the military transported them to Amritsar. After staying in a camp for a week, they came to Ludhiana because of their previous connections there.6 Lyallpur district had one of the largest populations of non-Muslim refugees to evacuate from West Punjab.The majority travelled by foot convoys.When the MEO took over the responsibility to evacuate non-Muslim refugees from Western Pakistan, it was estimated that 424,000 non-Muslim people remained in Lyallpur district (Singh 1962: 83). Most of the people awaiting evacuation were in Lyallpur itself, with an estimated 175,000 people who had already been evacuated by 28 September.7 The majority of the evacuation had taken place by 15 November. The only people remaining numbered about 17,000, most of whom were scheduled caste population, but they were mostly cleared by the end of November 1947.8 There were also around 5,000 bazigars,9 who had previously refused to migrate but, due to recent attacks and looting by local Muslims, had now decided to leave. In addition to these there were also a number of abducted women and girls to be recovered, who numbered around 400 (Singh 1991: 612, 614). By June 1948, however, it was clear that there were still around 3,000 persons and 80 girls, who needed to be evacuated from Lyallpur district.10 A year on from Partition and with the official role of the MEO effectively over, the DLO was still working to recover people from Lyallpur.11 In the south and eastern side of Lyallpur city, the Government College, which became the military headquarters, and the Khalsa College, had been turned into

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

160 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

161

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

refugee camps. Sixty thousand people gathered at Khalsa College to seek temporary refuge before their departure towards India (Anand 1961: 50, 27). Arya High School was also used as a camp, housing around 40,000 people (Singh 1962: 205). Refugees were squatting anywhere they could, in classrooms, and on verandahs, and playing fields. Anand, who was assisting at the camp, notes that people also started to sort themselves into professional groups. There were doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, journalists and some government officials (1961: 90), perhaps desperately trying to preserve their previous identity in this period of immense uncertainty. According to the MEO, the camps in Lyallpur were eventually cleared by 5 December (Singh 1962: 200). Khalsa College, like many other camps in the region, was visited by a cholera epidemic. Illnesses like dysentery were not the only problems for the occupants. They were also subject to attack, being a prime target for would-be looters and rapists. On 1 October 1947, a foot convoy of non-Muslims was passing through Lyallpur, when a Muslim mob attacked the convoy near Tarkabad. People nearby at Khalsa College could hear gunshots, which lasted over an hour. The convoy was looted, many bodies were found, others were left for dead and girls were also abducted (Anand 1961: 131–32). Khalsa College was close by and many of the injured were bought to the camp for medical assistance. However, Khalsa camp itself was attacked the same night. The Muslim troops who were there to protect it were implicated. The next night the Ayra School Refugee camp was attacked. This time the Baluchi soldiers were implicated. When the DC arrived in the morning there were apparently 150 bodies lying in the camp (Khosla 1989: 170). Designed to provide refuge and shelter, the camps were just as dangerous as the world from which they were trying to protect the refugees. One of the largest mass movements to take place during the whole Partition process was a convoy that originated from Lyallpur. Four hundred thousand Hindus and Sikhs set off from Lyallpur on 11 September 1947. The first 45,000 people reached Balloki Head, near the border by Ferozepur, a week later and the rest trickled into Indian territories gradually.The Balloki Route was often indiscriminately closed by the Pakistan government and was also prone to occasional Muslim attacks.The convoy was organized by colonists, who came along with their livestock, migrating en masse once the decision had been taken to leave Lyallpur. They came from a variety of backgrounds, which included petty shopkeepers, artisans, village menials and once-rich landlords and businessmen, and other professionals such as lawyers and doctors.The convoy undertook a journey of 150 miles. Most people walked, while those who brought their carts or tongas used them for transporting goods, and the sick and elderly travelling with them (Civil and Military Gazette 1947). Indian troops guarded the refugees. A sense of normality prevailed in the form of rest breaks,

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

161 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

162

PIPPA VIRDEE

cooking, milking cows, especially for the infants, and tending to the sick. Music and occasional speeches by village leaders helped to raise the refugees’ morale.The Indian government assisted by dropping food and drugs by air. Vaccines and doctors were flown in to assist the sick. A field ambulance was sent to Raiwind to inoculate refugees before crossing the border, after which the refugees were taken into reception camps (ibid.). Not all the people left Lyallpur by foot convoy. Near Lyallpur at Risalewala there was an airfield, which was used to fly people to and from Delhi. Planes were chartered by wealthy individuals. As Anand notes, however, people often paid inflated taxi or tonga fares to reach the airport and with no guarantee of flights. Anand describes a conversation that took place between the flight attendant and the prospective passengers, each bargaining and willing to pay over-inflated prices for tickets like an auction, even though some had booked their tickets in advance (1961: 109–110). This was clearly a profitable business for the transporters, but the number of people who could access this mode of transport was very small, as noted earlier. Jaswant Singh Makkar belonged to a wealthy family; his father owned 12 marabas of land in Sargodha. Due to their eminent position as wealthy landlords, they could afford to be more flexible about their departure, taking the time to sell their belongings before flying to Amritsar. He recalls: We stayed in Pakistan until 3rd November. It was only after 15 August that we started selling our belongings, things we could not take with us. No one disturbed us. My father had made arrangements and we flew to Amritsar, where we stayed for some time, then we proceeded to Ludhiana.12

Alongside wealth, personal connections were very important in assisting the migration process. The Liaison Agency Records give some hint of the latter as they contain letters written directly to the MEO requesting assistance. Alongside impassioned and general appeals for help from members of the public, especially with respect to the recovery of abducted women, recorded on pro-formas, there are letters from people that were clearly more likely to succeed because of their influence. For example Dr Daulat Ram Mediratta of Mani Majra, District Ambala sent a letter to the Inspector General of Civil Hospital, East Punjab; The Officer Commanding, MEO; CLO, Lahore; and the Deputy High Commissioner for India and Pakistan at Lahore. This was an appeal letter to aid the evacuation of his wife, daughter and personal possessions, all of whom were at the Arya Refugee Camp in Lyallpur. Dr Daulat Ram was willing to remit any cost incurred in the process.13 The letter most likely proved successful as added to it is the handwritten response for the attention of the DLO in Lyallpur, ‘for very early action’.

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

162 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

163

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

LUDHIANA Ludhiana was a focal transit point for refugees. The city was connected to all the major cities, Delhi, Amritsar, and Lahore, and thus was an important stop for refugees who were on the move.Those travelling by foot convoys would have used the Balloki Route, in particular the Ludhiana–Ferozepore–Kasur Road. All refugees from Ludhiana, Ambala, Karnal, and Ferozepore districts and from the East Punjab states of Patiala, Jind, Malerkotla, and Nabha used this route (Singh 1962: 131). Due to the large number of Muslims gathering in Ludhiana, which caused the local population to swell, the district was prone to attacks by Sikhs and Hindus.There are eyewitness accounts of violence against Muslims in the city itself, particularly in the Muslim-dominated areas of Field Ganj and Chaura Bazaar. Near about the 26 the shop of S. S. Din, the biggest Muslim merchant in Ludhiana, dealer in arms and ammunition and wine, etc. was looted. Military police stood by. They fired and then the mob looted the shop. Then other shops in Chowra Bazar and other localities were looted. Muslims found there were stabbed. On the next day news was current in the village. ‘Deputy Commissioner will get shops looted. So come to the city.’ Armed gangs from villages in a radius of 12 to 15 miles were thus mobilised to the city (Khan 1993: 183).

The quotation above is taken from an official Pakistani government publication. While accounts like these tend to present a one-sided version of history, they are rarely seen in Indian nationalist history texts. Refugees’ desire both for revenge and to ethnically cleanse local Muslims were factors in the violence in Ludhiana as in other parts of East Punjab. Abdul Rahman, a refugee from Field Ganj, informed me,‘at the time of partition, the tension was bearable initially. Afterwards, it changed to bloodshed and massacre when the Hindus and Sikhs from the areas of Pakistan went there and told their people about the way they were deserted’. He went on to inform me that the ‘bloodshed started on mass level when Muslims started it in some cities by listening to the stories of Muslim migrants and vice versa’. A female migrant, Sakina Bibi from Saidon da Mohalla, Ludhiana, who is now settled in Faisalabad, expressed similar views:14 Actually the migrants from the areas of Pakistan flared up riots there. While we were in camps we met some migrants from Lyallpur. They were regretting the loss of their properties and belongings. We were not afraid of Hindus and Sikhs of Ludhiana but feared the migrants from Pakistan who eventually exploited the locals against us. We were afraid of getting killed. They attacked and hewed Muslims, looted their belongings and raped and kidnapped their girls.

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

163 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

164

PIPPA VIRDEE

Another refugee from Ludhiana, who also settled in Faisalabad, by the name of Mohammad Sadeeq, talked about having very good relations in Ludhiana with Hindus and Sikhs before the Partition riots. He blamed the extremist organizations, yet maintained that locally things were calm: The demand for Pakistan invoked hatred. I don’t know who was behind those riots but gradually the enmity increased. We did not fear Hindus at the time of Partition but Sikhs. They were up to some mischief. The reason behind the fear was the presence of mischievous organization amongst Muslims and the other communities. The slogan for Pakistan was the main reason behind tension. No troublesome incidents occurred on local level, nor was there some business quarrel or problem and financial worries. Very few incidents of violence took place in Ludhiana city but the rural areas were under the rage of rioters.15

Malik Ludhianvi was a Muslim League activist at the time of Partition. He is now settled in the refugee satellite town of Ghulam Mohammad Abad in Faisalabad. His recollections differ from Sadeeq, perhaps because of his political affiliations. His account portrays the city of Ludhiana as much more violent. His house was close to the Clock Tower in Ludhiana, from where he witnessed the emotional flagraising ceremony on 14 August that marked India’s freedom from British rule. It was after this, he recalls, that riots spread in the city. Our house was at the dividing line of Madhupuri mohalla of Hindus and the mohalla of Muslims. So we left before the riots and shifted to Jamalpur two miles away. Our house was burnt first of all, because we were Muslim League activists and our walls bore the painted slogans of ‘Muslim League zindabad’ and ‘Pakistan zindabad’.16

Almost all of the 302,482 Muslims of the pre-Partition Ludhiana district migrated (GoI 1941). According to the 1961 census, there were only 4,686 Muslims left in Ludhiana district and of these only 524 were in urban areas (GoI 1961). Atiq-ur-Rehman was one of those who stayed on. He is currently President of the Muslim Council, Punjab while his brother, Maulana Habib-ur-Rehman Ludhianvi is the Shahi Imam of the Jama Masjid in Field Ganj.17 They are descendents of the Ludhianvi family that traces the first arrival of their ancestor in the city in 1850, seven generations back. They are also the grandsons of the secular nationalist Maulana Habib-ur-Rehman. As the family was so close to the nationalist freedom movement, the question of migration never arose. After Partition, the family spent a brief period in Delhi as the mosque in Field Ganj, like many others in the district, was converted into a gurdwara. It was then restored as a mosque in 1956 due to the strong family links with the Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru (The Tribune 2002). Bibi Amir Fatma, a spiritual healer from Gill village, just on the outskirts of the city,

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

164 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

165

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

also remained in India. She experienced no trouble in her village and the family did not feel it was necessary to leave.18 Her experience of communal harmony remained intact, signified by her continued acceptance by the local community. Like Lyallpur, the process of migration was quite slow in Ludhiana. By 19 October 1947, there were still many Muslims left in refugee camps in the district. MEO figures of camp residents are Ludhiana: 120,000; Samrala: 4,000; Raikot: 12,000; Jagraon: 10,000; White Bein: 40,000; and Sindwan Khas: 75,000 (Singh 1962: 130). Haji Kazim, who was born in Ludhiana, recalls leaving his home and going to the Chhawani Camp in the city.19 The family stayed there for one day and then left. He said people were desperate to board the trains for Pakistan. In an attempt to get onto a train quickly, their personal belongings were left behind at the station. But they just crammed into the train, which was going to the Indian border city of Amritsar. He recalls their fear at the time.This was only partly reduced by the party of Balochi soldiers who were escorting the train. Everyone felt a huge sense of relief when they reached the border at Wagah. At the same time, however, he remembers being saddened by the sight of some Sikhs lying dead at the station, and thought to himself that ‘the same thing was going on here’. Bashiran Bibi migrated from Saidan da Mohalla in Ludhiana. She remembers having very good relations with the Hindus and Sikhs of the neighbourhood. They received considerable assistance from their friends to aid their departure. Some Hindu friends also maintained contact with them in Pakistan through letters after Partition. It was three months after Partition that we left India. For two months we stayed there and kept a watch for our safety. The Hindus used to stand guard, protected us while we sold milk. I was married at the age of twelve and gave birth to Hasan at the age of 14. He was born in the camp, during migration. When he was born the Hindus came there to give us ghee, rice, clothes and other things. Hindus lived with us in a very friendly manner. We came here on the train, which we took from Ludhiana Cantonment station. We stayed for eight days in a camp in Ludhiana cantonment. On the fourth day of our stay in the camp, Hasan was born—so our stay was extended. On the eighth day, we got on the train and came directly to Lyallpur. We came straight to my father-in-law who had reached here eight days prior to our arrival.20

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION A number of themes emerged from the personal accounts of migration.These were in contrast to the ‘official’ history, which projected a unified and determined effort to assimilate and rehabilitate the refugees in both East and West Punjab.The personal

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

165 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

166

PIPPA VIRDEE

narratives, however, tell a different history of migration. The treacherous journey across the borders, experienced by millions, was met with disappointment upon arrival.The nepotism and corruption of the bureaucracy was only too visible for the refugees. For many, the upheaval during Partition was presumed to be only temporary and thus there seemed little point in making permanent homes when they migrated. Others spent years moving from one place to another in search of resolve and stability. While some used personal relationships and business links to find this consistency and security in deciding where they would migrate to, others continued to long for their ‘homelands’. Abdul Haq migrated from Chaura Bazaar, Ludhiana; he provides a first-hand account of the adversity and suffering that numerous individuals had to endure. ‘Our train took eight days to reach Pakistan from Ludhiana’, he declared, during the course of an interview in Faisalabad. He goes on to say: We reached Lahore via Amritsar. There was exchange of fire between the attackers and the military men escorting our train in Amritsar, leaving a lot of people dead. The attackers made every possible attempt to kill the people of our train but the military shielded us. The officer was a Muslim, while the soldiers were Dogras. On his orders, the soldiers opened fire on the attackers and forced them to retreat. They ran away leaving behind 20 to 30 corpses.The place of that incident was home to armed infliction on Muslim caravans or trains. We covered a hundred miles’ distance in eight days; it would have taken two and a half hours without the unnecessary delays.21

Hindus and Sikhs who crossed the killing fields of the Punjab in the opposite direction provide similar accounts of tortuous terror-filled journeys on trains, or gruelling foot convoys across the flooded and bloodied plains.There are accounts of people who were travelling on foot convoys encountering bloated bodies, which had been left to rot away. Others lost their loved ones en route, forced to abandon them without any proper burial or cremation. Refugees from all communities faced similar problems of rehabilitation. Those who had access to influence and money used their connections. People put in claims for compensation, but for some it often seemed an arbitrary decision rather than one based on factual evidence. Satya Rai notes that nepotism, corruption and bribery were rampant in the administration. Money, power and influence were important factors in the speedy evacuation of friends and family: ‘refugees could not get equal justice or attention’ (1965: 87). Some individuals took advantage of the chaos and lack of administrative control and used the misery of others to make money:‘one trip with the refugees or with their kit was equal to an ordinary month’s earnings’ (ibid.: 87–88) for the rikshawallas. ‘Some people put in claims with much exaggeration’, Abdul Rehman admitted in an interview in Faisalabad.‘But my father

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

166 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

167

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

was a religious person’, he continued, ‘and he told the actual details of his properties and settlement compensated him accordingly’. Refugees frequently had to resort to bribes in order to get their cases heard. ‘We put in claims after migration’, Mohammad Sadeeq re-calls:‘Our claims were compensated after giving some bribe to the authorities.’22 Rana Aftab Ahmad Khan further reiterated this point: You couldn’t get a house without giving a bribe of 20 to 50 rupees to the scouts and clerks of Finance Department, etc. I swear that nobody was allotted a house without a bribe. If we had bribed the authorities, we could have been allotted a huge building.The people who got houses without bribes were either those with relatives in the establishment or those who occupied the houses by force. The people who had relatives amongst government officials got land, houses and jobs and the people who were not able to bribe or thought it to be morally wrong could never get settled.23

Another theme that emerged from the oral narratives was that, rather than the state directing the mass migration and rehabilitation, people used previous connections in determining their destinations. The situation of the urban refugees interviewed here was of course very different from that of the rural migrants who were directed en masse to specific localities and districts. There were also some attempts to redirect skilled urban artisans. But this was far less effective and, as is revealed in these interviews, many urban migrants made their own arrangements and used their extended family networks and biradaris to get things done. In keeping with the chaos of the situation, there are first-hand accounts that reveal how people just ended up in Ludhiana, for example, accidentally. This was because refugees caught the wrong train or just went to the first destination they could. Bhagwant Kaur and her husband did not know anyone in Ludhiana but made a decision to go there on impulse: ‘My father-in-law was in government service in Pakistan, he had two options for relocation, Ludhiana or Ambala.We thought about what should we do … we were at the train station and he said we’ll go wherever the first train that comes takes us.’24 Similarly, Jaswant Singh Makkar, says, ‘we did not have any plans to come here but some of our friends landed here in Ludhiana and we thought, “why don’t we stay here?”’Other refugees, however, utilized pre-existing connections to ease the painful process of resettlement. Haji Kazim migrated from Ludhiana to Lyallpur. His phuphi (father’s sister) was living in Katchery Bazaar, Lyallpur and that was why he came to Lyallpur.25 Both Mai Manta and Gurnam Singh also migrated to Ludhiana because of pre-existing family ties. When we reached Amritsar we stayed in a gurdwara for three days. Then we told the people there that we want to go to Ludhiana because our relatives have

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

167 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

168

PIPPA VIRDEE

gone there. Then we came to Committee Bagh and stayed there for about seven days. We were provided with food and rations there as well. Then a person from here [Sabzi Mandi] went there and told us to leave because there was a house free in Sabzi Mandi. So we left and came here to this gali (narrow street). This whole gali was empty. Our family—there are fifteen of us—stayed together. We found the rest of them by sending messages and visiting camps. The reason we came to Ludhiana was because my thaya (father’s older brother) lived here. He was a Reader in the courts with the magistrates, so we all got together.26

In addition to family ties, geographic links, business contacts or even the potential for further opportunities were also important factors in determining where people migrated. Ghulam Nadi migrated from Ludhiana. He was aware of Lyallpur’s textile background, and because his family worked in this line of business prior to Partition, they decided to go to that city.27 Chaudhari Rehmat Ullah migrated from Jullundur. His father was a contractor and had a brick-kiln business, which they resumed in Lyallpur. He says: Initially, we arrived in Lahore. My cousin received and accommodated us in the camps near Gurhi Shaho. On the suggestion of some of my friends, I decided to settle in Lyallpur. Baba Ghulam Husain and Karam Ilahi were amongst those friends. I was on family terms with Baksh Ilahi, the owner of Crescent Mills [in Lyallpur].They had businesses spread all over the India. Baksh Ilahi and Gulzaar were in Jullundur [where Chaudhari Ullah lived].28

Abdul Rehman, present owner of Lyallpur Cotton Mills, highlights the importance of previous business connections in aiding the resettlement in Lyallpur. My father and brother purchased shoes for their shops from Agra. The owner of Chief Boot House, Sheikh Bashir Ahmad and his brother Sayed also purchased stock from there. That way they became friends of my brother and father. Sheikh Bashir invited my father and brother many times to visit Lyallpur and my brother invited them to Ludhiana. So my brother migrated to Lyallpur to seek help from Sheikh Bashir, who helped him a lot. He was a Councillor of Muslims; told my brother of many houses that were deserted by Hindus and Sikhs and asked him to choose the one of his choice. He also provided us with rations.29

Finally, there is the late-nineteenth-century migration link between Ludhiana and Lyallpur, which is often overlooked.The transfer of population during this period into the new Lyallpur canal colony has received relatively little attention, given its dramatic impact on the region (see further,Ali 1988; Gilmartin 2004: 3–20). Farmers, artisans and even some professionals were drawn by the promise of economic

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

168 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

169

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

opportunities. Migrants came from throughout East Punjab including Ludhiana. Fieldwork interviews revealed that at the time of Partition, some individuals remigrated eastwards to the ancestral homes and quarters in the Ludhiana district and Ludhiana city from which their grandparents and parents had earlier departed (see Tatla 1995). Though it is difficult to gauge its extent, there does appear to be some evidence that this earlier history of migration influenced the journey’s destination in 1947. Ratten Singh’s case history is only one example of someone whose family originally migrated to Lyallpur around 1910 and then returned to its ancestral home fifty years later. His family decided to try their fortunes in Lyallpur following the death of many family members due to a plague epidemic. His father decided to go to Lyallpur as they had heard of the new canal colony. He anticipated the need for a karyana shop, as they were many farmers and families settled there. Once settled, other family members joined them. Less than forty years later, Partition violence forced them to make a return journey to Ludhiana.30 An interview with Malik Ludhianvi suggests that Muslims in Ludhiana had been influenced by stories from Hindu and Sikh migrants to the canal colonies. They had told their relatives back in the city of the fortunes to be made in such places as Lyallpur. Moreover, the fact that people from Ludhiana had earlier migrated there meant that Lyallpur did not seem like an unfamiliar destination.When the Ludhiana Muslims were uprooted in August 1947, Lyallpur thus appeared an attractive destination. Malik Ludhianvi recalls that there was a rumour ‘that Lyallpur had been allotted to Ludhiana’. He goes on: Some people wanted to go to Gujranwala but the majority wanted to go to Lyallpur. Because of this we and most of the migrants from Ludhiana reached Lyallpur and started handlooms business.This rumour that Lyallpur would be given to Ludhiana also played its part to attract migrants from Ludhiana.We heard it in the camps and on our way as well. We liked Lyallpur because my father had worked as a driver in Jhang, near Lyallpur. He had seen Lyallpur city and he liked its geographical features and atmosphere very much. It was a new city then. It was famous in Ludhiana that most of the people were migrating from Ludhiana to Lyallpur and Lahore.31

The presence of pre-existing business or family links not only influenced the destination of migration, but also assisted in the process of acceptance by the local population. As Sarah Ansari’s work has revealed, the migration of refugees into Sindh resulted in ethnic tensions with the local population (Ansari 1994). Conflict between locals and migrants in the Punjab was muted, despite the fact that the latter outnumbered the established population in such cities as Lyallpur and Ludhiana. Even when refugees did not possess pre-existing ties, assimilation was made easier because of a common Punjabi language and cultural values.

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

169 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

170

PIPPA VIRDEE

While the local population felt some anxiety over the influx of refugees, the refugees themselves found it difficult to forget their home. Memories of homelands are apparent in the way migrants have named their business ventures. Lyallpur Sweet Shop, Lyallpur Tailors, and Lyall Book Depot are all shops run by refugees from Pakistan in Ludhiana, whereas in Faisalabad you find similar names reflecting the owners’ Indian refugee background, such as Ludhiana Sweet Shop, and Ludhiana di Hatti. These are just the small ways in which the refugees have preserved their memories.

CONCLUSION At the time of Partition, state mechanisms were unprepared for the mass migration that resulted in 12–14 million people being uprooted. Eventually, organization by the state came into force and a planned evacuation could take place.When we move away from the official response to migration, we begin to see the differential experiences of refugees. Urban refugees were less easy to control and, while the state directed some of the refugees, others made their own plans. Utilizing personal networks, refugees were able to migrate to places which had an element of familiarity, whether this was in the shape of family, friends, and business links or, in the case of Ludhiana and Lyallpur, memories and experiences that were shaped by the canal colony migrations between the two localities. Ironically, both Ludhiana and Lyallpur had populations in which 63 per cent belonged to the ‘other’ community. In Lyallpur, this meant the largest transfer of population in West Punjab. Bizarrely, these were the same people who migrated during the colonial period in order to ease the tensions of overcrowding in East Punjab and to develop the canal colonies. Without this, the tracts in West Punjab would most definitely have been Muslim-majority areas. In a strange turn of events, it is precisely because this migration had taken place at the close of the nineteenth century that, fifty years later these people were forced to make a return journey. The personal narratives of migrants in East and West Punjab, Muslims and nonMuslims, highlight the similarities people shared at a human level. These subtleties and nuances that can be gauged from localized studies often get lost in the generalities of Partition studies. The reality was that these people were not that different from each other. They shared the human suffering of Partition violence and of being uprooted from their homes.They experienced the same trauma related to Partition and the dislocation of migration. If there were differences, then these were at the level of class and economic status.The power afforded to the rich meant that their experience of migration was eased by their ability to control and manage this process.This was a luxury not available to the masses who, in this state of flux, had little control.

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

170 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

171

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

Those with access to information and those who were literate were better prepared. Jaswant Singh Makkar’s family members were able to plan their departure from Sialkot and sell their possessions before leaving, but this was an option open only to the elite. Meanwhile, the majority of the people were forced to abandon their possessions and homes as the only means of safeguarding their lives. Once safely across the border, the full realization of the upheaval began to sink in.This was only the beginning of that journey, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The dislocation of Partition lingered on for years to come.The uncertainty of the strange new environment meant that many shifted around two, three, or even four times before settling down. This transitory period lasted for years rather than months, and although at the state level refugees were quickly ‘processed’ and ‘rehabilitated’, in reality the task was a lot longer and harder.

NOTES 1. On the Bengal experience, see Talbot and Singh (1999). 2. For more details, see Butalia (1998); Major (1995); Menon and Bhasin (1993). Also see subaltern literature, for example, Amin (1995); Arnold (1984); Chatterjee and Pandey (1993); Guha (1982–87); and Hardiman (1986). 3. For further information on rural resettlement, see Randhawa (1954). 4. See Margaret Bourke-White (1949) for further descriptions. Khushwant Singh’s fictional novel, Train to Pakistan (1956), has captured the emotion and fear of these train journeys experienced by some two million people. 5. The figure suggested by G. D. Khosla for this incident alone is far in excess of anything that Lord Mountbatten imagined. According to Mountbatten, the total number of casualties in Lyallpur was quite low, at 500. Compared to other districts like Lahore and Sheikupura where an estimated 10,000 people died, the figure for Lyallpur is quite a conservative estimate. However, it would have been in the nationalist interest of both Mountbatten and Khosla to present two extreme figures. This information is based on a letter from Mountbatten of Burma to Penderel Moon, dated 2 March 1962, Mss Eur. F230/34, Indian Office Library, London, and Khosla (1989: 166). 6. Interview with Ratten Singh, Model Gram, Ludhiana, 22 February 2003. 7. Weekly and Progressive Refugee State: Non-Muslim, 29 September 1947, Liaison Agency Files, LVII/26/45, Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh. 8. Weekly Reports on Refugees, 23 November 1947, Liaison Agency Files, LVII/26/45, Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh. 9. Bazigars are a nomadic tribe and earn a living from delivering circus-like performances. From the records it is clear that these bazigars were causing some problems for both the East and West Punjab Governments. The former was concerned at the way they were treated by local people even though the bazigars had embraced Islam. The West Punjab Government was also viewed rather cynically by East Punjab, as trying to keep the bazigars in West Punjab so as to parade them as evidence of Hindus choosing to remain in Pakistan, even though they had converted. Letter to DLO, Lyallpur, 18 May 1948. Liaison Agency Files, VIII/21/15-B, Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh.

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

171 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

172

PIPPA VIRDEE

10. CLO, India to Chief Secretary, East Punjab, 29 April 1948 cited in Singh (1991: 612). 11. The DLO apparently had a very lucky day as they managed to evacuate 140 persons from Lyallpur. Letter to Mehta, CLO, 22 August 1947. Liaison Agency Files, VIII/22/7-EV, PSA 12. Interview with Jaswant Singh Makkar, Industrial Area B, Ludhiana, 30 March 2002. 13. Letter to the Inspector General of Civil Hospital, East Punjab, 25 October 1947, Liaison Agency Files, Bundle II + III file 7, PSA. 14. Interview with Abdul Rahman, Lyallpur Cotton Mills, Faisalabad, 7 February 2003; and with Sakina Bibi, Madina Town, Faisalabad, 30 January 2003. 15. Interview with Mohammad Sadeeq, Katchery Bazaar, Faisalabad, 8 February 2003. 16. Interview with Malik Mohammed Yousaf Ludhianvi, Ghulam Mohammad Abad, Faisalabad, 30 January 2003. 17. Interview with Atiq-ur-Rehman, Jama Masjid, Field Ganj, Ludhiana, 24 March 2002. 18. Interview with Bibi Amir Fatma, Gill Village, Ludhiana, 30 March 2002. Bibi Fatma has a following among all communities. Her devotees also come from the diaspora community in the UK. Upon entering the simple shrine, there are symbols of all four communities (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism) with all of them leading to the same door. 19. Interview with Haji Kazim, Jhang Bazaar, Faisalabad, 6 February 2003. 20. Interview with Bashiran Bibi, Harcharan Pura, Faisalabad, 7 February 2003. 21. Interview with Abdul Haq, Montgomery Bazaar, Faisalabad, 30 January 2003. 22. See notes 14 and 15. 23. Interview with Rana Aftab Ahmad Khan, Chiniot Bazaar, Faisalabad, 7 February 2003. 24. Interview with Bhagwant Kaur, Sabzi Mandi, Ludhiana, 30 March 2002. 25. See notes 12 and 19. 26. Interviews with Mai Manta (para 1 of quote) and Gurnam Singh (para 2), both of Sabzi Mandi, Ludhiana, 30 March 2002. 27. Interview with Ghulam Nadi, Gobindpura, Faisalabad, 6 February 2003. 28. Interview with Chaudhari Rehmat Ullah, Harcharan Pura, Faisalabad, 28 December 2002. 29. See note 14. 30. See note 6. 31. See note 16.

REFERENCES Ager, A., (ed.), Refugees: Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration (London: Continuum, 1999). Ali, Imran, The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Amin, S., Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Anand, B. S., Cruel Interlude (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961). Ansari, Sarah, ‘The Movement of Indian Muslims to West Pakistan After 1947: Partition-related Migration and its Consequences for the Pakistani Province of Sind’, in Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot (eds), Migration: The Asian Experience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 149–68. Arnold, D., ‘Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 11(4), 1984: 155–77. Bourke-White, Margaret, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India in the Words and Photos of Margaret Bourke-White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949). Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 1998).

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

172 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

173

PARTITION IN TRANSITION

Chatterjee, P. and G. Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies VII (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore, 8 October 1947. Dhiman, R., Punjab Industries (Ludhiana: Dhiman Press of India, 1962). Gilmartin, David, ‘Migration and Modernity: The State, the Punjabi Village, and the Settling of the Canal Colonies’, in Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-colonial Migration (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 3–20. GoI, Census of India, Punjab (1941). ———, After Partition (Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1948). ———, Census of India, Ludhiana District Handbook (1961). Guha, R., (ed.) Subaltern Studies, 5 volumes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982–87). Hardiman, D., ‘“Subaltern Studies” at Crossroads’, Economic and Political Weekly, 21(15 February), 1986: 288–90. Khan, Saleem Ullah, The Journey to Pakistan: A Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: National Documentation Centre, 1993). Khosla, G. D., Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading up to and Following the Partition of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). Major, A., ‘The Chief Sufferers: The Abduction of Women During the Partition of the Punjab’, South Asia 18(Special Issue), 1995: 57–72. Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, ‘Recovery, Rapture, Resistance:The Indian State and the Abduction of Women during Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28(17), 24 April 1993: 2–11. Pandey, G., Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Rai, Satya M., Partition of the Punjab: A Study of its Effects on the Politics and Administration of the Punjab, 1947–56 (Bombay: Asia House Publishing, 1965). Randhawa, M.S., Out of the Ashes—An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Chandigarh: Public Relations Dept. Punjab, 1954). Singh, Brig. Rajendra, The Military Evacuation Organisation, 1947–48 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1962). Singh, Khushwant, Train to Pakistan (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956). Singh, Kirpal (ed.), Select Documents on Partition of Punjab 1947 India and Pakistan (Delhi: National Book Shop, 1991). Talbot, I. and G. Singh, Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Talbot, I. and S. Thandi (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-colonial Migration (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004). Tatla, Darshan Singh, ‘The Sandal Bar: Memoirs of a Jat Sikh Farmer’, The Punjab Past and Present, 29(Apr–Oct), 1995. The Tribune (Chandigarh), ‘Surviving Tension,Yet Putting Up a Brave Face’, 5 March 2002, see http:/ /www.tribuneindia.com/2002/20020305/ldh1.htm Thompson, P., The Voice of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Virdee, P., Partition and Locality: Case Studies of the Impact of Partition and its Aftermath in the Punjab Region, 1947–61 (Ph.D. thesis, Coventry University, 2004). Whitehead, Andrew, ‘Refugees from Partition’, in S. Parsuraman and P. V. Unnikrishnan (eds), India Disasters Report: Towards a Policy Initiative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

09_Roy & Bhatia~chap-9.pmd

173 Black

8/8/2007, 9:28 AM

174

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

10 Fires in the Kangra: A British Soldier’s Story of Partition

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

... in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, A continent for better or worse divided. —W. H. Auden (1991)

Sunil Khilnani in his thoughtful reflections on the idea of India comments on how other cultures have recurrently used India as a foil to define their own historical moments (1997: 197). He points out that this last deed of the British Raj, the supposedly rational slicing of the land on the basis of religion, is comprehensible only in terms of their understanding of the Indian people as backward and superstitious (ibid.: 199). Khilnani’s sensitive pen captures the ‘weary, fearful, honest pathos’ of Cyril Radcliffe, the man entrusted with creating this new cartography of South Asia, a jurist who knew nothing about India and would never return there. The carnage that followed in the aftermath of Partition when millions of ordinary people were pushed into new and, in many ways, strange countries and acquired new identities is well known. Ashis Nandy (2002) says that the 1940s introduced into South Asian public life a new actor, the refugee—the uprooted, partly deracinated, embittered victim who knew suffering and had seen the transience of social ties, the betrayal of friends, and the worst of human depravity, his own and that of others. According to Ian Talbot, ‘Migration was the single most important agony which attended the transfer of power’ (1999: 238).Yet Pandey (1992) noted more than a decade ago that Partition was not talked about in mainstream histories of the subcontinent. Rather, this silence and elision inscribed Partition as an inexplicable event, an aberration in the narrative of modern ‘India’, the price paid for national independence. Since then, there has been a spate of scholarly work on

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

174 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

175

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

recovering the untold stories of Partition. But one perspective has been little addressed—that of the British soldier, duty-bound to maintain the ‘unbiased’ objectivity of Auden’s poem yet complicit in those terrible events, charged with protecting rioting communities from each other, while simultaneously coming to the realization that they too were bidding farewell to India. The following piece seeks to explore some of these perspectives. It is based on several interviews with Deborah Nixon’s father, Leslie Nixon, a young subaltern who was responsible for escorting and protecting refugees during the period of Partition in 1947.1 The retelling of his story is not to establish it as ‘truth’; rather we seek to explore the way in which memory and experience create the past as a different country and pervade living history. Our contention is that the past is never dead; rather its spectres haunt the present, giving it a contingent, unsettled quality. Nixon’s observations provide a ground-level perspective of a time whose incredible violence found everyone, including the new governments of India and Pakistan, unprepared for the sheer magnitude of its brutality (Butalia 1998: 3). Pandey also argues that the violence was not a sudden lapse into chaos but was connected to the three years leading up to Partition (2001).This story, like many others, is a narrow view of a much bigger historical drama. Witnessing an event of this nature is in a sense the first step in embalming it in a narrative that is acceptable to the teller. Remembering it around sixty years after the fact is a process that adds a layer of emotion and guilt over the original experience. Leslie was a soldier and as such was not afforded a wider political context for the military action in which he was involved. It was only after the Partition that he began to understand the political dimensions of this major event of the twentieth century. As the entire Raj was collapsing, so were identities forged by old paradigms of power and control. Decades later, Leslie’s stories still reflect this ambiguous attitude towards ‘the Indians’ a negative paternalistic tone combined with a real fear and abiding mistrust. ‘There were painful incidents. It was so long ago I don’t know how to recall some of them. On the other hand some things are burned into my memory.’ Leslie Nixon’s account of his experiences of the Partition displays, as expected, the influences of his schooling and upbringing in India. As Butalia asserts, it is essential for any understanding of the Partition experience to listen to how people remember and to be mindful that these stories are not ‘pure’ or ‘unmediated’ but influenced by memory, nostalgia and trauma (1998: 11). There is still in the telling an unwillingness to concede a more balanced view of the events. In the telling, Leslie always positions himself tangentially, as a ‘neutral participant, something like a UN peace-keeper’. What is of significance is that this position was only neutral in a very limited sense, in that Leslie was not a Hindu or a Muslim. Also, as an observer, he was not objective but very much a participant in the action. His perception is further complicated by his sense of himself as a soldier, following

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

175 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

176

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

orders, ‘unlike a historian who has never seen a bullet fired in anger’ and who had the responsibility of making life and death decisions in the process of transporting and protecting thousands of uprooted people in hostile territory. Fundamentally, the basics of Leslie’s story remain coherent; perhaps he will never be prepared for the more self-reflexive unravelling of his role and that of his government’s in the events of Partition. In this essay, we have allowed his voice to dominate and his narrative, poignant, sometimes self-deceiving, evocatively captures the atmosphere of those tumultuous times. In 1948, Leslie himself became a migrant, choosing to be repatriated to Perth, Western Australia on the tramp ship Asturias. His experiences of Partition created a dread of ever revisiting India; even now, in an echo of Auden’s poem, he says there are people there who might still want to kill him. For him, India will always be suspended in the amber of the violence and volatility of 1947. Although he offers India’s ‘abject poverty’ as the ostensible reason not to return, he also fears, like others of his generation, the sullying of his idea of India, the golden aura of the British Raj. He still believes the trains are dangerous as they ‘haven’t been safe since the British left’. This attitude towards the British seems to be shared by many forced into migration by the process of Partition, as if the violence and trauma of the dis-membering of their homes affected their re-membering of their past. A Punjabi couple displaced from Lyallpur commented on the order and discipline the British created in Lyallpur and the efficiency of the train system.2 However, unlike Leslie, they were able to share their experience with others from the same area. Leslie put a huge cultural and geographical distance between himself and India when he immigrated to Australia. For nearly sixty years, he had no one with common experiences with whom to share his memories so his cache of stories remains petrified in the unreflective voice of a twenty-two-year-old soldier. In contrast to his lapses of memory or selective amnesia, the Punjabi couple had clear recollections of dates, times, events and people connected to the upheaval of Partition. This uprooting of a whole community of people who share similar stories and ordeals may contribute to that community’s strong sense of collective memory about Partition.

BACKGROUND Leslie’s perspective is based on his worldview, which was shaped by his colonial upbringing in a very class- and race-conscious world. He sees the events through the lens of the late Raj and the regimes of power and exclusion and inclusion in the social world that domiciled Europeans occupied as they jostled for a foothold at the lower end of the colonial hierarchy with those labelled Anglo-Indian. Leslie was

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

176 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

177

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

born in Agra in 1925, schooled in Mussoorie and trained and served with First King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles as a King’s commissioned officer in Dharamsala, Nagrota and Pathankot. He came from a railway family who had lived in India for three generations and the eight children were schooled in India making only a couple of relatively short trips to England.The seven boys were sent to board at St George’s College in Mussoorie and spoke fluent Urdu while the two girls stayed at home. The family also included a Eurasian boy abandoned by both his Muslim father and Scottish mother (the latter had returned to Scotland). Hussein Amin, who later took the name of Gordon Forbes, was also sent to St. George’s with the boys of the Nixon family. The Nixons were domiciled Europeans, a term used to refer to families relegated to a certain level in colonial society by the British themselves (Buettner 2000: 281, Caplan 2001: 8). These levels were loosely prescribed by occupation, frequency of trips to Britain, place of schooling and, of course, blood. However, no family fell discretely into a single category and, for some British families, generations of domicile in India did little to bind them to it in the way in which they felt tied to England, regardless of the amount of time they might have spent there. Europeans born and raised in India and who claimed to be British were regarded as inferior by the ‘real’ British in India (those who were born in Britain and regularly travelled between the two countries) and, according to Buettner, ‘Regardless of their actual ancestry … experienced the same disadvantages as the Anglo Indian community, in effect falling outside the bounds of whiteness with its many attendant privileges’ (2000: 280).They were not marginal but neither did they fully participate in either Indian or British culture. The social borders were porous in a society that was not as clearly defined into discrete ‘autonomous and bounded’ groups as some postcolonial theorists suggest (Caplan 2001: p.8). Leslie had never heard the term ‘domiciled European’ before the interviews and describes himself as British. Indeed many Anglo-Indians are of the opinion that this term was used by people who wanted to distance themselves from Anglo-Indians and gain status on the social scale. McMenamin points out that the term AngloIndian overshadowed ‘the marked social gradations amongst domiciled Europeans and Anglo Indians’ (2001: 119). It was not difficult to hide one’s origins if one’s family was light skinned and both Anglo-Indians and domiciled Europeans could claim to be European based on the racial descent of their fathers (Anthony 1969: 5). These terms were extremely important to people because they affected access to certain jobs (within the railways for example) and to government pay scales. Basically one aspired to be as British as possible, whatever one’s descent. However, to the British, domiciled Europeans were ‘commonly equated with the racially mixed by the colonial elites’ (Buettner 2004: 81). The domiciled European community was

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

177 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

178

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

FIGURE 10.1 School Photo

Details: Leslie is at the front row, third from left.

FIGURE 10.2 Leslie with Gurkhas

Details: Leslie is at the front right with Rob May (front left), an Australian Gurkha officer.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

178 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

179

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

at pains not to be identified as Anglo-Indian because of this attitude towards race and certain privileged access to areas of employment. It was a self-conscious class system, which led to the development of a level of anxiety about identity within both European and Anglo-Indian communities. For example, Anthony (1969: 4), an advocate for the Anglo-Indian community, expressed doubts regarding the claims to ethnic purity that many domiciled Europeans made in order to position themselves more favourably for work opportunities. Growing up in a railway family where the head of the family was frequently transferred meant that the notion of home was never identified with any one place. Indeed the list of the Nixon family homes—Bombay, Bhusawal, Itarsi, Nagpur, Damoh, Poona, Bhopal, Jhansi, Sagar (there may be more)—reflects why school at St George’s College in Mussoorie was perhaps the most fixed point of the Nixon boys’ lives. The family appeared to be middle class with the usual large retinue of servants: cook, bearer, gardener, chokra (runabout) and an ayah (nursemaid) who looked after the children. During all the interviews, Leslie showed an obvious reluctance to admit to any social interaction with Indian or Anglo-Indian communities and emphasized his social distance from them. His family, domiciled Europeans, employed in the railways as drivers and engineers, aspired to the status of the British ruling class who considered them as only slightly above Anglo-Indians on the social scale.Thus, Buettner (2004: 81) agrees with Bear (1994) and Caplan (2001) that, ‘domiciled Europeans increasingly converged with Anglo-Indians to form an “interstitial group”’. Families like the Nixons, who had been in India for several generations, did not want to be confused with those of mixed blood. This was often hard as children picked up the ‘chi chi’ (a highly derogative term) or ‘Bombay Welsh’ accent from Anglo-Indian classmates. An Australian officer who visited the family in 1946 commented that Leslie’s father had an ‘Anglo Banglo’ accent.3 The right accent was important to those in the domiciled community as it signified the kind of schooling one had had and thus indicated social status. It was easier to control contact at home although in the Nixon family Gordon Forbes/Hussein Amin’s presence complicated this to a large degree. Leslie’s ambivalence about his family’s presence in India came up constantly during the interviews; for example, he attributed his mother’s death at an early age in Bhusawal to ‘an incompetent Indian surgeon’ though surgery anywhere in the 1930s would have been a risky proposition! He later rather begrudgingly acknowledged that the same surgeon had become eminent in Britain for pioneering work in his field. After leaving school at nineteen, Leslie joined the Air Force, training in South Africa. When he learnt while travelling to Europe on a tramp ship that World War II was over, he decided to join the Worcester rifles. He then retrained in Britain and India before being assigned in 1945 to the 1st K.G.V’s.O. Gurkha Rifles based in Dharamsala.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

179 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

180

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

‘I WAS A LIEUTENANT IN THE GURKHAS’ Leslie is still very proud of his connection with the Gurkha Rifles and brought with him to Australia ceremonial and practical kukris (fighting knives), clothing and books about the armies of India, movement orders and photos of his time serving in the north of India. He considered the Gurkhas (whose ancestors came from what is now Nepal) as superior to ‘the Indians’ and often commented admiringly on their ‘do or die’ mentality, blind loyalty and bravery. In part this attitude was certainly influenced by British army rhetoric about Gurkhas. However, the unflattering comparisons he makes between them and ‘the Indians’ reflect his conflicted and unresolved emotions about the marginal nature of his situation in India, feelings that were clearly exacerbated by the terrible experiences of Partition. The concept of the Gurkhas as ‘warrior gentlemen’ has been explored by Caplan (1995) who suggests that the British identified a level of congruence in soldierly FIGURE 10.3 Lieutenant L.G. Nixon, 1st K.G.V’s.O Gurkha Rifles, the Malaun Regiment

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

180 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

181

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

characteristics or martial nature as existing between themselves and the Gurkhas. This helped to cement the relationship between them but, in spite of the much vaunted trustworthiness and soldierly characteristics of the Gurkhas, the latter were never given command of regiments. In an anecdote about their toughness, Leslie recounted that if a group of Gurkhas was commanded to take a position they would literally keep fighting even when completely routed unless they were commanded to stop: in other words they were unable to think for themselves. Leslie has no idea of Gurkha cultural practices apart from the kukri knife initiations and his admiration for their abilities is tinged by paternalism. When asked about photos of Gurkha soldiers dressed as women, he shrugged it off by saying ‘they liked to do that’. There was little fraternization between non-commissioned soldiers and officers and Leslie says the Gurkhas preferred to stay amongst their own. In his book about the Gurkhas, Northey remarks that, apart from physical differences, it is humour and ‘… his frank open character (that) permits an intimacy in his intercourse with Europeans that is seldom achieved by other native races in the east’ (1937: 97). And yet, the Gurkhas were subject to stereotyping and derogatory myth-making as much as other groups under colonial rule. I think this is actually written in a book but it was a comment by one of the colonels of a Gurkha regiment—see the Gurkhs didn’t look dissimilar to the Japs and we used to pay them a bounty per Jap head they brought back.You know, if they came across a bunch of Japs swimming in the river or something like that, they’d wait until they got out and when they came out the Gurkhs would attack them, take the heads off and take the heads back, because the colonel paid them 50 rupees a head (or 5 rupees a head, or something). And in that particular story (it might be an anecdote, I don’t know), the colonel picked up this head and said ‘That’s my subedar major!’

In reading some of the army literature about the Gurkhas (see MacMunn 1911; Petre 1925) that Leslie brought with him from India it is clear that Leslie internalized an essentialized notion of the Gurkhas’ history, culture and identity. Caplan argues that it is from sources such as those written and circulated by the military that the idea of the fearless Gurkha was created and perpetuated: ‘a creation both of the military ambience in which he assumes his persona, and of the military authors who represent him’ (1995: 12). Even the term Gurkha was developed as a convenient umbrella term for the soldiers recruited from Nepal; ‘the word “Gurkha” is an English word not used by either the Indians or the Nepalis, the former use Gorkha and the latter use neither but would use “Gorkha” as a spelling’.4 It is difficult to disabuse Leslie of his attitude towards the Gurkhas from Nepal, particularly with respect to the martial characteristics that were assigned to them through the literature of the day. It is within this framework that he refers to Gurkha soldiers recruited from Nepal in the following accounts.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

181 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

182

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

THE PARTITION: FIRES IN THE KANGRA Dharamsala is in a beautiful, mountainous but relatively isolated area; in 1947, communications and transport would have been difficult. The partition of this area was also bound to be controversial as it contained districts ceded to India but with majority populations of Muslims. For example, Radcliffe awarded ‘three of the four tehsils of the Muslim majority Gurdaspur district … as well as the Hindu majority tehsil of Pathankot—to eastern Punjab’ (Ahmed 1999: 154).Thus, Muslims in the north of Himachal Pradesh who wanted to go to Pakistan had to make their way down to Dharamsala to be evacuated by train or truck towards the border. It was a terrible task for those responsible for the transportation of refugees and an even more heartrending and tragic experience for those forced to leave their homes behind. Leslie cannot now recall exactly how long he was involved in this process but thinks it may have been about four months. However, even after sixty years, his sense of responsibility and feelings of guilt around certain ‘actions’ that he had to carry out were palpable. As a lieutenant, Leslie’s duties included escorting refugees from a refugee camp at Yol, south of Dharamsala to a railway siding at Nagrota where they were put on trains and transported along a relatively short but dangerous railway route to Pathankot. The camp at Yol had been converted from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp during World War II to a refugee camp. By the time refugees arrived at Yol many were wounded and were treated at the camp hospital, which was staffed by Canadian missionary nuns. He recalls that on one occasion they were trapped in the camp by snipers for nearly two weeks and had to live off bully beef. Muslim refugees travelled by bus and, if they were fit enough, would be taken to Nagrota and put on a train to Pathankot. If they were wounded they were taken to an Italian POW camp. Sometimes they were cut with swords. Canadian missionary nurses would treat them. There was a hospital there, of course set up for the Italian POWs. So they just moved into the hospital and they were doing amputations and stitching people up. The main casualties weren’t caused by gunshot, it was sores and wounds that they’d had inflicted on them. In some cases gangrene was setting in. At Pathankot the First (Gurkha Rifles) would hand the refugees over to the Second (Gurkha Rifles) on trains to Amritsar, where they were often attacked by Hindus, and take them out of India. Or we put them on trucks and we’d bring them on by road. Those were the two ways we took them: by truck and by train. We didn’t take that many by truck.

The violence came as a shock to Leslie who had naively imagined a seamless handing over followed by the peaceful process of migration. To him, and the other

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

182 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

183

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

British soldiers, the ‘Indians’ were a homogeneous group whose religious beliefs were secondary characteristics. His complete lack of perception of the deep emotions raised by this event is noteworthy since he was no newcomer to India; rather, his family had lived there for three generations. In addition, the attitude that Partition was going to be an uncomplicated process of migration further illustrates the ambiguous relationship the European and Anglo-Indian community had about ‘place’ and ‘home’. Caplan (1997) comments that these people felt a profound sense of disconnection from their local environment accompanied by a feeling that home lay elsewhere. Headquarters for the regiment was high up in the Kangra valley overlooking the plains, so soldiers based there looked down on the fires that began. Leslie recalls that the moment Partition was officially announced the situation became literally incendiary as neighbours and villagers torched each other’s homes. Below is Leslie’s account of how he saw the events unfold. We knew Partition was coming. But it was confusing. I don’t know whether Partition started at midnight or on a particular date; we were isolated and had no newspapers or radios … however, the first thing that comes to my mind is the flames up the Kangra Valley. The Indians really went berserk and they set fire to all the Muslims and started killing them and all the rest and the Muslims were prepared to slaughter the Indians on the other side of the border. But I had no idea it was going to be so violent, that there’d be killing. It never entered my head that that would happen! I knew that when Partition came, the Muslims would either go to what was Pakistan or go to what is now Bangladesh; but I had no idea that the feelings would be so dreadful and that so much killing would go on! I thought it would just be like ‘You’re a Muslim, you’re going to have Pakistan. You’re a Hindu, you’re going to have Hindustan or India’ and that was that. The killing was taking place up in the Punjab and up in the hills around us, where we were getting the refugees into camps and then taking them down to the trains. And, of course, they tried to kill us, which didn’t enamour me to the Indians much. On our side, the Hindus were slaughtering the Muslims. On Pakistan’s side, the Muslims were slaughtering the Hindus. And, when these people came across, they’d tell everybody on the other side how they were being slaughtered, you see, so it just triggered off more and more killing.

The documents (Exhibits 10.1 and 10.2) reproduced here were discovered amongst Leslie’s papers. They capture the sense of immediacy and tension at that time. The person referred to as ‘young Nick’ is Leslie and tps refers to the transportees. The extract of the operations order included here gives a detailed outline of how refugees were to be moved as in the letter and, although understated, the intensity of the situation is very clear.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

183 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

184

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

EXHIBIT 10.1 Letter about Moving Refugees Dear Dicky, The situation is now very serious in this area I am afraid we have got to pinch six of your trucks to collect tps from Palampur. Please send young Nick with a section escort and 6 trucks to Palampur immediately. Fred P.S. This IS a disturbed area and you may act accordingly. Harrington is evacuating 1,000 refugees from Jawalamukli and has been told to get six of your trucks. Tell him he must wait until we have got these tps from Palampur. P.P.S. There’s a hell of a fire in Nagrota. Tell Nick to keep his trucks well under control, he may meet trouble on the way. Nick—old chum, the trucks have been tanked up. Leave Sub.Gangamani in charge—tell him to milap with me here this evening. There probably won’t be any outside patrolling tonight.

EXHIBIT 10.2 Operations Order on Moving Refugees Copy No. 2 SECRET IGRC OPERATION ORDER

No. 4 of 1947

(Ref map sheets No’s 52 D/SE,53 A/NE) INFORMATION 1. Communal feeling is high in the Hamirpur Tehsil and some atrocities have been committed. INTENTION 2. pl (composite D&E Co43) will move to Hamirpur on 22 Aug. to act in aid to the civil power when required METHOD 3. Move by road in civilian TpT to Thural (53A/NE 8 213) 4. Move on 40 mules from Thural to Sujanpur 5. Move on 40 mules from S. Bank of R. Beas at Sujanpur to Hamirpur 6. ST—to be ready by 0830hrs 22 August. Move on the ADIT’S orders

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

184 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

185

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

Leslie told us many anecdotes about random or opportunistic attacks on the holding camp and on the journey fromYol to Nagrota and from Nagrota to Pathankot depending on whether they were taking the refugees by road or rail. I remember, on one occasion we were bringing refugees down and halfway down—this is by road—there was a fort and we were organizing at the fort to take them on down south. A couple of things happened there. One was that we knew there were snipers around. They were trying to pop us off all the time and they’d pop the Muslim refugees too. And in this fort there was a big pond.We overnighted there because I know these two Muslims were killed there.They’d gone out to a jhil, a tank. We told them not to do it, we said ‘For God’s sake don’t go out and expose yourselves’; anyway, two of these blokes took their little prayer mat and put the prayer mats down and started praying to Allah and bang! bang! they were knocked over. And I don’t even know what we did with the bodies, to tell you the truth; I just can’t remember. Another time we were up there when one night, we were in the camp and there were a lot of swallows hanging around—I remember that. And we could hear this noise like jackals. Jackals have a maniacal laugh, a little like a kookaburra … a human maniacal laugh. Anyway, I had a young officer with me and suddenly … well, I thought they were jackals starting up, screaming and maniacal laughter. It went on for a while and he said ‘Oo, what’s that?’ I said, ‘I don’t worry about that, that’s bloody jackals.’ It put the wind up him very much because he didn’t know what it was. And I found out the next day that it wasn’t jackals, they were Indians being put to the sword in a village where we could hear them; and they were screaming and carrying on but they just sounded like jackals. Just sheer terror and screaming, you know? That’s all you could hear. Then the next day we’d load the refugees into the trucks and we’d get them to the town where we’d hand them over to the Second Gurkha Rifles. Now the Second would take them on and when they took them on to Amritsar where there were much bigger attacks, there were a lot of casualties, on the main train. After Amritsar sometimes the refugees were taken by road.Well, the column would be miles long and these people would be getting attacked as they were going along the road. So you’re getting refugees going out of the camps here and bringing in the dead and wounded and putting them back in the camp. That’s how bad it was.

Gurkhas recruited from Nepal and working for the British, although of Hindu religion, likewise saw the situation as occurring outside their sphere of interest. Corporal Rana from the 2/2 Gurkha Rifles reflects on what the situation meant to him: In 1946 and 1947 Hindus and Muslims killed each other. It was like war. It was dangerous to drive around then and the situation was tense.We went about armed.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

185 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

186

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

But they were killing each other so it was not my business.We heard that Jawaharlal Nehru let the country be Pakistan and India to keep the population balanced (Rana quoted in Cross and Gurung [2002: 172]).

The army was warned before Partition that some people were pretending to be Nihang Sikhs so as to be able to carry weapons (see Exhibit 10.3), thereby adding to the proliferation of armed and potentially dangerous groups threatening refugees. These kinds of unconfirmed and irrational rumours considerably added to the stresses and trauma of the time. Gurkhas also observed that Sikhs were particularly involved in the killings in some areas. This account is from a soldier from the Second Gurkha Rifles. It was to this regiment that Leslie delivered refugees for the onward journeys to Pakistan, where unfortunately the violence did not cease. There is again a mixture of horror at the atrocities and a desire to stand outside, to be positioned at a distance from it. There is an unintentional irony in these comments by Corporal Limbu of the 2/2 Gurkha Rifles regarding the role of the Gurkhas and the beheading of three Muslims: There was much communal violence, which we had to try and prevent but we were not allowed to use rifles. The Muslims had arrows and were persecuting the Hindus. In one brawl I cut off the heads of three Muslims and we had no trouble at all after that. They (Muslims) were afraid of us, our kukris and our rifles. The Hindus came to us in streams, like a column of ants, trying to grasp us, hang from us and pay us obeisance so happy were they to be relieved of persecution. ‘Take us to Nepal,’ they implored. We Gurkhas were a peace-keeping army. EXHIBIT 10.3 Letter Warning about Activities of Nihang Sikhs in Lahore (1947) Copy of HQ Lahore Area letter No: 1042 GI dated 28 Apr’47 Fwdd by HQ Jullunder Sub area under their letter no.426 dated * May ’47 Subject :- POLITICAL BODIES 1. The Punjab CID has reported that the number of NIHANG SIKHS has recently increased considerably. This is thought to be due to spurious conversions being carried out with the object to carry arms: as NIHANG SIKHS are allowed to carry the ‘NISHAN SAHIB’ (or spear) in areas which are not classified as ‘dangerously disturbed’ areas under the Punjab Public Safety Ordinance. 2. This sect is primarily a body of militant missionaries but which in normal times is not politically conscious. The obvious deduction from the information in para 1, however, is that they might be used as a military body in the event of a major clash with the Muslim community.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

186 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

187

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

From there (Hyderabad) we went to the Lahore area after it had become Pakistan. Hindus and Muslims massacred one another with atrocious cruelty. There was no one to look after affairs, no one to collect countless dead bodies and the corpses rotted with such a stench that none of us had any appetite left. There were uncountable deaths. We escorted [Muslim] refugees from Amritsar to Lahore and [Hindu] refugees from Lahore to Amritsar. The worst killers were the Sikhs: they were the most dangerous of all, killing any non-Sikh they met.They took notice of nobody but themselves and observed no laws but their own. They had to be kept under observation. If it had not been for the Gurkhas, they would have taken the whole country over. India owes that not happening to us Gurkhas. How can India and Pakistan work together after such happenings? I was young then and none of that affected me personally (Limbu quoted in Cross and Gurung [2002: 171]).

TRAINS TO PAKISTAN Many scholars and novelists have written of the horror that trains full of dead and wounded refugees evoked when they arrived at stations in the newly-created nations. It was as if the rioters on both sides of the border were sending messages to each other that could only be conveyed via the medium of corpses. Leslie recalls one such incident: In some of those places like near Amritsar, just near the border, I heard that one of these trains pulled in and one of the Gurkh officers handling the transfers, getting them across the border, went along the train saying ‘Everybody out! Everybody out!’ and there wasn’t a bloody movement. There wasn’t a person alive on the train— not one person alive!

On occasion, the Gurkhas were beset by so many rioters that they ran out of ammunition: Sometimes the Gurkhas fired the machine guns until the barrels were red hot and they couldn’t fire them any more. If you can imagine this: if you were small enough to be on an ants’ nest, the ants are coming at you and you had a machine gun but you couldn’t stop them, they just kept coming and coming and coming—thousands of them! Came from everywhere on both sides of the train, front and back.

The railway line that ran between Nagrota and Pathankot was small gauge and the trains were slow so the refugees on the trains were particularly vulnerable to opportunistic attacks and ambushes. Attacks on trains were not uncommon and were sometimes carried out with ‘a military precision’ (Talbot and Singh 1999: 208) around Amritsar and Lahore. Lesley describes an ambush by the ‘Indian army’ (probably Indian soldiers in the army though this is not clear) on a train full of

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

187 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

188

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

refugees which had come to a halt. He had to investigate what was going on and, although no one was injured or killed during this stand-off, it was nonetheless a terrifying encounter: Well I wondered why the engine driver kept blowing the whistle all the time. So I went up the front to find out why the train wasn’t moving and he said they’d pulled up the ties. They hadn’t taken the rails away but they’d taken them off the ties so that the train couldn’t go along. They said ‘Oh, there’s a little command post over there’ and I went over there with some of my Gurkhs and the soldiers were all lying in firing positions, you know, facing us. I thought, this is going to be pleasant! Anyway, I said ‘Where’s your commander?’ and they pointed him out and I said ‘What have you been doing?’ and he said ‘Lying down for the Koran.’ I said, ‘Don’t just stand there,’ and he looked a bit reluctant and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what; if you don’t stand your men down, the rest of the regiment is coming down the road and we’ll kill every one of you.’ That frightened him so he stood them down. Nobody was following; they could have put a bullet into me and nothing would have happened. But we made them put the ties back on and then took the train on in to the town. This was the Indian Army!

It was late autumn (August to September) so the weather was hot and the trains were very crowded as people were crammed into tiny carriages and, against their escort’s advice, raised the windows to let in air. But the refugees still would leave the windows open. Coming down on the train sometimes the refugees were skewered because, they wouldn’t put the windows down.The windows were open and they’d wait for an opportunity to attack.They’d have long bamboos, much bigger than you get here, which were sharpened at one end and hardened in a fire and they’d just charge the train and push bamboos through, just like skewering meat on a kebab, all these people. The same thing happened when the train was moving … the train was slow, it used to wind in and out and the jungle was quite thick—it came right up to the train … people could wait until the engine went past and come onto the train in the middle somewhere.… Because we weren’t in with the refugees—we were protecting them from the front and the back—I didn’t know about it until we actually got there, that the woman had been killed on this train. I don’t know what happened, but a bloke took a shotgun and pulled both the triggers and blew her face off. She was a young girl— about eighteen years old, I suppose. Well, we handed the refugees over. And the Indians used to snipe at us in that refugee camp, too, and try to kill us.

The most traumatic thing that Leslie remembers happened to a group of women and children in a village that had been abandoned by its menfolk who may have been fighting somewhere else or who had been killed. It is something he cannot

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

188 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

189

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

expunge from his memory and, though he ostensibly blames ‘the Indians’ because ‘they deceived us into it’, his feelings of guilt and responsibility are almost tangible. The action was so fast that the Gurkhas were not able to rescue the remaining women and children who had jumped into the well in fright. It was a terrible thing! I was given an order to go to a particular place. I went to the village and had two Gurkhs with me, and the people in the village were all Hindus and they said that a bunch of Muslims were going to attack and kill them and they were just over that hill there. And they would have outnumbered us, I guess, but we had machine-guns and it was frightful! … When we got there the people could see us armed to the teeth but there weren’t any men; they were all women and children and they were throwing themselves into this big well. And then I got some of the villagers down from where they were and I said ‘Take your dhotis off and try and get these people out’ and then I was given an order to move somewhere else. You can’t do everything! So I said, ‘You’ve got to get these people out.’ I don’t know whether they were Muslims or not; if they were Muslims, they were only women and children anyway. There were about 15 to 20 people in the well, some had already drowned; little babies and women. I don’t know why, they seemed to lose their strength. They might have been there for too long because sometimes when we got them nearly to the top, sometimes they’d let go and fall back to the bottom. We had to keep going with our patrols because we were getting calls from all over the place from people being attacked.... Things were going on all over the place. You’d get an order to go somewhere else and ‘What will I do?’ You know, all these people in this well! We organized the local people to get them out, there was no danger to people. Because there wasn’t, there wasn’t a gun between the whole lot of them—all women and children.

This motif of the well, women and children preferring death by drowning to other more horrible forms of death or dishonour to themselves or their religion, occurs frequently in the literature. Butalia recounts how in a Sikh village, Thoa Khalsa, near Rawalpindi in Pakistan some ninety women threw themselves into a well ‘in order to preserve the “sanctity” and “purity” of their religion, and to avoid conversion’ (Butalia 2000: 183). The incident described here was particularly harrowing because of the age and gender of the victims. Despite the fact that Leslie knew he and his men had been duped into participating, he obviously still feels that he was complicit and is unable to forgive himself. Eventually the violence played itself out and Leslie thought that it had subsided by about November 1947. This time also marked the end of his commission and thus he made the decision to leave India and follow an Australian friend to western Australia.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

189 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

190

DEBORAH NIXON AND DEVLEENA GHOSH

CONCLUSION For Leslie Nixon, India’s independence was a double sign. It signalled the end of his life there; the bloodshed and violence that he witnessed confirmed him in his decision to abandon the place that had been home to his family for three generations. The experience of Partition also strengthened in him the feeling that Indians were not capable of responsibly governing themselves. I was disappointed because it seemed to me that, having the Brits there was peace, you know? There was good government and that sort of stuff and when you look at the chaos before the Brits came, you know, these warring chiefs and things like that, and I thought ‘When we leave, maybe they’ll break up, India will break up into these warring parties.’ As it turns out, it did break up into three parts, you know, to Pakistan and Bangladesh and then north, where they’re trying to get independence for the Nagas and Kashmir. And I really thought that that would affect the type of life that the Indians had lived until Partition. When I was there before Partition and as a child, there were landowners that exploited peasants. This was slavery in its own way.You took a loan out and couldn’t pay it so you were virtually indebted to the bloke that lent you the money—forever. So, in that respect, I was feeling for the Indians that were going to be left behind and yet some of them said they were sorry Partition had come but I think, on the whole.… [P]eople wanted to be free, you know, which I can understand. I was more worried and concerned about the poor peasants.

After Partition Leslie never saw his father and at least one of his brothers ever again.The family split up and migrated to the UK, North America and Africa. Perhaps the periodic long separations of his childhood prepared him for this severing of ties. It was only in his old age that he resumed regular contact with his remaining brother. He came to Australia, a ‘new’ frontier, and became a geologist because ‘only Indians became carpenters and tradesmen’! Yet as we sat talking together, it was patently obvious that India is the unseen presence in Leslie’s life, a spectre that haunts his imagination and his house, with its garage full of artefacts and documents from India that he has never been able to throw away. During our interviews, sharing a meal of the curry that was his preferred food, the heartbreak of his separation from his history was apparent. Nobody got out of 1947 unscathed.

NOTES 1. All the quotations attributed to Leslie Nixon are from interviews conducted by the authors during February–December 2005. 2. Interview with Santosh and Om Prakash Gera, Bangalore, December 2004. 3. Personal communication from R. May, an Australian Gurkha officer, 12 May 2005. 4. Personal communication from J. Cross, 26 April 2006.

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

190 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

191

FIRES IN THE KANGRA

REFERENCES Ahmed, I., ‘The 1947 Partition of Punjab: Arguments Put Before the Punjab Boundary Commission by the Parties Involved’, in I. Talbot and S. Thandi (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Anthony, F., Britain’s Betrayal of India: The Story of the Anglo Indian Community (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1969). Auden, W. H., ‘Partition’, in his Collected Poems, ed. by Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, 1991). Bear, L. G., ‘Miscegenations of Modernity: Constructing European Respectability and Race in the Indian Railway Colony, 1857–1931’, Women’s History Review, 3(4), 1994. Buettner, E., ‘Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races: Defining Europeans in Late Colonial India’, Women’s History Review, 9(2), 2000. ———, Empire Families: Britons in Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Butalia, U., The Other Side of Silence (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 1998). ———, ‘Community, State and Gender: Some Reflections on the Partition of India’, in her (ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). Caplan, L., Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995). ———, ‘Colonial and Contemporary Transnationalisms: Traversing Anglo-Indian Boundaries of the Mind’ (paper presented at the Transnationalism Conference, University of Manchester, Department of Social Anthropology,16–18 May 1997; accessed 20 June 2005, www.alphalink. com.au/~agilbert/cap0399.html). ———, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Cross, J. P. and B. Gurung (eds), Gurkhas at War: In Their Own Words—The Gurkha Experience, 1939 to the Present [1999] (London: Greenhill Books, 2002). Khilnani, S., The Idea of India (London: Penguin Books, 1997). MacMunn, G. F. M. The Armies of India (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911). McMenamin, D., ‘Identifying Domiciled Europeans in Colonial India: Poor whites or privileged community?’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3(1), June 2001: 106–27. Nandy, A., ‘The Death of an Empire’, Sarai Reader, 2, 2002:14–21; http://www.sarai.net/journal/ 02PDF/03morphologies/04death_empire.pdf, accessed 15 December 2005. Northey, W. B., The Land of the Gurkhas or the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal (London: Hefer and Sons, 1937). Pandey, G., ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu–Muslim Riots in India Today’, Representations, 37(Winter), 1992: 27–55. ———, ‘Remembering Partition: Violence Nationalism and History in India’, Contemporary South Asia, 7, 2001. Petre, F. L., The First King George The Fifth’s Own Gurkha Regiment: The Malaun Regiment (London: London Royal United Service Institution, 1925). Talbot, I., ‘Literature and the Human Drama of the 1947 Partition’, I. Talbot and S. Thandi (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Talbot, I. and G. Singh (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

10_Roy & Bhatia~chap-10.pmd

191 Black

8/8/2007, 11:28 AM

192

PRABHJOT PARMAR

11 ‘Moving Forward Though Still Facing Back’: Partition and the South Asian Diaspora in Canada

PRABHJOT PARMAR

When asked his impression of Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998) while he was at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998, Naseeruddin Shah, India’s leading film and theatre actor, responded with a few questions: Is there no other subject for these filmmakers? Is there nothing they can show from contemporary India? I know Partition is the most important subject, but the way Earth and Train to Pakistan treat it, it does not move me at all. Three pages of Manto tell you what you want to know (Shah 1998).

Pamela Rooks’ film adaptation of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan was televised in India on Star TV in August 1997, coinciding with the celebration of fifty years of independence. More than the treatment of Partition as a subject in the two films, it is the outsiderness of Mehta and Rooks that seems to bother Shah. Emphasizing the importance of geographic residency, he further adds, ‘These writers and filmmakers are expatriate. They lack an intimacy’ (ibid.). Very few would disagree with Shah that Manto’s stories speak volumes about Partition; however, the question that Shah’s response provokes is, why should people living in diaspora not respond to Partition? As it is, not much has been written in English on Partition. As far as films are concerned (not to mention the disregard for the subject in Western or Hollywood cinema), even the copious corpus of Indian cinema itself demonstrates severe neglect of Partition as a subject. Recent films that treat Partition as a subject are so few that one could count these on one’s fingers.1 Shah speaks as if ‘expatriates’ are producing one film after another on Partition. Other than Earth and Train to Pakistan (1997), Ken McMullen’s Partition (1987) is another film made in the West, but unlike Mehta’s and Rooks’ films, it was entirely shot on a set in London.Additionally,

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

192 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

193

Canadian cinematographer/filmmaker Vic Sarin’s Partition (2007), a love story set against the backdrop of Partition, is the latest film on Partition made by and in diaspora. It was released in Canada on 2 February 2007. The recent production of Partition-based films, to use Suvir Kaul’s phrase regarding Partition literature, is merely ‘a scratching of the surface’ (2001: 4). There are numerous stories that need telling and layers that need careful unpeeling to let the profound implications of Partition days come out into the open and generate discussion of issues lying dormant under a shroud of silence. According to Jasbir Jain, ‘[T]he political and literary concerns in India are different from the ones which concern the writer of the diaspora’ (2003: 87). Undeniably, there are matters that diasporic communities do not have to or may not contend with outside of India. At the same time, their memory and ‘emotional investment in India’ (Radhakrishnan 2003: 125) spurs them to respond to issues such as the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India in the late 1980s and 1990s by retrieving Partition history that foregrounds the dangerous territory of communal divisions. To believe, as Shah does, that Indians living in the West lack an understanding of issues in the homeland because of domiciliary distance is ‘counter-productive’ (ibid.: 126). There may not be, after all, a stringent demarcation between the interests of Indians in India and elsewhere on subjects such as Partition and communal violence that continue to be relevant outside the limits of the homeland. Moreover, such compartmentalization seldom ties down creative writers, filmmakers, and artists. The transportation of Partition in the memory bags of migrants from South Asia to other parts of the world is evident in Roshan Lal Sharma’s life story Holy Men and Holy Cows (1968), Harwant Bains’ play Blood (1989), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1997), Tariq Ali’s cinematic rendering of Manto’s short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ as Partition, Balachandra Rajan’s The Dark Dancer (1958) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s story ‘Defend Yourself Against Me’ (1995), to name but a few works. Some of the works produced in diaspora, as mentioned above, verify that certain ‘political and literary concerns’ of diaspora and home may not be that divergent after all. As the case may be, at times diasporic artists unfold what may not have been discussed extensively in the homeland. Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel What the Body Remembers (2000) certainly does well in portraying the lives of predominantly Sikh characters before and immediately after Partition, a subject rarely found outside the Punjabi novel. Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and its depiction of the infamous Emergency addresses another subject that has been largely neglected in cultural productions within India.2 Mehta’s Earth is the first film on Partition that graphically depicts violence to enunciate the bloodbath that came with Partition.3 Elaborating on the response of diaspora to political events in the homeland, Verne Dusenbery, in the context of the separatist vision of some Sikhs in Punjab and in the diaspora as an aftermath of the 1984 planned killings of Sikhs in India, poses

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

193 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

194

PRABHJOT PARMAR

a question: ‘But why should Sikhs of the diaspora be moved by such imagery, given the presumably very different political and economic situations they are experiencing?’ (1995: 29). From the perspective of my argument, I suggest that ‘the presumably different political and economic situations’ that the Sikh, Punjabi, or South Asian diaspora experiences may not be exclusively triggered or elicited by what is presumed as remote. In other words, the conditions within Canada, of Canadian and colonial origin, along with direct or indirect influences of global political economies, generate ‘imagery’, emotions, passions, memories that compel creative artists like Baldwin and Mehta to reach back in history and present to their readers and viewers representations that continue to have contemporary relevance. It would not be wrong to say that there is a consensus amongst scholars regarding an uncomfortable silence about Partition in general, almost as if people want to forget it. In East Punjab or the Indian Punjab, writers or filmmakers have not exhaustively explored the painful division, dislocation and relocation of millions, and the violence that accompanied Partition. Exploring the near absence of Partition in Punjabi poetry and folk songs, Amarjit Chandan, himself a Punjabi poet living in Britain, says, ‘Maybe there is a collective sense of guilt of failure’ (1997). Some eminent works in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and English include Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (‘Carcass’) and the iconic ‘Ode to Waris Shah’; Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’ and several other stories; Kartar Singh Duggal’s Nau te Maas (‘Nails and Flesh’); Krishan Chander’s ‘Peshawar Express’ and several short stories; Nanak Singh’s four novels Eulogy in Blood (1948), The Game of Fire (1948), Deep Sea (1950) and The Painter (1951); Rajinder Singh Bedi’s story ‘Lajwanti’; and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956).The celebrations of fifty years of independence from British colonial rule in 1997 resulted in a keen attention towards exploring aspects of Partition in critical scholarship, literature, film, drama, and other cultural representations. If there is renewed interest within the subcontinent to voice the impact of Partition on people, the South Asian diaspora has also contributed to the evocation of the forgotten experiences of millions. In diaspora studies, terms such as ‘expatriate’, ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, ‘refugee’, and ‘exile’ are part of contemporary critical attention. My usage of diaspora includes migrations related to colonial rule and post-Independence movements out of South Asia, what Vijay Mishra categorizes as the ‘old diaspora’ and the ‘new diaspora’ respectively (Mishra 2001). Cognizant of the diversity of the diaspora that traces its roots back to the subcontinent, I focus on the South Asian diaspora living outside that geographic region. In this essay, I specifically discuss the South Asian diaspora living in Canada that celebrated its 100 years in Canada in 1997.4 The earliest migrants to Canada were mostly Sikhs from Punjab who arrived in 1904–08 (Jagpal 1994: 18). The racist immigration policy of white Canada prevented many from bringing their families from India in the early part of the

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

194 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

195

twentieth century. The second wave of migration, from the 1960s onwards, saw an exponential increase in various South Asian communities that included Punjabis from India (chiefly Sikh migrants) and Pakistan, Gujaratis, Bangladeshis in the 1970s, and Sri Lankans, especially Tamils, in the wake of the civil war in the 1980s. Sikhs are the largest community of all South Asian groups in Canada. For a diaspora that is over a hundred years old, South Asians until the last two decades did not contribute much to different cultural productions.There have been very few literary and other cultural responses to Partition by diaspora in Canada. Largely, the division of 1947 has not received much attention, or, as the poet Navtej Bharati asserts, ‘Punjab and Punjabis have not explored Partition, they have maintained a mysterious silence. Perhaps they are making use of silence to deal with the complexities related to Partition’.5 Since 1997, however, a handful of prominent works, from time to time, have brought Partition to the forefront of discussion in Canada. The narratives of Deepa Mehta’s Earth and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999) develop around characters and situations that evolve, as the 1947 division becomes a certainty. Tariq Malik’s collection of stories Rainsongs of Kotli (2004)6 unfolds in the Pakistani Punjab ten years after the Partition and weaves Partition into ‘Paani’ and ‘Homesickness and Other Fevers’. Anita Rau Badami’s latest novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006) also draws on Partition and connects it to the massacre of Sikhs in India in November 1984.The narrative takes place in India and Canada as politics and political events shape the lives of different characters. Miriam Pirbhai’s short story,‘Mrs Akbar’, unfolds the transfer of the subcontinental politics and tensions related to Partition to Montreal where the Akbar and Gupta families negotiate present and past. Partition, therefore, manifests itself not only in the generation that experienced it but also in the generations that follow, even in diaspora. The ‘multiple migratory subjectivities’ of diaspora illustrate varied responses to Partition via diverse mediums, including film, literature, theatre, painting, and sculpture (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 12). In this paper, I examine two such responses from within Canada by two Punjabi women: the literary and cinematic representations of Partition in Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (2000) and Mehta’s Earth. That both Baldwin and Mehta explore the Partition in Punjab, a land of their ancestors, raises questions about the way these works provide an intervention in the existing narratives on Partition, and then bring it into a much more global context while talking specifically of the partition of 1947. More than a close reading, I offer an exploration of why and how Partition becomes a subject for their respective works while discussing how the pressures of nationality and citizenship, cartographic reconfigurations, and divisions of people contribute to the retrieval of a violent and traumatic juncture in the subcontinent by a generation that did not directly experience Partition. Sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, the demand for separate nationstates, and territorial remapping in different parts of the world in 1990s, especially

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

195 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

196

PRABHJOT PARMAR

Quebec’s sovereignty issue in Canada, I argue, evoke happenings and memories of Partition and in turn shape Baldwin and Mehta’s responses. Using diaspora as a broad, all-encompassing term, I engage with Shauna Singh Baldwin, a second-generation Canadian of Indian descent and Deepa Mehta, an immigrant Canadian of Indian origin, within the vast confines of the South Asian diaspora. In my argument, I use Holocaust scholar Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ to illustrate diaspora artists’ rendering of Partition through literary and cinematic mediums (Hirsch 1997: 22). In addition to What the Body Remembers and Earth, I ground my arguments in several interviews and essays of and by Mehta and Baldwin in order to reveal the importance of Partition in their works. The immediate ramifications of the 1947 Partition were felt thousands of miles away in Vancouver, Canada, where friends, who had collectively opposed British rule in India by posting anti-imperial posters and bills on walls, felt mutually separated on account of the subcontinental fracture. Unlike the millions who suddenly became aliens in their homeland and had to relocate to a new nation-state on either side of the Radcliffe Line, those living in Canada were not involved in a physical migration caused by the 1947 division. However, the cruel and crucial last act of the imperial authority, before its forced departure, complicated notions of ‘national belonging’ for people in the diaspora. Asa Singh Johal of Vancouver recollects how awkward differences arose between him and his Muslim friend, as suddenly they belonged to different nations, separated by an imposed border in a land that they had left years ago.7 To use Gyanendra Pandey’s metaphorical expression, ‘the broken edges’ (2001: 19) of Partition stretched far beyond the line of demarcation approved by Cyril Radcliffe and the Boundary Commission.Without any physical migration, many people in diaspora were displaced from their ancestral homeland to an unknown territory with which so far they had had no direct connection. To illustrate this aspect of Partition and diaspora, I briefly refer to two examples: a scene from Manoj Kumar’s film Purab aur Paschim (East and West, 1970), which, though set in India and England, is pertinent to my discussion of diaspora in Canada; and an excerpt from Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? to further exemplify the impact of Partition on those living in diaspora in or before 1947. In Purab aur Paschim, when in London for higher studies at the end of the 1960s, Bharat (Manoj Kumar) asks his father’s college friend from pre-1947 days, Mr Sharma (Madan Puri), about his visits to India. Mr Sharma’s response is significant. He discloses that he has not been to India since he moved to England (seemingly in the early 1940s) because during Partition his family in Lahore perished and there was nowhere for him to go; hence, he continued to live in London. He maintained contact with his deceased friend’s family, but he did not visit India. For Mr Sharma, home was Lahore. Although he was assigned a new homeland by the act of partition, he did not undertake that move, even from England to India in post-Partition days.

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

196 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

197

For him home, which was in Lahore, no longer existed. In a somewhat similar situation is Bibi-ji, the elderly woman in Badami’s novel: ‘By 1947, Bibi-ji had been in Canada for almost 12 years. […] With Partition, Bibi-ji’s home village had become a part of Pakistan and so her visits were mostly to Amritsar where Papa-ji had relatives….’8 From the excerpt, we do not know whether Bibi-ji visited her ancestral home in Pakistan ever, but her trips home, outside of Canada, are now primarily to Amritsar where her husband’s family lives. She enjoys the idea of home in proxy, for what is lost to her cannot be regained. Consequently, the closest experience of recovering the lost home is via her visits to the other side of the border, in what is now the Indian Punjab. Amritsar is a surrogate home for Bibi-ji, not the home that is lost to her forever. Like Mr Sharma in Purab aur Paschim, Bibi-ji did not have to migrate physically from the newly created Pakistan to India, but was influenced by the cartographic divide thousands of miles away in Canada.The severing of physical connections with home and homeland without having undergone the traumatic journey across the border to the newly assigned home is peculiar to those living in diaspora at the time of Partition. Mr Sharma and Bibi-ji exemplify thousands of people living in diaspora who suddenly found themselves in a situation where they had to show allegiance to a new nation or just suffer the division of their home and homeland. Baldwin and Mehta not only belong to the post-Partition generation, but are also geographically located elsewhere from where the Partition was implemented. Born and raised in India, Mehta immigrated to Canada in 1973 and is a reputable Canadian filmmaker. On the other hand, Baldwin was born in Canada, grew up in India, and now lives in the USA. Growing up in India, particularly in North India, it is very difficult not to have come across the subject of Partition in a variety of cultural representations, including Hindi cinema, history books, short stories, novels, poetry, national television channel Doordarshan’s programmes in the 1980s such as Buniyaad (The Foundation) and Tamas (Darkness), Pakistani drama, or live broadcasts of Pakistan television (many areas of the Indian Punjab could watch the PTV broadcast from Lahore with great clarity before cable television made it possible to see it in the rest of India in the early 1990s). Stores and shops also offer visual reminders of the physically severed connection in local bazaars of northern India with names such as Karachi Stationery Mart, Lahore Sweets, Pindi Cloth House, Multan Cycles, and so on. Aside from such reminders, one characteristic that stands out in Punjab is the experience of family members. Baldwin renders visible such influences and experiences as she builds the story of two women married to one man, their relationships, the movement from their ancestral haveli to the city, and their final journey from West Punjab to Delhi, as the family migrates along with millions during Partition. Scarcely will there be a family in Punjab whose members did not experience the Partition. ‘I grew up hearing about all the horror stories of

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

197 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

198

PRABHJOT PARMAR

partition as did a lot of people who were from the Punjab, the area most affected.... Every family member has some horror story to tell. It was a Holocaust,’ Mehta tells Richard Phillips in an interview (Mehta 1999a). Elsewhere she says, ‘I have always thought about it [Partition]. I grew up in Amritsar and my father went to Government College Lahore. So I grew up with the disillusionment of Partition’ (Mehta 1998a). Mehta and Baldwin’s responses to the Partition as second-generation and diasporic creative artists acquire interesting dynamics.9 Their separation from the lived experiences of Partition is both temporal and spatial, which is further complicated by the geographical distance from India. As a filmmaker and a writer, respectively, both reach back in time to create what they neither witnessed, nor experienced first hand. Marianne Hirsch identifies the retrieval of history via oral history, documentary, photography, and so on by those who did not directly experience ‘traumatic events’, as ‘postmemory’. In the context of the memorialization of the Holocaust by ‘children of survivors or witnesses’, Marianne Hirsch articulates: ‘Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation’ (Hirsch 1997: 22). Hirsch further suggests that Postmemory may serve as an instrument ‘to describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences’ (ibid.). The collective trauma of Partition is a difficult subject for many in diaspora, as it is for those living in South Asia. In the case of creative writers and filmmakers, their respective mediums provide an avenue to tell and retell the stories that have not received outright and persistent attention as a subject in the mainstream cultural representations or have received marginal attention by the diaspora itself. Baldwin draws attention to the limited number of novels written in English on Partition, which, she says, she can ‘count on the fingers of one hand’. In her words, ‘[E]very story about Partition fills a huge gap in the universe of possible narratives’ (Baldwin 1999). In a similar fashion, referring to Earth, Mehta points out,‘It amazed me, the level of ignorance there [in the West or outside of India] about what 10 million people went through in this part [South Asia] of the world. Especially in Punjab. Their story needed to be told’ (Mehra 1998: 78).The migration created by Partition led to the displacement of an estimated ten million people, the massacre of over a million (Butalia 1998: 3),10 and the abduction and rape of 80,000 to 100,000 women in the months leading up to and during the Partition (Butalia 2000: 183; Menon and Bhasin 1998: 70). The compelling nature of the experiences of people, the social and oral history that Baldwin and Mehta grew up listening to, and their exposure to creative and semi-autobiographical writings of Manto, Khushwant Singh, Sidhwa, and others, is made manifest in their respective works, What the Body Remembers and Earth. Driven by an urge to depict the marginalized experiences of

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

198 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

199

Partition, both works showcase the horrific tragedy that came along with independence from colonial rule. What the Body Remembers is the story of a young woman, Roop, who becomes the second wife of a Sikh engineer, Sardarji, after his first wife, Satya, fails to have a child. Spanning life in the undivided India from 1928 until the Partition of 1947, the novel details the story of Roop’s life involving her father, brother, sister, and friends in her village Pari Darvaza, her marriage to Sardarji, her relationship with the first wife, Satya, and Roop’s children. Pari Darvaza, Rawalpindi, and Lahore are the key locations where most of the story unfolds.Towards the end of the novel, as migration from Pakistan to India and vice versa takes place, refugee camps and refugees in Delhi become the focus of Baldwin’s narrative. What is unique about this novel is its depiction of Sikh families, their traditions, rituals, and faith. In all likelihood, What the Body Remembers is the only novel written in English that in its entirety tells the story of Partition from the perspective of Sikh characters. As the story develops, Baldwin dexterously introduces the changing socio-political fabric of Punjab under the British rule as played out in a Punjabi village, Pari Darvaza. Calling attention to the identity politics in rural Punjab, W. H. McLeod states: ‘The Punjabi village of the early twentieth century was no place to go looking for clear-cut normative identities’ (1989: 42). As a small village in the vast province of Punjab,11 Pari Darvaza demonstrates how the influence and impact of urban politics and political dealings emanating from urban areas changed life in rural Punjab, which was concerned more with farming, daily community rituals, and celebrations, rather than the demands of political leaders. This is not to say that people in villages, as in Pari Darvaza, were ignorant country folk. Somehow, there was a desire to maintain the village community as it had been for centuries. Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus had lived together as a good mix in villages. There were obvious divisions set by the rigidity of caste system and religion, but these did not create hostility on an extensive scale on a day-to-day basis. For example, Roop, a Sikh, spends most of her time playing with her Muslim friend, Huma, in the streets of Pari Darvaza and in her courtyard. But being a Muslim, Huma is denied entry inside the kitchen of the Sikh household.12 By the mid-1940s, the ‘clear-cut normative identities’ had started to infiltrate the composition of many Punjabi villages: green flags of the Muslim League, saffron Akali flags, the tricolour of the Indian National Congress, the Arya Samaj and RSS flags, all competed with each other to demonstrate the political heavyweights in the region. Largely, the influences came from outside, from urban centres resulting in the imposition of the regional and/or national onto the local rural communities.The description of Pari Darvaza in Baldwin’s book demonstrates the gradual divisions in a Punjabi village that ultimately result in the fleeing of its Hindu and Sikh inhabitants and their massacres at the hands of Muslims who were

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

199 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

200

PRABHJOT PARMAR

not necessarily from Pari Darvaza but did have the sanctioned participation of some of the villagers.13 Contrary to becoming homeless, not fitting either in a diasporic location or at home, Baldwin retrieves buried social and political memories to give expression to the need to deal with issues related to Partition. A painful representation in the novel is Bachan Singh’s deep and mysterious silence after he reaches Delhi with his grandchildren. One day, he tells Roop what actually happened in their house at Pari Darvaza.When a large mob of Muslims had gathered outside Pari Darvaza with the intent to kill and loot, Bachan Singh, in order to save the izzat of his daughterin-law, Kusum, beheads her with her supposed consent. Unfortunately, when his son, Kusum’s husband Jeevan arrives in Pari Darvaza after some hours, he does not find anyone in the house, but upon finding Kusum’s mutilated body under a blood stained sheet, he presumes that it is the doing of Muslims and that it was a pity that none of his Muslim friends from Pari Darvaza had intervened to prevent Kusum’s killing. The existing writings on Partition include hardly any autobiographical or semi-autobiographical narratives that directly or indirectly confess to ‘sacrifice killings’ that took place in the undivided Punjab. With the story of Bachan Singh’s silence, Baldwin homes in on territory that is rarely acknowledged by those who, during Partition, ‘sacrificed’ their wives, daughters, or mothers by beheading them with kirpans (swords), giving them poison to ingest, or asking them to jump into wells. Baldwin deftly intersperses key markers of the freedom struggle in the lives of the chief characters. For instance, references to the Indian National Congress, Muslim League, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Master Tara Singh, Mountbatten, Radcliffe, the growing communal divide between Muslims and Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and riots and massacres leading up to, during, and after the Partition. Predominantly, the male characters are harbingers of the changing political landscape, or they seriously indulge in the discussion of politics, the future of India, or the demand for Pakistan. Early in the novel (in 1928), with bloodstains on his beard and kurta, Bachan Singh informs the women in his house about how ‘Arya Samaj Hindus’ took a Sikh boy in Gujarkhan, ‘tore off his turban, undid his knot of hair, and cut it off’.The allusion to the Shuddhi Movement is obvious and allows Baldwin to introduce the latent undercurrents of communal tension. Subsequently, there are references to the civil disobedience movement of 1929, as witnessed by Bachan Singh and Roop in Lahore; the Congress under Gandhi and their movement against the British government in the conversations between Sardarji and Mr Furquharson; and Muslim League, Congress and Akali politics in conversations between Rai Alam Khan and Sardarji right up to the Partition. The first wife, Satya’s political acumen and astute understanding of politics puts her in a league above most of the men, including Sardarji.

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

200 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

201

Besides her, Roop, Kusum, Huma, Gujri and other women get affected by the maledominated political scenario and receive whatever is doled out by political leaders, the public, frenzied mobs, or by their family members. The culmination of the changing political scenario in What the Body Remembers is the Partition. In chapter thirty-nine, the graphic narration of Roop’s departure with her children by car and Sardarji’s journey by train from Lahore to Delhi manage to evoke the imagery of millions travelling in kafilas (columns) from one newly-created nation to the other. Baldwin vividly describes Sardarji trying to get onto the train out of Lahore to India that is ‘covered like a long beehive, with refugees’. It is difficult for those familiar with Partition history not to think of the images of people uprooted, scrambling to get onto already loaded trains, as seen in several documentaries and films on Partition.14 It is the scene of a train full of butchered bodies of Muslims arriving from Gurdaspur at Lahore that acts as a catalytic point after which all chaos breaks loose in Mehta’s Earth. Whereas rural Punjab is the main focus of What the Body Remembers, Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s semi-autobiographical novel, Cracking India (1991), is set in its entirety in Lahore in the days leading up to and during Partition.15 The film is about a young Parsee girl, Lenny, who narrates the story as a grown-up woman. The whole film, then, is a flashback of the fifty-eight-year-old Lenny retrieving her memories of a childhood full of joy and camaraderie that was shattered by the ghastly events of 1947. We see the film as a chronicle of Lenny’s memories when she was eight years old. Lenny belongs to a well-to-do family and Shanta, the ayah, takes care of her. Lenny shares the affections of a group of older friends and admirers of Shanta, who meet with them in a park for a fun-filled time: the ice-candy man, masseur, zoo keeper, gardener, and butcher. As the film progresses, their group dynamics reflect the tensions building on a national level with the imminent division of India and creation of Pakistan. Somewhat similar to Baldwin’s Pari Darvaza, the harmonious group of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims experiences a fracture when a trainload of dead bodies arrives in Lahore, in which, among other victims, are the sisters of Dil Navaz, the ice-candy man. Mehta’s adaptation of Cracking India as the second film of her elemental trilogy, in addition to a commemoration of fifty years of Partition, is a statement against religious fundamentalism. As Vijay Mishra cautions,‘We need to accept that contrary to idealist formulations about diasporas as symbolizing the future nation-state, diasporas are also bastions of reactionary thinking and fascist remonstrations’ (Mishra 2001: 29). The growing communalization of politics and of the South Asian social fabric yet again bring to mind the traumatic memories of Partition. The November 1984 massacre of Sikhs led by Hindu Congress Party leaders in many parts of India, especially in Delhi, resulted in Sikhs becoming outsiders in their ‘home’ once again. In early 2002, the killings of Muslims by Hindu fundamentalists in Gujarat renewed

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

201 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

202

PRABHJOT PARMAR

Partition memories all over again.16 With the consolidation of the saffronization of the Indian political and social structure in 1990s—the Ram Janma Bhoomi temple issue, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by the butchering of Muslims in Mumbai, Kanpur, and elsewhere—the relevance of texts such as Earth that spotlight the futility of sectarian violence acquire added significance. Not merely a retrieval of the moment of geographic and social rupture, the film is a carefully thought-out deployment of the consequences of communal politics on people. To emphasize the death and destruction that come with sectarian divisions, Mehta indirectly draws a parallel between the socio-political situation during the 1940s, which culminated in Partition, and the ensuing violence and the increasing tensions between Hindu–Muslim communities in the 1990s as a result of the Hindutva initiatives to construct the Muslim past of India as a villainous period and the reinforcing of communal notions of Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan and Hindu rashtra.17 Mehta admits that she wanted to illustrate the ‘futility of sectarian-war, [in] a film that is anti-war’ (Mehta 1999a). The parameters of her exploration of communal violence and anti-war sentiments add another step to Mehta’s purpose: a global outlook that condemns ethnic cleansing and the vivisections of several territories as colonial empires reached their point of dissipation. Crossing religious, cultural, geographic, and temporal boundaries, Mehta develops links between different parts of the world to expose the universal nature of violence as well as sheer senselessness of communal killings: The reason I wanted to do a film about the partition of India into India and Pakistan was that also it is an exploration about what happens with sectarian war, whether it’s Rwanda or Kosovo or which ever country has been colonized and where the colonizers left, the way the French left Vietnam, they’ve always left a country divided. Fifty-two years later, for us, we are still struggling with the same boundary issues. As is Ireland or Kosovo (Mehta 1999b).

The continuation of the border dispute between India and Pakistan as a result of Partition, the responsibility of Britain, and the communal politics that span over half a century are all connected to the events that dominated the world political spectrum in the 1990s: ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and surrounding regions and the Rwandan massacres of minority Tutsis that resulted in ghastly killings on ethnic grounds. In Mehta’s understanding, ‘sectarian-mindset’ is a global phenomenon, ‘be it Beirut, Israel, Ireland, India, Rwanda. Passions rivening, nations fracturing, these are timeless, universal themes’ (Mehra 1998: 78).The fracturing of nation-states as in the case of Partition, or in the recent past in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, also has relevance in the Canadian context. Canada and Canadians faced a strong possibility of Quebec’s separation in the mid-1990s. I must point out that as

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

202 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

203

an issue it is never out of the Canadian political framework, but the events of the last decade of the twentieth century are germane to my discussion of Earth. Eleven years ago, on 30 October 1995, a public referendum prevented Quebec from becoming a sovereign nation-state by a very narrow margin, a referendum in which Pro-Canada voters got considerable support from the rest of the English Canada.18 Planes loaded with Canadians travelled from as far as Vancouver to Quebec to rally support for the federalists and the anti-secessionists. There were consistent media reports leading up to the referendum. The question of possible separation, division and its impact on Canada and Quebec were the focus of eminent analysts, historians, political commentators, and politicians. In other words, the issue of the separation of Quebec became a matter of widespread discussion. If diaspora is, as Mishra maintains, in a state of ‘mourning’ because of loss, trauma, and memory with particular reference to the Partition, then in the Canadian context, I suggest that the issue of Quebec’s sovereignty, the demand for a Quebec independent of Canada serves as a reminder to the South Asian diaspora in Canada of the traumatic division of India and Pakistan. Depending on the angle one views it from, Bloc Quebecois and its demand for Quebec’s sovereignty could be compared with the Muslim League under Jinnah in the 1940s and their demand for a separate nation-state for Muslims in India. A connection between Quebec and the Partition may seem a somewhat unlikely correlation; however, with reference to Partition, the question of Quebec in Canada and of Quebec and Canada carries significant relevance, historical as well as contemporary. In response to the two-nation formula put forward by the Muslim League, B. R. Ambedkar’s 1940 exegesis Pakistan or the Partition of India, in chapter 13 (Must There Be Pakistan?) elaborates on the co-existence of the French and the English in Quebec (Ambedkar 1945: 343–65). In order to demonstrate that the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan, a separate Muslim nation-state for Muslims of India, was inherently inconsiderate of the mutual co-existence of diverse religions and cultures in India, Ambedkar’s polemics focus among others on Quebec as an example. In his rhetorical arguments, he specifically cites Alexander Brady at length to explain the composition of and statistics from Quebec, to show how two very different groups, the French and the English, lived in Quebec. For Ambedkar, the foundational point is that if in the past Hindus and Musalmans could ‘live in a single country and under a single constitution’, then why ‘make so much of communal antagonism now? Is India the only country where there is communal antagonism? What about Canada? [and] the relations between the English and the French in Canada’ (ibid.: 345). I proceed with a disclaimer that we need to be aware that Ambedkar’s polemics are from 1940, when the Quebec separatist movement had not yet taken on the militant shape that emerged in the 1960s and its development under Bloc Quebecois leaders such as Lucien Bouchard in the 1990s. In support of an undivided India and in

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

203 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

204

PRABHJOT PARMAR

opposition to the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan, Ambedkar expands on how Anglophones and Francophones, two diverse linguistic cultures, one Protestant and the other Catholic, live together in Quebec, that they are not asking to be separate nation-states in spite of cultural differences. It is a foregone conclusion that Ambedkar’s example proved to be wrong in the long run, but raising the example of Quebec in opposition to Partition in 1940 gains importance vis-à-vis the strong demand for Quebec’s separation in 1990s and, for some people, its evocation of the Partition of 1947. Roshan Lal Sharma in his autobiographical work, Holy Men and Holy Cows (1968), devotes one full section to his recollection of Partition (Sharma 1968: 60–70). Recalling the politics of the 1940s, he too specifies various leaders citing the example of the French and English living under one nation, Canada. He does not mention Ambedkar, but remembers the political debates that favoured quashing the demand for Pakistan: ‘They presented several historical examples such as Canada where two linguistic (English and French) and religious (Protestants and Catholic) groups had been living together as one nation.’ As we know, these polemics failed, and we have two nations that emerged from a painful and bloody Partition for millions. The political banter between Sardarji and Rai Alam Khan in What the Body Remembers accurately spells out the two sides of the argument. In March 1947, in Lahore, Sardarji says,‘There are other ideas and options than Partition.... Federations, tiered governments, shared power’. In turn, Khan says, ‘Huh! Shared power! Partition will come; it is the only solution’ (Baldwin 2000: 401). The fissures between the federalists and the separatists in Quebec have become stark and deep in the last sixty years, with the referendum of 1995 becoming a fragile point of culmination for the sovereignists. In 1997, two years after the Canadian referendum, India and Pakistan celebrated fifty years of independence from British rule. Various communities in Vancouver, Toronto and other Canadian cities held celebrations as well as organized forums related to the issue of independence but more so to build bridges between India and Pakistan. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and CTV, two nationwide news channels aired special television programs to commemorate the birth of two independent nations and also to discuss contemporary politics in South Asia. CBC radio also presented extensive programmes to mark the fiftieth anniversary of India’s freedom from colonial rule. Vision TV, another national channel, held a festival of Indian films to mark the occasion.With such widespread attention, even if for a month or so, through popular cultural mediums, the narrative of Partition in the South Asian diaspora resurfaced for some and emerged for others, and yet others remained oblivious to it in every way. Amidst such attention, if Earth features in the Toronto film festival and in several other festivals across the globe, the connection between the subject of Partition in Earth and the fifty years of independence is not difficult to ascertain.

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

204 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

205

This period saw a number of short story collections, novels, and special issues of magazines and journals devoted to the fifty years of freedom.19 Partition became a topical issue, albeit for a brief period. Mehta however disagrees with those who imply that she was cashing-in on the fiftieth anniversary of Partition. In her words, the film ‘shows what war can do to ordinary people’ (Melwani 1998). In several interviews, Mehta uses the imagery of war to describe Partition. Her equation of the conditions generated during Partition to war is significant and requires scrutiny. Carnage, massacre, upheaval, cataclysm, holocaust, riots, madness, division, and so on are often read or heard in the context of Partition but war is seldom used as a metaphor to describe Partition. However, upon connecting Mehta’s explanation of a timeless and universal element in Earth—sectarian violence—to the contemporary worldwide political scenario of the 1990s, the use of war for what happened during Partition does not seem an improbable coordinate. On the connection of military and the Partition, there are testimonials of planned pogroms by Indian and Pakistani police, military, and civil establishments, including participation by personnel retired from military and police services who were trained in warfare. In What the Body Remembers, Roop, her maid Jorimon, and her children leave Lahore by car driven by their trusted driver Narain Singh. On the outskirts of Lahore, Roop sees an army truck full of Sikh soldiers, out of which one ‘pulled Huma up like a black cloth sack’. And a little later on, as the heat of the day takes its toll on the motor, the driver takes the car off the road and goes in search of water. This time an army lorry loaded with Muslim soldiers is on the rampage: ‘Led by a sometime-subedar, a non-commissioned officer … erstwhile soldiers to amuse themselves, [were] dragging struggling Hindu and Sikh women into the lorry’ (Baldwin 2000: 460). It is these men who, finding women alone in the car, attack them. Jorimon is nearly mauled by them. Miraculously, Roop’s name, tattooed in Urdu on her wrist, finally helps to convince the marauders that the women are indeed Muslims, ‘one of theirs’. Providing an analysis of violence carried out on trains during Partition, Swarna Aiyar systematically details the role of military personnel and ex-servicemen in several planned slaughters of Muslims in East Punjab, thus implicating the so-called protectors of law as the perpetrators of violence (Aiyar 1998: 15–38). The involvement of military personnel in Partition killings and atrocities as in various ethnic cleansings and genocides underpins the warfare tactics employed to exact revenge against a community in the name of religion, community, or nation. And it is women, as Baldwin depicts, who bear the brunt of war on their bodies. The ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eritrea, Somalia, Bosnia, Serbia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, and Canada’s participation as a peacekeeping nation (or non-participation as per NATO decisions) was accessible to Canadians in their supposedly safe and secure homes via the medium of television. Images of the

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

205 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

206

PRABHJOT PARMAR

Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the subsequent attention accorded to these because of General Romeo Dallaire’s account evoke the traumatic experience and images of Partition.20 Warring tribes remind us of warring communities; millions fleeing from their ancestral homes from Rwanda to Burundi or the Congo hark back to over fourteen million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs journeying from one side of the border to the other, surviving attacks and a brutal bloodbath. Mehta’s use of war to describe Partition has another facet as well. In 1998, both India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests to work towards developing nuclear weapons. Fifty years after Independence and having fought three wars and the continuing Kashmir dispute, the two nations engaged themselves in a competition to develop long-range missiles instead of working toward measures to restore peaceful co-existence as neighbours who share a common history and ancestry.The escalating Indo-Pak tensions in late 1990s earned them the infamous prefix of ‘nuclear states’, which in turn generated imagery of nuclear missiles and a war that would lead to another holocaust in South Asia, the earlier one being the Partition. Mehta uses war to iterate the implications of violence on people. Earth serves as a reminder of the impact of violence on women, children, and men: no one survives unscathed. Eightyear-old Lenny grapples to understand what happens in the months leading up to and during Partition. Dropping a china plate to watch it break in pieces, she wonders if that is how Partition will occur, like a shattering event. With her cousin, she climbs on the roof of her house to look down into the courtyard of what appears to be servant quarters, where many ‘giri hui aurat’, the fallen women, are huddled. Her confusion is evident. She does not understand why they are called fallen women, as she has no comprehension of rape. She looks down at them as though it were a spectacle; at the same time, her brief conversation with a little boy who tells her that he saw his mother naked and that the men of the ‘Other’ community had robbed her of her izzat puts her in a pensive and disturbed mood. Her witnessing of the splitting of a Muslim man tied between two jeeps going in opposite directions results in her trying to split her doll to experience the pain and inhumanity of the act. The slain body of Hasan in a gunnysack near her house and the violent abduction of her ayah from the security of her mother’s bedroom leaves Lenny a helpless witness, a moment that marks the loss of her innocence. In the wake of thousands of children killed, maimed, or rendered orphans in Rwanda, Bosnia, and elsewhere in the 1990s, Mehta’s portrayal of Lenny’s helplessness and confusion draws attention to the multilayered and complex impact of ‘war’, divisions, and ethnic conflicts on children. Exercising what Hirsch (1997) calls ‘postmemory’, the second or the third generation in diaspora are trying to forge a connection with the experiences of the witnesses and survivors, and, in so doing, are negotiating aspects of history while expressing their understanding of Partition and the accompanying violence, displacement, loss, and homelessness. In What the Body Remembers, Baldwin develops

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

206 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

207

an account that seemingly charts what transpired in the lives of millions in 1947: from the fearsome description of the Pathan, Burhan-e-din, at the door of the Faletti Hotel in Lahore in the beginning of chapter thirty-six to the uprooting of people, massacres, abduction and rape of women, hunger and thirst, to the difficulties that refugees from Pakistan encounter in Delhi in the concluding pages. Within the framework of her response to Partition and the need she felt to locate her novel’s last few chapters in and about a history that is not necessarily of immediate concern resides Baldwin’s own diasporic experience in relation to the subcontinental history and the significance of understanding and reconciliation: ‘If you don’t know much about the place you came from, how can you figure out if you have made progress by coming to the new world?’ (Baldwin 2003). These sentiments are articulated at the end of What the Body Remembers. In the closing lines, Baldwin amplifies postmemory via the male protagonist Sardarji, as he leaves in a tonga, ‘moving forward though still facing back.’ Not only does Baldwin describe the resilience of Sardarji against all odds and his will to re-establish the network he enjoyed in Lahore in order to build a new life in a new India, but the ‘moving forward though still facing back’ (Baldwin 2000: 515) appositely illustrates Baldwin’s position in diaspora, wherefrom she reaches back to her homeland to understand where she comes from. On the other hand, Mehta uses a semi-autobiographical story written from a child’s perspective to portray the ‘end of innocence’, the internecine violence, the division of a country and of people as the subject of her film—a somewhat safe articulation of the experiences of her family and the other stories that she grew up listening to. Proceeding from such an outlook to offer a non-partisan representation of violence, Mehta considered the viewpoint of a child as an unadulterated perspective of Partition.To an extent, Mehta vicariously lives the experiences of Sidhwa and perhaps of her own family during Partition through the medium of cinema, as she both wrote and filmed the script. She mediates her intent to illustrate what war does to people through the ‘stories of a previous generation’ (Hirsch 1997: 22) of a past that she did not witness. The disintegration of the camaraderie among Ayah’s male fans as the communal tensions build up in the film, at some level, must resonate with Mehta’s awareness of what her father experienced during Partition. She comments about her father having lost all his friends during Partition (Mehta 1998b). Some, presumably, were killed or displaced to unknown locations, and his Muslim friends were lost forever because of the geographical divide. If Sher Singh’s refusing to leave Lahore and Hasan putting his life at risk to protect his friends in Earth are poignant representations of what happened during Partition, the betrayal by the Ice-candy Man and Butcher and their pivotal role in the abduction of Ayah point to unspeakable horrors. The depiction of Ayah’s abduction and implied gang rape are Mehta’s articulation of a universal theme against violence, which gains contemporary significance in the wake of numerous reported and recorded rapes of women in

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

207 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

208

PRABHJOT PARMAR

Bosnia in the 1990s. Mehta, then, employs postmemory to tell not only what happened fifty years ago but also what had happened immediately before the making of the film in the mid-1990s, in Bosnia and Rwanda. Much like Baldwin’s character Sardarji, Mehta looks backwards with her gaze set forward to mediate the contemporary with the past in an endeavour to rectify the differences between the two sides of the border, be it Indo-Pak, the Balkan states, or Rwanda. To reach a wider audience, Mehta uses film as an instrument to translate Partition as a metaphor for sectarian violence and its accompanying costs. In Canada, Partition inflects the contemporary South Asian diasporic identities: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, all thrown together in a multicultural, Canadian melange, often called East Indians, Indo-Canadians, or South Asians (a recent and preferred inclusive category of cultural identification). Numerous instances reflect harmony and friendship between people of Indo-Pak descent in Canada as opposed to fewer examples of animosity or acrimony. Community and volunteer associations are forums that best illustrate such cooperation: protest petitions against nuclearization or militarization, candle-light vigils for peace, celebrations of festivals, literary or cultural events.21 More often than not, I have heard people pointing out that it is the politicians who are to be blamed for the existing Indo-Pak tensions, whereas, on their own level, the people state, ‘We want peace and friendship.’ Of course, there are those who do not support such efforts, but they are the minority compared to a large mobilization of support for peace and cooperation in the South Asian ‘ethnoscape’ in Canada.22 Diaspora, thus, while looking towards the future from a contemporaneous standpoint, simultaneously looks back at Partition to emphasize the futility of the madness that prevailed during the turbulent months of 1947. The looking back to look forward openly discusses Partition as a watershed in Indo-Pak relations and acknowledges the growing need to discuss it in an atmosphere of cordial openness. Partition, therefore, complicates intra-diaspora relations, yet paves the way for peace initiatives supported by the diaspora in Canada for an amicable outlook in the South Asian region.23 While describing the conception and making of Earth, Mehta confesses that Partition ‘had always held a sort of dark fascination’ for her. She further points out that she ‘grew up hearing stories about this particular holocaust, the carnage, the rapes and the mindless acts of violence that people who had lived together in relative harmony for centuries, committed against each other—all in the name of religion and nationalism’ (Mehta 1998a). The neutrality of the Parsee community and the story of Partition from a child’s perspective in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India appealed to Mehta as a distinctive film subject. Mehta maintains that communal violence in India and Indo-Pak tensions have roots in Partition, and, by exploring the subject of Partition, the film team ‘hoped to understand why war is waged and why friends turn enemies, and why battles are invariably fought on women’s bodies’ (ibid.).

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

208 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

209

This stance complicates the divisions on political issues that Shah (1998) and Jain (2001) identify between diaspora and those living in the homeland. The question, then, is, as Jain poses it in the context of diasporic writings,‘Where does the literary end and the political begin?’ (Jain 2001: 82). Here, I would like to extend Jain’s query: Is there a distinctive demarcation between the literary and the political in Mehta and Baldwin’s texts? Rather, both texts, literary and cinematic, emerge from within multiple political contexts. Take, for instance, the politics of location of the authors and that of their subject matter:Where are these writers writing? What are they writing about? They are depicting a socio-political scenario with which they are familiar only through other narratives: of history, sociology, geography, politics, folklore, oral history, literature, and film. What purpose do works of fiction, semi-autobiographical or completely fabricated, serve in diaspora, and what message do these works convey to those residing in the original ‘homeland’: South Asia. Here, Sujala Singh’s suggestion regarding history and fiction would be useful: ‘As questions of narrative are asked of history, but not of fiction, fiction almost becomes the desired “Other” of history’ (Singh 2000: 127). This ‘fiction’, in my discussion, refers both to literary and cinematic narratives that become, in opposition to official historiography, the ‘desired “Other”’. These texts provide an avenue for opening dialogue and discussion of a subject that predominantly remains a very touchy issue, even in the diaspora. It is almost as if one does not want to tread on the toes of others, for the fear of fanning smouldering passions and stoking painful memories. In an epilogue titled ‘Selaab’, Tariq Malik (2004: 202) draws attention to the fact that ‘every sixth person in the modern world can trace his or her roots to Indo-Pakistani subcontinent, [and] the impact of the partition of India … continues to loom compellingly large on a global scale’. Primarily works of fiction, What the Body Remembers and Earth convey images of what happened in South Asia as the British colonial rule came to an end after a long struggle for independence. For millions, however, this independence is interchangeable with Partition, as Avtar Singh Bhasin expresses it with the title of his book, Some Called it Freedom, Some Partition. Mehta and Baldwin in different interviews and essays express a desire to put an end to current and future massacres and violence, division and displacement of people as experienced in 1947.Within imaginary and fictional works there resides a didactic and edifying aspiration to exert change globally. Baldwin articulates it in the following manner: ‘Perhaps we can eventually learn enough from telling the story so that it can’t happen ever again, in the Balkans or anywhere else in the world’ (Baldwin 1999). Both are not nostalgically searching for their roots; instead, from diasporic locations both engage Partition from an international perspective as a traumatic experience that continues to have currency on a much wider scale globally.

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

209 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

210

PRABHJOT PARMAR

NOTES 1. See South Asian Cinema, special issue on Partition, July–August 2003. Also see, ‘Trains of Death’ (Parmar 2007: 68–100). 2. In India, Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi (2005) is a rare cinematic rendering of the Emergency days. A few years ago, Govind Nihalani’s Hazar Chaurasi ki Maa (1998) based on Mahasweta Devi’s story also touched upon the political turmoil of early 1970s India, chiefly the Naxalbari movement. 3. Hindi cinema stayed away from either graphically depicting communal violence or focusing on violence during Partition lest it ignited communal passions and led to sectarian violence. Following Earth, Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Chaos: A Love Story, 2001) shows explicit scenes of violence on railway platforms and in trains during Partition. 4. Hereafter, diaspora means South Asian diaspora, unless specified otherwise. 5. Interview with Navtej Bharati, London, Ontario, Canada, 8 January 2006. 6. I thank Navtej Bharati for suggesting this book. 7. Interview with Asa Singh Johal, Vancouver, Canada, 8 July 1996. 8. The excerpt is from a promotional website that provided a brief synopsis of Badami’s novel, http://www.thebukowskiagency.com/CanYouHeartheNightbirdCallPV.htm, accessed 13 January 2006. 9. Second-generation here refers to those born after Partition or children of witnesses and survivors. 10. Butalia points out that some estimate that about two million people died but a ‘widely accepted’ figure is one million. 11. Undivided Punjab stretched from the present Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab in India across to the Pakistani Punjab right up to the edges of the Frontier provinces. 12. The restriction of Muslims from the kitchen may have brahmanical roots with the notion of purity and impurity if touched by a maleccha. Sikh Gurus specifically worked towards equality regardless of caste or economic status. However, the Hindu traditions that Sikhism rejected persevered, for example, untouchability in undivided India, a practice still followed by most Sikh families in India and in diaspora. For a comprehensive discussion of untouchability in rural Punjab, see Jodhka (2002). 13. Since Baldwin’s story is set in West Punjab, the victims of Partition violence in the novel are chiefly Sikhs and Hindus. In East Punjab there was a reversal of this phenomenon: Muslims were the victims of Hindus and Sikhs. 14. For a detailed description of the railway platform, the teeming refugees, panic and palpable fear, see Baldwin (2000: 445–53). Recent films such as Earth and Gadar depict enactments of what transpired at the railway platforms and trains. However, Nastik (The Agnostic, 1954) and Dharamputra (Adopted Son, 1961) make use of documentary footage of refugees in overcrowded trains to show the mass exodus of people from both sides of the border. 15. Sidhwa’s narrative takes the reader out of Lahore to the countryside around Amritsar and Lahore to elaborate on the story of Ranna and what happens to him during Partition. In the filmic adaptation, due to restrictions of time and perhaps to avoid too many subplots, the action takes place in Lahore alone. Cracking India (1991) was originally published as Ice-Candy Man (1988). 16. As a guest on a phone-in discussion forum on Radio India in Surrey, BC, in March 2002, I recollect several Sikh callers recounting how the Gujarat massacres evoked their experiences during 1947 and 1984. On history and memory, see Butalia (1998: 3–11, 261–78). Also see Pandey (1993); and Chakravarti and Haksar (1993).

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

210 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

211

17. The Arya Samaj led the shuddhi or purifying movement: Hindustan for Hindus only in the early twentieth century. Baldwin’s example of Bachan Singh coming home with bloodstains after rescuing a Sikh boy from Arya Samaj cadres as discussed earlier is a clear reference to the Shuddhi Movement. 18. In this referendum, 4.7 million votes were cast: 49.4 per cent said ‘Yes’ and 50.6 per cent ‘No’ to sovereignty. For an overview of the contemporary scenario in Quebec, see Edwards (2002). 19. For important collections of essays planned to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary including voices of writers and artists such as Bhishm Sahni, Kartar Singh Duggal, Satish Gujral, see Hasan (1995), and Settar and Gupta (2002). For a collection of literary works, see Bhalla (1998) and Memmon (1998). Granta and New Yorker carried special issues on Partition and subcontinental independence, as did several scholarly journals, South Asia, Ariel and Oxford Literary Studies to name a few. Outlook, India Today and other Indian magazines and newspapers took out special editions on the subject of Partition and the fifty years of Indian independence. 20. Lt Gen. Romeo Dallaire (Retd) gives a detailed account of these events in his book, Shake Hands With the Devil—The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. The critically acclaimed film Hotel Rwanda (2004), based on the communal violence and the state-sanctioned planned massacres of Hutus by Tutsis, graphically depicts the tragedy in Rwanda. 21. SANSAD (South Asians for Secularism and Democracy) in Greater Vancouver and INSAF (International South Asian Forum) based in Montreal are two examples of several grassroots, voluntary associations working towards peace and democracy in South Asia, including IndoPak friendship. 22. Arjun Appadurai (2003) discusses five ‘scapes’ to describe ‘global cultural flow’. Ethnoscape refers to ‘tourists, immigrants, exiles, refugees, guest workers, and other moving groups and persons’. 23. A peculiar feature of South Asian regional politics is the domination of the Indo-Pak binary, whereas issues of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, or Bhutan often get secondary status.

REFERENCES Aiyar, Swarna, ‘“August Anarchy”: The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947’, in D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1998), pp. 15–38. Ambedkar, B. R., Pakistan or Partition of India, 2nd edition (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1945). Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 25–48. Badami, Anita Rau, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Toronto: Knopf, 2006). Bains, Harwant, Blood (London: Methuen, 1989). Baldwin, Shauna Singh, ‘What the Body Remembers’, Author Essay, 1999, http://www. shaunasinghbaldwin.com/wtbressayo99.pdf, accessed 8 May 2007. ———, What the Body Remembers (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000). ———, ‘With Contempt or Love?’ (speech given at the Center for Canadian Architecture, Montreal, 24 May 2003), http://www.sawnet.org/books/writing/SSB_CCA.html, accessed 7 October 2005. Bhalla, Alok, Stories about the Partition of India (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1998). Bhasin, Avtar Singh, Some Called it Partition, Some Freedom: Last 75 Days of the Raj (New Delhi: Siba Exim Pvt. Ltd, 1998).

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

211 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

212

PRABHJOT PARMAR

Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur, ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies’, in Braziel and Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 1–22. Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 1998). ———, ‘Community, State and Gender: Some Reflections on the Partition of India’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Inventing Boundaries (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 178–207. Chakravarti, Uma and Nandita Haksar, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation (Delhi: Lancer International, 1993). Chandan, Amarjit, ‘Punjabi Literature on Partition : Some Observations’ (paper read at British Association of South Asian Scholars Conference, Bath, England, 11–13 April 1997), http:// amarjitchandan.tripod.com/partition.htm, accessed 8 May 2007. Dallaire, Romeo, Shake Hands with the Devil—The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House, 2004). Dusenbury, Verne, ‘A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities’, in Peter van der Veer (ed.), Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Edwards, John, ‘Sovereignty or Separation? Contemporary Political Discourse in Canada’, in Daniele Conversi (ed.), Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 130–49. Hasan, Mushirul (ed.), India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, 2 volumes (Delhi: Roli International, 1995). Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative & Postmemory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997). Jagpal, Sarjeet Singh, Becoming Canadians: Pioneer Sikhs in Their Own Words (Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 1994). Jain, Jasbir, ‘The New Parochialism: Homeland in the Writings of the Indian Diaspora’, in Makarand Paranjape (ed.), In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts (Delhi: Indialog, 2001), pp. 79–92. Jodhka, Surinder S., ‘Caste and Untouchability in Punjab’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXXVII(19), 11–17 May 2002: 1813–23. Kaul, Suvir (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Malik, Tariq, Rainsongs of Kotli (Toronto: TSAR, 2004). McLeod, W. H., ‘The First Forty Years of Sikh Migration: Problems and Possible Solutions’, in Gerald N. Barrier and Verne A. Dusenbery (eds), The Sikh Diaspora: Migration and the Experience Beyond Punjab (Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Publications; Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1989), pp. 29–48. Mehra, Sunil, ‘For a Piece of Earth’, Outlook, 9 March 1998: 77–79. Mehta, Deepa, ‘How the Film Earth Came About’, http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/films/earth/ presskit.pdf, 1998a, accessed 12 September 2005. ———, Interview with Deepa Mehta by Rehan Ansari, Himal, 11(12), December 1998b, http:// www.himalmag.com/98Dec/deepa.htm, accessed 12 September 2005. ———, Interview with Deepa Mehta by Richard Phillips, World Socialist Website, http://www. wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/meh-a06.shtml, 1999a, accessed on 12 September 2005. ———, Interview with Deepa Mehta by Maya Churi, ‘Interview: Deepa Mehta’s Elements, From “Earth” and Beyond’, Indiewire: People, September 1999b, www.indiewire.com/people/ int_Mehta_Deepa_990914.html, accessed 7 October 2005.

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

212 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

PARTITION AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

213

Melwani, Lavina,‘Back to Roots: A Powerful Film on the Futility of Partition’, India Today, 2 November 1998: 81. Memmon, Muhammad Umar (ed.), An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin Book of Partition Stories, 3 volumes (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998). Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). Mishra,Vijay,‘Diaspora and the Art of Impossible Mourning’, in Makarand Paranjape (ed.), In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts (Delhi: Indialog, 2001), pp. 24–51. Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘In Defence of the Fragment:Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXVIII(17), April 1993. ———, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Parmar, Prabhjot, ‘Trains of Death: Representations of the Railways in films on the Partition of India’, in Ian Kerr (ed.), New Departures in South Asian Railway Studies (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 68–100. Pirbhai, Miriam,‘Mrs Akbar’, in Prabhjot Parmar and Nila Somaia-Carten (eds), When Your Voice Tastes Like Home: Immigrant Women Write (Toronto: Second Story Press, 2003), pp. 51–58. Radhakrishnan, R., ‘Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 119–31. Rajan, Balachandra, The Dark Dancer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958). Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997). Settar, S. and Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition: The Human Dimension, 2 volumes (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002). Shah, Naseeruddin, Interview with Naseeruddin Shah by Rehan Ansari, Himal, 11(12), December 1998, http://www.himalmag.com/98Dec/deepa.htm, accessed 12 September 2005. Sharma, Roshan Lal, Holy Men and Holy Cows, http://www.econets.com/hmhc/hmhc1.html, 1968, 1998, accessed 13 January 2006. ———, Holy Men and Holy Cows: The Adventures and Philosophies of an Americanized Hindu (New York: Exposition Press, 1968). Sidhwa, Bapsi, Ice-Candy Man (London: William Heinemann, 1988). ———, Cracking India (Minneapolis: Milkweed Paperbacks, 1991). ———, ‘Defend Yourself Against Me’, in Saros Cowasjee and Kartar Singh Duggal (eds), Orphans of the Storm: Stories from the Partition (New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1995), pp. 305–29. Singh, Sujala, ‘Nationalism’s Brandings: Women’s Bodies and Narratives of the Partition’, in Ashok Berry and Patricia Murray (eds), Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 122–33.

11_Roy & Bhatia~chap-11.pmd

213 Black

8/8/2007, 9:37 AM

214

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

12 Eternal Exiles in the Land of the Pure: Mohajir s in Mass Transit

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

I am the deprivation and neglect foreign to you. A separate realm, another dimension. By the very virtue of the chaos in which I reside, I am a nationality apart from you. I am the significant, the majority, the united, and you are a minority, an outsider. —Maniza Naqvi (1998: xiii)

The Partition of India in August 1947 along with the country’s freedom from 200 years of colonial rule was accompanied by unprecedented violence and communal strife, as well as an exchange of population across the newly-created borders. Reports of loot, plunder, rape and murder filtered across the borders, and forced the evacuations of entire communities from each country. Hindus were forced out of Pakistan, and Muslims were forced out of India, with each migrating community attacked and plundered along the way. Partition narratives, thus, cannot escape recounting the horror of Partition violence, and inevitably become testimonials to the terror and mayhem of violent migrations, dislocations and displacements. In Partition narratives, Indian Muslims are invariably told to go where they truly belong (Pakistan), and Pakistani Hindus are told to leave the country of the Muslims to make room for the ‘true believers’, and thus, migration becomes the dominating trope of texts about the events of Partition. These migrations and relocations forced a renegotiation of identity, and led to the formation of a new community within Pakistan, which is called mohajir (immigrant)1 to-date, an identity that is perceived to be distinct from the Pakistani identity. The mohajir population dominates the metropolitan centre of Sindh—Karachi—and even after three generations, the mohajirs are considered to be a separate political and cultural community, distinct from the resident Sindhi population. Instead of allowing assimilation and identification with a predefined ‘Pakistani’ identity, housing schemes and development plans for Karachi in the late 1940s and early 1950s

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

214 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

215

MOHAJIRS IN MASS TRANSIT

reinforced divisions along communal lines, which in turn forced immigrants to consistently negotiate their identity as mohajirs, and as Pakistanis. It is this constant negotiation of identity and space that this paper will focus on. Beginning with a conceptualization of the effects and complications of migration by Salman Rushdie and Homi K. Bhabha, as well as the religious associations of migration in the minds of Muslims, the paper will focus on the conceptualization of communal identity and the migrant’s role within Karachi in Maniza Naqvi’s novel, Mass Transit, which in turn, complicates the very definition of migrancy, travel and the (im)possibility of a return to an imagined—remembered—home. Written by a Pakistani expatriate currently living in the United States, the novel focuses on three types of migrations— forced migration leading to exile, privileged migration for economic and personal freedom, and an attempt to return ‘home’ in order to reclaim lost roots. Each migration carries with it its own emotional baggage, baggage that is questioned and examined within the novel in detail. The novel focuses on the migrations, dislocations and ruptures in the lives of three families, seen through the eyes of Safina, a Pakistani expatriate living in the United States. She returns to Karachi, Pakistan to attend the funeral of her grandmother, and decides to stay permanently, hoping her decision will help her reconnect, to give her a sense of belonging to one place, one country. Her attempts to reintegrate herself into Karachi society, however, are thwarted at every juncture, and she finally decides to return to America, accompanied by her mother, who believes that America will provide her with a better home.The novel maintains an omniscient perspective, with the city of Karachi as the main character. The political history of Karachi plays a major role within the novel, encapsulated within the walls of the house occupied by Safina’s family, which is divided into four major sections to accommodate Muslim migrants arriving in Karachi after Partition.Two sections are devoted to one family’s growing needs, while families belonging to a different part of India occupy the other two sections. The divisions present within the house replicate the divisions that characterize the map of the city of Karachi, with each area, each boundary telling a different story about the various people who characterize the city’s dynamics. Mass Transit establishes the city itself as a city of immigrants, with wave upon wave of immigrants descending upon the city with each successive year, causing the city to become an administrative nightmare, but a vibrant city with a pulse all its own, a language unique to itself, its inhabitants.The dominating trope of the novel, in spite of its focus on unmoving structures (Karachi, the house), remains migration—both to and from the city. It is thus important to examine, briefly, the space that is created due to migration, and the particularities of Partition migration as it influenced (and continues to influence) Indian Muslims in Karachi. Migration has been viewed as a liberating movement in recent scholarship on postcolonial migration and diasporic community formations, a move that supposedly

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

215 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

216

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

leads to bigger and brighter opportunities in a different territorial location, and becomes ‘a determining feature of counterhegemonic literature and politics’ (Sharma 2001: 597).This, in turn, suggests that without the experience of migration, a writer is incapable of producing such a literature. Sharma defines migration as a term that ‘refers not only to the displacements of people in history but to a state of displacement’ (ibid.) that may or may not be a traumatic experience. For Salman Rushdie, for example, the migration from India to England enabled him to assume a hybrid identity as a creator, which, according to him, would not have been possible had he remained in India. In his 1982 essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’, Rushdie claims that ‘Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group’ (Rushdie 1991: 20). Thus, for Rushdie, the phenomenon of displacement is something to revel in as a creative writer, a moment to celebrate instead of a moment of loss and trauma.The migration to a new country and exposure to a new culture allows him to view everything in a duality, to inhabit an in-between space or no-man’s-land that connects two realities. This in-between space allows the creative writer to become the point of connection and intersection between two (or more) realities. He asserts that ‘we [immigrant writers in England] are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy’ (ibid.: 15).This fertile territory of a writer’s imagination that somehow straddles two differing realities is reminiscent of Homi K. Bhabha’s delineation of a writer’s ‘interstitial perspective’ (Bhabha 2004: 4), or an in-between space that a postcolonial subject (or an immigrant) cannot help but occupy. Maniza Naqvi occupies a similar territory, in that she grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, then moved to Karachi, from where she moved to the United States, and now works with the World Bank. She maintains close links with Pakistan, and tells her interviewer, Laila Kazmi, that ‘I am in Pakistan as often as I can manage’. Her strong connections to Pakistan establish her as an interstitial writer, one who straddles the divide between two very different cultures, but still manages to claim a territory as her own, to call both places ‘home’. The circumstances that governed migrations during Partition and those governing the migrations celebrated so unequivocally by Rushdie and Bhabha are, quite literally worlds apart, however, and comparisons between the two would seem almost arbitrary and forced. But these vastly different migrations seem to collide in Naqvi’s novel, within Safina’s character who, long before she undertakes her personal migration to the West, is branded a mohajir—a term that refers to her family’s migration across the borders between India and Pakistan in 1947, which was characterized by violence, dislocation, disorientation and upheaval.This is very unlike the migration

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

216 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

217

MOHAJIRS IN MASS TRANSIT

celebrated by Rushdie, whose idea of immigration is restricted to the movement from the East (India or Said’s Orient) to the West (England or the colonizing nations), which in turn, implies upward mobility. The move from East to West also incorporates a willingness to move in search of better opportunities, and addresses the educated upper-middle-class Pakistanis and South Asians, who speak English fluently, and have enough finances to allow them to find better employment opportunities. Such a migration implies that the homeland is remembered with nostalgia for something lost, but without the desire, or the ability, to return. Rushdie claims: … writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back.… But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge…that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions … imaginary homelands … (1991: 10).

Bhabha and Rushdie would, then, agree that migration from the East to the West leads to a split in personality and worldview of the migrant that can never be reconciled; it also leads to the creation of an imaginative territory that a migrant is doomed to inhabit, one that is full of longing for all that is lost (the homeland) and all that could be gained (imagined success and prosperity in the new home). It is this split in personality, this desire to return, that characterizes Safina’s decision to somehow refurbish her portion of her grandmother’s house, to return it to its lost glory.What is missing, however, is the understanding, the realization, that the ‘home’ exists only in her imagination and that the house and the city have moved beyond her reach. Safina’s epiphany at the end—that she has lost the battle with the city to reclaim her self, her past—encapsulates the acceptance of her own self as the conglomeration of various histories of migrations and dislocations, and that this particular history is one that can never be ignored. It also makes her the quintessential interstitial hybrid—she can never belong to either of her two adoptive cultures. Shailja Sharma argues, ‘[t]hat experiences of migration differ, I think, is one of the crucial distinctions to be made in any discussion of the subject’ (2001: 597). It is this crucial distinction in the experiences of migration that the rest of this paper will focus on. Coupled with the violence accompanying Partition, the experiences of the cross-border travellers of India and Pakistan are particularly traumatic and distinct from the experience of relocating from the East to the West as described by Rushdie and Bhabha, and encapsulated within Safina’s character in Mass Transit. The fertile territory that Rushdie happily occupies becomes a place of exile and conflict for the migrant who arrived in Karachi after 1947. Forced to emigrate, envisioning a new, ideal, particularly Islamic state in Pakistan, migrants arriving in Karachi found only chaos and confusion, and found themselves categorized as

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

217 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

218

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

refugees—a problem for the new administration of Pakistan that had to be solved as quickly as possible. The mass migrations that characterized the Partition of India are welldocumented in both literary texts and scholarship about Partition. Niaz Zaman claims that Partition: … included the largest single migration of history, involving a total of eleven and a half million people, ten and a half crossing the border of Punjab—Hindus and Sikhs moving eastward, Muslims westwards—and another million crossing the borders of Bengal—Hindus moving west, Muslims moving east. Along with the misery of that movement were the riots and conflagrations, an outpouring of savagery unprecedented in its scale and span. Estimates of deaths range from half a million to two million (Zaman 2000: 3).

This mass hysteria seems to ‘prove that the division was inevitable’ (ibid.: 4), in fact, necessary, because the three major communities dominating the Indian political scene (Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs) proved that they could not, or would not, live together in ‘peaceful harmony’, which in turn is a politically loaded statement. How the violence is viewed and constructed within historiography about the Partition of India depends heavily on who is doing the retelling.The discourse surrounding violence itself needs to be examined, as Veena Das and Ashis Nandy have shown in an essay, in which they delineate multiple ways of the categorization, and the legitimizing, of ‘communal’ violence.They argue that ‘the three languages of sacrifice, feud, and vivisection, provide legitimation to many kinds of violence in Indian society today’ (Das and Nandy 1986: 181), with the discourse of sacrifice and feud legitimating the violence of Partition riots. As Gyanendra Pandey has shown, however, the history of the violence that ‘surrounded, accompanied or ... constituted’ the Partition, has only begun to be addressed (Pandey 1994: 189). The fact of the violence remains undisputed, but the reasons for the riots and the ‘mass hysteria’ surrounding Partition change, depending on the proclaimed ‘nationalistic’ affiliations of the historiographer. Where historiographers have found it difficult to represent the violence of Partition riots due to problems of language (how to describe it), or analytical stance (ibid.: 190), creative writers have returned to the communal nature, the uncertainty and brutality of this violence again and again. According to Niaz Zaman: … the first impressions conveyed by the creative writer were that of a communal conflagration. The stark images of abducted women being paraded through the streets, of mutilated bodies of men and women, of train loads of corpses, of lines of moving humanity trudging through roads strewn with bodies and baggage left behind, the religious cries now turned into battle cries or calls for vengeance strew the literature that emerges immediately after independence (2000: 13).

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

218 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

219

MOHAJIRS IN MASS TRANSIT

Most of the narratives that focus on this violence, then, also focus on the feelings of loss, despair and disorientation that are the result of the migration and forced relocation. The narratives effectively question the need for the separate nations by including characters who help members of other communities—a Hindu family helps a Muslim family escape the violence, or vice versa, for example—and thus, the new nation, be it India or Pakistan, depending on the narrator’s proclaimed ties of affiliation, implicitly comes under attack. Chaman Nahal’s novel Azadi (‘Freedom’, 1975), for example, focuses almost exclusively on the migration of a Hindu family (Lala Kanshi Ram, his son Arun, and his wife) on foot, tracing their experiences as they flee Sialkot, across the violence-torn province of Punjab, heading towards the relative safety of Delhi. The novel still manages to give some space to a Muslim family who risk their lives in order to help the protagonists, even though they belong to the opposing (enemy) religious community. Even the novels that do not focus on the violence of Partition, as Zaman points out, cannot ignore the mass migrations of the Partition year, and inevitably focus on the sense of dislocation and inescapable loss that accompanied the migration. In Aag ka Darya, Qurratulain Hyder’s Urdu novel transcreated as River of Fire (1998), characters debate over the need for Partition, and mourn the loss of unity and friendship that had characterized the religious communities before Partition. The violence of Partition, though not the focus, is still re-enacted in the way a previously united group of friends is divided along religious and political lines, pitting children against parents, friends against friends. Nationalism and the debates surrounding it, questions about where Pakistan will be located, debates about which religious group deserves the title ‘nation’ lace the narrative, with friends slowly and gradually drifting apart as Partition approaches. The impact of Partition migration on individual lives, however, is not a topic addressed by many literary writers.The fact of the migrations and the violence is accepted, even mourned, but the literary works about Partition end when the other side of the border is reached, and life after Partition, presumably, begins anew. Sarah Ansari (2005) describes the effects of the migrations during and after the Partition year on the province of Sindh. Most of the scholarship on Partition has invariably focused on the province of Punjab, and the effect of Partition on Sindh is yet to be explored fully. Ansari focuses on this province, which, according to her, is ‘a less-studied but no less significant part of the new state’, and her book ‘explores the immediate after-effects of Partition in this particular Pakistani province, and takes as its main focus the experience of communities brought together as a result of Partition related migration’ (Ansari 2005: 2). Her study shows that the largely Urdu-speaking Muslim population that arrived in Sindh in 1947 failed to assimilate with the existing Sindhi population, and maintained an identity that linked the mohajir

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

219 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

220

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

community to the Urdu-speaking Muslims in India. Karachi, the capital of the newly formed state, saw an influx of Muslim mohajirs from the United Provinces, Bihar, Delhi and other areas of India, who were then settled in various refugee camps around the city. Called refugees instead of immigrants by the state, the Muslim migrants became increasingly disenfranchised by the administrative machinery of Pakistan, as the state failed to provide them with proper housing and other basic amenities that they considered to be their right (ibid.: 124–32). The new refugees, who saw themselves as religious mohajirs, consistently questioned the necessity of the migration when faced with the lack of resources available for them in the promised Muslim Utopia. Called mohajirs to-date, the Muslim migrants to Pakistan were treated as outsiders to Sindh, a burden on the new capital’s resources, and in the month following Partition,‘the authorities … decided that the risk of escalating violence required that no more refugees be allowed into Karachi’. Those who had already arrived in the city were relocated to areas around Karachi instead of being given a place to live in the city itself (ibid.: 53). This attempt to limit the number of migrants to the city was viewed by the immigrants as a particularly hostile gesture. Lack of proper housing and other resources further divided the two communities— the mohajirs and the residents of Karachi. When the Muslims left India, they imagined themselves as crusaders in the name of Islam, equating their forced migration to that of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers.2 They saw themselves as the mohajirs of 622 CE, on their way to a new country where they would be welcomed and encouraged to help establish the ideal Muslim state that was first established by the Prophet in Medina and promised to them by the leaders of the All-India Muslim League prior to 1947. Hastings Donnan and Pnina Werbner observe that in the minds of the immigrants arriving in Pakistan, ‘their exodus has strong resonances in religious history, for in Islam too migration is important, Muhammad’s “migration” (hijra) from Mecca to Medina in AD 622 marking the beginning of the Muslim calendar’ (Donnan and Werbner 1991: 10). Instead of being welcomed, however, the Muslim migrants were left to fend for themselves in refugee camps along the borders of Karachi. Cooperative housing schemes of the late 1940s and early 1950s led to improvements in housing and accommodation, but divided Karachi along communal lines, with each group of Muslims, representing different areas of India, establishing mini-communities within the larger city. Ansari asserts that ‘Housing societies ... looked like they were going to be for the exclusive service of particular sections of people’ (2005: 140). Thus, the events following the Partition of India led to a division between communities in Pakistan, and the establishment of a distinct mohajir identity. The division along communal lines led to clashes between various ‘communities’ in Karachi which characterized most of the latter half of the twentieth century in

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

220 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

221

MOHAJIRS IN MASS TRANSIT

Pakistan, and more specifically, Karachi. Hamza Alavi discusses this ethnocentricity that characterizes the urban centres of Pakistan, and Karachi in particular. He claims that the ‘people of Pakistan have not yet fused into a single community. The story of the Bengali movement, culminating in the liberation of Bangladesh, is a manifest example of this,’ (1991: 163–64). He traces the history behind the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM), the political party representing the Urdu-speaking Muslim immigrants who arrived in Pakistan in 1947, and asserts that the … emergence of the MQM as a major political force was not merely a matter of Muhajirs getting organized as such. It marked a sea change in their political attitudes…Overnight there was an ethnic redefinition for they now [by 1984] declared themselves to be Muhajirs rather than Pakistanis. Instead of moving towards an end to communalism and to ethnic conflict, the rise of the MQM, in the face of strident Sindhi nationalism, further consolidated the hold of communalism in Pakistan politics (Alavi 1991: 178).

Where Ansari claims that the rise of ethnic and communal identity can be traced back to the events that occurred during and shortly after the Partition year, Alavi lays the blame squarely on the rapid—and, for him, surprising—rise of the MQM. Both explanations, however, seem simplistic. The division along religious, cultural or linguistic lines can just as easily be traced back to the two-nation theory enthusiastically espoused by the All-India Muslim League leaders in the decades preceding the Partition, only to be abandoned as Pakistan became a reality. Be that as it may, the undisputed fact remains. Karachi is essentially considered as being divided along ethnic and linguistic lines, with mohajirs forming more than 51 per cent of its population (Ansari 2005: 127). It is this particular scenario within which Maniza Naqvi’s novel, Mass Transit, situates itself.Where most novels about Partition end—with the creation of Pakistan in 1947—Mass Transit begins. The book situates its characters in the Karachi of the 1980s and 1990s, with Partition a never-forgotten, but distant, memory.The novel focuses on the metropolitan city’s history, concentrating on one particular family’s struggles, dreams and problems. Like Partition novels, violence and communal strife are the dominating trope of the novel, with migration and its accompanying, often violent, dislocations as its main focus.The novel itself does not touch upon the Partition or its accompanying riots that have affected the city’s population so deeply, but the Partition and its after-effects are felt nonetheless. In the opening chapter, Rasheed Ali, one of the main characters of the novel, mourns the formation of communal identities, and asks: ‘Where is that Pakistani nationality that we created in forty-seven? Now we have mohajirs, Sindhis, Balochis, Punjabis, Pathans, Seraikis, and God knows how many more.... Everyone a Muslim but ready to kill each other

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

221 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

222

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

for their old and new found tribes.’ Partition continues to figure in his lamentation, when he begins to talk of the violence occurring on the streets of Karachi. He asks Have you forgotten the blood at Partition? … will we ever change? We are the same! At that time we could not live with Hindus, two separate nationalities we were told, Muslims and Hindus, distinct from each other, so we carved out Pakistan, a million deaths, rivers of blood…This country of Muslims you will see, you will forget Partition! (Naqvi 1998: 10–11).

Thus, even though Partition is not the focal point of the novel, it overshadows its characters, an event that defines their understanding of nationhood, community and brotherhood. The main characters of the novel arrive in Pakistan after Partition in 1947 and settle in a house in Karachi that had been emptied by the departure of a Hindu businessman.The property is divided into four distinct sections, two of which belong to a different family that also arrived in Karachi after Partition. Class structures dominate, and consistently reinforce this division, with the omniscient narrator telling us that ‘the other family sharing the haveli had always been regarded with scorn and disdain. Her [Safina’s] mother had spoken of the other family, the opperwalas, the ones upstairs, as though they had been an affliction that she and her family had endured’ (Naqvi 1998: 38–39). The main character, Safina, returns to this house, to attend the funeral of her grandmother. Having lived in Washington most of her adult life, she is clearly looking for a home to return to. She decides to stay back in Karachi, taking over her mother’s portion of the house, struggling to return the old, dilapidated house to its former glory, spending long hours scrubbing floors and tending its garden, trying to make the space familiar to herself. Having been unable to develop a sense of belonging to American society, she believes that she can return to Karachi, and easily find acceptance there. After all, it is her ‘real home’. She was born in Karachi, so she truly belongs in that house and that culture. Unfortunately, the city, and her family, refuses to let her return, showing her all too clearly that there is no possibility of turning back time, of recapturing the past. Things have changed so irrevocably—or have not changed at all—that Safina cannot recognize them. As discussed already, Safina becomes a representation of the new immigrant—the upwardly mobile migrant who travels from the East to the West. This simple characterization is complicated, however, by her link to multiple homelands, and the labelling of her subjectivity as mohajir. The novel, thus, questions the notion of home, and brings to the forefront the impossibility of a return home after migration.

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

222 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

223

MOHAJIRS IN MASS TRANSIT

In the prologue to the novel, the personified city of Karachi addresses Safina, and claims that there can be no redress, no return home. The city itself, with its communal divisions and boundaries claims that: I will not let you merge into me. I will not let your sterilized, well-groomed, hygienic, privileged existence pollute the purity of my deprivation and degradation … I will not redeem you by receiving your love, nor take you as mine though you give yourself to me, though you try to bridge that enormous ravine that divides us circumstantially … there is no redemption, no redressal, there is no way back (Naqvi 1998: xiii–xiv).

Thus, the novel brings the problem of immigration and the idealization of the homeland to the forefront. In as much as immigrants cling to an idealized homeland, once they revisit that homeland, they discover that what they thought of as home cannot, or will not, accept them and that there can be no ‘return’, a truth discovered by Safina, who visits Karachi, and then attempts to carve out a space for herself within the confines of her childhood home, only to find that it is impossible.This particular moment within the novel foregrounds multiple issues, the primary one being the stagnancy of the homeland, its unwillingness, or inability to adapt to change, to ‘westernization’ on the part of the city. The responsibility for assimilation is curiously displaced. Safina’s inability to return home could have been read as a change in her own attitudes due to her stay in America, but the quote from the city here clearly shows that the return is impossible not because Safina herself has changed, but because the city refuses to change, leaving little room for ‘progress’ and ‘development’ —concepts personified by Safina’s ‘Americanization’ and rejected irrevocably by the city itself. The filth, the poverty, the undeniable squalor of the city’s tenements is consistently juxtaposed by the apparent affluence of the elite who create a metropolitan city on the foundations of ‘Third World’ under-development. By the end of the novel, Safina simply sells her space, takes her mother, and returns to America, finally realizing that home, for her, will always be an imagined, idealized, but non-existent, space. The very title of the novel suggests a certain kind of mobility that is dependent on a pre-existing structure. A mass transit system allows an ease of movement from one place to another, but in the context of Karachi, as the novel suggests, this system of mobility is not present, which leaves one longing for mobility.The paradox is that the main character searches, not for mobility, but for a certain kind of rootedness that is denied to her. She hopes to return to her roots, only to find that there are no roots, and she is forced to return to Washington, rejected by her ‘own’ people. Her exit is clearly reminiscent of Partition migrations, where Muslim families were forced to leave their homes and ‘return’ to their own home, a home they had never

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

223 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

224

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

seen, but desired, based on communal lines. Safina’s expulsion is similar. She is told time and time again that she is an outsider to the reality of the city (Karachi) and its inhabitants, and since she had decided to leave once, she could never return permanently. In spite of the rejection of her proposed re-migration by the city and her family, Safina clings to her idea, and visits a mazaar (grave of a Sufi saint) to find a place of solace in order to clear her mind. Instead of finding the comfort she is searching for, she is asked to move out of the mazaar to make room for a political rally. It is here that she finally accepts the fact that ‘the place where she longed to be was too far away for her to reach even as she sat in its midst’ (Naqvi 1998: 178). She is forced to acknowledge that ‘[e]verything was exactly the same, religion being used for politics, funds being used for power, and the people being used for fodder. Everything was exactly the same, only this time even her dreams had been used and squandered and hope had left forever and circle after circle of barricades seemed to engulf her’ (ibid.: 180–81). As Rushdie acknowledges, the home remains the same (Rushdie 1991), and it is the returning immigrant who changes irrevocably, a fact demonstrated by Safina’s final acceptance of the change in her own self and perceptions. Kamran, Safina’s cousin, asks her why she would even consider returning to Karachi when she has so much more to get from the Western world, that is, America. For him, migration to the Western world would be a dream come true.Tired of the incessant violence and communal strife that characterized Karachi in the 1980s and 1990s, Kamran longs for the imagined security afforded by migration to another country, a longing that is once again reminiscent of Partition narratives, where incessant violence surrounding the announcement of Partition forced the exchange of populations across borders. Naqvi’s vision of Karachi is that of a city irrevocably divided along ethnic, cultural, economic and class lines, with no possibility of intersections between them. The dominating structure of the novel is the house belonging to Safina’s family, which is divided into two distinct sections. Naqvi describes the house, or haveli as a ‘tenement, divided and shared between two separate and unrelated families’ (1998: 38). The two divisions were further subdivided, with the house finally divided into a total of four sections. The divisions of the house are strictly enforced. According to the narrator, ‘the other family sharing the haveli had always been regarded with scorn and disdain … circumstances had housed them in the same building, but that was where the relationship ended’ (ibid.: 38–39). The sectioned house seems to represent the communal boundaries that characterize Karachi. The circumstances of Partition and the forced relocations of millions of Muslims forged new associations and helped establish a sense of community that is superficially unified, but internally divided, represented by the house inhabited by Safina and her family. Alavi shows that the turbulent scene in Pakistan has consistently proven that Pakistani nationhood has failed to inspire a unified national identification. He claims that Pakistan ‘is still

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

224 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

225

MOHAJIRS IN MASS TRANSIT

a country in search of an identity.… Political debate and conflict have revolved around the question: what is the legitimate place of subnational aspirations and demands within a larger concept of Pakistan nationhood?’ (Alavi 1991: 163). A similar question is addressed within the novel, when Rasheed Ali laments the violence of the streets, as already discussed. The novel raises important issues arising out of Partition migration and relocation, but the characterization of Safina’s migration and attempted relocation is highly problematic. Safina steals out of her beloved Karachi in the dead of the night, accompanied by her mother who wishes to escape her house—full of disturbing memories—as much as Safina wished to return to it.The novel ends with the personified city speaking again, revelling in its squalor and misery, trying to find a reason for the squalor, concluding that ‘I understand how it can appear as a conspiracy, because there is a blueprint, yes … it has been handed down to us through history: language, religion and ethnicity … all used to disenfranchise, marginalize, and divide’ (Naqvi 1998: 188–89). Migration of communities across borders has been a dominant trope of narratives about the Partition, as well as narratives written after the Partition of India. The experience and categorization of migration, however, differs depending on who migrates, and under what circumstances.Those who were forced to migrate in 1947 find themselves eternally separated from the existing population in Sindh, unable to find a form of subjectivity other than that of the immigrant. The migrant who emigrates willingly, as Rushdie shows, however, can revel in a certain kind of freedom afforded by a duality of perspective possible only due to the fact of migration.The experience of migration then can only be shared in the longing for home, and the recognition that there can be no return to the remembered home. This particular (im)possibility of a return ‘home’ is further complicated by the conglomeration of different histories of migration in one character, who is labelled a migrant by virtue of being born into a migrant family. By rejecting Safina’s proposed return, and by forcibly ejecting her from Karachi, the novel Mass Transit effectively questions the existence of ‘roots’ in one specific location, and instead, seems to valorize a rootless, diasporic, interstitial state of existence.

NOTES 1. The word mohajir is literally translated as ‘immigrant’, but in the context of Pakistan and the Partition, is used to refer to the largely Urdu-speaking Muslim population that arrived in Sindh and Punjab during, and after, the Partition year.The political use of the term mohajir to designate a particular ‘ethnic minority’ in Pakistan needs further contextualization and elaboration, which I will undertake shortly. 2. For a historical account of the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina, see Peters (1994: 167–210).

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

225 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

226

AMBER FATIMA RIAZ

REFERENCES Alavi, Hamza, ‘Nationhood and the Nationalities in Pakistan’, in Hastings Donnan and Pnina Werbner (eds), Economy and Culture in Pakistan: Migrants and Cities in a Muslim Society (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 163–87. Ansari, Sarah, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Introduction’, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), pp. 1–27. Das, Veena and Ashis Nandy, ‘Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence’, in Veena Das (ed.), The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 177–95. Donnan, Hastings and Pnina Werbner, ‘Introduction’, in Donnan and Werbner (eds), Economy and Culture in Pakistan: Migrants and Cities in a Muslim Society (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 1–34. Easthope, Anthony, ‘Bhabha, hybridity and identity’, Textual Practice, 12(2), 1998: 341–48. Hyder, Qurratulain, River of Fire (orig. pub. in Urdu as Aag ka Darya) (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). Nahal, Chaman, Azadi: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). Naqvi, Maniza, Mass Transit (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998). ———, Interview with Maniza Naqvi by Laila Kazmi, Women of Pakistan website, http://www. jazbah.org/intmaniza.php, accessed 8 May 2007. Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies III: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 188–221. Perloff, Marjorie, ‘Cultural Liminality/Aesthetic Closure? The “Interstitial Perspective” of Homi Bhabha’, SUNY Buffalo, 2006, http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/bhabha.html Peters, F. E., Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Rushdie, Salman, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, in his Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York, London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 9–21. Sharma, Shailja, ‘Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy’, Twentieth Century Literature, 47(4), 2001: 596–606. Zaman, Niaz, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000).

12_Roy & Bhatia~chap-12.pmd

226 Black

8/8/2007, 9:41 AM

227

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

13 Refugee Women, Immigrant Women: The Partition as Universal Dislocation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

Most of the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Interpreter of Maladies belong to the genre of expatriate Indian writing. The volume also contains two Partition stories. While this reference to the Partition may appear meagre, in my reading it plays a foundational role in the narrative of displacement which the collection as a whole constructs. The representation of immigration experience in this collection affiliates itself with the rhetoric of displacement in the narratives of the Indian subcontinental partition.Thereby, Interpreter of Maladies constructs a readily consumable affect of similarity between the earlier displacement of partitioned subjects and the displacement of the migrants to the West. As a Partition scholar, I find it important to explore the politics of the imagination of similarities between these two very different kinds of displacements. It seems to me that the affect created by the inclusion of strands of Partition narratives in the collection of mostly immigration-themed short stories is the universalization of the experience of dislocation and exile. Equally significantly, the universal narrative of dislocation is articulated from the privileged position of the expatriate. This paper asks: does a text such as Interpreter of Maladies not participate in the forgetting of a certain specific traumatic locality and history by privileging similarity between the Partition and the later migration to the West? And as a corollary, if we read such a text without being alert to its textual politics, are we not also participating in a similar kind of forgetting? The interest of this paper is also to understand the problematic I describe above in terms of gender politics. In my reading, gender-specific negotiations allow Lahiri’s fiction mobility between the two different imaginaries and experiences of displacements.The immigrant women characters form for Lahiri’s book the unifying

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

227 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

228

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

connection of similarity with the figure of the refugee woman. I would like to explore what it means to mobilize women as a universalizing trope of ‘the displaced’. Does common victimhood under patriarchy make the experience of metropolitan immigrant women equivalent to that of the refugee women of the subcontinent during the Partition and in current times? Should we read, in a collection such as Lahiri’s, women’s commonality and ignore the differences between immigrants and refugees in the interest of our feminisms? Or do we have to be vigilant as both feminists and scholars of the subcontinental partition so as to not collapse the above difference as a compromising politics? I keep in mind these questions when reading Lahiri’s collection as an instance in which a literary text constructs a discursive affinity between forced migration and immigration, and does so by deploying a certain kind of helpless woman as a universalizing trope. The premise on which I conduct this discussion is that, in spite of the complication brought forth by gender of any easy formulation of power and powerlessness, it is problematic to conflate the condition of the immigrant and the refugee. This is because such conflation obliterates the difference between forced migration and migration by choice. The affect of similarity keeps hidden the vast difference in mobility—the need, choice, and ability to move—between the two groups. While gender complicates much of the distribution of power within these groups, it does not overwrite the difference of mobility for the women in either of these groups. While the immigrants have moved, however paradoxically into a state of ‘exile’ (here, with Aijaz Ahmad [1992: 85–86]), I note the irony of the use of the word ‘exile’ in the immigration context), the refugees have had to migrate due to external forces without their consent, hegemonic or voluntary. Once in a host state, the refugee stays within boundaries: ‘the refugee camp’ in this sense is the paramount marker of restriction of movement.While both communities are defined in reference to another place, they do not have the same possibility of return. James Clifford (1997) has formulated the diasporic condition as a continuous longing for return and the simultaneous deferral of that return, which may be applied to the immigrant characters of Lahiri’s fiction. However, migrants living in the metropolitan centres for economic reasons are quite different from refugees, who long for a home that no longer exists or are legally barred from going home. We cannot think of the displacements of immigrants who are metaphorically in exile as similar to the histories of people who have been forcibly moved, who remain confined in refugee colonies or camps, who can barely move by choice, or ensure their rights in the host state. The difference is also in the relative hyphenated spaces and the available fluidity between the identities of the immigrant and the refugee. While the immigrant has certain mobility within multiple, fluid, and hybrid categories of character, allegiance, belonging and national consciousness, the refugee does not.

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

228 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

229

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

Before I move on, two caveats in this context. First, when I emphasize the distinction between the subjects of forced migration and the immigrants, and the difference in their relation to the Partition, the point of the exercise is not to claim memory of an event for one group over another. One can read a genealogical link through shared memory between the Bengali intellectual/elite diaspora (the subject of the text under discussion) and the refugees of the 1947 Partition. Memory is a precious and much fought over commodity; while I do not wish to engage in a fight over memory, I want to draw attention to the politics of the universalization of dislocation through a certain kind of deployment of collective memory. Second, nor is the purpose of the exercise to implicitly establish victim status for one group in relation to the other. The prototype of the East-Bengali refugee-victim belongs to a high class/caste Hindu propertied family and is no subaltern.1 The difference, then, lies elsewhere. In order to mark the difference between refugees and immigrants in the discussion of the text, I have worked with the idea that subjects form differently through different modes of dislocation. In addition, I understand the difference in terms of the location of each group with respect to the metropolis, and through their respective positions of power and powerlessness in relation to global capitalism. Interpreter of Maladies contains nine short stories. Out of these, on one hand, ‘A Real Durwan’ and ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’ speak to the Partition experience. On the other hand, the primary immigration-community of the collection consists of elite intellectual/professional, specifically Indian-Bengali, immigrants in America. Along with the two Partition stories, I will read ‘Mrs Sen’s’, which I take to be a paradigmatic example of the immigration-narrative of the collection. Although arguably the stories in this volume do not form a true storycycle in the strictest sense,2 the connectedness of the stories is apparent to a reader and the stories invite interconnected readings.3 My reading of a strong connection in these diversely located stories is also supported by the fact that the strands of Partition narratives occupy strategic and important places in the main narrative about immigrant dislocation.4 Moreover, these strands of Partition narratives are well integrated into the main narrative of the collection: the two Partition stories frame the eponymous story. All these organizing strategies of the book suggest that we are meant to read the collection as a whole, taking up together all its strands— the Partition with the immigration stories. ‘A Real Durwan’ is set in Calcutta in an undefined post-Partition time. The protagonist is Boori Ma, the sweeper turned gatekeeper (durwan) of an apartment building in North Calcutta. She is an old woman, an erstwhile refugee from East Bengal, who ‘enumerated twice a day the details of her plight and losses suffered since her deportation to Calcutta after the Partition’ (Lahiri 1999: 70). To the tenants,

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

229 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

230

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

the Partition and its trauma are things of the past, and they listen with incredulity to the old woman’s narrative of loss and homelessness. ‘No one doubted she was a refugee’ but the rest of the tale they found hard to believe because such stories recounted loss of incredible wealth, the details of which changed everyday. In an ironic development, the old woman is falsely accused of being an accomplice in a petty theft in the apartment building, and is turned out of her shelter without any ceremony, re-enacting her earlier exile. The inclusion of ‘A Real Durwan’, however, lends a different lens to reading the other immigration stories in the collection, such as ‘Mrs Sen’s’. I take the latter as a paradigmatic text because it reflects many of the preoccupations of Lahiri’s fiction. Mrs Sen, who is never named, is a thirty-year-old, helpless, obedient, Bengali wife ‘brought’ to America by her husband. Being isolated from her family and friends and displaced from her ‘home’, she finds the North American life harassing and hostile. As Eliot, the young boy she babysits, recognizes, ‘when Mrs Sen said home, she meant India not the apartment where she sat chopping vegetables’ (ibid.: 116). She is quintessentially the trapped figure. Her predicament is figuratively staged in the story in terms of her inability to drive. She has to take up babysitting, perhaps for company, perhaps as something to keep her busy, but it must happen at her home because she cannot drive. This inability to drive causes real concern in the American characters Mrs Sen meets. For instance, when making babysitting arrangements, Eliot’s mother’s primary concern is that Mrs Sen does not know how to drive. Immediately after, the omniscient narrator notes, ‘Eliot’s Mother worked in an office fifty miles north, and his father, the last she has heard, lived two thousand miles west’. Thus, it is not just Mrs Sen’s inability but also the crippling contrast to her fellow Americans that makes her a misfit and makes precarious the social acceptance she receives as an adult member of the community. Interpreter of Maladies goes to great lengths to meticulously construct the fact that Mrs Sen’s situation is in fact very similar to that of Boori Ma. The similarities between the two stories are numerous, not just in terms of affects they evoke but also the circumstances. Both are helpless fringe characters, at the mercy of others, misfits, dismissed, in a place not of their choice. Both are pitiable figures who are cripplingly contrasted to other characters in the respective stories. Boori Ma’s dialect from East Bengal makes it evident that she is a refugee, while Eliot notices that Mrs Sen’s English falters when she is under stress. Like Boori Ma’s endless talk of her lost home, Mrs Sen, too, is homesick and talks of home as a place of bonding, community, and plenitude. What Boori Ma likes best to recall are the ‘easier times’ she had back in her past, when they ‘ate goat twice a week’ and ‘had a pond … full of fish’ (ibid.: 71). Meanwhile, Mrs Sen describes her left-behind home in terms of comfort. When confronted for not being able to drive, she apologizes thus:

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

230 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

231

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

‘… At home, you know, we have a driver.’ ‘You mean a chauffeur?’ Mrs Sen glanced at Mr Sen, who nodded. Eliot’s mother nodded, too, looking around the room. ‘And that’s all … in India?’ ‘Yes,’ Mrs Sen replied. The mention of the word seems to release something in her. She neatened the border of her sari where it rose diagonally across her chest … ‘Everything is there’ (Lahiri 1999: 113).

As with Boori Ma, Mrs Sen’s memory of home and her longing to return are marked by plenitude and the excessive. However, most importantly, both characters—the refugee and the immigrant woman—lack mobility. Mrs Sen realizes that being able to drive would hardly allow her to move of her own will. Note her poignant conversation with Eliot: ‘Mr Sen says that once I receive my license, everything will improve. What do you think, Eliot? Will things improve?’ ‘You could go places,’ Eliot suggested. ‘You could go anywhere.’ ‘Could I drive all the way to Calcutta? How long would that take, Eliot? Ten thousand miles, at fifty miles per hour?’ (ibid.: 119).

The story emphasizes that it is not significant that Mrs Sen cannot go places, but that she has nowhere to go. Driving would allow her a completely superficial mobility she neither needs nor desires. Her situation, the story suggests then, is essentially that of exile, not very different from that of Boori Ma. Like the refugee who has no existing home to return to, Mrs Sen’s attempt to go home is equally futile. Ironically, of course, Mrs Sen eventually does need to take the car out just once in the story, which is when she has an accident, shattering all illusions of even a temporary and fragile sense of mobility. Readers will remember that Boori Ma, too, is similarly punished in the earlier story for attempting mobility. The theft, for which she is falsely accused, takes place while she is out for a walk: ‘Where was she, when she was supposed to guard the gates?’ (ibid.: 81), the tenants scream. Precisely, therefore, Boori Ma’s fault is her movement: ‘For days she has been wandering the streets, speaking to strangers.’ Both stories end in humiliation and exclusion for these two characters: metaphorically for Mrs Sen and literally for Boori Ma. Boori Ma and Mrs Sen are then both marginalized, powerless figures and, as I read above, the collection emphatically underscores the similarities. There are, however, crucial differences between the two characters as well, which Interpreter of Maladies affects out of focus. Mrs Sen’s inability to go home is a different kind of disability than Boori Ma’s. The latter (and all refugees) cannot go home because the home in question does not exist legally and materially, which is not the case for the immigrant. Mrs Sen cannot go home because she has chosen (for complicated

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

231 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

232

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

reasons of course) a certain conditionality of existence. Unlike Mrs Sen, there is no hope of return for Boori Ma. What is metaphorical for Mrs Sen is literal for the refugee Boori Ma.Without suggesting that the oppressiveness of Mrs Sen’s immigrant life is in any sense unreal, I want to underscore that Interpreter of Maladies cannot interpret the differences in the maladies that exist between her condition and that of a refugee. If the Partition narrative of ‘A Real Durwan’ acts as an implicit background to the other immigration stories, such as ‘Mrs Sen’s’, the third story I read in this paper, ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’, stages within itself the rhetorical and thematic echo of the two experiences. It is set in North America and is told from the point of view of a ten-year-old Indian-American child, Lilia.The story begins with reports of Bangladesh’s War of Independence of 1971 and a brief gloss on the history of the Partition. We are reminded that, while the narrator’s Hindu family is IndianBengali, Muslim Mr Pirzada is a Pakistani-Bengali, in the process of becoming a Bangladeshi.5 The paradox of their different citizenship plays out in the story, especially when poised against the linguistic and cultural oneness of the Bengali community. Lilia’s father corrects her when she calls Mr Pirzada an Indian: ‘Mr. Pirzada is no longer considered Indian … not since Partition. Our country was divided. 1947’ (Lahiri 1999: 24). The explanation about how the country was divided makes ‘no sense’ to Lilia. After all, ‘Mr. Pirzada and [her] parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same’ (ibid.: 25), ate the same food and were culturally so similar. Nevertheless, by showing her a world map, her father still insists that she understand the difference. Questioned from the staged naivety of a child’s opinion, similar to Bapsi Sidhwa’s Partition novel Cracking India (1991), the story unsettles the broader ‘adult’ presumptions behind nationality and citizenship. Against the backdrop of both the Partition and Bangladesh’s War of Liberation, we are made to grapple with the politics of categories and institutions such as nationalities, nationalisms, citizenships, foundation of modern nation-states and division of territory into states. Such unsettling perspectives spill into the experience of the child-narrator’s sense of belonging as a Bengali-American. Mr Pirzada’s hyphenated existence as Pakistani-Bengali echoes in the also-hyphenated identity of Lilia. The text glosses the relative marginalization of Lilia as an ethnic minority in the United States by depicting how she has little and strained access to the Bengali/Indian part of her history and culture. Like Mr Pirzada, the complexities of identity and belonging become negotiations and hazards of nationality and citizenship. For Lilia, and similarly for Mr Pirzada, the relationship between identity and nationality is unstable and fluid. Mr Pirzada’s reference to and evocation of the Bangladesh Liberation War bears an implicit connection to Lilia’s consciousness and North American existence.

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

232 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

233

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

In Lahiri’s story, the two characters, so different in age, national consciousness and nationality, can intuitively experience each other’s hyphenated spaces.Through this story, the collection draws similarities between the hybridity of identities of the immigrant and that of subjects in the throes of the redrawing of national boundaries in the Partition. However, the story underplays the fact that Mr Pirzada’s identity is not fluid the way Lilia’s is. Mr Pirzada’s sense of identity/community in the story, as instantiated by the Bangladeshi struggle for self-determination and struggle towards an independent state-formation, is by definition more territorial and singular. It shares none of the multiplicity of vision and possibilities for the secondgeneration Indian-American immigrant, Lilia. On one hand, the connection that Interpreter of Maladies draws between Mr Pirzada and Lilia can be read as a universal Bengaliness that transcends history and geography and that connects the two Bengals; but equally easily, the connection is a broad gesture towards the universalism of human feelings. Pointedly, Lilia imagines a kind of sorority with the seven daughters Mr Pirzada has back at home, daughters who are roughly Lilia’s age. This, too, becomes a universal bridge of commonality through age and gender. Such commonality thus charts an imagined connection between subjects formed through emigration to the West with the subjects formed through the Partition of Bengal. Further, while the text records the stark and bare-bones conditions of the refugees, it does so with simultaneity and parallelism to American consciousness. It is on a TV screen in a North American living room that we must watch the calamities unfolding on the streets of Dhaka. The discussion of Bangladeshi catastrophe takes place over dinner during commercial breaks, presumably flashing advertisements of products that ensure the American way of life.The vision of lack of food for the refugees and the picture-perfect plentiful life in America must occur simultaneously: Lilia’s father serves her another piece of fish while reminding her of what ‘children [her] age must do to survive’ (ibid.: 31). Or we see that, while putting a kebab in his mouth and reaching for a second, Mr Pirzada ‘can only hope … that the refugees are as heartily fed’ (ibid.: 29). This conversation further reminds him to give Lilia a small plastic egg filled with cinnamon hearts.While it is certainly possible to read the simultaneity here as Lahiri’s deliberate ploy to create irony, the irony does not challenge the overall ‘human’ connection of empathy between Lilia and Mr Pirzada, his daughters, and the hundreds of thousands of hungry refugees by proxy. Lilia finds herself unable to eat after watching the starving children on TV. She touchingly saves the cinnamon treat and eats it ritualistically, praying for the safety of Mr Pirzada’s daughters, without brushing her teeth lest the prayer washes away. This strong connection is that of empathy, allowing the immigrant subject affective identification with the subjects of the subcontinental Partition.

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

233 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

234

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

The economies of parallelism, empathy, even affective identification, suggest an implicit universalization of exile and displacement: a vision of exile as a human condition without any geographical or historical mooring.The narrative of displacement, Interpreter of Maladies, can resonate into three very different and dispersed historio-geographical experiences: refugee experiences of an earlier generation in India, alienation in East Pakistan which led to the Bangladesh War of Liberation, and lives of immigrant Bengali Indians and Bangladeshis in North America. Although each strand of narrative refers to a specific historio-geographical situation, the situations depicted in them strongly echo each other. In spite of these localizing references, then, I argue, Lahiri writes her characters outside history. As a result, the collection of stories, as a whole, is able to construct a discourse of similarity around these diverse historical situations. While one could argue that the diverse narratives of dislocation occupy the same psychic space and the same logic of exile in the expatriate (or the expatriate writer’s) imagination, the seamless blending of these diverse strands to form a universal narrative of dislocation can be achieved only from the privileged cosmopolitan location of the expatriate. For instance, Lilia empathizes with Mr Pirzada’s daughters, because in some ways she identifies with them given their age and gender. However, the existing commonality between them is a contingent one: Lilia has the privilege to identify partially, and it is a privilege when one can choose to identify with some aspects of powerlessness but is not forced to embody that powerlessness entirely. In more than one way, the lack of historicity of the collection is constructed to privilege the representation of the immigrant community Lahiri writes about. As I stated earlier, the main narrative is not about the refugees or about the Partition. The distance from the subcontinent spatially and from the Partition trauma temporally are essential to the functioning of the plot and characters of Lahiri’s stories. For instance, even if Lahiri includes Partition narratives in her collection, what kind of narratives are they? Boori Ma’s tale must unfold several years after the Partition, in an undefined time. It must take place in an apartment building in North Calcutta, not on the much contested territories of the densely populated refugee colonies in South Calcutta or at the borders of West Bengal and Bangladesh. The story cannot be about the people who are still haunted by the living Partition, who are struggling to keep the border porous, dodging border guards and other law keepers. The exile Boori Ma undergoes in the story is a re-enactment of her earlier exile, suggesting that it could have happened anywhere at anytime.‘A Real Durwan’ is not about the actual deportation: Lahiri’s collection has no access to the details of the actual plight of the refugees, and the story must find Boori Ma in a remove of time and space. Similarly, other than being viewed on a TV screen, the story of the Bangladesh War of Liberation can only be accessed through Mr Pirzada, who is a scholar with a grant and thus mobile enough to visit North America. The stories

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

234 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

235

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

Lahiri constructs with characters removed from the actual time and place of the Partition trauma allow a large degree of abstraction of the specificities. These universal abstractions are easily compliable with the requirements of the stories of dislocation of the immigrant communities that Lahiri wants to tell. To extend the argument, Lahiri writes her women characters, especially the first-generation immigrant women,6 outside history and geography so that they can offer a common imaginary enabling connection with the refugee women. My concern lies in the gender politics behind this affective conflation of the immigrant woman with the refugee woman. It is significant that the refugee subject in ‘The Real Durwan’ is a woman whose helplessness is conditioned by her gender and also her age. For Mrs Sen, the lack of mobility is also gendered: her immigration experience is markedly different from Mr Sen, an assistant professor of mathematics in a university. This gendered lack of mobility connects Mrs Sen’s story with Boori Ma’s tale of forced migration and exile from home, as much as with the restricted living Boori Ma has in her new country and society, and also in her second banishment.The bonds of empathy between Lilia and the Bangladeshis are formed through Lilia’s imagined commonality between herself and the seven daughters of Mr Pirzada. I see how one can imagine women as universal, ubiquitous figures of the quintessentially displaced. Not only can one argue that all women are essentially displaced in the state of patriarchy, but one can also state that that displacement itself is a gendered experience.Women suffer displacement differently than men; very often the displacement itself occurs because of and as a form of gender violence, as is perhaps the case with Mrs Sen. I am not averse to feminist positions that want to see this universality. Nevertheless, I do not find Lahiri’s discursive universalism politically attractive. For one, I am worried that such universalism threatens to shut down crucial questions of choice and agency for the immigrant woman. Further, this sort of universalism portrays both the immigrant woman and the refugee woman as objects of pity from the vantage point of a privileged gaze. Mrs Sen has had little or no choice in her migration to America; Mr Sen ‘brought’ her to North America after their marriage. Like her, all immigrant women are similarly victimized and pitiable figures in Lahiri’s writing. The universe Lahiri creates in her stories, or for that matter her later novel The Namesake, completely disallows the possibility that immigrant women may have exercised choice. Thus, however alluring, the universalism of Lahiri’s victimized woman is a problem because it figures the immigrant woman as an always-already victim. Her conflation with the refugee woman negates the possibility of agency for the latter. Not that I advocate that we ought to put the refugee woman within a framework of absolute victimhood. We will do well to bear in mind what Bagchi and Dasgupta (2003) remind us in the Introduction to their critical volume on the Bengali refugees of 1947: that the histories of survival of the refugee women and their contribution in setting up

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

235 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

236

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

the quotidian life again can be, and indeed often are, stories of triumph. Nevertheless, there are crucial differences between the refugee and the immigrant, as I have argued earlier in the paper: the subject of forced migration does not have, by definition, the choices the latter has. For the refugees, the lack of possibility to make a choice about moving plays a crucial role in their subject formation and the experience of their ‘refugeeness’. The conflation with the immigrant woman, thus, also does disservice to the refugee woman, taking away a significant condition of her subjectivity against which we should understand her struggle. To sum up, this essay argues that the universalizing discourse of dislocation as I read in Interpreter of Maladies, which can only be articulated from a privileged cosmopolitan location, robs the subcontinental Partition of its specific traumatic location and history. Further, this universalization is affected by gendering similarities between different categories of dislocation. In the attempt to draw parallels between immigrant and refugees, Lahiri’s text mobilizes the discourse of the woman as an allegorical figure belonging outside history, geography, and, as I want to emphasize, agency. For it is that presumptuous quality of ‘helplessness’, a supposed ‘less than’ about women’s agency, that allows the equation of refugee women and immigrant women. I argue, therefore, not only for maintenance of the specificity of the context in which we understand dislocation, but also specificity of the context in which we read women’s victimization and exploitation if we indeed seek to understand the conditionality of their victimization. Finally, I close by admitting that this paper is motivated by a concern that goes beyond Lahiri’s collection. I take Interpreter of Maladies to be symptomatic of a larger narrative of affect that conflates refugee migration and emigration to the West as similar or comparable instances of displacement. This larger narrative is not just confined to literary texts but permeates Partition studies as well. Let me clarify by returning to my position as a Partition scholar from which I opened this paper. In the last few years or so, several critical studies on the Partition have broadened their foci to include migration to the West, as indeed this volume does. Now, I am not dismissing migration to the West as a legitimate category worthy of our critical attention within Partition studies. However, I wonder if this marks a new direction in which subcontinental Partition studies itself is heading. If it is, then I also wonder what this new direction signifies: is the new direction reflexive and accommodative of the growth of interest in the subcontinental partition in the Western academy? If Partition studies is to broaden to blend with immigrant/diasporic studies, I am not against such a development. However, in that case, I would emphasize the need for an accompanying critical commentary on the politics which instantiates and allows such a move. I am also interested in the debate on what it means if Partition studies should become a minor strand—if I take Lahiri’s collection as symptomatic one more time—in a larger global narrative of dislocation and displacement. Taking up

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

236 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

237

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

a literary text such as Lahiri’s as an instance that not just allows but also provokes readings of universalisms of displacement, I hope to anticipate the debate that should accompany the new direction Partition studies seems to have chosen.

NOTES 1. We should, however, note that the demography of the refugees of the Partition of Bengal has always been more various than this prototype suggests. Later waves of refugees and continuing cross-border human traffic complicate the story even more. We should keep in sight not just the elite Hindu refugees but also the non-elite (lower caste/class, the ‘tribal’ people who are in turn dislocated by the wave of Bengali refugees) and the Muslim subjects who become refugees or suddenly acquire ‘minority’ status when they choose to stay back in India. Nevertheless, Himani Bannerji’s comment (2004) is highly illuminating about a large section of the refugees in question: ‘The joke that all East Bengali refugees claim that they are displaced landlords may be less a myth than an exaggerated truth. Articles, documents and reminiscences in this volume tell us about the loss of considerable land and other property, about professional incomes of middle class Hindus who were “forced” to migrate. They speak to the disruption of social lives of semi- or petty-bourgeois feudalism prevailing in both rural and urban educated Hindu families in east Bengal’ (paragraph 6). Taking this comment as a sum-up of the central refugee narrative of this time and location, we realize that class alone is not enough to understand the difference between the refugee subject and the expatriate emigrant to the West. In fact, part of the trauma of dislocation of both groups is the erasure of class identity and privilege. 2. Noelle Brada-Williams (2004) has studied Interpreter of Maladies as a consistent short-story cycle, wherein all stories revolve around the formulations of carefulness and carelessness that characters show within relationships. 3. Significantly, the Partition stories appear alternately with stories dealing with immigration experience. Susan Mann (1989) notes that ‘simultaneous self-sufficiency and interdependence’ mark a short-story cycle; and further, that titles are key ‘generic signals’ and that ‘collections that are not cycles have traditionally been named after a single story to which the phrase “and other stories” is appended.... Generally placed first or last in the volume, the title story represents what the author feels is the best work or, in some cases, the best-known work.’ For instance, Faulkner insisted on having ‘and Other Stories’ removed from Go Down, Moses, which allows us to read the absence of the phrase as a conscious signalling device, as also in Lahiri’s text (Mann 1989: 17, 14, cited in Brada-Williams 2004: 454). Lahiri’s collection is titled Interpreter of Maladies after the third story in the collection, although there is no indication that that particular story is the single most important one. As several critics have noted, the title refers to Lahiri’s role as the author and speaks to the collection as a whole. 4. Most critics have located immigration and immigration-related dislocation as the main themes of the stories. Asha Choubey traces the sense of exile through five of the nine stories and asserts that Lahiri’s ‘protagonists—all Indians—settled abroad are afflicted with a “sense of exile”’ (2001: para. 4). Basudeb and Angana Chakrabarti also note common themes in Lahiri’s stories, for example, that ‘this sense of belonging to a particular place and culture and yet at the same time being an outsider to another creates a tension in individuals which happens to be a

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

237 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

238

PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY

distinguishing feature of Lahiri’s characters’ (2002: 24–25). Similarly, Ashutosh Dubey notes that Lahiri’s characters focus on the ‘themes of emotional struggles of love, relationships, communication against the backdrop of immigrant experience’ (2002: 25). 5. The story itself glosses this history. Colonial India was partitioned into India and Pakistan in 1947. Pakistan became a declaredly Islamic nation, while India became secular though with a clear Hindu majority and, arguably, Hindu majoritarianism. Pakistan was two united but noncontiguous landmasses west and east of India, named West and East Pakistan respectively. There followed, however, conflict between West Pakistan and East Pakistan, which were united around religion but were ethnically and linguistically different. The Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis felt marginalized in the newly-formed Pakistan and the resulting dissent culminated in a second partition, that of Pakistan, to form a new sovereign Bangladesh after the Bangladeshi War of Liberation in 1971. The latter war saw horrific genocidal violence in East Pakistan perpetuated by the West Pakistani army and sent further huge waves of both Hindu and Muslim refugees to India, in addition to the large numbers of Hindu refugees who had already left East Pakistan. At a more micro-level, in the process of partitioning colonial India, two states within erstwhile India, Punjab and Bengal, were first split into halves: a part of Punjab went to West Pakistan and a part of Bengal became East Pakistan. Thus, when we speak of Bengal, we refer to the state of West Bengal in India and to East Bengal, which was first East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. 6. The helpless women are inevitably first-generation immigrants. These are the women, like Mrs Sen, who can be likened to a refugee like Boori Ma. We can also think of Mala of ‘The Third and the Final Continent’ and Ashima of her novel The Namesake. The second-generation women in the Interpreter of Maladies are by contrast far more enabled, superior figures: we have only to think about Shobha of ‘A Temporary Matter’, Twinkle of ‘This Blessed House’, Mrs Das of ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’, Moushumi or Sonia of The Namesake. Lahiri’s own authorial subjecthood also belongs to same group. By all measures, these latter characters, second-generation Americans, are strong women who definite contrast with the group of immigrants their mothers have been. This contrast makes the helplessness and the predicament of the immigrant woman in Lahiri’s narrative more obvious. Pointedly, the evaluation of the immigrant woman as a victim privileges, and comes from the privileged gaze of, the second-generation American woman.

REFERENCES Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). Bagchi, Jasodhara and Subharanjan Dasgupta (eds), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India (Kolkata: Stree, 2003). Bannerji, Himani, ‘Partition and its Meanings’, Review of The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subharanjan Dasgupta, Economic and Political Weekly, 21 August 2004, http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf= 08&filename=7586&filetype=html. Brada-Williams, Noelle, ‘Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as a Short Story Cycle’, Melus, 29(3–4), 2004: 451–64. Chakrabarti, Basudeb and Angana Chakrabarti, ‘Context: A Comparative Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and Shubodh Ghosh’s “Jatugriha”’, The Journal of ‘Indian Writing in English, 30(1), 2002: 23–29.

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

238 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

239

REFUGEE WOMEN, IMMIGRANT WOMEN

Choubey, Asha, ‘Food Metaphor in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies’, The Literature & Culture of the Indian Subcontinent (South Asia) in the Postcolonial Web, http://postcolonialweb.org/india/ literature/lahiri/choubey1.html, 2001, accessed 9 May 2007. Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Dubey, Ashutosh, ‘Immigrant Experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies’, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, 30(2), 2002: 22–26. Lahiri, Jhumpa, Interpreter of Maladies (New York, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). ———, The Namesake (New Delhi: Harper Collins and The India Today Group, 2004, orig. pub. 2003). Mann, Susan Garland, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (New York: Greenwood, 1989). Sidhwa, Bapsi, Cracking India (Minneapolis: Milkweed Paperbacks, 1991, first published as Ice-Candy Man, London: William Heinemann, 1988).

13_Roy & Bhatia~chap-13.pmd

239 Black

8/8/2007, 9:47 AM

240

SHUBH MATHUR

14 Srinagar–Muzaffarabad–New York: A Kashmiri Family’s Exile

SHUBH MATHUR

My memory keeps getting in the way of your history. There is nothing to forgive.You won’t forgive me. —Agha Shahid Ali (1997)

This essay attempts to chronicle the remembered history of a prominent Kashmiri family. While their political involvement might be thought to make their experience atypical, their ‘multiple exiles’—from Srinagar in Indianheld Kashmir to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-held Kashmir or ‘Azad Kashmir’1 to NewYork city—are all too typical of the trajectories that have created sizeable diasporas in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir, Europe, Canada and the United States. Also typical are the rarely spoken tales of repression and personal loss, a history which has been lost in the flood of dominant South Asian voices, both official and unofficial. Recovering oral history and memory then becomes a way of recording a different version of the Kashmiri past than that contained in the competing claims made by India and Pakistan. It allows us to discover events unrecorded, and their significance, and to uncover a history to which I, with an undergraduate degree in history from Delhi University, was a stranger. The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 created the current partition of Kashmir, enforced now through the establishment of a highly militarized border, and on the Indian side, a highly sophisticated border fence, air surveillance and heavily mined strips of land. But the partition of Kashmir, written not with a capital but a lowercase ‘p’, is not a single, unique event with a clearly definable date. It is an ongoing trauma, enmeshed in history, and local and global politics. In Jammu and Kashmir, the politics and dynamics of Partition overlapped with ongoing popular political struggles against the repressive Dogra regime. Looking at this process from an indigenous Kashmiri perspective brings this longer history into focus, clarifying

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

240 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

241

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

that the politics of 1947 in Kashmir were in fact superimposed on earlier movements for accountable, representative and just government. Reintroducing agency into this history enables us to question received versions of events in Kashmir as enshrined in the Indian mythology of Partition and to challenge teleological and statist interpretations of history, which justify the current dispensation (for instance, Chaddha 1997; Ganguly 2002). In such accounts, six decades of war, repression and military force against a civilian population are made to appear as the inevitable outcome of unstoppable historical forces, of the limited political choices open to the newly independent nation. To understand these events as the result of choices made by Indian, Pakistani and Kashmiri actors is indeed to reopen the possibility of resolving the conflict. While the cultural and social uniqueness of the Kashmir valley have been emphasized by Indian writers, there were nevertheless close social, economic, religious and familial ties that connected it to regions north and west, rather than to Jammu and the south. Partition in Kashmir meant the division of Jammu and Kashmir into Indian-controlled and Pakistan-controlled areas along the Line of Control (LoC). the LoC, which Kashmiris prefer to call the Ceasefire Line, invoking its impermanence, divided villages, families and communities just as it did all along the border drawn in 1947. It marks the points at which the rival armies of India and Pakistan stopped when their first war as newly independent nations was ended by a ceasefire negotiated by the United Nations. It closed off the logical and historical land routes running from the Kashmir valley—the heart of Kashmir—north and west towards what became Azad Kashmir and Pakistan. Kashmiris who happened to be on the wrong side of the Ceasefire line became defined in the official Indian parlance as enemies, foreigners, infiltrators. India, lacking a land route to Kashmir, settled for heroic feats of logistics and engineering, blasting a 20-kilometre tunnel through solid rock (named Jawahar Tunnel, after Prime Minister Nehru) to claim the prize, giving reality through the feats of army engineers to the slogan of the Hindu nationalist right, ‘Kashmir hamara hai’ (‘Kashmir is ours’). In much postcolonial writing, the term ‘diaspora’ has become interchangeable with ‘expatriate’, losing along the way its connotations of persecution, dispossession, exile and sorrow. The sizeable Kashmiri diaspora in Europe, Canada and the US, however, carries all of these meanings as lived experience, not only in the past but also in the present through connections with family members who have remained behind. Exile in their case means the literal impossibility of ever returning to their homes, to which they have been declared foreign, hostile and traitorous by the Indian and (to a much lesser extent) the Pakistani state. Following Pandey (2001), historians of Partition have sought to separate local communities from the larger political context, arguing that only the individual experience of violence defines such events. On the contrary, individual lives cannot be separated from history and

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

241 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

242

SHUBH MATHUR

from the path of the nation-state, as those who have been at the receiving end of its violence can testify. A brief foray into autobiography becomes necessary, as the recording of multiple exiles became for me a personal voyage of discovery. I first met the Muzaffars as an Indian discovering, hesitantly, the record of fourteen years of human rights abuses committed by Indian forces in Kashmir.2 I was aware, of course, that since 1989 there have been anything from half to three-quarters of a million Indian troops stationed in the Valley, with catastrophic consequences for the civilian population. I was also familiar with the depth and virulence of nationalist passion in India—fed by a decade of militant Hindu politics—that sanctioned and condoned these abuses. My job, as I saw it, was to record the abuses, to publicize them in national and international fora, aware that many previous efforts had failed or succeeded only very partially. I steeled myself to read and hear tales of horror and atrocities, and, as an anthropologist, to convey them to a surfeited audience. But my Kashmiri interlocutors had a much more difficult task for me: ‘Talk to the Indians, tell them we want to talk to them. We want them to listen to us. We have tried everything and failed to get a hearing, maybe if they hear this from one of their own people, they will listen.’ While the original telling, like other recent Kashmiri cultural productions, film, poetry or music, is dignified and elegiac, my rendering is more akin to a blunt instrument. But it may serve to break down some of the persistent myths that underlie competing claims to Kashmir by outsiders, and open a space for Kashmiri solutions to the conflict. It is easy to read the grim history of Kashmir as an unending tragedy, but a closer acquaintance makes it clear that this is much more a story of courage and endurance, softened by all the virtues and skills for which Kashmir was, in happier times, famed in India—graciousness, beauty and consciousness of beauty, tolerance, friendship. And, perhaps like other peoples caught on the anvil of history, a wholly unexpected (unreported?) sense of humour. The recording of life histories lends itself most easily to collaborative ethnography. The ethical and theoretical issues raised by advocates and practitioners of collaborative ethnography have acquired a new urgency since the Darkness in El Dorado controversy:3 questions of power and representation, and of the anthropologist’s accountability to the people she or he studies. Collaborative ethnography offers a way, in the wake of the crisis of ethnographic authority, to recast the anthropological project of translating lives and meanings. It creates the possibility of refiguring the production of knowledge, away from institutionally privileged sites to the lived reality of anthropological subjects. … collaborative research with research subjects is only recently entering onto anthropology’s center stage as a necessary condition of both applied and academic work. We no longer just choose to engage in collaborative research with our sub-

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

242 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

243

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

jects; collaboration is increasingly conditioning not only our advocacy but our so-called pure research as well (Lassiter 2005; see also Martinez 2002).

In other words, collaborative projects can no longer be considered ‘merely’ an ethical luxury but have become an analytical and epistemological necessity. Lassiter’s comments are particularly applicable to the case of Kashmir, where not only political control, but representations of history and identity have been the currency of outsiders.

HISTORY AND MEMORY The Muzaffar family has been prominent in Kashmiri politics since the 1920s and the anti-feudal struggle,4 to which they trace the origins of the movement for Kashmiri independence. Raja Muzaffar is one of the founders of the JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front), and remained its senior vice-chairman until he migrated to the United States from Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir, after receiving death threats because of his pro-Independence politics.The JKLF, with membership on both sides of divided Kashmir, is the largest pro-Independence group in Kashmir. Raja Muzaffar is now the JKLF’s representative in the United States. The Muzaffar family’s history has been part of the movement for democracy, which had its beginnings in the 1930s in the anti-feudal struggle against Dogra rule. Raja Muzaffar: To understand the present you must go back in history, to 1848, when Kashmir was sold by the British to the Dogra rulers for seventy-five lakh rupees. Yes, seventy-five lakhs! [7.5 million] Land and people were sold for a pittance.

The sale of the territory of Jammu and Kashmir by the British to Gulab Singh, a feudatory of the Sikh kingdom, who had helped the British defeat Ranjit Singh in 1846, is seen as a founding moment in the relationship between India and Kashmir, defining as it does a modus operandi where deals are made and the future of the state decided by powerful outsiders, without reference to the people who live there. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the memory of that injustice remains fresh. The Dogra regime, one of the independent princely states of colonial India, quickly revealed its discriminatory, autocratic and rapacious nature: back-breaking taxes assessed at half or more of the produce; indifference to the suffering among peasants and craftsmen due to famine and epidemics; a repressive police force on the watch for any political activity; a ban on official employment for Muslims, which was reserved initially for Dogras and later for Hindus, who constituted less than one per cent of the population (Jamwal 2005); and an emphasis on the Hindu character of the state expressed through contempt and neglect of the cultural and religious values of the majority of the population (Rai 2004). The burden of economic exploitation

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

243 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

244

SHUBH MATHUR

and political repression fell on the Muslim population, who comprised the peasantry and artisan class, while the Hindus—Pandits and Dogras—came to be seen as the props of the confessional state. The 1920s saw the beginning of the anti-feudal movement, for responsible government and an end to discrimination. Most Indian commentators have taken the religious nature of the anti-feudal movement as a given, opposing as it was a state and ruling class that derived its identity and legitimacy from an appeal to a Hindu religious identity. But remembered history places the origins of the struggle not in the various religious affiliations competing for the loyalty of Kashmiri Muslims in the 1930s, but in the literacy associations, and particularly in the Reading Room Association started, among others, by Raja Muzaffar’s uncle Peer Maqbool Jeelani of Khanyar, Srinagar. Loosely based on the YMCAs, they sought to counter the Dogra and Hindu monopoly on education and employment by promoting literacy, and focused on ending that most objectionable feudal practice, of forced labour. Mrs Fatima Muzaffar: My mother-in-law (Raja Saheb’s mother) was a remarkable woman. He doesn’t like to talk about his family so I have to tell you. She had very progressive views and was way ahead of her times. She inspired the struggle against feudal privileges and its most hateful form, forced labour. She gave up the privilege of being carried in sedan chairs, since human beings should not be treated like beasts of burden.

Even this innocuous programme ran foul of the regime, which perhaps rightly, saw it as the thin end of the wedge of democratic reforms and representative government. As the movement gathered momentum, the regime struck, arresting those accused of making ‘seditious’ speeches. At the Srinagar Central Jail, a crowd of demonstrators gathered to support one such prisoner. Raja Muzaffar: On 13 July 1931, the Maharaja’s troops opened fire on a demonstration of unarmed protestors. We see this as the start of our movement for freedom.

Twenty-one persons were killed and a new era of repression began, with political leaders arrested and tortured or forced to flee. The events of 1931, labelled by Indian writers as ‘riots’, and more commonly as ‘communal’ or even ‘Hindu–Muslim’ riots, created a pattern that became more marked over time—repression and exile to escape repression, the representation of the opposition to autocracy as ‘communal’ and ‘disloyal’. As the repression of the Dogra regime grew, so did the opposition; the no-tax movement in Poonch, begun in the late 1930s and later strengthened by demobilized soldiers, attracted support from surrounding areas. These rebels, brutally suppressed by the Maharaja with the vocal support of the pro-regime Praja Parishad, would eventually, after 1947, be termed ‘infiltrators’, by way of post-facto justification.The countdown to 1947 and the decisions by various actors,

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

244 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

245

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

again, external to the state, have been recorded elsewhere and need only be mentioned briefly here (Bose 2003; Mustafa and Murthy 2001; Schofield 1996). The fairer accounts do not corroborate the official Indian version which records ‘secularist’ (read, ‘non-Muslim’) and nationalist triumph over ‘communal’ (read, ‘Muslim’) and secessionist ones. The British decision to award Gurdaspur district in Punjab to India—even though on both principles of population composition and contiguity, which were supposed to guide the Radcliffe Commission, it should have been part of Pakistan—paved the way for massacres of the Muslim population there and the creation of a land corridor from India to Kashmir. The decision of the new government of Pakistan to help or instigate the ‘tribal raiders’ to move into the Valley provided a pretext for the Dogra Maharaja’s decision to accede to India. The Indian government’s decision to hold the line against ‘Muslim expansionism’, by sending in troops to claim Kashmir was voiced by V. P. Menon, Indian Secretary of the Ministry of States: Personally when I recommended to the Government of India the acceptance of the accession of the Maharaja of Kashmir, I had in mind one consideration ... that the invasion of Kashmir by the raiders was a grave threat to the integrity of India. Ever since the time of Mahmud Ghazni ... India has been subjected to periodic invasions from the north-west.... [W]ithin less than ten weeks of the establishment of the new State of Pakistan, its very first act was to let loose a tribal invasion through the north-west. Srinagar today, Delhi tomorrow. A nation that forgets its history and its geography does so at its peril (quoted in Udayakumar 2001).

Menon’s reasoning again provides a glimpse of the profound suspicion and prejudice with which the Indian establishment has regarded the Muslim majority in the state— an attitude to be found equally among centrist liberals and the far right. This, far more than imperialist manipulation or Pakistani interventions, has shaped Indian policies towards the state. The unilateral decision by the Dogra ruler to accede to India, without regard for the wishes of the majority of the population and for the earlier ‘standstill agreement’ signed with Pakistan guaranteeing that trade, travel and communication would continue uninterrupted, has been best described as ‘comparable to the sale of Kashmir by the British to Maharaja Gulab Singh in terms of its immorality and singular lack of concern for the wishes of the people of the state’ (Mustafa and Murthy 2001).

1947 Kashmiri Muslim memories of Partition are centred on the massacres of Muslims in Jammu, when the Maharaja’s troops, helped by the Hindu organizations, the Hindu Mahasabha and its Kashmiri affiliate the Praja Parishad, indulged in an unchecked

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

245 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

246

SHUBH MATHUR

orgy of violence, in which an estimated 200,000–300,000 Muslims lost their lives or became refugees in Pakistan (Jamwal 2005). It is this episode of ethnic cleansing that lies behind casual statements of the demographics of the region, which tell us that Jammu has a Hindu majority, just over 50 per cent of the total population. Needless to add, it finds no mention in Indian histories of the Partition. We were told that at that time people were killed in cruel ways. Men were tied to trucks and pulled in opposite directions.

Refugee convoys intended to convey Muslim refugees safely to Pakistan were attacked, while the soldiers supposed to be guarding them stood by and watched or joined the attackers.The Muslim neighbourhoods of Jammu were besieged, and the numbers of Gujjars killed from nearby settlements ran into the hundreds. Nevertheless, The Hindus in the Kashmir Valley remained safe and protected even in the wake of communal killings of Muslims in the Hindu dominated Jammu region. Credit for this goes mainly to Sheikh Abdullah and his colleagues in the party.… In the Jammu province, things went very differently. There, unlike every other part of the state, Hindus and Sikhs slightly outnumbered Muslims; and within a period of 11 weeks starting in August, systematic savageries, similar to those already launched in East Punjab and in Patiala and Kapurthala, practically eliminated the entire Muslim element in the population, amounting to 500,000 people. About 200,000 just disappeared, remaining untraceable, having presumably been butchered, or died from epidemics or exposure.The rest fled destitute to West Punjab. According to official records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No. 534, March 6, 1951: ‘Shortly after the terrible slaughters in India, which accompanied Partition, the Maharaja set upon a course of action whereby, in the words of the special correspondent of The Times of London published in its issue of 10 October 1948, “in the remaining Dogra area, 237,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated, unless they escaped to Pakistan along the border, by all the forces of the Dogra State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs”.’ G. K. Reddy, a Hindu editor of Kashmir Times, said in a statement published in The Daily Gazette, a Hindu paper of Karachi, in its issue of October 28, 1947: ‘The mad orgy of Dogra violence against unarmed Muslims should put any self-respecting human being to shame. I saw armed bands of ruffians and soldiers shooting down and hacking to pieces helpless Muslim refugees heading towards Pakistan.… I saw en route State officials freely distributing arms and ammunition among the Dogras.… From the hotel room where I was detained in Jammu, I counted as many as twenty-six villages burning one night and all through the night rattling fire of automatic weapons could be heard from the surrounding refugee camps.... The events in Jammu province revealed that there was an attempt to change the demographics of the division. The 1947 carnage left several Muslim majority

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

246 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

247

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

populated villages in Jammu district alone totally Hindu or Sikh populated. In Jammu district alone, which is a part of the larger Jammu province, Muslims numbered 158,630 and comprised 37 per cent of the total population of 428,719 in the year 1941. In the year 1961, Muslims numbered only 51,693 and comprised only 10 per cent of the total population of 516,932. The decrease in the number of Muslims in Jammu district alone was over 100,000. That there was a design to change the demographics is demonstrated by another incident. Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehr Chand Mahajan told a delegation of Hindus who met him in the palace when he arrived in Jammu that now when the power was being transferred to the people they should better demand parity. When one of them associated with the National Conference asked how they could demand parity when there was so much difference in population ratio. Pointing to the Ramnagar natural reserve below, where some bodies of Muslims were still lying, he said, ‘the population ratio too can change’ (Jamwal 2005).5

The killings of Hindus and Sikhs in this particular episode of ‘retributive genocide’ (Brass 2003), though the numbers were not comparable, were in the border districts of Rajouri, Mirpur and other areas under Pakistani control. Fighting between Indian and Pakistani forces caused immense suffering, as recorded in this rare account by an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) archivist: Fighting continued throughout 1948, causing the deaths of many civilians and further large-scale population movements.Two million people—half the population of Kashmir—fled to the mountains, where many died of hunger and exhaustion as they tried to cross the snow-covered passes (Rey-Schirr 1998).

Contrary to the high moral profile claimed by official Indian versions of the fighting in Kashmir in 1948, military operations were marked by disregard for the conventions of war: In October 1948 ... the ICRC had received vigorous protests from the Pakistan Red Cross concerning the Indian Air Force’s bombing of two of its hospitals ... in ‘Azad Kashmir’.... Patients had been killed, and there had been large-scale damage. Pursuant to its policy regarding the forwarding of protests concerning alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC had conveyed the Pakistan Red Cross’s protests to the Indian Red Cross Society, requesting it to ask the Indian government to investigate the matter and, if necessary, to take all possible measures to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.The Indian government stated that under no circumstances could its pilots have deliberately attacked the two medical facilities, and deduced that the marking of the hospitals, or even their location, must have been inadequate ... (ibid.).

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

247 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

248

SHUBH MATHUR

There was also disregard of the plight of civilians trapped by the conflict: In mid-February 1949, Nicolas Burckhardt visited the Alibeg camp in ‘Azad Kashmir’, which had just been returned to administration by the Pakistani authorities and which at that time housed 1,200 non-Muslim refugees. One month later, he journeyed to the ‘thesil’ of Kotli in the district of Mirpur: in autumn 1948, a total of 50,000 people had fled as Indian troops advanced and had become trapped in the north of the district, separated from Pakistan by a range of mountains more than 2,000 metres high, the only practicable link having been cut by the Indian army.... The aid therefore had to be airdropped by the Pakistani army (ibid.).

Indifference to human suffering in pursuit of territorial goals became another part of the pattern to be repeated in future conflicts. In the arbitrary manner of all partitions, the demarcation of the Ceasefire Line came to define belonging and exclusion, casually separating families, villages and resources. Raja Muzaffar: To maintain law and order situation after Pakistani tribes’ invasion in the Valley Sheikh Abdullah was appointed as Prime Minister and his colleagues namely Mirza Afzal Baig, Peer Maqbool Jeelani (my uncle), Soofi M. Akbar and Maulana Masoodi as civil administrators. My father was the jageerdar of the Uri area and his brother sought his influence in the maintenance of law and order situation in the border area. My father refused to receive Brigadier Cariappa (who became the first Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army) at the helipad at Uri and chose to leave the town. He moved to another house he owned across the stream (nalla), planning to return after the visit by the army commander. That nalla later became the Ceasefire Line between India and Pakistan. The Ceasefire Line divided not only the land but the family. The Government of Pakistan established contact with Sheikh Abdullah (as mentioned in Atish-i-Chinar, Sheikh’s autobiography) and Peer Maqbool Jeelani played the role for a meeting of high official of the Government of Pakistan with Sheikh Abdullah in Pehlgam.…

1952–53: REFORM AND EXILE The brief tenure of Sheikh Abdullah’s government saw the implementation of sweeping land reforms, the most successful effort in independent India, which gave land to the tiller and provided debt-relief to the rural population. This, coupled with the spread of elementary education, giving Kashmiri Muslims a claim to government employment, lent a greater urgency to the Jammu-based pro-Dogra opposition, now bolstered by its association with the RSS and Jan Sangh—the political incarnation of Hindu nationalism in independent India. As the landlords were mostly Hindus, and the farmers who benefited from the reforms mostly Muslim, the accusation of communalism could once again be levelled against the Kashmiri Muslim

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

248 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

249

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

leadership. Acting on two fronts but in concert, Centre and Right in the Indian establishment began an assault on the guarantees of autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir that were already written into the Indian constitution.6 The Nehru–Abdullah rift marked a turning point in the history of Kashmir. It had long been in the making. Yet the background is little known and less understood. Two factors caused the breach. Nehru’s pressure on Abdullah to finalise the accession beyond doubt and the Jan Sangh-supported agitation in Jammu with which not a few among Nehru’s colleagues sympathized (Noorani 1999).

For his part, Sheikh Abdullah insisted that the Indian government honour its commitment to the autonomy of the state, and hold a plebiscite. As the Jan Sangh leader Shyama Prasad Mookerjee led increasingly aggressive morchas (marches) of Hindu activists into the Kashmir Valley to force the Indian state to rescind Article 370 of the Indian constitution (which guaranteed autonomy to J&K) with no apparent effort by the Indian government to rein in the movement, it became clearer and clearer that the result of the plebiscite would probably not favour India. The J&K Government responded to the Jan Sangh morchas by jailing Mookerjee, who died in prison. Mookerjee’s death produced demonstrations in Jammu and north Indian cities demanding ‘quatil Abdullah ko phansi do’ (‘hang Abdullah, the murderer’) (Puri 2006). The plebiscite was never held; instead, the Indian government dismissed Sheikh Abdullah, replacing him with the more compliant Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, who promptly denounced his predecessor as a tool of foreign conspiracies (Bose 2003). Sheikh Abdullah was not hanged, as the Jan Sangh demanded, but arrested under the Public Security Act and remained incarcerated for the remaining twenty-two years of his life (until 1975) with brief spells outside. The ‘constitutional crisis’ of 1952–53 consisted essentially of the Indian government dismissing an elected government—even though it lacked the power to do so under Article 370 of its own new Constitution—reneging on public guarantees. Not only Sheikh Abdullah but also other prominent politicians were accused of collaborating with Pakistan and either jailed or forced to leave to ensure their safety. Along with Sheikh Abdullah, other prominent politicians including Raja Muzaffar’s uncle Peer Maqbool were accused of collaborating with Pakistan and either jailed or forced to flee. Raja Muzaffar: After these arrests, my father postponed his return to Srinagar to avoid being jailed. From LoC he moved to Muzaffarabad, leaving behind mother, brothers, sisters, home, property, friends.

The coup of 1953, barely remembered in Indian history, was not a bloodless one. Popular estimates put the number of those killed in the process of installing a proIndian government at about 1,300. They are not remembered or commemorated;

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

249 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

250

SHUBH MATHUR

more than fifty years on, the families are still too afraid to talk about the events. It is not even known where those killed in 1953 by Indian forces are buried. The blanket of fear and repression closed down over the next three and a half decades and produced a steady stream of exiles, under suspicion of ‘anti-national’ activity or of conspiring with Pakistan. One such story is told by Rafiq Kathwari: When I was a teenager about 35 years ago and in my final year in college in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, the movie Battle for Algiers was a big hit. It captured my imagination as well as that of my classmates, one of whom approached me a few days later and asked if I would commit myself to the liberation of Kashmir. Yes, of course, I said, reading a typed sheet my friend took out from his coat pocket. ‘Bear Arms against a Sea of Troubles’, I remember the title said. ‘This is our manifesto,’ my friend said as I read the aims and objectives, which included blowing up bridges and the local radio and telephone buildings, ambushing army convoys and killing soldiers. The text said nothing about where we would get arms and ammunition, the number of members in the group, how we would organize, who our leader was or when we would execute our plan. However, I remember the manifesto was long on the why, with each point emphasized in the present tense: Our cause is freedom. India promised us a referendum on our future, but fails to keep its promise. Prime Minister Nehru, the last Englishman to rule India, has kept our popular leader Sheikh Abdullah in jail for over 15 years. To the extent that India denies us our fundamental rights and subverts its own constitution, to that extent, India is not a democracy. It was great stuff for my impressionable mind. My friend had energized me. If the Algerians could do it, so could Kashmiris. I read the typed manifesto again before signing it with a flourish. A few weeks later that teenage flirtation landed me for 11 months in Srinagar’s Central Jail, where I met 12 of my classmates who had also signed the manifesto. (The college Principal had been somehow alerted to the plan and called the police.) Subsequently, India announced that it had cracked a dangerous gang of terrorists trained in Pakistan. There was no trial. We were just locked up and forgotten, until one beneficent pro-India sycophant in Kashmir was replaced by another, who ordered an amnesty. Soon after, I fled to the future of other continents (Kathwari 2002).7

1989: INSURGENCY AND AFTER The repressive nature of the puppet regimes installed by the Indian government in Kashmir since 1947 has been ably recorded by Bose (2003) as also the ‘democratic deficit’ (Baruah 2005) displayed by the Indian state in dealing with minorities in border regions. Thus the slogan of the first organized political movement in modern Kashmir, which emerged in the 1930s … was ‘Responsible Government’; government

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

250 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

251

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

accountable to and in the interests of the citizenry. As we shall see, that agenda of institutionalizing ‘responsible government’ remains unrealized seven decades later, and Kashmir’s people have not yet made the transition from being subjects to being citizens (Bose 2003: 8).

JKLF members have suffered repression on both sides of the Lines, as the Pakistan government has found their goal of complete independence inconvenient. ProIndependence leaders and political activists have been detained and tortured and political activity strictly controlled. While the scale of abuses does not approach that in Indian controlled Kashmir, Raja Muzaffar: If you say there are human rights abuses by Indian forces, you must also talk about abuses on the Pakistani side; if you talk about repression by India, you must also talk about political repression by Pakistan.

Nearly all prominent political leaders bear the marks of torture on their bodies. Once JKLF launched the insurgency, after the spectacularly unfair elections in IHK (Indian Held Kashmir) in 1987, the Muzaffars’ house and the family became the headquarters of the pro-Independence movement in Azad Kashmir. A Mother Courage figure, Mrs Muzaffar became the storm centre of the movement as the logistics and sustenance of the movement fell on her shoulders.This too is a role she has inherited from a long history of Kashmiri women’s activism (Bose 2003; Manchanda 2001). Raja Muzaffar: She devoted her house as the head office of the organization where international media and diplomats from around the world visited to get updates on the Kashmir situation.

They spoke of human rights abuses only reluctantly, in lowered voices, perhaps sparing my feelings as an Indian. Or perhaps revealing a sorrow too deep to be spoken. Mrs Muzaffar showed me two photographs displayed on the drawing room walls. These are two of my nephews, who were both killed on the same day, one on the Indian side of Kashmir, the other on the Pakistani side. We had organized a demonstration for reunification at the Line of Control in Azad Kashmir, but the Pakistani army did not want the demonstration to march all the way. They used force to prevent the demonstrators from reaching the Line, my nephew was killed by a bullet in his back. The same day we received the news that my other nephew had been killed (in IHK) by the Indian army.

As the conversation moved to Indian politics and religious violence against minorities in India, they spoke unasked about the Hindu minority in the Kashmir valley.

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

251 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

252

SHUBH MATHUR

Raja Muzaffar said: Their leaving is a matter of shame for us, it should not have happened. This is their country, we want that they should come back.

The demand for freedom is seen as being compatible with religious tolerance; indeed three years after I first had this conversation with the Muzaffars, we are witnessing Kashmiri leaders representing different politics initiating efforts for the return of the Kashmiri Pandits. Parallel to these are the Kashmiri Pandit efforts to build bridges, reaching to the Muslims of the valley rather than leaving their plight a propaganda tool in the hands of the Hindu nationalist right (Greater Kashmir 2005; Kashmir Times 2005). Too much has been lost to return to the status quo ante; there is no going back. ‘Freedom’s terrible thirst’8 cannot be assuaged but only quenched. Mrs Fatima Muzaffar: People should think, what is it about this people that they rise again and again, and are cut down again and again, and yet rise again? The only solution is for them to be free.

And what of the anthropologist who seeks to set down these memories? Ted Swedenburg’s account of writing oral histories of Palestinian fighters comes with the caution that … a researcher can sometimes be tainted with the dangerous images associated with his or her informants. This hazard seems particularly acute when one chooses to consort with Palestinians…I hope that someday someone will document how aspiring graduate students, from various disciplines, were warned by advisors not to do research on Palestinians, how guilt by association with Palestinian ‘terrorists’ affected academic hiring and promotion, how the taboo on the subject severely circumscribed academic discussion of the issues, and so on (1995: 25–26).

‘Dangerous anthropology’ (Sluka 1995) nevertheless offers the possibility of transcending the barriers of history, allowing us to dream as did Iqbal: ‘O Himalaya … let me imagine that dawn/unstained by red.’9

NOTES 1. Any discussion of Jammu and Kashmir is a terminological minefield. I follow Sumantra Bose (2003) in referring to the two divided parts as India-controlled Jammu and Kashmir (IJK) and the smaller area, controlled by Pakistan, as ‘Azad’ Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). 2. The interviews on which this paper is based were conducted informally over a period of roughly three years from 2002 to 2005. I met members of the Muzaffar family in a variety of

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

252 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

253

SRINAGAR–MUZAFFARABAD–NEW YORK

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

settings in New York City. The paper includes excerpts from my interviews with Raja Muzaffar and his wife, Mrs Fatima Muzaffar. Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado (2000), about anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s fieldwork among theYanomami people of Venezuela, was a detailed critique of his highly unethical fieldwork practices.Tierney argued that not only did Chagnon create a deadly measles epidemic by inoculating a population that was known to have no immunity to the disease, but also that he created the very conflicts he documented to justify his label of ‘the fierce people’. This label became a convenient pretext for the dispossession and slaughter of the Yanomami by gold and oil prospectors in the Amazon. Sahlins (2000) provides an excellent review of the book and the implications of the controversy for the making of the discipline. The term ‘feudal’ is used as shorthand to describe the political arrangements instituted during the colonial period via the mechanism of the Dogra princely state and denotes its autocratic, repressive and highly exploitative nature (Rai 2004). I thank Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal for giving me permission to quote from her article in Communalism Combat. Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees autonomy for Kashmir, has become another emotive political issue and a propaganda ploy for the Hindu right; Article 371 provides identical guarantees for the states of the northeast. Contrary to Hindu nationalist propaganda, Kashmir is not selected for ‘special treatment’. Thanks to Rafiq Kathwari for allowing me to quote from his article in Counterpunch. ‘Freedom’s terrible thirst, flooding Kashmir,/is bringing love to its tormented glass, / Stranger, who will inherit the last night of the past?/Of what shall I not sing, and sing?’ (Ali 1991) See http://www.nycbigcitylit.com/contents/PoetryAsian.html.

REFERENCES Ali, Agha Shahid, ‘After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan’, in his A Nostalgist’s Map of America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991). ———, ‘Farewell’, The Country Without a Post Office (NewYork: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997). Baruah, Sanjib, Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Bose, Sumantra, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (New Delhi: Vistaar/Sage, 2003). Brass, Paul, ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–47: Means, Methods, and Purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research 5(1), 2003: 71–101. Chaddha, Maya, Ethnicity, Security and Separatism in India (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1997). Ganguly, S., ‘Continuing Challenges’, Seminar, Securing South Asia: A Symposium on Advancing Peace in the Subcontinent, 517, 2002. Greater Kashmir, ‘Bridges not Walls’, Editorial, 20 September 2005. Jamwal, Anuradha Bhasin, ‘Prejudice in Paradise’, Communalism Combat, 11(104), 2005. Kashmir Times, ‘Return to Valley; KPs Float New Body’, 11 September 2005. Kathwari, Rafiq, ‘Kashmir Dispute will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire’, Counterpunch, 8 January 2002. Lassiter, Luke Eric,‘Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology’, Current Anthropology, 46(1), February 2005. Manchanda, Rita, ‘Guns and Burqa: Women in the Kashmir Conflict’, in Manchanda (ed.), Women, War and Peace in South Asia: From Victimhood to Agency (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001).

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

253 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

254

SHUBH MATHUR

Martinez, Samuel, ‘Activist Anthropology: Working Together and Sharing the Gain’, GSC Quarterly, SSRC, June 2002. Mustafa, Daanish and Viren Murthy, ‘Faces of the Beloved: Rerouting the Tragic History of the Kashmir Issue’, in S. P. Udayakumar (ed.), Handcuffed to History: Narratives, Pathologies, and Violence in South Asia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2001). Noorani, A. G., ‘How and Why Nehru and Abdullah Fell Out’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30 January 1999. Pandey, Gyanendra, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Puri, Balraj, ‘Challenges in Kashmir’, Deccan Herald, 21 June 2006. Rai, Mridu, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Rey-Schirr, Catherine, ‘The ICRC’s activities on the Indian subcontinent following Partition (1947–1949)’, International Review of the Red Cross, 323, 30 June 1998. Sahlins, Marshall, ‘Jungle Fever’, Review of Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney, Washington Post, 10 December 2000. Schofield, Victoria, Kashmir in the Crossfire (London, New York: I.B.Tauris, 1996). Sluka, Jeffrey A.,‘Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork: Dangerous Anthropology in Belfast’, in Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (eds), Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Stories of Violence and Survival (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). Swedenburg, Ted, ‘Prisoners of Love: With Genet in the Palestinian Field’, in Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (eds), Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Stories of Violence and Survival (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). Tierney, Patrick, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000). Udayakumar, S. P., ‘Introduction’, in Udayakumar (ed.), Handcuffed to History: Narratives, Pathologies, and Violence in South Asia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2001).

14_Roy & Bhatia~chap-14.pmd

254 Black

8/8/2007, 11:31 AM

255

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

15 Against Silence and Forgetting*

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

Dare I disturb my mother’s ‘fated exile’ of silence, her ‘binding oath’ where the rule is ‘to not return’ from the silence? —George Halasz (2001b) I want to erase the word 47 I want to wash away the inkstain of 47 With water and soap. 47—the word pricks like a thorn in my throat I do not want to swallow it. I want to vomit it out. —Taslima Nasrin (1994)1

A number of Indian and Pakistani writers who were born after the 1947 Partition and population transfers—or who were only children during the mass ethnic cleansing, slaughter, and mayhem that accompanied the achievement of national independence in the subcontinent’s new states—have in recent years produced autobiographical and scholarly work in an effort to unearth and work through buried family memories of Partition’s trauma. To support a close and integrated reading of this literature, this paper suggests an interpretive framework that builds upon Maurice Halbwachs’ analysis of ‘forgetting’ (1992), Veena Das’ ethnography of ‘dumbness’ among Punjabi refugees (1995, 2000), Eva Hoffman’s concept of a ‘hinge generation’ born to parents who had experienced mass atrocity (2004), and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ (1997).2 Additionally, I use this framework to examine recent work by the historians Urvashi Butalia (2000) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002a, 2002b), and the psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar (1996). Reading these authors together, one finds recurring patterns and resonant themes: recognition of the ‘silence’, ‘muteness’, and ‘forgetting’ with which their

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

255 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

256

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

parents’ generation had addressed (or failed to address) Partition’s violence; the accounting of costs and burdens of this silence across generations; the act of remembering Partition; and telling one’s own family stories, as a moral and intellectual imperative.

PARTITIONS OF MEMORY AND THE 1947 GENERATION Memory depends upon the physiology, biochemistry, and organic functionality of the brain.3 A series of physiological actions and responses, memory also depends upon interpretive and imaginative processes of the human mind. But an individual’s memory of the past, and particularly of a traumatic past, does not exist or operate in isolation from the experience, pressures, and needs of the primary social groups with which he or she identifies and in which he or she participates.Thus, writes the modern historian Annette Becker, ‘the group we belong to determines what our memory brings to mind in the present’ (Becker 2005: 102, 106).4 Here we acknowledge the powerful ‘collective’ element of memory’s operation, the creation by communities and nations of a useable past, and the transformations of memory’s social construction and reconstruction over time.There is nothing uniquely ‘modern’ (or, certainly, ‘post-modern’) about the processes shaping collective memory: the way the past is invoked and remembered, emphasized and distorted, used and misused, in social and political context. One only needs to re-read the histories of Thucydides or Shakespeare, or sacred books such as the Gospels or the Mahabharata— or to study the interpretation and social history of these foundational texts across generations—to find rich illustrations of such processes. But the recognition of collective processes of remembering, and the study of their operation— the ‘collective memory’ idea itself—is of modern origin, introduced by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in his 1925 Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1992). An interpreter of his era’s unprecedented catastrophe, the killings of millions in global war, Halbwachs was also a witness, and like so many millions, a victim; he perished at Buchenwald in 1945. Referencing Durkheim’s idea of a ‘collective consciousness’, Halbwachs argued that our memory of past events, as individuals, depends upon ‘social frameworks’ (cadres sociaux); that is, ‘the frameworks of collective memory’ (ibid.: 172). His theory has become ubiquitous in modern (and post-modern) scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the rhetoric of popular discourse, in our era of heightened communal and ethnic identifications.5 For the purposes of this paper, what is most provocative and haunting about Halbwachs’ familiar theory is a corollary argument that has perhaps received less attention: that forgetting, no less a socially constructed phenomenon, ‘is explained by the disappearance of these frameworks or of a part of them’ (ibid., emphasis added). Halbwachs associates

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

256 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

257

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

forgetting with ‘the deformation of certain recollections’ and relates both to ‘the fact that these frameworks change from one period to another’. In this process, ‘they most frequently distort that past in the act of reconstructing it’. Thus, in an effort to maintain cohesion (Halbwachs refers to ‘equilibrium’), ‘society tends to erase from its memory all that might separate individuals or that might distance groups from each other’ (ibid.: 172, 18). Evocatively, Halbwachs suggests a process in which memory of past events is partitioned between forms that promote social equilibrium at a given historical period (sustained as dominant ‘collective memory’ of the period) and forms that disrupt or threaten that equilibrium (memories that are repressed or ‘forgotten’ within a given community in the same period).6 For the majority of people living in what are now the divided territories of northern India and Pakistan, Partition was “the event of the twentieth century— equivalent in terms of trauma and consequence to World War I (the ‘Great War’) for Britain or World War II for France and Japan’ (Pandey 2006: 21).

For the generation that lived through this ‘event’, what does it mean to remember it? The term ‘Partition’ evokes specific memories, images, and stories remembered and transmitted, or held tightly if not kept secret, by individuals and families. Partition means Lahore, Delhi or Bombay; Kashmir, Punjab or Bengal.To one family (or part of a family) the term evokes the experience of witnessing neighbours fleeing in terror, or joining riots in the streets; to another, the experience of walking, possessions strapped to bodies, in a kafila, an immense human column of suffering and fear, toward an unknown land. For some, the association confirms a homeland secured; and for others, it simply means a home lost forever. Pandey writes: Practically the entire minority population of certain areas was driven out: Hindus and Sikhs from the West Pakistan territories and Muslims from East Punjab and several neighbouring tracts in India, as well as Muslims and Hindus from the two halves of Bengal (although this happened on a lesser scale and somewhat more gradually). Incalculable numbers were uprooted, murdered, maimed, looted, raped and abducted ... (ibid.: 134).

For Partition’s survivors, remembering 1947 requires managing an acute, if not almost unbearable, tension of opposites. On the one hand, it involves the final victory of historic anticolonial and national-liberation struggles in which millions had participated and sacrificed over decades, the birth of new independent states, the transformation of former subjects of the British Raj into citizens in new sovereign republics; on the other hand, it means the exodus of millions of refugees, the murder of hundreds of thousands, and countless individual acts of brutality, rape, kidnapping and atrocity. In the midst of the worst depravity and horror, there were moments and actions of selfless generosity and compassion, humanity, and sacrifice. Still, in a penetrating essay, Jason Francisco identifies the mass violence of 1947 as nothing

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

257 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

258

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

less than ‘fratricide’, a word that concisely evokes both the intimacy of Partition’s horrors, the killing of neighbour by neighbour, and the immense, epic scale of its tragedy (Francisco 2000; see also Butalia 2000: 3; Pandey 2001: 88–91). To remember the traumatic events of 1947 is to re-experience the suffering of the original wounds. In a historic era of nation building, it is better to focus on the triumph, the immense achievement of political independence and sovereignty, and to gather the energy necessary to meet the overwhelming new obligations of national development. ‘I had lost everything, forty people of our family were martyred’, remembered Hurmat Bibi more than four decades after her flight from Nikodar in East Punjab. ‘But the happiness I found when I saw the Pakistan flag flying at the Pakistan border is still living in every cell of my body’ (Azadi ke Mujahyd, cited in Talbot and Singh 1999: 246). New identities, momentous beginnings; citizenship and nationhood offered a means of shedding one’s status as ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ or even ‘perpetrator’, and provided a kind of redemption, or perhaps even absolution. Thus, the social ‘equilibrium’ of the era of new states pushed towards setting aside or forgetting Partition’s trauma in order to enable the fullest possible attention to the pressing tasks at hand, and above all, the obligations of development, political and economic.This is what Clifford Geertz called ‘the integrative revolution’: the labour of assimilating diverse communities into a multicultural nation, inspiring participation in the nation-building project and the willingness to endure hardship and make sacrifices on its behalf (Geertz 1973).These nationalist imperatives powerfully informed the cadres sociaux of Partition’s collective memory for new Indian and Pakistani citizens, through the historiography and textbooks of the founding period, the stories told and untold in schools and cultural institutions, and a political ideology of ‘unity in diversity’. At stake was the stability and very survival of each nascent, volatile, tentatively unified state.The ongoing threat of renewed violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had to be suppressed; efforts by political entrepreneurs to agitate for the national self-determination of disaffected ethnic and linguistic communities had to be pre-empted at all costs. These overarching goals supported a turning away from Partition’s traumatic past toward a brighter, shared future and patriotic national identity (Pandey 2006: 47–48).

STORIES MUTED; TONGUES CAUGHT Exemplifying the revisionist approach of contemporary scholarship by secondgeneration historians and anthropologists, recent work by Pandey and Veena Das has focused attention on the evocation, during the initial decades of each state, of a collective amnesia about Partition’s immense horror and tragedy. Pandey’s

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

258 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

259

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History (2001) demonstrates how Indian historiography disseminated a nationalist-infused narrative, marginalizing Partition’s bloodshed and suffering while emphasizing the great achievements of India’s statebuilding process (ibid.; cf. Pandey 1994).‘As in history writing, so in films and fiction, Indian intellectuals tended for a long time to celebrate the story of the Independence struggle rather than dwell on the anguish of Partition’ (Pandey 2006: 22). Pandey correctly recognizes important exceptions: a number of the finest Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu writers of the 1947 generation courageously addressed Partition’s violence in books published in the initial decades of the post-Independence era. Here (Pandey 2001) he singles out Rahi Masoom Raza’s 1966 Aadha Gaon for special recognition. One is also haunted by the conversation between dead men in Intizar Husain’s 1973 Shahr-e-Afsos (The City of Sorrows), and by Khushwant Singh’s 1956 Train to Pakistan, the Urdu poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and the paintings and charcoal drawings of Satish Gujral, among other resonant works. But can one dispute Pandey’s assessment that ‘Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s devastating stories are the outstanding example’? No depiction of Partition’s horror cuts to the bone as deeply, and with such bitter sorrow, anguish, and black irony, as Manto’s short fiction.7 Still, as Pandey emphasizes, first-generation Partition literature generally ‘was largely confined to the strifetorn areas of Punjab and its environs in the decade or so after Partition’(ibid). Nor did Indian or Pakistani readers welcome these reminders of their too-recent horrors. Pandey’s assessment of the erasure of Partition’s horrors from historiography and culture is mirrored in the thick description of family life suggested by the work of the anthropologist Veena Das. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork throughout the 1990s among Punjabi families displaced by the subcontinent’s partition and the ensuing riots, Das closely observed the carefully circumscribed rules governing the recollecting of Partition in intimate settings, within family homes, as well as in public rituals and spaces. A central trope of Das’s ethnography is the experience (and, not infrequently, the necessity) of muteness; specifically, ‘the violence they had experienced was muted’ (2000: 59). She asserts, ‘[a]n essential truth of the annihilating violence and terror that people experienced during these riots, namely that as human understanding gives way, language is struck dumb’. Moreover, ‘[a] relapse into a dumb condition is not only a sign of this period but is also a part of the terror itself’ (Das 1995: 184, emphasis added). Its effect is ‘a silence on the violence that was done to and by people in the context of the Partition’, in which ‘[a]ny spontaneous reference to atrocities done, witnessed or suffered during Partition was not allowed to surface’ (ibid.: 61). ‘Logan di zaban kis ne pakadi hai? Apni izzat apne hath hondi hai’ (‘Who has caught the tongue of people? One’s honour is in one’s own hands’). For Das, these Punjabi ‘exhortations that spiced everyday conversation’ reveal ‘a precarious balance around issues of honour and shame’. To preserve this balance, ‘the community offered

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

259 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

260

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

a protection by silence’ to the women abducted during Partition, and to the families with whom thousands were eventually reunited, families still suffering from ‘the perception of shared misfortune of having been unable to protect the honour of the girls’. Das presents an extended study of a Punjabi woman (Das calls her Manjit), whose parents had died decades earlier in the Partition riots. She herself had been kidnapped and later returned. How did she hold herself up in all the years thereafter? ‘Quietly, I went on hearing, went on bearing’, she tells Das.‘I stitched up my tongue’ (ibid.: 61–62). Of course Manjit does not stand in for the diverse experience of Partition’s survivors across the varied regions of the subcontinent. Many bitterly recounted stories of Partition’s crimes; others hounded their families with untamed animosity toward other ethnic groups. Some writers and authors bravely spoke out for reckoning and mourning; although they did so, as Sa’adat Manto’s experience suggests, at a heavy price. But Manjit was by no means the only witness silently bearing, and neither was her tongue the only one stitched up.

THE ‘HINGE GENERATION’ Research concerning the legacy of mass violence during World War II documents the ‘transgenerational transmission of holocaust trauma’: how identity construction in the adult children of survivors (and perpetrators as well) is powerfully affected by their parents’ memories and experiences of a deeply traumatic past—and by the burden of their parents’ silence (Fonagy 1999). ‘For a social group to be able to “remember”, it is not enough for the various members who belong to it at a given moment to preserve in their minds representations of the group’s past’, writes historian Marc Bloch in a 1925 book review of Halbwachs’ Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire,‘the older members must also transmit those representations to the younger ones’ (Bloch 1925).8 However, Holocaust survivors often did not speak of their experiences in the Shoah, even to their own children (see, for instance, Mazor et al. 1997). The psychoanalyst Dori Laub describes the survivors’ silence as a ‘fated exile, yet also a home, a destination, and a binding oath’; transmitted through families to the next generation, it becomes a ‘double exile’ binding parents and children throughout their lives (1992: 58, 72). ‘Through the silence’, writes Gaby R. Glassman, the second generation ‘absorbed feelings and fears which, unconsciously, parents had projected onto them’ (1999). Thus, in the words of a daughter of survivors, a family’s silence ‘can be very noisy indeed’ (ibid.). Referring to Laub’s research, George Halasz (2001b) suggests a fundamental dilemma confronted by men and

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

260 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

261

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

women of the second generation, in many cases until the day of their parents’ death: ‘Can those predictable, intolerable moments, when the wall of silence between survivor parent and child seems impenetrable, be breached?’ Again and again, in what has in recent years become a very substantial scholarly literature, one finds references to the parental silence endured by the children of Holocaust survivors, the powerful effect this silence has had on their psychological development and identity, and their struggle to ‘break’ through the muteness they have inherited.9 Eva Hoffman did not contemplate or claim her own identity as a ‘child of Holocaust survivors’ until well into her adult years (Hoffman 2004: 27). In After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Hoffman imagines a ‘latency period’ in collective memory, dominating the 1950s across all regions of the world ‘as if on cue’. In this period, the traumatic experiences of World War II and the population transfers of the postwar period were addressed by ‘forgetting or more forceful denial, repression or simple indifference’, a response ‘propelled by a natural, or at least understandable, impulse to turn away from the spectacle of carnage and towards the future’ (ibid.: 78, 83–85).10 The children of Holocaust survivors came of age during this ‘latency period’ of memory’s suppression—as did the children of Nazi perpetrators. For these children, growing up with their parents’ stories, told and untold, ‘[t]he imprint of family speech—or silence—was, for better or worse, and with whatever reactions followed, potent and profound’ (ibid.: 181).They did not live through the catastrophic history, and yet ‘the formative events of the twentieth century have crucially informed our biographies and psyches, threatening sometimes to overshadow and overwhelm our own lives’ (ibid.: 25). Thus, writes Hoffman, ‘[t]he story of the second generation is, above all, a strong example of an internalized past, of the way in which atrocity literally reverberates through the minds and lives of subsequent generations’ (ibid.: 103). Perhaps most importantly, this generation presents a link, a living bridge, between the remaining survivors and witnesses who directly experienced trauma on a massive scale, and subsequent generations, for whom the troubled past may be distant and resolved, or a present (although perhaps unconscious) source of pressure for retribution and further violence.‘The second generation after every calamity is the hinge generation,’ she writes, ‘in which the meanings of awful events can remain arrested and fixed at the point of trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the world, and new understanding’ (ibid.: xv). To what extent has the memory of 1947 remained ‘arrested and fixed’ for the subcontinent’s hinge generation?11 To what extent has this generation transformed the meaning of Partition’s catastrophe—and what new relations and understandings have they forged? On the one hand, nationalist-triumphal historiography, focusing on the achievement of Independence (and the avoidance of remembering or speaking

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

261 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

262

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

about Partition’s atrocities) remains pervasive in history books, school texts, social discourse, and, as Das’s research suggests, in family narratives as well.12 On the other hand, as Das and Pandey exemplify, within the second generation one finds powerful resistance to inherited memories, stories and silences. This generational resistance takes several dominant paths. From the Left, it includes revisionist historiography, rebellion by critical scholars against the distortions, hagiography and hypocrisy of previously-accepted official accounts, including textbooks of the founding decades’ scholars. (In the case of India one thinks especially of the historians of the Subaltern Studies movement, and recent work by the Marxist literary scholar Aijaz Ahmad; in Pakistan, where historical revisionism is less accepted, one thinks for example of Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman [1985].)13 From the Right, perhaps most powerfully and pervasively of all, it includes religious revivalism: rebellion through orthodox observance, religious nationalism, and reactionary communalism against the perceived secularism, multiculturalism and amnesia-infused tolerance of founding political institutions and ideologies.14 Yet there is a third path of generational resistance: postmemory—a deeply personal rebellion, through autobiographically-infused scholarship and literary expression, against the repressive silence and forgetting that pervaded survivors’ homes (Hirsch 1997).15 This path is less travelled; indeed, it is by definition solitary and idiosyncratic. Yet I believe that it reflects a creative, transformative power—a liberating influence that resonates (quietly, but no less profoundly) with others who had similar experiences growing up, and with subsequent generations.

WHY RAKE THIS UP AGAIN? Susannah Radstone refers as follows to the process of ‘doing memory work’: ‘research situated within disciplines, marked by the holding in tension of oppositions associated with memory’ (2000: 13). In this context, with attention to the experience of adult children of Holocaust survivors and to her own personal story, Marianne Hirsch’s 1997 investigation, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory discusses the ‘second-hand subjectivity’ of second-generation ‘postmemory’: the ‘experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’. For Hirsch, … postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation (1997: 22, emphasis added).

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

262 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

263

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

But what about the special group of people who had lived through the catastrophic events not as mature adults but as young children? These individuals share characteristics of the first generation (they are no less ‘survivors’) but, at the same time, they share characteristics of the second, ‘hinge’ generation as well. Using Hirsch’s categories, these individuals (and they alone) are at least potentially capable of both memory and ‘postmemory’—as, for example, the autobiographical novels of Elie Wiesel (1958 [2006]) and the Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa (1991) poignantly suggest.16 In this context, and informed by the analytical perspective suggested by Halbwachs, Das, Hoffman, and Hirsch, the concluding portion of this paper examines recent ‘memory work’ by Urvashi Butalia and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Indian historians born after 1947 to Partition refugees, as well as by the Indian psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar, who lived through Partition as a young boy. Inspired by the horrific violence of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assassination by Sikh bodyguards, which evoked memories of Partition, Butalia focused her research on the most marginalized populations in Indian society: women, children, and especially Dalits (the scheduled castes, Harijans, or untouchables, as Butalia [2000] notes). In so doing, she sought to rescue for public consciousness Partition stories and perspectives that would otherwise disappear and never be heard. Speaking with perpetrators as well as victims of monstrous violence, she enabled confused and often guilt-ridden people to express their anguish, to identify the ghosts that have haunted them for decades, and to openly grieve and mourn. ‘One day our village took off to a nearby Muslim village on a killing spree’, a Sikh confesses. ‘We simply went mad. And it has cost me fifty years of remorse, of sleepless nights—I cannot forget the faces of those we killed.’ A Muslim who participated in mob killings of Hindus uses almost the same language to describe ‘the wild wave of hatred’ that swept him away, and the guilt he has harboured ever since (Butalia 2000: 58). ‘Why rake this up again?’ Many of those whom Butalia interviewed pleaded with her to let sleeping dogs lie. ‘If people have lived with their experiences, in some ways have made their peace with them, what is to be gained by pushing them to remember, to dredge up the many uncomfortable and unpleasant memories that they prefer to put away?’ (ibid.: 282). As a scholar with tremendous personal investment in her ‘memory work’, Butalia struggled with this difficult question throughout her research process. ‘To this day’, she reflects, ‘I have not solved this dilemma: I am torn between the desire to be honest and to be careful’. ‘Why, why are you doing this?’, she was repeatedly asked, and the question ‘dogged me constantly’, she says. ‘I didn’t know—I still don’t—what I should be doing. Ought I to have given up the work?’ She never found an answer that released her from her own doubts and fears. But she continued in her efforts, not because of an abstract conception of the value of her interviews to the historiography of 1947,

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

263 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

264

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

but because of the deeply personal motivations that brought her to initiate the project at the outset. ‘In the end’, she writes, ‘I decided that if this search meant so much to me, I simply had to go with it. I could not abandon it’ (Butalia 2000: 36–37). Postmemory’s imagination, the public working through of personal and family issues in the service of a man or woman’s private individuation process, reveals a larger social vision. As an illustrative example, Butalia recounts how an elderly professor ‘broke down while recalling how he had heard a Muslim woman being raped and killed in the nearby market, but had not been able to express his horror or sorrow.’ With Butalia’s facilitation, ‘[f]ifty years later, he was able to allow himself to remember, to mourn, and perhaps to begin to forget. But first he had to be able to admit the memory’. In this context, Butalia writes that, ... despite many uncertainties, I have become increasingly convinced that while it may be dangerous to remember, it is also essential to do so—not only so that we can come to terms with it, but also because unlocking memory and remembering is an essential part of beginning the process of resolving, perhaps even of forgetting (ibid.: 283).

‘So the call to memory’, writes historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, explicitly responding to Butalia’s reflections, ‘is a plea for a talking cure’ (2002b: 143). Chakrabarty finds such a call, and plea, in the treatment of 1947 in what he calls the ‘new histories’ of Indian and Pakistani hinge-generation scholars such as Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Butalia, Pandey and Das (ibid.: 141, 163).17 Chakrabarty’s own work eloquently adds to this new evocative scholarship of Partition’s postmemory. I include his work in this context because, like Butalia, he has implicitly and explicitly situated his analysis of Partition’s communal violence, and its ongoing legacy in the intervening decades, in his own personal and family history. In several essays in his 2002 book, Habitations of Modernity, Chakrabarty reflects upon ‘the memories and politics of the popular violence that rocked British India when it was divided in 1947’, in the context of ‘contemporary discussions in India of the significance of the Partition’ (as he states in his Introduction to the volume). Chakrabarty, one of the finest historians of the subcontinent’s twentieth century, is widely recognized as such within his profession internationally. Thus, one is struck by the disclaimer at the outset of ‘The In-Human and the Ethical in Communal Violence’, an essay examining ‘how some of the recent writings of the memories of violence of 1947 may help us think “the politics of difference”’, the ways in which ethnic groups in India attempt to fix, erase or negotiate their differences (2002b: 138). ‘I do not approach this question as a specialist in the history of the Partition of India’, he writes. In a field of inquiry that privileges methodologies based on efforts to achieve scholarly objectivity, as detached as possible from private or emotional biases, Chakrabarty claims a very different kind of interpretive

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

264 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

265

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

authority, one that derives precisely from his autobiographical intimacy with the moral and historical dilemmas he addresses. ‘My own relation to the history of the Partition is personal’, he writes. ‘My parents’ lives and those of their families were affected by it’. As for Urvashi Butalia, what makes ‘personal’ Chakrabarty’s relationship to Partition’s savagery, at once motivating his writing on the subject and conferring authority on his insights, is the ‘second hand subjectivity’ Hirsch defines as ‘postmemory’. ‘I was born and grew up in a Calcutta struggling to accommodate the numberless refugees who migrated from East Pakistan through the 1950s’, Chakrabarty explains. His mother and her family were among these refugees, and his own experience growing up in India was indelibly shaped by his family’s exodus to Calcutta, as well as by their past life in East Bengal, a place of the imagination on the other side of the border with Pakistan. Chakrabarty identifies several ways in which his family’s past East Bengal identity and the legacies of their migration infused his own boyhood, especially through the filter of photographs,18 the social meaning of food, and the vicious soccer rivalry between the East Bengal Club—with which the refugee families associated themselves—and the West Bengal Mohun Bagan Club. We were called bangals, while the older natives of Calcutta, who identified more with the western part of Bengal, were called ghotis.… We loved the Hilsa fish, while they loved prawns.… And every time the two soccer clubs met, the spirit of rivalry between the bangals and the ghotis spilled over into areas far beyond the sporting ground. If the East Bengal Club won, the price of Hilsa went up, for every bangal household celebrated. Prawns suffered badly if the victory went to the other side (2002b: 138–39).

Chakrabarty’s childhood was played out in the context of the ‘ongoing culture war between the bangals and the ghotis’ in which the tensions of spirited play retained a violent edge.‘Sometimes heads were broken on the soccer field’, Chakrabarty recalls; sometimes minor riots broke out when one team or another was defeated (ibid.: 139–40). As Butalia finally brought her mother back to Lahore, so Chakrabarty took his parents to Bangladesh, for the first time since Partition, ‘to visit my ancestral homes on both sides’. Returning to Bikrampur, the village where Chakrabarty’s father had spent his childhood, ‘[w]e discovered that the Muslim family that used to work for my father’s family was in occupation of the house’. Indeed, they had lived there continuously since 1947. Thus, the visit triggered deep and complex feelings for each family. Upon greeting the Chakrabartys, the old man of the Bangladeshi family told them: ‘All this is yours. You can take it back if you want.’ In response, the Chakrabarty family assured them, ‘no, we have come only to see the house, not to claim it as our property’. There were only two comfortable chairs out for

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

265 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

266

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

the occasion, and one stool. The old man offered the chairs to Dipesh and his father. ‘You are the masters’, he said,‘you should sit on the chairs’.The senior Chakrabarty said: ‘No, no, those days are gone; we are not masters and servants.You should sit on the chair.’ Caught between the tensions of old divides—between Muslim and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian, master and servant— ‘[t]he situation came to a successful resolution’, writes Chakrabarty,‘through my saying “But you are both old and senior to me; it is I who should sit on the stool”’ (ibid.: 47–48). Sudhir Kakar turned nine during the Partition riots, terror and migrations of the summer of 1947. Living with his Hindu family in Rohtak, a small town near Delhi, his childhood perception of the unfolding catastrophe was coloured by the fears and prejudices of his parents and other family members who gathered as refugees in his home. Five decades later, after he had established himself as a leading psychoanalyst in his native India, Kakar reflected on these formative experiences in The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict, a study of the psychosocial dynamics of Hindu–Muslim riots from Partition through the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the larger Hindutva movement in the late 1980s, as well as the mass violence that swept India following the December 1992 destruction by Hindu rioters of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya. Kakar analyses ongoing sectarian violence in the context of recurring cycles of ethnic conflict linked historically and psychologically to the unresolved collective trauma of Partition’s massacres and population transfers. Like Butalia and Chakrabarty, he explicitly places his own personal and family narrative in his analysis of these larger social processes. Like them, Kakar advocates, by his work and his own example, an effort to reclaim suppressed memories of the traumatic past rather than stand by and allow them to be relived, albeit unconsciously, in the form of renewed cycles of violence, hatred, and fear. Kakar spent his time listening to the often bitter conversations of adult family members, trying to absorb their meaning, to understand both what was happening within his own extended family and the larger chaos surrounding them. His home had become a small haven in the midst of this chaos, yet the young Kakar learned dark lessons there. From these conversations, I became aware of the Hindu hate of the Mussulman—the destroyer of temples, devourer of cow flesh, defiler of Hindu womanhood, rapers and killers all! Mussulmans were little better than animals, dirty and without self-control, who indulged all the demands of the senses, especially the violence of the body and the pleasures of the flesh (Kakar 1996: 26).

One is struck by the honesty of Kakar’s family history—and by his achievement, after many years of his own psychological development, in transforming ethnic hatred into deep compassion and analytical insight.

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

266 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

267

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

Listening as a young boy to his family’s stories of the Partition’s riots, including the rapes and mutilations those riots produced, ‘their fearful images coursed unimpeded through my mind which reverberated wildly with their narrators’ flushes of emotion’. Decades later, Kakar identified ‘a frantic tone to the stories, an underlying hysteria I felt as a child but could only name as an adult’. Looking back, he understood that ‘my uncles, aunts, and cousins had not yet recovered from the trauma of what had befallen them’ and that ‘[t]he partition horrors stalked their dreams’ (ibid.: 31). The nine-year-old Kakar witnessed the riots in his city, the burning homes of Rohtak’s neighbourhoods. But his vivid memory of mayhem was inseparable from the images he absorbed from the conversations he overheard, fuelled by bonds of identification with his parents and the relatives who had taken refuge in his home, ‘the deep sense of communion I felt with my family and the wider, although vague, entity of “the Hindus”’ (ibid.: 35). Kakar’s reflections on his childhood experience led him to recognize how firstgeneration memories and stories of atrocity can become ‘arrested and fixed’ in the minds of their children, through bonds of generational loyalty and shame, and can remain alive as a source of renewed familial and communal violence.Thus the creative work of Kakar’s postmemory led to a penetrating interpretation of the psychological origins and dynamics of Hindu–Muslim riots, a set of sharp analytical tools to help understand them, and an impassioned plea to use these tools to prevent future riots and massacres.

CONCLUSION Partition’s children—the original victims, survivors, and witnesses of these events— are mostly dead now.Those who remain are old and dying off.To the extent that they have remained circumspect if not silent about their memories and experiences, the acts of brutality and compassion they saw with their own eyes or for which their own hands were responsible, we only have a few years left to hear from them. Will there ever be a full accounting of the tremendous human suffering unleashed in the months before and after the Independence of India and Pakistan? Will all those killed be acknowledged and mourned? In a region where the legacy of 1947 continues to poison, threaten and disable, can ‘truth and reconciliation’ be achieved? In an effort to answer these questions, the testimony of these surviving witnesses—freely given, uncorrupted—will be of the highest value. The second generation is now well into their middle age. Except for those who were young children at the time of Partition, this generation did not live through or witness the original traumatic history; yet, as Hoffman argues, it remains the last to stand in relation to that history ‘with a sense of a living connection,’ a connection

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

267 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

268

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

through which ‘the formative events of the twentieth century have crucially informed our biographies and psyches, threatening sometimes to overshadow and overwhelm our own lives’ (Hoffman 2004: 25). A number of these hinge-generation writers and artists, some seeking to reclaim their own identities from the grip of their parents’ often-suppressed memory of past suffering, have made achievements in autobiography, fiction, and scholarship in a genre of expression Marianne Hirsch has usefully identified as ‘postmemory’. These authors have pursued contradictory motivations: on one hand, empathy and identification (affirming the deep bond shared between child and parent, they seek to help aging parents recover and work through traumatic memory); on the other hand, rebellion and betrayal (cracking their parents’ shell of denial, they bring private, hidden stories out of family closets into public spaces). But these contradictions have generated profoundly creative approaches, methodologies, and works honouring the parental memories they revealed. As a result, these writers have provided space for a more honest and expansive version of their society’s collective memory. In this context, Gyanendra Pandey and Veena Das’ scholarship offers a powerful analysis of the causes, dynamics, and distorting effects of memory’s collective suppression among the 1947 generation (outside of the important yet isolated work of exceptional figures like Sa’adat Hasan Manto). Urvashi Butalia and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s investigations of Partition and its collective memory are illuminated by autobiographical insight. Sudhir Kakar has transformed his personal narrative of childhood experience into penetrating insights for future generations. Taken together, the work of these authors helps to produce a far more comprehensive account of Partition’s mass violence, and its legacy of trauma, than first-generation ‘official’ narratives had allowed. By this process of reclaiming repressed memories in often searing detail, these writers and artists are making a significant contribution to the evolution of the subcontinent’s collective memory. Helping to loosen the grip of fossilized, ideologically-charged versions of the past, they encourage members of their communities to confront and work through pain, grief, and guilt that had previously been insufficiently addressed in a larger social context. Perhaps Partition’s destructive hold on the future may be lessened as a result.

NOTES *I wish to thank Krista Andersen, Theirno Balde, Shinjini Chatterjee, Diana Dang, and Rubin Sandhu for their help with editing and cite-checking this paper, and especially Anjali Gera Roy for her generosity and patience during the writing process. This paper draws in part on research discussed in my essays, ‘Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine’ (2005) and ‘Divided Lands, Phantom Limbs: Partition in the Indian Subcontinent, Palestine, China and Korea’ (2004).

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

268 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

269

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

1. Nasrin, a courageous Bangladeshi writer now living in exile in Sweden, was born in Mymensingh, East Pakistan, in 1962. She has continued to write fiction and poetry in Bengali, and speaks out for freedom of expression, human rights and women’s rights in South Asia, despite the censorship and banning of her books by the governments of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, fatwas ordering her death by fundamentalist clerics, including the offering of money for her execution, and large demonstrations supporting the fatwas. She has received the UNESCO prize for ‘promotion of tolerance and non-violence’ in 2004 and the Sakharov prize for ‘freedom of thought’ from European Parliament; see http://taslimanasrin.com/index2.html for more information. 2. I wish to thank Carol Bardenstein for introducing me to Hirsch’s concept in her 2003 review of Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. 3. Today, neurologists can use positron emission tomography (PET) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect organic memory disorders within specific tissues and groups of cells within identified regions of the brain. See, for example, ‘Positron emission tomography (PET) scan’, on http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/pet-scan/CA00052. 4. Here, Becker cites the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986: 70): ‘public memory is the storage system of the social order.’ 5. Recent scholarship applying Halbwach’s analytical framework to contemporary history include Alexander et al. (2004), Radstone (2000) and Wood (1999). 6. Ironically, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, written in 1925 in the wake of European self-destruction in the Great War, exemplifies the process of collective forgetting it describes. During the war, Halbwachs had visited battlefields strewn with corpses; he lived through the shelling of Nancy and ‘he had seen the bodies of civilians trapped under the ruins’ (Becker 2005: 103). And yet, as Annette Becker provocatively notes, in setting out his theory of memory’s social construction following traumatic history, he entirely omits reference to Europe’s recent, devastating war. ‘Halbwachs tries to erase and censure the trauma of the war,’ Becker writes, ‘as if determined to leave no trace that might become memory, choosing instead to construct a shroud of silence and emptiness’ (ibid.: 105). 7. In recent years, second-generation Indian literary scholars including Khalid Hasan, Mushirul Hasan, Alok Bhalla and Sukeshi Kamra have rediscovered Manto’s work, and republished them in English (translated from the original Urdu), along with Partition fiction and essays from a wide range of other writers of the 1947 generation. See Khalid Hasan (1997); Bhalla and Adil (2002); Mushirul Hasan (1995, 2000); Bhalla (1994); Kamra (2002). See also Cowasjee and Duggal (1995); Francisco (1996); Talbot (1999: 228–52). 8. ‘We may speak of “collective memory”’, writes Bloch, ‘but it is important not to forget that at least part of the phenomena embraced within that term are simply acts of communication between individuals’ (Bloch [1925: 79] cited in Becker [2005: 109]). 9. See Gampel (1991); Halasz (2001a); Roth and Maxwell (2001);Trachtenberg and Davis (1978); Wilson (1985); Kogan (1995); and Pastor (2000). See also Resources for Children of Holocaust Survivors, at http://www.judymeschel.com/coshpsych.htm. For related analyses of secondgeneration memory among the post-Holocaust generation of Germans, see Bar-On (1989) and Schlant (1999). 10. Here Hoffman refers to the ‘mass expulsions and forced repatriations, waves of refugees’ within Eastern and Central Europe. 11. Hoffman’s ‘hinge generation’ concept refers to the generation born in the aftermath of mass atrocity. Individuals who were only children during Partition events not only share some characteristics of the first generation but also of the second/hinge generation, as for example

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

269 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

270

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

the writings of Elie Wiesel poignantly suggest.This paper examines, in addition—as the writings of Elie Wiesel suggest—individuals who experienced those events as children. Pakistani accounts might be especially so arrested and fixed; the 1947 achievement of Jinnah’s Muslim League in establishing the independent state of Pakistan continues to dominate Partition narratives, and Jinnah himself continues to be revered as the nation’s Quaid-i-Azam. For a discussion of revisionist historiography among second-generation Indian and Pakistani scholars, see Greenberg (2005). For a discussion of religious revivalism in an Indian Hindu context, see Brass (2003), Varshney (2002), and Jaffrelot (1993). Perhaps religious revivalism is somewhat less of a ‘generational rebellion’ in Pakistan than India. After all, Jinnah’s Muslim League argued that the selfdetermination of India’s Muslims required the establishment of a separate Muslim state. However, it is important to remember that Jinnah, non-observant himself, opposed turning Pakistan into an Islamic republic, or, indeed, the privileging of Islam within Pakistan’s political or even social order. In his August 1947 speech to Pakistan’s new Constituent Assembly (Akbar S. Ahmed [1997: 173] calls it his ‘Gettysburg address’), Jinnah pleads for a tolerant, secular, multicultural state: ‘You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan’, declared Jinnah. ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.... We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination between one caste or creed and another’ (ibid.: 175). ‘In my reading, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’(Hirsch 1997: 22). Sidhwa’s Cracking India was originally published as Ice-Candy Man in 1988. Sidhwa’s childhood story, transformed into art, continues to reverberate, through the impact of Cracking India on young readers in Pakistan as well as India, and perhaps especially through the haunting film Earth (1999), written and directed by Deepa Mehta, based on Sidhwa’s novel. Chakrabarty cites Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries (1998), which was originally published in New Delhi by the publishing house founded by Urvashi Butalia, Kali for Women. Chakrabarty also cites Butalia (2000), Das (1995), and Pandey (2001). Chakrabarty writes: ‘I came to know about life in Dhaka through the two family albums of old photographs that my mother had held on to as the most precious of her possessions while the family moved about from one house to another in Calcutta in the riot-torn days of August 1946’ (2002b: 138).

REFERENCES Ahmed, Akbar S., Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London: Routledge, 1997). Alexander, Jeffrey C., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Bardenstein, Carol, Review of Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine by Raja Shehadeh, Journal of Palestine Studies, 126 (Winter), 2003. Bar-On, Dan, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Cambridge: University of Harvard Press, 1989).

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

270 Black

8/8/2007, 9:52 AM

271

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

Becker, Annette.‘Memory Gaps: Maurice Halbwachs, Memory and the Great War’, Journal of European Studies, 35, 2005: 102, 106. Bhalla, Alok, Stories about the Partition of India (New Delhi: Indus, 1994). ——— and Vishwamitter Adil (Transl.), ‘The City of Sorrows’ by Intizar Husain, in A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Bloch, Marc, ‘Mémoire collective, traditions et coutume. A propos d’un livre recent’, Revue de Synthèse historique, 40, 1925: 73–83. Brass, Paul R., The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003). Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham: University of Duke Press, 2000). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’, in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002a). ———, ‘The In-Human and the Ethical in Communal Violence’, in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002b). Cowasjee, Saros and K. S. Duggal, Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition of India (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1995). Das, Veena, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). ———, ‘Violence and the Work of Time’, in Anthony P. Cohen (ed.), Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values (London: Routledge, 2000). Douglas, Mary, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press: 1986). Fonagy, Peter, ‘The Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma’, Attachment & Human Development, 1(1), 1999: 92–114. Francisco, Jason, ‘In the Heat of Fratricide: The Literature of India’s Partition Burning Freshly’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). Gampel, Yolanda, ‘A Daughter of Silence’, in Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy (eds), Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 120–36. Geertz, Clifford, ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 255–310. Glassman, Gaby R., ‘Intergenerational Protection in Holocaust Survivor Families and its Impact on the Second Generation’s Other Relationships’, 1999, http://www.baycrest.org/ If_Not_Now/Volume_1_Fall_2000/7151_8786.asp. Greenberg, Jonathan D., ‘Divided Lands, Phantom Limbs: Partition in the Indian Subcontinent, Palestine, China and Korea’, The Journal of International Affairs (New York: University of Columbia, Spring 2004). ———, ‘Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/ Palestine’, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and Middle East, 25(1), 2005: 99–104. Halasz, George, ‘Beyond the Wall of Silence’, in Kathy Grinblat (ed.), Children of the Shadows: Voices of the Second Generation (Crawley: University of Western Australia, 2001a). ———, ‘Children of Child Survivors of the Holocaust: Can Trauma be Transmitted across the Generations?’ (paper presented at the conference: ‘The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children of the Holocaust’, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, 24–27 May 2001b, http:// psychematters.com/papers/halasz.htm.

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

271 Black

8/8/2007, 9:53 AM

272

JONATHAN D. GREENBERG

Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Hasan, Khalid (trans.), Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition by Sa’adat Hasan Manto (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997). Hasan, Mushirul, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (New Delhi: Lotus, Roli Books, 1995). ———, Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: University of Harvard Press, 1997). Hoffman, Eva, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (NewYork: Public Affairs, 2004). Jaffrelot, Christophe, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1993). Jalal, Ayesha, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Kakar, Sudhir, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Kamra, Sukeshi, ‘Narratives of Pain: Fiction and Autobiography as “Psychotestimonies” to the Partition’, in Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002). Kogan, Ilany, The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust (London: Free Association Books, 1995). Laub, Dori, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in S. Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). Mazor, Aviva,Yolanda Gampel and Gilit Horowitz, ‘Interviewers’ Reactions to Holocaust Survivors’ Testimony’, Echoes of the Holocaust 5, 1997, http://www.holocaustechoes.com/5mazor.html. Menon, Ritu and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). Nasrin, Taslima, ‘Denial’, poem from Ay Kosto Jhenpe, Jiban Debo Mepe, 1994, http://www.indiaseminar.com/2002/510/510%20poems%20on%20partition.htm. Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies VIII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). ———, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2001). ———, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2006). Pastor, Irene, Second Generation Experience Legacy of Silence (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 2000). Radstone, Susannah, ‘Working with Memory: An Introduction’, in her (ed.), Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 13. Roth, John K. and Elisabeth Maxwell, ‘Memories of Silence: Trauma Transmission in HolocaustSurvivor Families and the Exiled Self’, in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 117–26. Schlant, Ernestine, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (NewYork: Routledge, 1999). Shehadeh, Raja, ‘Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 32(2), 2003.

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

272 Black

8/8/2007, 9:53 AM

273

AGAINST SILENCE AND FORGETTING

Sidhwa, Bapsi, Cracking India (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1991). Talbot, Ian, ‘Literature and the Human Drama of the 1947 Partition’, in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 228–52. Talbot, Ian and Gurharpal Singh (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Trachtenberg, M. and M. Davis, ‘Breaking the Silence: Serving Children of Holocaust Survivors’, Journal of Jewish Communal Service, 54, 1978: 294–302. Varshney, Ashutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Wiesel, Elie, Night (first published in France as La Nuit, 1958, this edition with new translation by Marion Wiesel and new Preface by Elie Wiesel, London: Penguin, 2006). Wilson, Arnold, ‘On Silence and the Holocaust: A Contribution to Clinical Theory’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 5(1), 1985: 63–84. Wood, Nancy, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999).

15_Roy & Bhatia~chap-15.pmd

273 Black

8/8/2007, 9:53 AM

274

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Notes on the Editors and the Contributors

THE EDITORS ANJALI GERA ROY is Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has published several essays in scholarly journals and edited anthologies. Her books include Three Great African Writers (2001); Wole Soyinka: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2006); and Rohinton Mistry: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (with Meena T. Pillai, 2007). She has co-edited a special issue of The Literary Criterion on ‘New Directions in African Writing’, and of Translation Today on ‘Post-colonial Translation’. Dr Gera Roy has also translated Shivani: Two Novellas and is currently working on Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond. NANDI BHATIA is Associate Professor at the Department of English, University of Western Ontario. She has authored Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (2004); edited a special issue of Feminist Review on ‘Postcolonial Theatres’; and co-edited (with Nirmal Puwar) a special issue of Fashion Theory on fashion and Orientalism. She is currently editing a book titled Modern Indian Theatre: Colonial Encounters and Contested Formations. Additionally, she has published essays on South Asian literatures and diasporic culture, the 1947 Partition, and British imperial literatures and drama in anthologies and journals such as Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Centennial Review, Feminist Review, Sagar, and Fashion Theory.

THE CONTRIBUTORS DEEPIKA BAHRI is Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. She is the author of Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature and editor of Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality; Realms of Rhetoric; and a special issue of the South Asian Review on racial hybrids. She is currently working on the representation of Anglo-Indians, Eurasians, and racial hybrids in postcolonial literature, and HIV/

16_About the editors.pmd

274 Black

8/8/2007, 9:56 AM

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

275

AIDS in developing countries is her secondary research interest. Based on preliminary research in this area, she has written a report entitled ‘AIDS Prevention and Control in Tamil Nadu’ for USAID/CDC. She has developed an extensive Postcolonial Studies Website available at: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/ PAULOMI CHAKRABORTY is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. Her dissertation is on narratives of the Partition of Bengal (1947) in select literary and cinematic texts from West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh. Along with her research, she teaches first-year students in her home university, usually courses on world literatures in English. NONICA DATTA teaches history at Miranda House, University of Delhi, and is currently Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. A historian of modern India, she did her M.A. and M.Phil from Jawaharlal Nehru University and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Her publications include Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (1999) and articles relating to social and cultural history of North India. She has also revisd and updated the entry on ‘Indian History—Modern’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Her book, Fear and Violence:A Daughter’s Testimony and Memory of Partition, is due to be published soon. DEVLEENA GHOSH is an academic at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Technology, Sydney. She has worked and published on culture and commerce and on intercolonial networks in the Indian Ocean region, and on Muslim women’s networks in Australia. Her books include Colonialism and Modernity (with P. Gillen, 2007) and Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges (co-edited with S. Muecke, 2007). Her forthcoming publications are Women in Asia: Shadowlines (edited) and Water, Sovereignty and Borders in Asia and Oceania (co-edited with Heather Goodall and Stephanie Donald Routledge, 2008). JONATHAN D. GREENBERG is Lecturer at Stanford Law School and Stanford University’s Program in Public Policy; Affiliated Scholar at the Stanford Center for International Conflict & Negotiation; and Counsel to the Canadian law firm Heenan Blaikie LLP, where he directs the firm’s practice in international dispute resolution. His scholarship has been published in The Journal of International Affairs, Stanford Law Review, Stanford Journal of International Law, Dispute Resolution, and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and Middle East. SUKESHI KAMRA is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University, Ontario, Canada, and teaches courses in South Asian literature and culture as well as in postcolonial theory. She is the author of Bearing Witness: Partition,

16_About the editors.pmd

275 Black

8/8/2007, 9:56 AM

276

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

Independence, End of the Raj (2002), of articles on Partition literature, and more recently on popular texts of the freedom movement. She is currently writing a book-length study of the formation of the nationalist public sphere in colonial India. RITA KOTHARI teaches at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA), where she also runs a research centre for translation on behalf of Katha, an NGO. Some of her publications include Modern Gujarati Poetry (1998); Stepchild (2003); Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English (2003); Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by Gujarati Women (2006); and Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat (2007). She is currently translating Partition stories from Sindhi into English and co-editing a book on translation traditions in India. SHUCHI KOTHARI teaches in the Department of Film, Television, and Media Studies, University of Auckland, New Zealand. She writes screenplays for the film industries in New Zealand, USA, and India. The short film Fleeting Beauty was her first foray into producing, followed by Clean Linen and more recently, Coffee & Allah. Her recent commissioned feature screenplays were Bollywood Bride, for the Los Angelesbased Jag Mundhra Films, and In Such Times (co-written with Nandita Das). She publishes in the field of South Asian popular culture and is currently developing a pan-Asian sketch comedy show for national television broadcast in New Zealand. SOMDATTA MANDAL in Associate Professor of English at the Department of English and Other Modern European Languages,Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India. She has received several academic fellowships and her areas of interest include contemporary fiction, translation, culture studies, diaspora studies, and film studies. She has edited several anthologies and her recent publications include Reflections, Refractions and Rejections: Three American Writers and the Celluloid World (2004), and Film and Fiction: Word into Image (2005). SHUBH MATHUR isVisiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Connecticut College. She did her B.A. from Lady Sri Ram College, University of Delhi, and her Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in NewYork. Her work is concerned with nationalism, violence, migration, and human rights. Her first book, The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism, is due to come out soon. DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD, Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at James Madison University, Virginia, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is finishing a manuscript on postcolonial writings on national identity and gendered violence. Her current research focuses on the Partition. She has contributed to scholarly journals and anthologies in India, the UK, and the US.

16_About the editors.pmd

276 Black

8/8/2007, 9:56 AM

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

277

NICOLA MOONEY has a Ph.D. in social-cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her research involves Sikh communities in India and Canada, and is broadly focused on ethnicity and identity, modernity, transnationalism, gender, and religiosity. She is the author of Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity among Jat Sikhs (forthcoming), and is working on a collection on the representation of Sikhs in film. Recently appointed to the Social, Cultural and Media Studies Department at the University College of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, she also holds an adjunct appointment at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, where she was formerly McCain Post-Doctoral Fellow. DEBORAH NIXON is Lecturer in Academic Literacy, undertaking Ph.D. research through the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her research project focuses on the experience of domiciled Europeans in India up to and during the Partition in 1947. PRABHJOT PARMAR is a Ph.D. student working on representations of Partition in literature and cinema (Punjabi and Hindi) at the University of Western Ontario. In Fall 2007, she begins her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She is the co-editor of a collection of immigrant women’s writings, When Your Voice Tastes Like Home (2003). MANAS RAY is Fellow in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His articles on cultural theory and practice have been anthologized in collections like Global Television: Views from the Periphery (1998); Media of the Diaspora (2003); and City Flicks (2004). Based on the paper included in this volume, the Nobel Laureate novelist John Coetzee has remarked: ‘India may be leading the world in the growing convergence between history-writing and the kinds of narrative we associate with fiction.’ AMBER FATIMA RIAZ is currently working towards her Ph.D. in English at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include violence against women during the 1947 Partition riots, translation theory, feminist theory, architecture theory, veiling and the Muslim woman in India and Pakistan, and the role played by religion in women’s lives. Her Ph.D. dissertation is tentatively titled The Politics of Veiling and the Feminist Gaze in Fiction by South Asian and Middle-Eastern Women. PIPPA VIRDEE is a Research Fellow in South Asian History at De Montfort University. She has published on the partition of the Punjab and its consequences for the population displacement in 1947, and has authored Coming to Coventry: Stories from

16_About the editors.pmd

277 Black

8/8/2007, 9:56 AM

278

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND THE CONTRIBUTORS

the South Asian Pioneers (2006), which documents the South Asian migration to Coventry. She is currently working on Muslim women’s experiences of Partition and resettlement in West Punjab. JENNIFER YUSIN is Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Her research focuses on literature about the partition of India and its status as testimony to that history. Her academic interests also include trauma theory, psychoanalytic theory, and ethics. She has published on testimony and Maurice Blanchot, and is currently working on revising her doctoral work into a book publication.

16_About the editors.pmd

278 Black

8/8/2007, 9:56 AM

279

INDEX

Index

1947: Earth, content and interpretation, xix, 201–202, 205, 207–208 Aag ka Darya (Hyder, Qurratulain), 219 ‘Aj Akhan Waris Shah Noon’ (Amrita Pritam), 6–7 Alavi, Hamza, 221 Amrita Pritam’s life history expressions with literary cultures of Punjab, 8 Hindu–Muslim–Sikh tension, experiences of, 3–4 influence of Sufi poets, 9–10 interpretation of Pinjar, 17–20 job with All India Radio (Lahore), 4 life at Lahore, 2–4 1947 Partition experiences, 5–17 rebellion against religion, 3, 16 self-perceptions, 1 Anderson, Benedict, 28 Anglo-Indian communities, 177, 179 Ansari, Sarah, 169, 219, 221 Appadurai, Arjun, 32 Azadi (Nahal, Chaman), 219 Baldwin, Shauna Singh depiction of military personnel in Partition killings and atrocities, 205 early years of, 197 responses to the Partition, 198 views on narratives of Partition, 198 What the Body Remembers, content and interpretation, 199–201, 205–207 Bangladesh’s War of Independence of 1971, 51, 232, 234, 238 Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, autobiographical account of, xxii; see also Ice-Candy Man (Sidhwa, Bapsi) Deepa Mehta’s adaptation, see 1947: Earth, content and interpretation depiction of Lenny’s feelings of suffocation, 87–88 Lenny’s imagining of scars, 88 Lenny’s vision of violence, 89 narratives of Lenny, 86–87, 92

17_Roy & Bhatia~Index.pmd

279 Black

opening pages of, 94–95 traumatic nightmares of Lenny, 89–97 Bear, L. G., 179 Bedi, Rajinder Singh, 4, 194 Bengali identity in films, post-Partition Chinnamul, 67–68 Chitra Nadir Pare, 77–78 creative artists of Bengal, 66 popular themes before Partition, 66 Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy, 68–73 Supriyo Sen’s documentaries, 78–80 Surya Dighal Bari (Shaker, Masiuddin and Ali, Sheikh Niamat), 77 Tahader Katha (Dasgupta, Buddhadeb), 74–76 Benjamin, Walter, 99 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, Sigmund), 84 Bhabha, Homi K., 215–17 Bhagat Singh, execution of, 2 Bollywood, 34, 66 Boota Singh’s story, narration of, see Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, content and interpretation of border, see boundaries, territorial Borders and Boundaries (Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamala), x Bose, Sumantra, 250 boundaries religious, 9, 18, 23, 31, 202, 223–224 territorial, 13, 20, 32, 59, 65, 101, 121, 202, 228, 233 Buettner, E., 179 Butalia, Urvashi, 28, 30–31, 33, 175, 189, 263–64 Caplan, L., 179–80, 183 Caruth, Cathy, 84 Chakravarti, Dipendu, 68 Chandan, Amarjit, 194 Chatterjee, Partha, 71, 144 Chinnamul (Ghosh, Nemai), 67–68 Chitra Nadir Pare, 77–78

8/8/2007, 2:34 PM

280

PARTITIONED LIVES

Citizenship Act, India (1961), xxi collective consciousness, 256 collective memory, about Partition, 83–85, 90, 176, 198, 229, 256–58, 261, 268–69 community Anglo-Indian, 177, 179, 183 based solidarities, 3, 17 European, 177, 179, 183 identification, 29–31 in the context of modernity, 51–52, 56, 59, 61, 64 inter-community violence, 107 migrating, 214–15, 229, 234 of Netaji Nagar, 120–133, 136, 141 Parsee, 208 religious, 17–21, 31, 219 Sikh, 33, 43, 195 concentration camps, of India and Pakistan, 159 consciousness, role in trauma, 84 Darkness in El Dorado controversy, 242, 253 Das, Jibanananda, 79, 143 deferred action, 84 Derrida, Jacques, 82, 110, 113 Des Hoya Pardes, 33 Dharamsala, refugee evacuation at, 182–87 diasporic communities and Partition, xxiii–xxvi literary works, 193 Punjabi poetry and folk songs, 194 responses to political events in the homeland, 193–94 South Asian diaspora living in Canada, 194–97, 209 Difficult Daughters (Kapur, Manju), 30 displacement, phenomenon of, 216 dispossessed people, 7, 51, 57, 60, 62–63, 68, 74, 99–100, 105, 118, 241, 253 disturbance, see Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, content and interpretation of; Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, content and interpretation of Dogra regime, 240, 243–44 domiciled European community, 177, 179 Donnan, Hastings, 220 Dusenbery, Verne, 193 East Bengal, 58, 60, 67–68, 72, 74–78, 121, 123–124, 138, 143–144, 238, 265 East Bengali refugee-victim, 229, 237 ethnography, of Partition cinema, 31–35 Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Hirsch, Marianne), 262 films, on Partition, 31–35 1947: Earth, 30, 192, 201–202, 205, 207–208

17_Roy & Bhatia~Index.pmd

280 Black

Chinnamul, 67–68 Chitra Nadir Pare, 77–78 Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, content and interpretation of, 41–44 Komal Gandhar (Ghatak, Ritwik), 68, 70–71 Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ghatak, Ritwik), 68–70 Partition (Sarin, Vic), 192–93 Refugee (Mukherjee, Shantipriya), 68 Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, content and interpretation of, 35–40, 43–44 Subarnarekha (Ghatak, Ritwik), 68, 71–73 Surya Dighal Bari (Shaker, Masiuddin and Ali, Sheikh Niamat), 77 Tahader Katha (Dasgupta, Buddhadeb), 74–76 What the Body Remembers, 199–201, 205–207 Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, content and interpretation of, 41–44, xix Gandhi, Mahatma, 42, 65, 111, 131, 144, 154, 200 Gangopadhyay, Sunil, see Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun Garam Hawa (Satyu, M. S.), 67 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 110 Green Revolution agricultural reforms, 27–28 Guha Thakurta, Meghna, xv Gupta, Dipankar, 27 Gurkha soldiers, 180–81 Habitations of Modernity (Chakrabarty, Dipesh), 264–66 Haider, Sajjad, 4–5, 15 Haq, Abdul, 166 Hawayein, 33 Hirsch, Marianne, 198, 206, 262 Holocaust trauma, 198, 206, 208, 260–262 Holy Men and Holy Cows (Sharma, Roshan Lal), 204 homelessness, 5, 56–61, 200, 206, 230 Husain, Intizar, 101 Ice-Candy Man (Sidhwa, Bapsi), 30, 210, 270; see also Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, autobiographical account of Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie, Salman), 78, 216–217 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) movement, 67, 71, 121 Indira Gandhi’s assassination, 263 individual trauma, 84 interview excerpts, of Partition experiences of M (Hindu) as refugee, 151 as victims of minority group, 149 immediate years after Partition, 152–54 in Hyderabad, 151 in India, 150

8/8/2007, 2:34 PM

281

INDEX memories of school days, 147–48 of train journeys, 150 of Z (Muslim) as a mohajir, 151 as victims of minority group, 149 immediate years after Partition, 152–54 in Delhi, 150 in Hyderabad, 151 memories of school days, 148 of train journeys, 150 Italian prisoner-of-war camp, 182 Jain, Jasbir, 193 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 2 Jat Sikh families, 33–34, 45 Jat Sikhs, 45 Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, xx, xxv ‘A Real Durwan’, 229–30, 232–33 immigrant women characters, 227–32, 235 ‘Mrs Sen’s’, 230–31, 235 narrative of displacement, 234 representation of the immigrant community, 234–35 universalizing discourse of dislocation, 236 Kamra, Sukeshi, 29 Kashmir history, 243–45 Kashmiri Muslims, role in politics, 243–44, 248–49 post-Partition, 240–41 Kashmiri diaspora, 241 Kashmiri family’s exile background, 243–45 ‘constitutional crisis’ of 1952–53, 248–50 memories of Partition, 245–48 period of insurgency and after, 250–52 Kasturba Sewa Ashram, eviction incident at, ix Kathwari, Rafiq, 250 Kaur, Bhagwant, 167 Kazim, Haji, 167 Keller, Stephen L., 27 Khalsa College refugee camp, 160–61 Khan, Rana Aftab Ahmad, 167 Khilafat movement, 2 Khilnani, Sunil, 28, 174 Komal Gandhar (Ghatak, Ritwik), 68, 70–71 LaCapra, Dominick, 106 Lahiri, Jhumpa, see Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies Lahiri, Ranabir, 79

17_Roy & Bhatia~Index.pmd

281 Black

Lahore, see also Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, autobiographical account of activities of Nihang Sikhs, 186–87 Amrita Pritam’s observations, 2–4 and Partition, 5, 257 attacks on trains, 187 cultural festivities in, 15–16 in Bollywood, 35–42 in What the Body Remembers, 201–205, 207 mass migration and state response, 157–59 PTV broadcast, 197 Leslie Nixon’s account of Partition experiences early years in India, 176–79 evacuation process at Dharamsala, 182–87 as a lieutenant in Gurkha Rifles, 180–81 observations of violence, 175 post-Partition events, 190 train journey to Pakistan, 187–89 views of India, 176 literary cultures, of Punjab, 8–9 Ludhiana, mass migration and state response, 163–65 Ludhianvi, Malik, 169 Ludhianvi, Sahir, 4–5 Lyallpur, mass migration and state response, 159–62 Maachis (Gulzar), 33 Mahanagar (Ray, Satyajit), 70 Majumdar, Kamal Kumar, 75 Makkar, Jaswant Singh, 167 Manta, Mai, 167–68 Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, 99–100 martyrdom, see Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, content and interpretation of; Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, content and interpretation of Mass Transit (Naqvi, Maniza) focus of, 215, 223 main characters of, 215, 222 opening chapters, 221–22 protagonist’s dilemma, 222–24 vision of Karachi, 224–25 McLeod, W. H., 199 McMenamin, D., 177 Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ghatak, Ritwik), 68–70 Mehta, Deepa 1947: Earth, content and interpretation, 201–202, 205, 207–208 early years of, 197 responses to the Partition, 198 ‘sectarian-mindset’ phenomenon in Canadian context, 202–204 use of war, 206 views on narratives of Partition, 198

8/8/2007, 2:34 PM

282

PARTITIONED LIVES

Menon, V. P., 245 migration, a comparative analysis arguments of Shailja Sharma, 217 and communal violence, 218–19 as a determining feature of counterhegemonic literature, 215–17 from the east to the west, effects, 217 effects on the province of Sindh, 219–20 evacuation figures 1947, 158 mass migration and state response in Ludhiana, 163–65 in Lyallpur town, 159–62 personal experiences, 165–70 routes used, 158–59 mohajir discourses, xxiii mohajir population, 214, 221 mohajirs, 106, 108, 109, 220, 221 identity, 215, 220 in Karachi, xxv, 107, 108; see also Mass Transit (Naqvi, Maniza) Muslim, xix, 220 religious, 220 subjectivity, 222 the term, 214, 216, 225 Mokammel, Tanvir, 77 Mullick, Swapan, 79 Muslim League, 17, 23, 41, 149, 151, 157, 164, 199, 200, 203–204, 220–21, 270 Muslim migrants, in Karachi, 220 Muzzaffar family, exile of, see Kashmiri family’s exile Nadi, Ghulam, 168 Nagarik (Ghatak, Ritwik), 70 Nandy, Ashis, 174 narratives, of Partition, x nation-state, 26–27, 32, 116, 196, 201–204, 232, 242 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 27, 111, 154, 164, 186, 200, 241, 249–50 Netaji Nagar squatter colony and Partition, xx the community, 120–33 government interventions, 139–42 violence in, 133–39 Northey, W. B., 181 Oberoi, Pia, xv–xvi O’Donnell, Erin, 68 The Other Side of Silence (Butalia, Urvashi), x Palanka (Tarafdar, Rajen), 68 Pandey, Gyanendra, xii, 174, 196, 218 Partition and memory of traumatic events, 256–58

17_Roy & Bhatia~Index.pmd

282 Black

and second-generation scholars, 258–60 and trauma theory, 83–85 and violence, 218–19 content of narratives and testimonies, x, xii–xiv, xix, 29–31; see also Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, autobiographical account of defined by scholars, x evoked memories of, 262–67 in films, 31–35 Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, content and interpretation of, 41–44 Refugee (Mukherjee, Shantipriya), 68 Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, content and interpretation of, 35–40, 43–44 history, depiction of culture, 100–101 Gulzar’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’, 105–106 Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers, 106–109 language framework, 100 Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, 101–105, 110 Partition texts, 101 Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Siyah Hashye, 99–100 identity construction in adult children of survivors, 260–62 impact on Kashmir, 240–52 memoirs of Singh, xxi–xxii painful events of, 26–29 Partition (Sarin, Vic), 192–93 Pinjar, content and interpretation of, 17–20 Pritam, Amrita, see Amrita Pritam’s life history Punjab government intervention to refugee influx, 157–58 Partition Lahore, 5 views of Amrita Pritam, 10–17 pre-Partition Gujranwala and religious schism, 2 Hindu–Muslim–Sikh tension, 3–4 political movements, 2 Punjab Boundary Force (PBF), 157 Punjabis, 1, 4, 8–10, 14, 16–18, 23, 27–35, 39, 44, 56, 65, 104, 147, 154, 169, 176, 193–95, 199, 221, 255, 259–60 Punjabiyat, 30 Purab aur Paschim (Kumar, Manoj), 196–97 Purba-Paschim (Gangopadhyay, Sunil), 61 Rai, Satya, 166 Rajpura refugees, story of, ix–xi Randhawa, M. S., 27 Refugee (Mukherjee, Shantipriya), 68 refugee rehabilitation, 27, 75, 117, 166–67

8/8/2007, 2:34 PM

283

INDEX refugees, in Kolkata/Calcutta and the Left party, 117 composition of, 116 early settlements, 116–17 narration of early squatter colonies, 118–20 government interventions, 139–42 Netaji Nagar community, 120–33 violence, 133–39 Rehman, Abdul, 166, 168 Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History (Pandey, Gyanendra), 259 Rowlatt Satyagraha, 2 Rushdie, Salman, 215–17, 225 Rwandan genocide (1994), 206

subjectivity in Arjun, see, see Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun of immigrants, 225, 236 of Sikhs in films, 44–46 second-hand, 262, 265 Sufi poets, 9 Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun Arjun’s homelessness, depiction of, 56–62 dates of composition and publication, 51–52 in the light of epic Mahabharata, 53–55 story details, 52–53 Surya Dighal Bari (Shaker, Masiuddin and Ali, Sheikh Niamat), 77 Swedenberg, Ted, 252

Sengupta, Debjani, 73 Shadow Lines (Ghosh, Amitav), 30 Shah, Bulle, 4, 9 Shah, Fazal, 8 Shah, Naseeruddin, 192–93 Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, content and interpretation of, 35–40, 43–44, xix Sharma, Shailaja, 217 Shuddhi Movement, 200 Sidhwa, Bapsi, see Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, autobiographical account of; see also Ice-Candy Man (Sidhwa, Bapsi) Sikh identification, in Partition films, 44–46 Sikh literary heritage, 8–9 Sikh subjectivity and ethnic experience of Partition, in films, 26–46 Sindhi identity, in postcolonial India, 147 Singh, Gurnam, 167–68 Singh, Ratten, 169 Singh, Sujala, 209 Siyah Hashye (Manto, Sa’adat Hasan), 99–100 Sleepwalkers, (Paul, Joginder), 106–109 Sluka, Jeffrey A., 252 Subarnarekha (Ghatak, Ritwik), 68, 71–73

Tahader Katha (Dasgupta, Buddhadeb), 74 Talbot, Ian, xv Tamas (Sahni, Bhisham), xvi–xviii, 30 The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Kakar, Sudhir), 266–67 Tierney, Patrick, 253 Toba Tek Singh (Manto, Sa’adat Hasan), 101–105, 110 Train to Pakistan (Singh, Khushwant), 30, 82–83, 192, xix trauma theory and Partition, 83–85

17_Roy & Bhatia~Index.pmd

283 Black

Ullah, Chaudhari Rehmat, 168 Veena Das’ ethnography, of muteness, 259–60 violence-related migration, 157 Waris Shah, compositions of, 6–8 Way Back Home (Sen, Supriyo), 78–80 We Have Arrived in Amritsar and Other Stories (Sahni, Bhisham), 30 Werbner, Pnina, 220 What the Body Remembers (Baldwin, Shauna Singh), xxiii, 30 Zaman, Niaz, 218

8/8/2007, 2:34 PM