The Theme of Partition in the Indo-English Novel

THEME OF PARTITION IN THE

INDO-ENGLISH NOVEL

The three novels, I have chosen for study, deal with India’s independence and the holocaust that followed in the wake of the partition of the country. They seek to provide a brutally realistic story of political hatred and violence, of mass passions during those turbulent and fateful days that preceded and followed the partition of the British India, when people were seized by communal frenzy.

The three novels take up this theme and seek to portray the “conflicting loyalties and various forces” that resulted into the ghastly tragedy of blood and horror, a heart-rending episode of en masse madness during “one of the bloodiest upheavals of history: twelve million people had to flee, leaving their homes nearly half a million were killed; over a hundred thousand women young and old, were abducted, raped, mutilated.” Many a train during the terrible time was halted by armed bands of men systematically killing the unfortunate passengers.

Every citizen was caught up in the holocaust. No one could remain aloof; no one could be trusted to be impartial. The administration, the police, even the armed forces, were caught up in the blaze of hatred. Mobs ruled the streets, burning, looting, killing, dishonouring women and mutilating children; even animals sacred to the other community became the legitimate targets of reprisals. “The entire land,” to quote Malgonkar, “was being spattered by the blood of its citizens, blistered and disfigured with the fires of religious hatred; its roads were glutted with enough dead bodies to satisfy the ghouls of a major war.”

What brackets these novels into one group is not only the theme of partition that is common to all of them, but also its quality of stark realism, its absolute fidelity to the truth of life and its trenchant exposition of one of the most appalling episodes in the annals of current Indian history. These novels contain among other things, a well-contrived structure, an artistically designed plot, a gripping narrative and imaginatively carved-out three-dimensional characters.

The sleepy Mano Majra, a tiny imaginary village in the remote reaches of the Indo-Pak frontier, half a mile away from the river Sutlej, forms the locale of Train to Pakistan. It has been described to be one of the few “oases ofpeace” untroubled by the frantic acts of murder, plunder, arson, abduction and rape.

Having set the pattern of the village, its atmosphere fused with the “whistling” and puffing of rail-engines, the activities of the village being regulated with the arrival and departure of the trains, Khushwant Singh obviously wishes the reader to see Mano Majra as a microcosm of the communal temper ofthe country during the days of the partition. The peaceful life of the villagers is disturbed when the first stories of the atrocities arrive, but for the villagers of Mano Majra they remain the happenings in another world; the idyllic tranquillity continues to be there. People are content doing their job and living in a world of their own, meeting at the Gurudwara, discussing the common problems of the village, and sharing each other’s joys and sorrows.

The artistically conceived opening scene unfolds itself with the raiding of Lala Ram Lal’s house followed by subsequent robbery and murder by a gang of dacoits led by Mali. At that time Jugga, who has spent quite as much time in jail as at home and branded as “Budmash number ten,” is away from his house in the enticing arms of his Muslim sweetheart, Nooran. Almost at the same time when Mali and his gang are busy in robbery and urder and Jugga and Nooran are lost in each other’s arms, Hukum Chand, the Deputy Commissioner of the district, who is on inspection in Mano Majra, and whose mouth smells of whisky, tobacco and pyorrhea, is fondling with Hasseena, a hired teen-ager pros. Coincidentally, Iqbal (Singh), a western-educated immature communist, also lands at almost the same time, with a mission to “create political consciousness among the proletariat peasants” of Mano Majra. Murder, robbery, romances on the sly, sordid intrigue–all these “on the eve,” as it were, are a “prelude to the swelling act.” The scene is appropriately characteristic of “true to life” description of acts like robbery, murder and love-intrigues, but its “ramifications and remote echoes” go far beyond the inhuman and cruel actions actually described in the first part of the narrative.

The sudden arrival of a train-load of corpses of Hindus and Sikhs plunders the tranquillity of the village, inflames the communal frenzy and creates commotion, fear, suspicion, violence and mass-madness in the air. Muslims and Sikhs, who have lived together for centuries, are now furiously engrossed in a fratricidal conflict. The gruesome scene of violence that turned the Punjab into a wasteland, has been vividly described. The bodies are burnt like rubbish heaps, and ironically, the fuel (kerosene and firewood) is provided by the poor innocent village-folk. Sikhs are quick to retaliate. They attack a Muslim-refugee train, send it full of thousands of dead bodies across the border as “gift to Pakistan.” The second train-load of men, women and children from Pakistan has to be buried in a trench, for there is no more oil to spare and the wood is damp because of rain, The bodies are dug out by the monster of a bulldozer, “eating, chewing up the earth casting it aside” and then “belching and vomiting it out.”

But still there is some amount of sanity, wisdom and humanity left in the innocent and bewildered villagers of Mano Majra. “What have we to do with Pakistan? We were born here, so were our ancestors. We have lived amongst you as brothers,” says one of the village Muslims in a gathering of Sikhs.

And instant comes the response:

Yes, you are our brothers. As far as we are concerned you and your children and your grand-children can live here as long as you like. If anyone speaks rudely to you, your wives or your children, it will be us first and our wives and children before a single hair of your heads is touched…(p. 110)

The Sikh peasants simply cannot refuse shelter to the Muslim refugees; “hospitality was not a pastime but a sacred duty” (p. 109). But for their own safety Muslims have been ordered to “evacuate” to a refugee-camp for departure to Pakistan later on. A handful of fanatic young Sikhs from outside Mano Majra, in order to retaliate, are planning to blow up the bridge and the train scheduled to carry Muslim-refugees to Pakistan. They plan to stretch a rope across the first span of the bridge, a foot above the funnel of the engine; “when the train passes under it, it will sweep off all the people sitting on the roof of the train. That will account for at least four to five hundred...” (p. 133).

Even Hukum Chand, the Deputy Commissioner, is terror-stricken and avoids getting involved in the “winds of destruction blowing across the land.” The authorities sit passive and cannot help protect the train of Muslim refugees, nor can they desist the terrorist band from stopping the trains and butchering its Muslim passengers.

Amid this universal madness and communal frenzy. “the simple, uncalculating,” and earthly love of a man for his beloved asserts itself and averts the catastrophe. Jugga, self-confessed “local ruffian,” realizing that the attack on the train might mean danger to his Nooran, manages to slash at the rope with his kirpan.

He went at it with his knife, and then with his teeth. The engine was almost on him. There was a volley of shots. The man shivered and collapsed. The rope snapped in the centre as he fell. The train went over him and went on to Pakistan (p. 153).

Jugga a burly No. 10 Budmash thus redeems himself by saving the lives of thousands of Muslims in a stirring climax. His act of love and sacrifice, as a young and brilliant critic points out, “silhouetted against the drop of hatred and violence, towers above communal difference and lends a quiver and meaning to the general aimlessness of life in the partition days.” The triumph of love, humanism, faith in the innate goodness of man in a “moment of real crisis and challenge” mark the central significance of the novel.

This starkly realistic, frequently disturbing contemporary historical novel, depicting riots, bloodshed, atrocities and horrors of partition, also provides an interesting study of characters under stress. Jugga, “an outlaw,” becomes almost noble by his last act of self-sacrifice. Hukum Chand, a hard-boiled magistrate, “an abandoned old rake” with his peculiar conception of beauty, is portrayed as almost human when he entertains an affectionate feeling for Hasseena, the Muslim pros, whom he neither understands nor conquers.

In recording the events, Khushwant Singh maintains his dispassionate objectivity. As an honest chronicler he strives to probe deeper into the problem of communal frenzy and holds both, Hindus and Muslim~, equally guilty. Both the communities blamed each other of connivance and initiated killing. But the fact is, as the novelist reports, “Both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped.”(p. 1)

Khushwant Singh builds a powerful series of episodes with the ground of Indian landscape, Indian sights and sounds, Indian manners and gestures as only a keenly observant and sensitive artist can depict them. The novel, to quote William Walsh, “is a tense, economical novel, thoroughly true to the events and the people. It goes forward in a trim, athletic way, and its unemphatic voice makes a genuinely human comment.” Besides the novelist’s comic, and sometimes ironic vision, his genuine faith in the humanistic ideal, a significant aspect in respect of Train to Pakistan as Dr Shahane also underlines, is its trenchant portrayal of hard and harsh facts of life against the drop of India’s partition, its skilful dissection of the real and its presentation beneath the inhuman bestialities of life to the human layer. Staggered at its brutally realistic quality, a reviewer in American Scholar describes Train to Pakistan as a “brew of brimstone, blood and nitric acid served piping hot. The novel can be said to have succeeded in communicating to the reader the pity and the horror, “the grossness, ghastliness and total insanity of the two-nation theory and the partition tragedy,” without ventriloquising or infiltrating puerile sentimentality.

II

Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964) seeks to provide an “epic presentation of the whole struggle for Indian independence and its aftermath.” The novelist’s purpose of describing this period seems to be two-fold. The first is to introduce to the reader, as an objective chronicler, the basic ingredients of the political scene–the struggle for emancipation, the two parallel movements symbolising two extreme cults–the violent and the non-violent, the injection of the communal virus, the parting of the ways, the Muslim outcry for division, the Hindu answer, the Quit India’s phase and finally the removal of the shackles climaxed by the creation of two separate states–India and Pakistan. The second intention of the author is to probe into the ideology of Ahimsa, non-violence and truth, offered by the Mahatma not only as a political expediency but “also as a philosophy and a “a way of life.” The mood and the tenor of the novel, defined in the epigraph, appears to present the prophet in an act of self-doubts and self-questioning:

This non-violence, therefore, seems to be due mainly to our helplessness. It almost appears as if we are nursing in our bosom the desire to take revenge the first time we get an opportunity. Can true, voluntary non-violence come out of this seeming, forced non-violence of the weak? Is it not a futile experiment I am conducting? What if, when the fury bursts, not a man, woman, or child is safe, and every man’s hand is raised against his neighbour?

The novelist seems to be exhibiting his affiliations with the anachist movement, and, therefore, tries to focus on the events that proved the Mahatma’s apprehensions to be true; it came in the wake of freedom to become a part of India’s history. Thus choosing a wider canvas, Malgonkar strives to depict how communal poison soured and embittered the lives of freedom-fighters (like Shafi Usman in the novel) and steadily turned them communal fanatics. The young terrorists, who blow up railway tracks, bridges and an aeroplane, are presented to be each other’s enemies at the end of the novel.

It is a tragedy unrelieved by heroism or grandeur. Gian and Dehi are two friends with two extreme ideologies. Gian, a young collegiate, a self-styled Gandhian, accepts the creed of non-violence, truth and the boycott of the Britishers. Born in a village ridden with feudal traditions and taboos, he impulsively swayed by the fascinating spectacle of consigning the foreign clothes to fire as a token of his staunch support to the Swadeshi Movement. But, later, when his brother is killed by his cousin in a family feud over property, he abandons his solemn vow of non-violence and murders the assassin of his brother. Declared “criminally guilty” he is transported to Andamans on a life-sentence. Gian, a Gandhian, is forced by the circumstances to be an anti-Gandhian, a liar, a deceit, a terrorist and an anarchist. Gian’s micro-tragedy of family-feud suspicion, rivalry, hatred, vindictiveness, and murder can be interpreted to be foreshadowing “the macro-tragedy on a national scale in the year of partition.”

On the other hand we have a terrorist group of young, revolutionary students, the freedom-fighters led by Debi Dayal, who blow up railway tracks and bridges. The reason of Debi’s hate for the British lies wholly outside the realms of politics and is purely accidental. He continues breeding his contempt for the British, plans to sabotage the R. A. F. aircraft with some detonating pins stolen from his father’s firm. The operation is successful but the police is quick to retaliate. Debi is traced, tried summarily, arrested and sentenced to Andamans for life, to the horror and chagrin of his family.

Both friends now once again are face to face on a prison ship bound for Andamans. In prison Gian becomes an informer, collaborates with the British, betrays Debi, whose hate remains pure until he is liberated by the Japanese and returns to India as their agent. Gian also manages an escape to India with the help of his British captors, has an affair with Sundari, Debi’s sister, on the ground that he has befriended her brother, but he is soon caught, rejected and even humiliated by her. Debi, instead of joining hands in the freedom struggle, falls in love with a Muslim girl Mumtaz, whom he buys from a brothel. Debi, in a bid to help his parents in Lahore, is killed by a mob of furious Muslims and Mumtaz is carried away. In the final cataclysm of mutilation, rape, plunder and murder only Sundari and Gian survive, fleeing together from what has suddenly become Pakistan with no future left for them. This is how “the sunrise of our freedom” found millions done to death, and tens of millions “dispossessed of all that they owned and cherished, and brutally tossed,” on the other side of the artificial border between the newly-bifurcated countries.

Malgonkar builds a powerful plot with gripping and suspenseful events. The novel attains an epic grandeur in the sense that the events have been brilliantly dramatized and packed with veriegated richness of human contents. The novelist displays a wonderful knack of depicting the socio-political ground with consummate skill and convincing emotional situations. I can only quote a paragraph that throws into relief the depth of feeling and its expression with pitiless precision. The novelist’s indignation and sense of disgust at the pernicious wrong, the voiceless, inarticulate agony of the poor, helpless refugees can be obvious:

...They passed scene after scene of carnage. At one place there was a scatter of pitiful human belongings: bedrolls, bundles, tin trunks, ...brass utensils, earthen surais, boxes, bewildered dogs still chained to stakes in the ground–but not a single human being. It must have been a camp where a thousand or so refugees had been assembled for evacuation. What could have happened to them? Had they made a rush for a train, leaving everything behind, or had they just fled in panic, chased by some howling mob? A few miles further, they saw a field covered in red cloth, as though left for drying. It was only when they came closer that they discovered that they were not passing some factory for dyeing bolts of cloth but a scene of massacre, transformed by some trick of the morning light into a mirage. The large patches of red which had resembled left out to dry, shrunk and shrivelled and faded before their eyes, leaving only pools of dried blood. The vultures, the dogs and jackals emerged, strutting disdainfully. They had pulled and torn the flesh of the bodies of men and women strewn over the field to such an extent that there was now no way of telling how much mutilation had been inflicted by who had attacked them. That must be the place where they had attacked the train the previous night….The land of the five rivers had become the land of carrion. The vultures and jackals and crows and rats wandered about, pecking, gnawing, tearing, glutted, staring boldly at their train. (p. 369/370)

Is this the independence which India needed? Is the “The Sunrise” of our freedom? Who was to blame? What price the freedom? These are some of the questions that the novelist directs at the reader, keeping himself aloof, refusing to answer.

Malgonkar has been accused of being biased and influenced by his own personal predilections when he discredits non-violence that he identifies with weakness and cowardice of Gian who builds his life on a series of lies and conceits and is still allowed to survive with Sundari with safety and freedom at the end. This, as the critics believe, greatly damages the symbolic significance of the struggle for and renders itself as an unreliable document of the struggle for independence and the creed of non-violence. This only shows that the critics have failed to bear in mind the warning in the Author’s Note that “only the violence in this story happens to be true...nothing else is drawn from life. The characters are...(all) fictitious.” We must also not lose sight of the fact that the novelist is primarily a story-teller, a deft novelist, not a chronicler or a historian. A Bend in the Ganges records not a jest in history, but “one of history’s meanest affronts with a great wave of terror,” the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims.

III

The latest on the theme is Chaman Nahal’s Azadi(1975). In all respects Azadican rank to be a very good historical novel that recreates the agony with compassion, recalling all the scenes, both heroic and horrid, related to the unhappy and unfortunate event in Indian history–called Partition. The scale of disaster is hard to grasp. If we had TV screens in 1947, “we would have seen mile upon mile of refugees; 20,000 per ten-mile column with many such columns on both sides” of the new Indo-Pakistan frontier; train loads massacred; mounds of dead bodies cremated in railway stations; and unparalleled examples of naked fury and hate, ofmass orgies of lust and hate and bestiality.

With detailed descriptions of the daily lives of seven families living in close proximity in two apartment houses in Sialkot, a predominantly Muslim city, Nahal makes it clear that both sides were guilty, and by concentrating on the smallness and humdrum existence of these people, he shows how they were swept along by the irresistible tide of events.

The novel emerges from within the slow rhythms of an even domestic life, in a dull lower middle class milieu, which has received the impact of the freedom movement, but is moored to the acceptance of the British Raj. The slavishness of the people beaten for a thousand years by foreigners is reproduced in the smallness of their outlook, in the narrow bazars and narrower lanes of a district town. The monotony of mediocre living is relieved by occasional little excitements, like the “Hurrah parade” on the New Year Day of the British Indian soldiers, the native festivals, the visit of a political leader with the consequent bazar gossip about the future. In this kind of pleasure-seeking, the Hindus find catharsis in Gandhi’s words, while the Muslims gain confidence from Jinnah’s assertions. With Independence assured, the people fear that Jinnah and the Muslims will persist their demand for a separate state. But Gandhi is known to the people to have said that the partition would come only on his dead body. No one believes that the imperial power would be so callously senseless to actually divide the country. But Lord Mountbatten declaring Partition in the parting kick of his radio speech dispelled the doubts, fears and apprehensions of the masses.

What follows is known to the Indian people in the form oflegends, myths and stories, of one of the greatest waves of barbarism of our feudal history. Mulk Raj Anand compares this tragic event with the scourge of Chengiz Khan who piled up mountains of skulls, and with the devastation, death and disruption spread by Timur the Lame, wherever he limped across the Central and Middle Asia to India. The hearsay about the terror is brought home by the novelist in an intimate manner, knitting together the murders, the rapes, the mutilations and the tortures of the fables with the concrete daily experiences of his characters. Nahal succeeds admirably in recapturing vividly one of the most haunting nightmares of the blackest period in the Indian history, the refugees caravan, the atrocities perpetrated on the unoffending, battered and dilapidated dregs of humanity, that Dante’s moving inferno that the refugees find themselves plunged in, exhausted but still tottering on as if toward the Promised Land. Their pitiable plight can move even their enemies to gesture of sympathy and compassion.

The novel, written with the pressures of stream of Consciousness, unfolds the events vividly in front of our eyes like scenes in a sequence on the TV screen. The scenes abound in their variety domestic, amorous, ghastly, lurid, playful, heroic, pathetic and symbolic. The scene of desolation in the refugee camp and of parents crying over the loss of their near and dear ones, the scene of the refugee casting a longing, lingering look on the buildings, factories, churches, temples, schools at the time of their leaving their home town for destinations unknown to them, the scene the ghastly attacks on the caravan of refugees motivated by communal frenzy, the shameless parading of raped, naked women; of all ages, in streets for the delectation of the sex-maniacs, the pangs of labour-pains of a child-birth in a moving train, the self-immolation of a Sikh refugee Niranjan Singh, who is not prepared to get his hair shorn off for safety–all these are the scenes too deep for tears, and too poignant to be forgotten. But the most pathetic is the closing scene. Nahal describes with remarkable restraint, grace and delicacy, the vacuity in the minds of the three occupants of a small room in the Kingsway refugee camp:

The three of them lay fully awake. Not being able to fathom their minds and feeling restless about it. Not being able to talk to each other and feeling guilty about it. Not being able to go to sleep and feeling angry about it. A sadness weighed on their hearts, and each felt stifled, crushed (p. 370).

In the adjoining room, Sunanda is shown working on her sewing machine that helps her to live. She has an infant child to bring up, and she must live for the child. The continual movement of sewing machine is intended to be symbolic of the cycle of Life (Life, death and life again):

The machine went whirring on, its wheel turning fast and its little needle moving up and down, murmuring and sewing through the cloth. The doors of both the rooms shook with its vibration (p. 371).

The stream of consciousness technique used by the novelist helps him to surround the events with swift narrative and then to emphasize moments, in order to reveal the reality of the horrors. The sweep of the eloquent descriptions, to quote Anand “becomes more than historical journalism, because it is allied with the emotions of human beings, from felt experience.” This enables the novelist to evoke the agonies of the various people with an uncanny differentiation of the shades of expression.

The novel has a message for us all–though not intended obtrusively: we must give up hating one another and pray for forgiveness for what we did or saw or heard then. What makes this novel distinctly different from the other two is that Nahal accepts the partition as a fact, an inevitable happening. That is why he attributes the blame neither to the Britishers nor to the national leaders for this cataclysm and carnage, but accepts the acts of barbarism, bloodshed and massacre on a huge scale as a necessary celebration for the advent of freedom. The novel compares favourably with its two other compeers in the sense that it provides a genuine tragic catharsis exorcising the demon of hate and heralding the birth of compassion and understanding. Hope and its renewal are mingled with terror. We feel appalled but heartened, terrified but uplifted at the end of the novel. Azadican claim to be one of the rare tragic novels in Indian fiction, intensely felt, poignant and symptomatic of the author’s deep understanding of human impulses and emotions.

The text quotations used in the paper are from the following editions:

1. Train to Pakistan. IBH Publishing Company, Bombay (Pearl Paper, 1972).
2. A Bend in the Ganges. Pan Books Ltd., London (1967).
3. Azadi. Arnold Heinemann Publishers (India), New Delhi (1975).