A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Citation preview

fo)3 eladesh

A Divided Legacyis perhaps the first book to analyze Partition novels in three major languages of the Indian sub-continent: English, Bengali and Urdu. In addition,

Punjabi novels available in English translation have also been included. The book is thus an important addition to the numerous writings that have appeared in recent years on an event that not only created two nation states but also affected the psyche of the people who had been thus divided. Part of the

collective memory of the sub-continent, the Partition generates diverse responses from the generation that witnessed it and the children who inherited their legacy. A Divided Legacy examines both the detailed narratives that have been written on the Partition as well as novels that, either written in the late forties or situated around 1947, choose to be disturbingly silent. (see back flap)

Harriet & Edson Spencer

A DIVIDED LEGACY

shiny ae

Pee hb

M Divided Legacy The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Niaz Zaman

Karachi

Oxford University Press Oxford

New York 2001

Delhi

OXFORD University Press

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6pP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlim Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2000 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First published 2000 Second Impression March, 2001 All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction should be send to Oxford University Press at the address below.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 19 579535 0 Not for sale in Bangladesh Cover design by Proshanta Karmakar Produced by The University Press Limited, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Published by’ Ameena Saiyid, Oxford University Press 5-Bangalore Town, Shahrae Faisal PO Box 13033, Karachi-75350, Pakistan.

be SH

3 ae

,

ae

073 )01-3089 2-3

oC)

LOD | Contents Acknowledgements

vil

Introduction PERSPECTIVES

ON PARTITION

Chapter One MASSACRES

AND

ny

MADNESS

Chapter Two THE FIERY PLAIN: SELECTED

URDU

THE

PARTITION

IN

59

NOVELS

Chapter Three DIVIDED

81

HEARTS

Chaptér Four PUBLIC

POLITICS

AND

PRIVATE

VOICES

FROM

LIVES

97

Chapter Five A NEW

DAWN:

EAST PAKISTAN

Lazy.

Chapter Six THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES: BENGALI NOVELS OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

157

Chapter Seven HINDUS

AND/AGAINST

MUSLIMS

185

Chapter Eight THE FIRES OF PARTITION IN SHARF MUKADDAM AND ANITA DESAI

PA

vi_

A Divided Legacy

Chapter Nine CALIBAN'S AND

CHILDREN:

SHASHI

SALMAN

RUSHDIE

233

THAROOR

Chapter Ten BEGINNING AND

AGAIN:

MAHMUD

BAPSI

SIDHWA

SIPRA

Chapter Eleven BETRAYAL IN BENGAL: IN THE SHADOWS OF FIREFLIES

a

Chapter Twelve

NOSTALGIC SHADOWS: THE PARTITION IN SUNIL GANGOPADHYAY, AMITAV GHOSH, AND TASLIMA NASREEN

Conclusion

Bibliography Index

307 331 341 347

Acknowledgements There are several persons and institutions who made this book possible and I would like to take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude. First of all, | must thank Gowher Rizvi whose thoughtful kindness made it possible for me to go to Queen Elizabeth House. Jam also grateful to Ursula Griffith and Simon Kay of the British Council, Dhaka, for providing me a travel grant to take up the QEH offer. Thanks are also due to QEH for providing me the space and the facilities to carry on my work; to Professor K.S. Murshid, Professor S.I. Choudhury, and Professor S.M. Ali of Dhaka University for their encouragement and support; to Dr. Robert Young of Wadham College, Oxford University for his help. In addition to research at Oxford, I was able to work at Delhi, thanks to a visiting fellowship at the University of Delhi made possible by the support of Professor Malashn Lal and Professor Ravi Verma. I am grateful to the University of Dhaka for granting me a sabbatical to complete my work. Thanks are also due to the Asiatic Society, Bangladesh, for providing me office space to do my writing. I would like to thank the staff at the various libraries I worked: the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the India Office Library, the QEH Library, the University of Delhi Library, the Sahitya Akademi Library. There are

many people who helped me to get books and I would like to thank them: Professor Abu Rushd for loaning me his copy of Nongor, Professor Razia Sultana for helping me find a copy of Sardar Jainuddin's Anek Suryer Asha, and Ghazala Hameed for getting me Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's The Heart Divided. | would like to thank Durdana Soomro for making it possible for me to stay in London to work at the India Office Library and for providing a home away from home. I would also like to express my deep appreciation to my family for their understanding and patience which has made it possible for me to complete this work.

=< Riisattseal Cape i

reeaeten

|

in e de

tne ouslio? medic

dt z

|

rims

nogque ody ed oldiegoy me ligtcaliviga (ts I gore

=

tes

i eae:

|

Qiflevrolta|

aisah pric A

©

JielgiK> a inoiaedtee 4 oN ‘cr BH a ;

desbalgne® .viois0® aivaivay

So a

tesa coal bbe | erin Yurob yeeros ob

a winds sii

aciotbotyods,be

DAE dic

me aot

HAO

aan

ont,

ywenhy inet otek As iy , ie

ye

Ee

)

Toi

Agath oF oath) Dhue F Bia anornd 1 wane, to vgoo aid oft Sines

eit

whine to vqoo 6 bat yah gi ont quiltey tat booaght anes

or sve,

Aner of sdf bina | bank 8 oy pobrot i yete of ora 16) STOR

‘orn omed & yhibiver er ‘ eit 0) Morey afte era vin 2

i obpen

eed Aairiy aecciasey f

uA

Sven ng

COT E

ints i .

fs

NS

daitivd

Secale Y vaGM on droit}

nemlwe 6 innsE Yoeeston1 TEN, oy pina

Ad : v2 fi his i” «

2

.

Ban

Introduction

PERSPECTIVES

ON PARTITION

This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn,

This is not that dawn of which there was expectation, This is not that dawn with longing for which The friends set out, (convinced) that somewhere there would be met with,

In the desert of the sky, the final destination of the stars, Somewhere there would be the shore of the sluggish wave of night, Somewhere would go and halt the boat of pain. — Faiz Ahmed Faiz!

On August 14, 1947 Pakistan came into being as a new and independent country. A few hours later, at the stroke of midnight, India gained its independence. "At the stroke of midnight," proclaimed Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, "when the

world sleeps...." The hour of midnight which lent itself beautifully to Nehru's rhetoric and at Midnight (1975) Midnight's Children because astrologers ! Translated

would provide the title for the books Freedom by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre and (1981) by Salman Rushdie, was chosen simply —consulted by Hindus before all auspicious

by Victor Kiernan,

(Karachi: O.U.P., 1996), 127.

Poems

by Faiz,

quoted

in Ian Talbot, Freedom's

Cry

2

A Divided Legacy

occasions — said

that August

15 was

inauspicious.

They

said,

however, that the midnight of August 14 and 15 was all right. The

Assembly therefore met on August 14, 1947 and continued to sit till the midnight hour. So deep-rooted was the belief of "secular" India in astrology that even the agnostic Nehru had to bow before it. A country that had for a hundred and fifty years been one under British rule? split into three parts and two nation states. In the newly created state of Pakistan, despite people like Faiz, there was rejoicing that a new homeland for the Muslims had been created, a land where they could once more regain the lost glory which they had enjoyed under the Mughals and which, much diminished, they had lost in 1857 with the suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny and the defeat of Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. Exiled to Rangoon — Burma was part of British India at the time— Bahadur Shah Zafar continued to write poetry, dirges for his loss that also became dirges for the Muslims of India. Even though the Governor-General of the new nation of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had been critical of the moth-eaten and truncated Pakistan that he was getting, the euphoria of victory, however blighted, made many forget that the part of India that had seen the glories of Muslim rule had been apportioned to India. Nor did many ask what had happened to the "states" that had been mentioned in the Lahore Resolution, the resolution passed by the Muslim League at their congress at Lahore in 1940 that had, for the first time, formally demanded the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslims. While life in the villages went on as it had for centuries, in the cities and district headquarters,

the Union Jack came down, and the green and white Pakistani flag went up. And everywhere dark brown or wheat-coloured soldiers, clad in incongruous kilts, played bagpipes. The independence of India and Pakistan, however, did not come without violence, displacement, pain. It involved not only independence, but also the breaking up of the Indian subcontinent into two independent nations, one of them composed of two wings a thousand * Even under the Mughals. who had succeeded in uniting much of India, the south had not come under their rule. and even when it was ostensibly governed by Delhi, was prone to uprisings and rebellions, The British after 1857 consolidated their position and, despite problems, were more or less in substantial control of all of India. >

Introduction

3

miles apart and ethnically, linguistically, culturally different from each other and which would, barely twenty-four years after independence, split apart. It 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 the 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.‘ While the Oxford-educated Nehru spoke to his nation at the hour of midnight, reminding them that he had kept his promise and that India had a tryst with destiny, in Calcutta, a sorrowing Gandhi fasted at the failure of his attempt to preserve a united India and at the nots that had shattered his belief in non-violent means. In Cambridge, Choudhary Rahmat Ali, the man who had first articulated the name

"Pakistan," also spent a sorrowful day, alone,

drafting a new tract, this time criticizing Jinnah for accepting the partition of the Punjab.° The fanfare and panoply of independence hid a stark reality: that by a stroke of the pen thousands of people would have to leave their homes and seek refuge in a new land, only because they belonged to a different religion. Furthermore, even in principle it would never have been possible for all contiguous states to form a new nation — though Choudhary Rahmat Ali had envisaged at least three states: Pakistan, Bangistan and Osmanistan — compnising of 3 VP. Menon gives the figure of 5 1/2 million non-Muslims crossing into India and an equal number of Muslims moving into Pakistan from East Punjab, Delhi, the United Provinces, Ajmer, Alwar, Bharatpur, Gwalior and Indore. He gives the figure of 1 1/2 million nonMuslims crossing the border from East Bengal into West Bengal. He does not mention the Muslim population which crossed into East Bengal from West Bengal and Bihar. According to Menon. 4.00,000 non-Muslims later migrated to India from Sind. See The Transfer of Power in India (London: Longmans. Green and Co.. 1957). 431. +

Gopal Das Khosla gives [1949]): Penderel Moon appended to the book. he Quit (London: Chatto and

the figure of 5.00,000 in Stern Reckoning ({[New Delhi]: n.p. as about 2.00.000. However. in a final "Note on Casualties" suggests that this figure "was somewhat inflated." See Divide and

Windus, 1961), 293.

> Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight (London: Collins, 1975). 242.

4

A Divided Legacy

the state of Hyderabad. There had also been some vague idea of a confederation of states and the idea of a land corridor connecting the Muslim land mass in the west with that in the east.© The First Draft Plan for transfer of power would have allowed an Indian province to become independent if a majority of both its communities so wished. Mountbatten showed the draft to Nehru at Simla — Jinnah had not been invited on this trip. Nehru rejected the idea and V.P. Menon was given the task by Mountbatten to prepare an alternative draft plan, which Nehru approved.’ However, when Pakistan came into being, it was as a unified state, though incongruously separated by a thousand miles ofIndian territory. There was no corridor. Why did independence involve also Partition, the splitting up of a country that, since the Mughals, had been more or less one? Why, since Hindus and Muslims had dwelt together before the coming of the British, did the need for Partition arise? As if to prove that the division was inevitable, the Partition was both preceded and succeeded by violence, with followers of different religions attacking each other. K.K. Aziz notes that the idea of Pakistan resulted from two factors: the Muslim fear of Hindu rule and their feeling of being separate from the rest of Hindu India. "The conquerors of India, the proud inheritors of the triumphs and glories of the Mughal court, could not merge themselves in the drab greyness of the vast Indian millions and still call their past their own."* Aziz, however, is not a disinterested observer. His very diction reveals that he subscribes to the view that Muslims are inheritors of the Mughals.

Not surprisingly, Aziz traces the idea of Pakistan to the revolt of 1857. However, it was not until 1937 that the fear of Hindu rule and the feeling of separateness led to the idea of a separate nation.

While Aziz sees the idea of separateness as coming from within the Muslim community, other writers suggest that the British had a 6 VP. Menon refers to Jinnah's demand for a corridor to link East and West Pakistan. See The Transfer of Power in India (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957). 370.

7 VP. Menon, The Transfer of Power in India (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957),

361-5. 8 K.K. Aziz, A History of the Idea of Pakistan, Vol. 1 (Lahore: Vanguard, 1982), 2. .

Introduction

5

strong hand in creating this feeling. The British involved the Hindus closely with them rather than the Muslims, knowing well that a new sense of Hindu nationalism could be fanned by reminding them that they had been dominated for over a hundred and fifty years by the Muslims. The most important figure who saw the separateness of the Muslims was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, however, did not see the Muslims and Hindus living separately. What he emphasized was Muslim self-awareness. He exhorted the Muslims to take advantage of the new western knowledge while, at the same time, preserving their Islamic values. The first clear formulation of the two-nation theory was in the May 19, 1888 issue of Rafique-i-Hind, a weekly of Lahore, founded by Muharram Ali Chisti. "Is it not true," the editorial asked, "that Muslim national nghts are suffering due to domination of another nation?"? Abdul Halim Sharar, a journalist and writer, wrote novels set in the times of the Crusades, the Islamic empire in Spain, and

the early days of Muslim rule in India, to remind Muslims of the great past of Islam. Communal nots in 1880 shook him, and he wrote an editorial in the weekly journal Muhazzib on August:23 in which he advocated that Hindus and Muslims should occupy different areas. Times are such that the religious rites of one nation cannot be performed without ignoring the susceptibilities of the other. Nor is there the element of patience to ignore insults. If things have reached such a stage. it would be wise to partition India into Hindu and Muslim provinces and exchange the population. The Hindus seem to be of the view that they should not allow Muslims to be their neighbours. Neither do they like to convey the jingle of their temple bells to the Muslim infidels. nor do they themselves like to hear the Azan. Surely this position would be acceptable to Muslims because they

too seem tired of Hindus.!° 9 Quoted in Aziz. 41. 10 Translated by A.S. Khurshid and quoted in "Origin of Pakistan: Partition," The Pakistan Times. March 23, 1962. Cited in Aziz, 43.

Trends

that Led to

6

A Divided Legacy

Aziz notes, however, that Sharar's Urdu original did not use the

Urdu word for province, but the word az/a, the plural of zila, district. He suggests, therefore, that, strictly speaking, Sharar was not advocating a partition of India but a relocation of Hindus and Muslims in order to avoid communal clashes. But, as Aziz points out, this idea of relocating people on a mass scale on the basis of their professed religion was not something that had been thought of or planned earlier. Thus, though the language was vague, people were beginning to talk about separation. Aziz describes three stages in the movement towards Partition: 1. The realization of the gravity of the communal problem: 2. The voicing of the need for and possibility of separation: and 3. The realization of a political division — though this last was arrived at slowly and almost reluctantly.

As Aziz notes, this last step of physical separation and political division was a revolutionary step which most feared to take. While most moderate Indian politicians spoke about a united India and secularism, there were always a number of radicals who spoke on the one side of a separate homeland for the Muslims and on the other of a Hindu India. An editorial comment in Arya Vir clearly reveals the attitude of the radical Hindu. The time is not far when this Islam shall be abolished for ever from India and anybody. even Mahatma Gandhi, who helps directly or indirectly in propagation or defence of Islam, shall be regarded as the enemy of this country and swaraj, and no true-hearted Hindu shall keep any relations with such persons. ... Now we will practically show to Muhammedans and some of their swarajist friends that if they are desirous of seeing an atmosphere of peace and unity in India, it must be their first duty to drown this Islam in the Ganges forever; Hindus cannot tolerate Islam for long, because it has not

only caused a great harm to the Hindu nation, but has also prevented India from getting swaraj. So long as the present Islam is not reformed and it is an obstacle in the path of the welfare and freedom of this country, Hindu-Muslim unity is utterly impossible. ... Time will come when this country will have Aryan rule once more. Then Islam will be properly reformed or people will be heard calling

Introduction

7

Abdul Rashid and Muhammad Amin by the name of Ram Sarup and

Ram Das. . .!! While the idea of Partition was generally mooted by Muslims, the first clear idea of partitioning was expressed by Lajpat Rai. Lajpat Rai wanted independence so badly that he was willing to set up a Muslim state in India if that was the only way to win freedom. Under his scheme, the Muslims would have four states: North-West

Frontier, western Punjab, Sind, and east Bengal. He also suggested that if there were other Muslim majority areas large enough to form a province, they should be similarly constituted. "If there are compact Muslim areas in any other part of India, sufficiently large to form a province, they should be similarly constituted. But it should be clearly understood that this is not a united India. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non Muslim India."!* Though Lajpat Rai spoke of Bengal as a Muslim majority area, East Bengal was not always on the minds of the people who spoke of a homeland of the Muslims. This was all the more surprising because the All India Muslim League had been formed in Dacca in 1906. Thus, when the poet Iqbal gave his clarion call for a homeland of the Muslims at the All India Muslim League conference at Allahabad in 1930, he conveniently ignored Bengal. I would like to see Punjab. NWFP. Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to be the final destiny of

the Muslims at least of North-West India.'*

In 1940 at a meeting of the All India Muslim League at Lahore, a resolution was passed formally asking that "geographically contiguous units" where Muslims were in the majority should be constituted into "independent states." 1 tyya Vir, June 25, 1927. Cited Aziz. 140. 12 The Tribune. Lahore. December 14, 1924. Cited Aziz. 145.

13 All India Muslim League: Allahabad Session: December 1930: Presidential Address by Dr. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Barrister-at-Law. Cited Aziz, 193.

8

A Divided Legacy

Though, as Aziz notes, there were at least 170 statements that

called for a separate homeland for the Muslims, independence and partition when they did come came suddenly. The first clear statement given by the British of their intention of leaving India mentioned their date of departure as mid-1948. On June 3, 1947. however, Mountbatten announced that the British would leave in August that same year. This act of bringing the date forward is in

itself an example of the haste with which Partition finally took place. Anita Inder Singh notes that the transfer of power by the British to India and Pakistan was a last-minute decision prompted by administrative exigencies. Before August 1947, the British had cited Hindu-Muslim differences as a pretext to prolong empire. They wound up the Raj when these differences were exacerbated to breaking point. Inder Singh suggests that the British agreed to independence for a number of reasons. They realized that their ability to enforce law and order had greatly diminished. Though they had broken the Quit India movement of early 1943, they realized their inability to deal with large-scale disturbances in future. They could no longer take the loyalty of Indians at all levels of administration for granted. Air force and naval mutinies in January and February 1946 confirmed the split in the military base of the empire. Britain's own post-war domestic and international commitments ruled out the alternative of recruiting British citizens to the ICS and armed forces, Neither the British nor Congress wanted Partition. Inder Singh suggests that Britain wanted a united India within the imperial security system so as to be able to use India's army and economic resources for military purposes. Britain wanted such guarantees before transfer of power took place and it was in these circumstances that Britain let "the threat of Pakistan" hang over the heads of the Congress so that they would give Britain the military facilities it wanted. One wonders whether the threat of a partitioned India didn't allow the British to play with Congress and Jinnah until the game no longer remained a game. The very absurdity of a country made up of separate wings, and where, under any circumstances, millions of Muslims would have to remain behind in India leads one to wonder

whether the idea of Pakistan wasn't a game plan that went wrong.

Introduction

9

Inder Singh notes how communal feelings ran high after the Cripps mission. Singh suggests that these feelings were deliberately allowed to run high to permit Britain to better bargain with Congress. Communal propaganda by the League reached a peak during the elections of 1945-6 and was kept up while the negotiations between _the Cabinet Mission and Indian parties were in progress. There are reports of the League, Akalis and the RSS organizing private armies. There is no mention of provincial action against them, or of Congress trying to counteract them, so that communal propaganda had a free hand at the time.

While communal feelings ran rampant, Jinnah called for "Direct Action" in Calcutta. The communal violence that took place as result of this action plus the communal riots in Noakhali led to even further rumours and further communal trouble. In Bihar and U.P. and then in the Punjab in March 1947 communal violence broke out on such a massive scale that the police and military seemed unable to deal with it. Jinnah accused the British of deliberately allowing the violence to get out of hand.'* Several writers have accused Jinnah of arrogance and vanity, of a refusal to play second fiddle to Gandhi or Nehru. But, as Khosla points out, Jinnah was deliberately used by the British to wrest concessions out of the Indians. Mountbatten believed that he would be Govermor-General of both India and Pakistan, with Nehru Prime Minister of India and Jinnah Prime Minister of Pakistan. The propaganda, however, worked even better than the British realized, and Jinnah became the father of a nation

even before he knew it. Ian Stephens suggests that it was Mountbatten's vanity that led to the haste — and to the chaos — that attended Partition. He notes that

the Atlee government had announced in February 1947 that power would be transferred not later than June 1948. Mountbatten came to — after Mountbatten had demanded and received Delhi in March plenipotentiary powers.'> In May Mountbatten decided to accelerate 14 The Times, March 28, 1946. 1S tn the "Second Nehru

Memorial

Lecture," given on November

14, 1968, Mountbatten

described how he had told Atlee that he would only accept the Viceroyalty if he were allowed to make his own decisions in India. The Viceroy had until then been under the

10

A Divided Legacy

the programme of'transfer. On June 4, he disclosed that the transfer would take place in mid-August that year, merely ten weeks later. Ian Stephens points out the drastic consequences of this haste. Inevitably, therefore, the operation would become a scuttle. All sorts of important things, which might have been arranged in a more orderly manner under the previous programme, would now need to be done less tidily. However, done the job was, with wonderful speed, and most people would admit, in the very adverse circum-

stances with wonderful completeness. . . .!° Stephens goes on to note, however, that the transfer of power was

attended with nots and massacres—and was not the complete success that Mountbatten would have liked people to believe. He suggests that the massacres of several hundred thousand people, the displacement of several million, the Kashmir dispute, all these might

have been avoided had more time been allowed and the date of independence not been hastened. However, Stephens does note that it might also have been possible that, had Partition been delayed, there might have been "a fairly speedy stride into general chaos; the danger that by June '48, a state of affairs would have been reached wherein no functional Government or Governments existed to which power could be transferred." Given the rhetoric, and given the obvious dislike of Mountbatten and Nehm for Jinnah, a point Stephens notes, this possibility was also likely. Whatever the reason for the almost unseemly haste with which independence came, what did transpire was that boundaries were orders of the Secretary of State for India. Mountbatten insisted that the Secretary of State would have to support and accept that decision. "Atlee consulted Stafford Cripps, and even after twenty-two years I can remember his next words: 'You are asking for plenipotentiary powers above His Majesty's Government. No one has been given such powers in this century.’ There was silence for quite a while, then he went on: ‘Surely you can't mean this?’ ‘Escape at last’, I thought as I firmly replied that I did indeed mean just that and would quite understand if as a result the appointment was withdrawn. But Cripps nodded his head and Atlee replied, 'All right, you've got the powers and the job'." "Reflections on the Transfer of Power and Jawaharlal Nehru," The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lectures: Being the Four Lectures Given in the Years between 1966 and 1971 (London: The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust: 1973), 20.

16 "7 ecture on Pakistan," Prepared for delivery at The Cambridge University, Feb. 24, 1969.

Centre

of South

Asian

Studies,

Introduction

11

demarcated without paying heed to the logic of such demarcation. Not only was this demarcation done in haste, it was also done by a man who did not know India and who had recourse only to a map. But even then, it seems absurd that any one, in his right mind could have thought of a country composed of two provinces separated by 950 miles of foreign territory. Looking back at the years preceding 1947, one even wonders how serious were the people who spoke of a homeland for the Muslims or who spoke of areas where Muslims dominated as going to form a separate country. Choudhary Rahmat Ali, who is credited with the idea of Pakistan, did not have one Pakistan in mind but three.

Initially he thought of Pakistan as consisting of Punjab, N.W-F.P., Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. In 1940, however, encouraged

by the reception of this idea by the Muslim

League, he added

— and — comprising of Bengal and Assam the idea of Bangistan — comprising of Hyderabad. Rahmat Ali saw a vision Osmanistan of "Dinia" which he defined as follows: Dinia is the new designation and destiny of the old, antediluvian "India," which is dying its well-deserved death. It is obvious that the

word "Dinia" is composed of the letters of the word "India" itself and that, in the arrangement of letters, there is only one change. This is the transposition of the letter "d" in "India" to the first place.

That is all.'7 The sudden decision of the British to leave and to partition India meant that not only was Rahmat Ali's suggestion of three Muslim states forgotten, but so too was the Lahore Resolution which had spoken of states. The immense power that the British delegated to Sir Radcliffe further meant that areas which Muslims assumed would fall to them did not. Khosla, for example, notes that, knowing that the demarcation of the boundaries would upset many people, the Radcliffe Commission wisely delayed publishing until after August 15, 1946. People who went to sleep thinking that they were part of

Pakistan woke up to find that they had been allotted to India. There are also suggestions of unfaimess. S.M. Burke and Salim Al-Din 17 Cited by Gopal Das Khosla, 9.

12

A Divided Legacy

Quraishi in The British Raj include a letter from Noel-Baker to Atlee, dated February 26, 1948, which mentions Radcliffe's having

shown the planned division to "the authorities in Delhi."!® Radcliffe subsequently modified his award. The awarding of the Muslim majority area of Gurdaspur to India could only have been done after receiving suggestions from people interested in withholding the area from Pakistan and allowing India access to Kashmir. O.H.K. Spate noted, as early as 1948, both the unique nature of Pakistan — and its vulnerability. "The unique layout —two great blocks of territory separated by 950 miles of India is inherently vulnerable, and each unit in itself in also difficult to defend."!9 In words that are almost prophetic, he foresaw the problem that the smaller, less resourceful province would have with the larger one. Spate believed that East Pakistan could only be kept going with help

from West Pakistan, but he questioned how long this support would continue, noting “there are already signs (in the centralization of services in Western Pakistan) that Eastern Pakistan is regarded as a poor relation, as indeed it is. It seems not entirely impossible that Westem Pakistan might fail to support Eastern Pakistan in peace and then have to spend far more to prevent by war its absorption into India."*° In 1971, while East Pakistan was not absorbed into India, the factors that Spate mentioned in 1948, did result in the break-up of Pakistan, a break-up which was undoubtedly helped by Indian support for the Bangladeshi nationalists, but which was inevitable given the absurdity of the partition and the boundaries of Pakistan. The haste with which the entire business of handing over power was completed, coupled with the releasing of communal emotions resulted in riots that racked Bengal and Punjab. Most people were caught unawares in the political act and had to move rapidly. In the confusion and the spate of rumours, feelings ran high. And as millions of people started moving — eastward and westward depending’ on '8 $M. Burke and Salim Al-Din Quraishi. The British Raj in India: An Historical Review (Karachi: O.U.P., 1995), Appendix F.

I9OHK. Spate, “The Partition of India and the Prospects of Pakistan," Geographical Review,

Vol. 38: 1, p.24. 20 Spate, 28.

Introduction

13

their religion — people wreaked vengeance for crimes real or imagined. Looting, raping, killing continued on a scale unprecedented in the history of India. Hindus accused Muslims of ghastly crimes and vice versa; Pakistanis accused Indians of ghastly crimes and vice versa. Undoubtedly the riots resulted in unprecedented bloodshed, though it is also possible that some of this was exaggeration. In 1948, the Government of India set up a Fact Finding Organization to provide an accurate account of the happenings in West Punjab, the North-West Frontier and Sind. Thousands of refugees were examined and their statements recorded. As Khosla points out, attempts were made to check the veracity of the witnesses. Many of the victims exaggerated their sufferings. Much of the evidence was rejected because it could not be verified. Khosla stresses that the work of the organization was not to counter the "exaggerated accounts of the atrocities perpetrated in East Punjab" that had been published in Pakistan and that had received support from the government of Pakistan. Nevertheless, the fact that the Fact Finding Organization was only meant to examine the cases of West Punjab, the North-West Frontier and Sind suggests that it was indeed to counter the claims of the refugees moving to Pakistan. Despite the elimination of all unverified reports, Khosla's report suggests the violence and tragedy of Partition. Given the violence that attended Partition, given the traumatic movement of millions of uprooted people, it is not surprising that 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 tumed into battle cries or calls for vengeance strew the literature that emerges immediately after independence.

Saadat Hasan Manto and Kishan Chander use Urdu to describe this

violence; Khushwant Singh uses English. What is surprising, however, is that some writers who witnessed violence chose not to talk about it. While this is generally the case with Bengali writers, who ignored the riots to describe the attempt at building a new homeland, or on finding a new home, or on. the

14

A Divided Legacy

continued struggle for a new order that independence had promised but not achieved, this silence is even more striking in someone like Qurratulain Hyder. Twice, once in Aag ka Darya and again in Akhri Shab ke. Humsafar translated as Fireflies in the Mist, she writes about the years before and after Partition, but chooses to remain silent about the Partition year. Both the discourses and the silences are significant. This study, therefore, focuses not only on what are called "Partition novels," that is, novels like Khushwant Singh's

Train to Pakistan and Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges, but also novels like Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka Darya where the chapter on Partition contains only two words, "Hindostan — 1947," and Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day where Partition appears only as distant fires or an empty house next door. Thus even as the Partition forms, as Robert Ross notes, a myth

from which writers continue to draw again and again, there are many Partitions, many treatments of Partition.2! These differences range from the melodramatic realism of Khushwant Singh, with his focus on the train massacres in the Punjab, to Salman Rushdie's plethora of events and confusion of identities. But this difference is not just that between realism —which Singh shares with later writers like Manohar Malgonkar and Chaman Nahal — but in the acceptance of Partition and the recognition of the hybridity that is the identity ofthe subcontinental person today. Moreover, at this distance, while a writer like Amitav Ghosh can see the blurring of lines that divide the two nations, there is a recognition that Partition is part of our history. This study attempts to examine the novels written on the Partition and independence of India and Pakistan in three major languag es: English, Bengali and Urdu. A few novels in Hindi and Punjabi have also been included as these are available in translation. I am not including short stories—except in passing. Any study which attempts to include novels in several languages is bound to suffer an unwieldiness. However, the choice of novels in several languag es is deliberate. Partition was a momentous event in the history of the -_

21 "The Emerging Myth: Partition in the Indian and Pakistani Novel", ACLALS Bulletin 7 (1986): 63-69.

Introduction

15

subcontinent. It was the first time that a country which had been brought together over a period of time had been deliberately, at one stroke, separated into three bits. The violence of that division and the suddenness of it could not but affect the psyche of the people who had been thus divided. While India never accepted that division, Pakistan attempted to justify it on the basis of the two-nation theory which was disproved with the emergence of Bangladesh and which contemporary studies of Jinnah suggest might have been more of a bargaining tool and an idea than a real demand. Furthermore, the creation of Pakistan was attended almost immediately in the eastern province by the Language Movement. This was essentially both a cultural and political struggle and was reflected in a search for identity as well as in socialistic outpourings in poetry and fiction. Despite individual differences, it would not be wrong to suggest that East Bengali novels depict this search for a new identity even as they depict a struggle which has not ended. The novels of the three regions therefore, in essentials, suggest the dominant ideologies of

their nations. Meenakshi Mukherjee has suggested that the Indian writer who writes in English is more Indian than one who writes in a regional language.? Taken to the logical conclusion this should mean that the Indian who writes in English should share a common outlook with the Pakistani who writes in English. But, if we examine the writings of Sidhwa

and Sipra we

see that, in the need to establish their

credentials as Pakistani writers, they both begin with the Partition and with the event which has become the symbol for the Partition in Punjab: the train massacre. At the same time, despite their differences, they both stress a more positive side to Jinnah than reflected in other writings from the subcontinent— though, recently, both Shashi Tharoor in Zhe Great Indian Novel and Mukul Kesevan in Looking Through Glass depict a more sympathetic treatment

of Jinnah. On the other hand, Bengali writers differ, depending on whether they are writing in East Bengal or West Bengal. West Bengali Butcher (London: 22 "In Search of Critical Strategies." The Eye of the Beholder ed. Maggie 142-3. Hutchinson, 1963: rev. 1970).

16

A Divided Legacy

novelists speak of displacement, East Bengali novelists, when they are not writing about a new identity, describe a struggle that is not yet over. Post-colonial writers differ from their predecessors by embracing the Raj, suggesting a hybridity that includes the Raj, even if this inclusion, as in Tharoor, is comic. As the world becomes smaller, thanks to the electronic explosion, the differences that emerge in the visions of these different writers might appear absurd, but the reality of borders inspires Partition fiction — even when a deep sense of humanity imbues the writer. Thus Faiz, despite his sadness, and Manto, despite his bitter criticism of rank communalism, accepted the creation of Pakistan. One of the chief differences perhaps between Indian and Pakistani novels on the Partition is that, despite all the sadness in Indian novels, there tends to be a sense of euphoria attendant on independence. This is not always so in Pakistani novels. Though Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's novel, The Heart Divided ends on an optimistic note, she avoids the Partition itself. Urdu novelists such as Abdullah Hussain in Udas Naslein and M. Aslam in Ragqs-i-Iblis show, like Faiz, the failure of Pakistan to live up to its promi se for Abdullah Hussain — though and for M. Aslam this promise is different. This sense of failure is even greater in novelists such as Bapsi Sidhwa and Mehr Nigar Masro or again, in the case of Sidhwa, the need to — though proclaim her Pakistani identity prevents too great a questioning on her part. It is perhaps worth remembering that, while India celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1997 albeit under the shadow of cormuption in high places and accompanied by the rumbli ngs in Kashmir, celebrations in Pakistan were muted. There didn't seem much to celebrate about in Pakistan, still struggling under the stranglehold of feudalism, still coming to terms with the loss of its eastem wing. In Bangladesh, where the Muslim League had been formed and from where the Tiger of Bengal had emerge d to give at

Lahore that clarion call for Partition that came to be known as the

Lahore Resolution, there was no celebration. A new generation of East Bengalis had forgotten, that, along with progressives who believed that the struggle was not yet over, there had been writers

like Abu Rushd and Abul Fazl who had seen in the creation of

Introduction

17

Pakistan the creation of a new identity and the beginning of a new dawn. This study attempts to examine these different responses to

Partition by different writers and to show that, despite individual differences, the ideology of the nation affects the writer's response.

Gearon ois

“WaPo! wae od bre rt wt Ro ne a Here yp eeeriy seeds onl

AnbbtMial wits ae wente “or”tae aAis

itw

oe ‘etapa we teainw atShale vo * *

“rT

eer Whee

trie

“We.

¥

,

i

aig :

—

_

:

Chapter One

MASSACRES

AND MADNESS

Rioters brought the running train to a halt. People belonging to the other community were pulled out and slaughtered with swords and bullets. The rest of the passengers were treated to halwa, fruits and milk. The chief assassin made a farewell speech before the train pulled out of the station: "Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies. News of this train's arrival was delayed. That is why we have not been able to entertain you lavishly the way we wanted to." — Saadat Hasan Manto.

The Indo-English writers who had begun writing in the twenties and thirties fell silent in the years immediately succeeding Partition and the creation of the two states of India and Pakistan, or chose to write about the years before Partition —if they did not avoid this subject all together. As K.K. Sharma and B.K. Johri note, "This unfathomably tragic and momentous event has not stirred the creative imagination and urge of many Indian-English writers; only a few novelists have treated it seriously and what is more surprising is that none of the foremost fictionists — Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Bhabani Bhattacharya— has concentrated upon it in any one of his novels."! Bhabani Bhattacharya explains this silence by suggesting that the writers were "too dazed by recent history to make it their 1 ‘The Partition in Indian-English Novels (Ram Nagar: Vimal Prakashan, 1984), i.

20

A Divided Legacy

material." But he also notes that in western literature the two world wars have provided a rich source of material for novels.* What made westem writers live through history "undazed?" Thus, R.K. Narayan writes Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) and Kamala Markandaya writes Some Inner Fury (1955). Ahmed Ali follows Twilight in Delhi with Ocean of the Night in 1964, contrasting the Muslim splendour of the past with the 1930's sordidness of Lucknow. Raja Rao and Bhabani Bhattacharya completely ignore the Partition. Mulk Raj Anand who had in Untouchable (1935) written about the impact of Gandhi on the untouchable Bakha, does not, however, completely ignore Partition. His socialistic sympathies make Private

Life of an Indian Prince (1953) — though Partition does not form its central subject —a study of the impact of Partition on the lives of the rulers of the princely states who found after independence that they were no longer wanted in a democratic nation. For the immediate impact of Partition on creative writing one must turn not to Indo-Anglian fiction, but to Urdu writing, particularly the works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Manto's brilliant and vitriolic

pen had already shocked his audiences with his stories of life's stark realities, of lust and human sexuality. Though he moved to Pakistan, Manto saw that the violence and horror of Partition did not spare anyone, and that both Muslims and Hindus were equally capable of the greatest cruelties. Manto's forte was the short story — including the form of the grim anecdote, an example of which forms the epigraph to this chapter. In his hands this form is moulded to focus on the dark horrors and tragic ironies that attended Partition and independence. Moving from the black humour of the stories of the dog who belongs to neither Muslims nor Hindus and the madman who belonged to one country and now belongs to another, to the tragic story of the girl gone mad after repeated rapes so that she no longer recognizes her father accept as a rapist Manto gives the starkest and bleakest pictures of Partition. Even though most 2 “Literature and Social Reality," The Aryan Path, Vol. XXVI: 9 (Sep. 1995): 396. 3 Saadat Hasan Manto, Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, tr. Khalid Hasan, (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997), includes these three stories: "The Dog of Titwal,"

"Toba Tek Singh," "The Return."

. Massacres and Madness

21

westem readers—and many from the subcontinent would have to approach Manto through translations —the horror is strikingly manifested. No other writer perhaps has approached the bleakness and

pessimism of Manto. Even while writing about the horrors of train massacres and rape, the writer in Urdu, Hindi or Punjabi stops short

of the sheer horror of Manto. Nor do all writers share Manto's

depths of despair. Part of this is the result of the genre. No novel can sustain the heightened intensity of the shorter form. There has to be some sort of resolution at the end of the novel, in addition to quieter sections interspersed throughout. M. Aslam's Raqs-i-Jblis purports to be a portrait of a world presided over by a rejoicing devil. But even Aslam does not portray a world without hope. Despite the several stories of Hindu cruelties to Muslims — this partisan novel does not show Muslim cruelties to Hindus or Sikhs— Aslam suggests that, even in the midst of the horrors and madness of Partition, individual friendships cross religious divides. Most novels of north — tend to focus — and later English India, in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi murders, massacres, Train Partition. on the violence attending which in fiction this abductions, rapes are recurrent motifs in the displacement of population forms just one additional theme. Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka Darya is exceptional not only in that it focuses on nostalgia and loss as the aftermath of Partition, but also in the fact that, in a novel that traverses centuries and includes the Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and British-Indian periods before

focusing —in two-thirds of the novel —on the generation that witnessed Partition and was soon to be separated by that event, Partition itself is dismissed in a chapter of simply two words: "“Hindostan— 1947." Did nothing happen that year? Or was it too

horrible to be noted? To those who do not know, the chapter says

nothing. And for those who do, perhaps it is not necessary to repeat the descriptions of that traumatic moment. In a manner of speaking, the silence that attends Hyder's depiction of 1947 is also present in the writing in Bengal. Representative Bengali writing does not deal with riots and murders. ed Instead, in both the Bengals, East and West, the fiction is concern with displacement rather than with violence and death. Despite the

22

A Divided Legacy

riots that occurred in Calcutta and Noakhali, the stories that emerged from Bengal have not been about looting and killing as about leaving and loss or, in the writing of East Bengali writers, either the hope of a new dawn or the search for a new identity. In the east, as Sukanta Chaudhuri noted, the business of adjusting to the new life took considerably longer and Partition was thus in a sense never really over.* Hence the nostalgia about homes left behind, hence also the absence of the sense of a new beginning. Another reason — conscious or unconscious — for the reluctance of the Bengali writer to bring in the violence of Partition might also stem from the commonality of

language, which for most writers socialistically inclined — as most top-ranking Bengali writers have been — superseded the difference created by religion and the politics of Partition. Just as Qurratulain Hyder in both Aag ka Darya and Fireflies in the Mist omits the Partition year, the Bengali writers of both East and West Bengal obliterate the violence of Partition from their racial memory. For the East Bengali writer, Partition and independence were soon followed by the Language Movement and the consciousness of the differences that existed between them and the people of West Pakistan rather than the differences between them and West Bengal. Thus the predominance of the motif of displacement which occurs eitheras a historical necessity or because of the manoeuvres of politicians —not because of irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims. Briefly then, looking at the fiction of the fifties, one can see a distinct pattern emerging: in the west and north, Partition is attended by violence, by rape, by massacre and mutilation. In the east it is attended by displacement. These are, of course, not always mutually exclusive. Thus, displacement is also a theme in Attia Hosain's

Sunlight on a Broken

Column

which includes a train massacre

towards the end of the book. Johri and Sharma suggest that Mulk Raj Anand avoided writing about Partition because he had been away from the Punjab and did not "see and feel the actualities of

the Partition." Referring to Balachandra Rajan, they note that he has dealt with the theme of Partition only "cursorily". I believe, 4 Personal Interview, New Delhi, Nov. 1996.

Massacres and Madness

23

however, that Anand's treatment of Partition, like Rajan's, differs in

perspective rather than degree. In this chapter I intend to examine Mulk Raj Anand's Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), and Balachandra Rajan's The Dark Dancer (1958) to show their different responses to the trauma of Partition. In each of these novels we get an image of "chassis" and change. The treatment of this change is, however, different in each writer. Anand describes

the effect of Indian independence on the Indian princes; with Anand's socialistic views, a parasitic aristocracy has to go — even though the narrator does succeed in arousing sympathy for the prince who is forced to sign the Act of Accession. Singh describes how the communal feelings accompanying Partition rent the happy village of Mano Majra where Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu villagers had coexisted peacefully and even interdependently. Though Partition is accompanied by large-scale violence, epitomized in the train massacres of the Punjab, the final train massacre

does not take place,

suggesting that, for Singh, there is still hope. Ralph J. Crane echoes Johri and Sharma, saying that The Dark Dancer is not a "partition novel."> However, Rajan too includes a train massacre — which, with Manto and Khushwant Singh, becomes the symbol of the violence attending Partition. Moreover, the mob attack which causes the protagonist to lose his wife is caused by the communal tensions that accompanied Partition and independence. In The Novel in the Third World (1976), Charles Larson notes the difference between early and later third world novels. The main difference that Larson points out is "a marked evolutionary

from the collective consciousness to the individual consciouspattem ness."° This pattern Larson sees as follows: © communal consciousness (little or no introspection)

e individual consciousness (introspection)

e group focus

e individual focus

(no main character)

(main character)

3 Ralph J. Crane, Inventing India: A History of India (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 136.

in English Language

6 Charles Larson, The Novel in the Third World (Washington DC: Inscape, 1976), 175.

Fiction

24

A Divided Legacy

e situational plot (conflict is usually triggered by outside events — exposure to another culture)

e plot is secondary to character development (conflict tiggered by personal problems)

e use of cultural materials (anthropological backgrounds, etc.)

e development of individual — states of mind — of differing emotional states (the furniture of the mind)

None of the novels written in the fifties were "early" novels, strictly speaking. Indo-Anglian novels had begun as early 1868 when Bankim Chandra Chatterji wrote Ram Mohun's Wife in English — before, like Michael Madhusudan Dutt he too gave up writing in English and tumed to Bengali. The "flowering" of the Indo-Anglian novel had, however, taken place in the 1930's with the writings of Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand. In these writings, despite the presence of "individual consciousness" in a novel like Untouchable, the "communal consciousness" predominates. While Anand depicts a day in the life of the untouchable Bakha, he also projects the importance of Gandhi not only in Bakha's life but on Indian life in general. Nor is it only Anand who focuses on Gandhi's influence on India in the thirties but also Raja Rao — in Kanthapura — and Narayan — in Waiting for the Mahatma — though, unlike Rao and Anand, Narayan wrote this novel in the fifties. Nevertheless, though the Indo-Anglian novel may claim to have come into its own by the third decade of this century, until its "legitimization" by the awarding of literary prizes to novels such a Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and the opening of Penguin India, Indo-Anglian novels tend to be "early" novels. They lack the critical consciousness of the novels of the eighties, as they lack their acceptance of the post-colonial hybridity. A need to justify the use of English — differently from Raja Rao who was writing as a colonial

subject — is also latent in these writers — many of whom had another tongue. Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh, Balachandra Rajan do not explain their use of English to tell their stories of Partition. Despite this, the use of detail to describe the Indian scene — much

more

evident in Singh and Rajan—results

from perhaps the

Massacres and Madness

25

subconscious need to justify their use of their former master's language. Furthermore, English, after two hundred years of British rule, was the only link language not only with the erstwhile masters but also with the other parts of the Indian Union which, no longer united against a common enemy, was split into several states, each with its own regional state language. Above all, however, the need

to understand what had happened, to come to terms with the forces that had rent the land and, at least in Anand's case, with private demons and socialist ideals, led these writers, each in his own way, to explain what happened when India gained independence but also fell apart. Mulk Raj Anand's Private Life of an Indian Princeis subtitled "A Novel," lest any reader imagine it to be anything but fiction. The opening lines, of course, immediately dispel any false notions about the book being anything other than a novel. The reader, gingerly opening the book to wonder what sort of book it is will be pleasantly surprised by the humour of the opening lines. I was deep in siesta in my room in the annexe of Sham Pur Lodge on the afternoon of a rainy day, when Munshi Mithan Lal, ex-tutor but now Private Secretary to His Highness, came in and twisted the toes of my feet to wake me up. "What's the matter, Munshiji," I asked him as I waited for him to

recapture his breath. I vaguely guessed that one of those things had happened to His Highness which always happened to His Highness. I couldn't tell exactly what it was this time, because anything, any of a thousand different things, could have happened to our prince, especially in the incalculable state of mind in which he had been

ever since he was asked to sign the instrument of accession to the "free India" a few months ago.’

Though this opening paragraph suggests the sad fate awaiting "His Highness" in common with other heads of princely states, the overall

tone is deceptively humorous. Despite the humour in the book, there is also a serious undertone as, through the narrative of the "private life" of an imaginary Indian prince, Anand suggests the follies and foibles

, 1953), 7. Further 7 Mulk Raj. Anand, Private Life of an Indian Prince (London: Hutchinson references to the text will be given parenthetically.

26

A Divided Legacy

of the princely class. It is not until further into the book that the seriousness really starts, and then too guised in humour. Meanwhile, in his masterful fashion, Anand, through his narrator — Dr. Hari Chand — involves the reader in Munshiji's problem. Munshi Mithan Lal — whose

name

is distorted into Mian Mithu,

in keeping with his erstwhile function of tutor and his present parrotlike nature — informs the doctor that His Highness is lost. The Private Secretary is frantic with worry. Others are frantic too. "Mrs. Russell, in the flat below, is also frantic, because her daughte r has not retumed from school" (10). The doctor sinks back into his pillow with a smile. There is no need to worry, he tells Munshij i. "His Highness has probably gone out for a little picnic with Bunti Russell" (10). It is this very thought, however, that has the Private Secretary worried. There is first of all the irate father. Further more, the lower classes are looking for any excuse to get nid of the prince. How could His Highness indulge in any liaison, particul arly at this time when the accession question is not settled? Do you realize the seriousness of this, if His Highne ss has indeed gone out to "eat ashes" with her? Captain Russell has already rung up the police And there will be a first-class scandal ! What with the Praja Mandal people looking for any excuse to damn His Highness, and this accession business not yet settled! Partap Singh has gone

out looking for him in the khud, and the servants are out searching

in all directions towards Annandale, the Lower Bazaar, the Lover's Lane. .. And the rain will not stop! (10)

But this is not the only liaison that the prince has had. The narrator attempts to explain why the poor prince must not be criticized too harshly for indulging in these weaknesses of the flesh. After all, ever since the British Government had controlled the affairs of the princedoms of India, "these princelings had not much to do, after

their precocious childhood in the zenana, expen sive boyhood.in the Chief'

s Colleges, and after all the flattery and adula tion of hangerson like ourselves, except to set about to achieve the only other

conquests left to them, the conquests

over women,

the easiest

victories in our hapless country where the place of women is stil]

governed by Manu Smriti and the Hindu Mitak shra Law...." (13). +

‘Massacres and Madness

27

Vicky, as the Prince is called for short— later in the book, when

things become serious, he is called Victor —has attempted intercourse with Bunti who has led him on. Fortunately for him, Bunti is merely a flirt and he has not completed the act and therefore cannot be charged with rape. Vicky pretends that he is not frightened of Captain Jevons who examined Bunti, but the narrator suggests that the prince had been frightened by the English doctor, as he was always of the British. Before the transfer of power to Indian hands, the prince had lavishly entertained the English official, given presents to Englishwomen. "In his speeches he had always paid the conventional glowing tribute, which the Indian princes were addicted to paying to their masters, though it is true that in private, when the Resident was hostile, or things did not go his own way, he had talked of the courage of Netaji Subhas Bose, the Rani of Jhansi and Raja Mahendra Pratap. After the transfer of power he leaned more and more towards nationalism, though his reluctance to accede to the Indian union, in spite of Sardar Patel's exhortations, showed that he preferred the British paramountcy" (28). The prince, Anand seems to suggest, is both politically and sexually powerless. He is unable to "penetrate" Bunti, and his mistress continually betrays him with his inferiors. Though Vicky has three wives, he is besotted with Ganga Dasi— often called Gangi, for short — who teases him, gets material benefits from their liaison, and continually and openly flirts with others. Vicky is

troubled by his passion for the lowbom, unfaithful Gangi and occasionally waxes nostalgic about his third wife Indira. During the early days of their marriage, they were happy. Indira is the good Hindu wife. But she is jealous, and cannot tolerate Vicky's philandering ways. Gangi is also possessive and, to top it all, she is both unfaithful and greedy. As Vicky ponders the unfaithfulness of Gangi and rues the possessiveness of Indira, the Praja Mandal grows strong. The people of Sham Pur become increasingly politically conscious and vocal. Under the directions of the Praja Mandal, much strengthened by the post-war feeling of revolt current everywhere, and especially by the struggle for fundamental rights in the states, the people of Sham Pur became more than ever vocal. And the suppression of civil and

28

A Divided Legacy

political liberty by the new ministers only added fuel to the fire that had been smouldering for years. Then came the transfer of power from Britain to India, and the attempt of His Highness Maharaja Ashok Kumar of Sham Pur to take advantage of the prevailing chaos, to strike out on his own and assert his independence, by not signing the Instrument of Accession. This brought him into odium all over India. (49)

To get over his feelings of frustration, Vicky goes off on a hunting trip. At least at his hunting lodge and during the hunt, he can get away from his feelings of powerlessness and frustration. But even on the hunting trip, reality catches up with Vicky. The Communists are active even here, and when the doctor emerges from his bath, he is accosted by a young man who exhorts him to join them. "Dr. Shankar, leave the Maharaja and come over to us — you know your heart is with us." The young man disappears as abruptly as he had appeared. Other impacts of Partition are felt even in this remote hunting lodge. The maharaja is eating his breakfast when he realizes that Khuda Bux has cut off his henna-dyed beard. Khuda Bux explains that he has had to do so for fear of his life. He has converted to the Hindu faith in order to save his skin. It transpires that the man from whom Khuda Bux has sought help is intriguing against the Maharaja. These petty intrigues do not disturb the Maharaja, but other things too have changed, as he soon leams during another hunting trip, this time arranged for the Americans. (In pre-independence India, the princes catered to the whims of the British, after independence they cater to the whims of the Americans, the new tulers.) During this trip neither the Maharaja nor the Americans for whom the hunt has been arranged manage to shoot any wild cats. It is Buta, the shikari who shoots both the cheetah — which had been carefully arranged for the pleasure of the would-be hunters — as well as the panther. When he comes for his bukshish, however, Buta is

given less than he expected. What Victor does not realize is that

times have changed. The lower classes are no longer willing to stand abuse from the rich, nor are they willing to accept charity and doles. The lowly shikari Buta is no longer willing to accept just any

Massacres and Madness

29

handout, and starts to argue about the amount he has received for his work. "What is this buk buk?" Victor asked in a gruff voice. "Don't

talk

like that,

Maharaj,"

said

Buta,

half gallant,

half

impudent, even as he bent his head and then joined palms of his coarse, black hands. "What are you barking"? Victor shouted enraged at the man's impertinence. "I'm not a dog, Huzoor," Buta answered back. "We want our fair

wages. And Rai Bahadur won't give them to us."

Victor shouts at Buta, tells him to leave. But Buta is not frightened. Though he is still polite, he stands his ground. "No more begar," said Buta, his face still leaning on his hands. Victor hits Buta who falls back. The others restrain Victor. . Back in Sham Pur, the hartal continues. Though the unrest has begun gradually, and though the agitation has not yet got out of hand, the prince realizes that he cannot keep putting off signing the Instrument of Accession. He goes to Delhi. At Delhi, however, Victor finds that though Sardar Patel had

been sending emissaries to him asking him to sign the Instrument of Accession, Sardar Patel is in no hurry to see him. Victor cools his heels, engages in a little sightseeing and one evening even goes to visit a courtesan. Partition has had its effects here as well. The finest courtesans were Muslims and have all left for Lahore. Victor and his entourage have to make do with "amateur" madams like Rukmani and "amateur" courtesans like Lakshami. Lakshami sings a film song and bursts into tears. There is no knowing how the rest of

the night would have transpired because Munshi Mithan Lal, who has been given the slip, comes hurrying into inform the Maharaja that Sardar Patel has given him an appointment for five in the moming. Victor signs the Instrument of Accession and returns to Sham Pur where he finds everyone in a state of rejoicing at his diminished

state. He asks Hari Chand what he thinks about the changes that have taken place. The doctor, as he always does when he is asked questions that have somewhat difficult or awkward answers, speaks

30

A Divided Legacy

about changes and revolutions. The entire world is going through a process of change. There are revolutions everywhere: the Industrial revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution. He - explains, "the world, and India, as part of that world, is in a ‘state of chassis,'" (232), of change. But the maharaja insists on knowing whether the doctor believes "that the ignorant can rule the world without experience" (233). The doctor says he does. "I believe in men. They have a great vitality in spite of the humiliations [they] have suffered" (233). Meanwhile Gangi has disappeared. Sham Pur rejoices at the victory of the Praja Mandal. Slogans are raised: "Bolo Sham Pur Praja Mandal ki Jai" (240). Political changes take place in Sham Pur. Victor falls ill, depressed over his changed political situation as well as over the betrayal of Gangi. In his illness, he is tended by a nurse called Dorothy. One night the doctor is woken up by Dorothy who complains that Victor was touching her. When she resisted, however, he desisted from his actions and went back to his bed. The doctor agrees to keep guard to prevent Victor from approaching Dorothy again. Victor is accused of causing the troubles in the state. He gets sicker and is taken to England to help him recover. But he cannot get over Gangi. Meanwhile, in a shop he comes across June, a young shopgirl. The girl faints, and Victor takes advantage of the situatio n by showing his concem for her well-being. He sends her home with his ADC, Partap Singh. The next day, he sends her roses and invites her to dinner. The card bears his full name as well as all his titles and honour — knowing s that June, like other Englishwomen, would be naturally attracted to an Indian prince. Though Anand has revealed the Maharaja's full name before, this is the first time that all his titles are disclosed, Suggesting the irony of the situation. Victor has lost all his power, but he can still use the titles and honours inherited through the Mughals and the British: "Lt-Gen.

His Highness, Farzand-i-Khas-i-Daulata-i-Inglishia, Mansur-i-Zaman, Amir-ul-Umra, Maharajdhiraj Sri 108, Sir Victor Edward George, Ashok Kumar Bahadur, K.C.S.1., K.C.LE., D.L. (Benares), Maharaja of Sham Pur" (290).

Massacres and Madness

31

Though Victor — by now the doctor has stopped referring to him as Vicky — manages to carry on a flirtation with June, he has not forgotten Gangi. Occasionally, the doctor sees Victor and Partap Singh whispering, but he does not quite understand what is going on. Then one day, an Inspector from Scotland Yard appears and takes away Partap Singh. It is then that the doctor realizes that Victor has been plotting to murder Bool Chand, whom he suspects of being Gangi's lover. It transpires that Victor and Partap Singh have indeed been successful, and that Bool Chand is dead. Victor

and his staff must leave for Sham Pur the next day. Victor starts talking nonsense: No, no, I don't want to go to Sham Pur. No, no, no, thieves, traitors,

I do not want to hear the echoes of my own voice. I tell you I am the Maharaja of Sham Pur. Are you not frightened of me? .. . Who are you? An Englishman? The Political Resident? No, Sahib, I do not want to hear your voice.... Go! May your face become cursed! ... Do not push me! .. . . Go, go your way! .. . (314)

The doctor realizes that Victor has gone mad. Instead of standing trial, Victor is taken to the mental asylum at Poona. The doctor has to give a brief account of the life of Victor to the attending doctor, though he wonders if that account can explain Victor's madness. A young Englishman, who had given Victor and the doctor a lift to Poona, tells the doctor that he should write the story. "You should write down the private life of our prince, you know. It may be useful for Captain Bhagwat and it may interest other people — it seems a fascinating story" (325). As the doctor thinks about the idea, he realizes that he will have to return to Sham Pur. His mind is made up almost by chance when he finds three letters waiting for him: one from the magistrate at Sham Pur summoning him, another from Munshi Mithan Lal who has been incriminated in the murder of Bool Chand and who now asks the doctor to come to his aid. The third letter is from Indira, informing him that she is coming to Poona to look after her husband. As the doctor wends his way to the waiting taxi he reflects "on the irony and tenderness of a woman's love that would pursue a man even to hell to rescue him when the love was selfless and real"

32

A Divided Legacy

(240). Ending on this sombre and tender note, Private Life suggests that, perhaps, had Victor not been burdened by the trappings of princedom, he might have been a happier man. The ending is, of course, very different from its humorous opening and though the book becomes increasingly serious with Victor, like Lear, falling further and further into madness — even echoing in his mad speech lines from Lear's madness speech — Private Life never quite recovers from the humorous note of its opening. Even though Anand does touch upon the chaos and confusion after Partition, and though there are occasions when he speaks about the loss of life and changes in traditional pattems of living, his concem about the trauma of Partition is diluted in this study of a dying aristocracy in its last throes. It is therefore very different in tone from Train to Pakistan —which moums the end of a world where people had dwelt side by side for generations, in harmony with nature and in tune with the encroaching age of machines —and even from The Dark Dancer which seems to reflect some of Anand's sense of humour and wit. Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan is perhaps the first IndoAnglian novel that focuses on Partition. Along with the writing of Manto and Kishan Chunder, Train to Pakistan entrenched the image of the train massacres in fiction so that it would be called up by later writers when they wanted to stress the violence and inhumanity attending the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The novel was initially titled Mano Majra, but was renamed to focus on the train massacres that form the core of the novel and became the predominant image of the partition of the Punjab. Train to Pakistan tells the story of a small village, Mano Majra, somewhere on the border between Pakistan and India. When the story opens, Sikhs and Muslims are living at peace with each other, but gradually, through a number of accidents, interferences, human greed, Singh depicts the growing rifts. The people who lived in harmony with each other grow apart and even attempt to kill each other. Singh refuses to accept the idea that neighb ours can really tum into enemies, so the real villains of Partition are the dacoits who fall out with one of their number, the officials — the inheritors of the colonial rule—who use human beings as they will, and the

Massacres and Madness

nameless

leaders

who

use

communal

differences

to build

33

up

tensions, and the faceless mob which allows itself to be led. Several forces come into play at the same time: human greed, which leads the five. dacoits to rob and murder the Hindu moneylender, and then leads the dacoits into carrying out the wishes of the magistrate who wishes to get rid of the Muslims —even though the manner in which he permits this expulsion might lead to the death of the young Muslim singer-prostitute who reminds him of his dead daughter.

There is also the communist force in the person of Iqbal — the man who claims to be without a religion, but learns that one must belong to some religion whether it is to get a place for the night or to accept an excuse for being let out of jail. If there is anyone as bad as the dacoits or Hukum Chand the Magistrate, it is Iqbal — Mohammad, Singh or Chand—who talks big about helping people save themselves, but when it comes to saving the train and the doomed people on board, is both cowardly and indifferent. The real hero of the story tums out to be the "number ten budmash," Juggat Singh, who has his unique concept of honour which prevents him from robbing a man of his own village and who attempts, in his own way, to bridge the difference between Sikh and Muslim by making love to the daughter of the Muslim weaver. Let out of jail —let him do something to save the train if he will, thinks the magistrate who has also allowed the dacoits to leave jail to destroy the human cargo aboard it— Juggat Singh cuts the rope across the bridge, even

though he knows that his enemies are hiding in the dark and will not let him escape. In Train to Pakistan, Singh blends the image of the train massacres with the timeless ways of the land and its people which, under the impact of Partition, give way to change. Thus there is the description of the daily life of the people which follows a certain routine, but a routine which is determined by the comings and

goings of the train. When the story begins, the trains are punctual, but, with growing turmoil, the timings become erratic, so that, instead of interspersing the lives of the people and acting as signals for the different acts and meals, the trains disrupt the daily lives. Finally, the train becomes a monster that destroys the harmony of Mano Majra.

34

A Divided Legacy

Though a couple of pages into the book, it appears that things are the same as they always have been, the opening paragraph of the book, describing that summer, hotter and drier than ever before, prepares the reader that something ominous will take place. The summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year. It was hotter than usual, and drier and dustier. And the summer was longer. No one could remember when the monsoon had been so late. For weeks, the sparse clouds cast only shadows. There was no rain. People began to say that God was punishing them for their sins.®

But what are these sins? Communal disturbances that were taking place all over India. The summer before, communal riots, precipitated by reports of the proposed division of the country into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan, had broken out in Calcutta, and within a few months the

death roll had mounted to several thousand. Muslims said the Hindus had planned and started the killing. According to the Hindus, the Muslims were to blame. The fact is, both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped. From Calcutta, the riots spread north and east and west: to Noakhali in East Bengal, where Muslims massacred Hindus; to Bihar, where Hindus

massacred Muslims. Mullahs roamed the Punjab and the Frontier Province with boxes of human skulls said to be those of Muslims killed in Bihar. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs who had lived for centuries on the Northwest Frontier abandoned their homes and fled toward the protection of the predominantly Sikh and Hindu communities in the east. They travelled on foot, in bullock carts, crammed into lorries, clinging to the sides and roofs of trains. Along the way — at fords, at crossroads, at railroad stations — they collided with panicky swarms of Muslims fleeing to safety in the west. By the summer of 1947, when the creation of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people — Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs — were in flight. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in

8 Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 1. Further references to the text will be given parenthetically.

Massacres and Madness

35

terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. One of these villages was Mano Majra. (1-2)

Before the story is over, Singh will show how even in peaceful Mano Majra the communal conflict caused by the political changes has the power to disrupt and disturb. There is nothing exceptional about Mano Majra. The villagers, however, have some claim to importance because of the trains which pass through their village. But Mano Majra was an unimportant stop.

Not many trains stop at Mano Majra. Express trains do not stop at all. Of the many slow passenger trains, only two, one from Delhi to

Lahore in the mornings and the other from Lahore to Delhi in the evenings, are scheduled to stop for a few minutes. The others stop only when they are held up. The only regular customers are the goods trains. Although Mano Majra seldom has any goods to send or receive, its station sidings are usually occupied by long rows of wagons. Each passing goods train spends hours shedding wagons and collecting others. After dark, when the countryside is steeped in silence, the whistling and puffing of engines, the banging of buffers, and the clanking of iron couplings can be heard all through

the night. (4) Khushwant Singh weaves the daily routine of the people with the movements of the trains. But, even as Singh interweaves the lives of

the people with the routine of the trains, he also suggests how the separate religious communities co-existed with each other. Thus he narrates how the moming train rushing through the village on its way to Lahore signals the mullah that it is time to say the moming azaan. The mullah's azaan in turn alerts the Sikh priest that it is time to get up and wash and say his prayers. Before daybreak, the mail train rushes through on its way to Lahore, and as it approaches the bridge, the driver invariably blows two long blasts of the whistle. In an instant, all Mano Majra comes awake. Crows begin to caw in the keekar trees. Bats fly back in long relays and begin to quarrel for their perches in the peepul. The mullah at the mosque knows that it is time for the morning prayer. He has a

36

A Divided Legacy

quick wash, stands facing west toward Mecca and with his fingers in his ears cries in long sonorous

notes,

"Allah-ho-Akbar."

The

priest in the Sikh temple lies in bad till the mullah has called. Then he too gets up, draws a bucket of water from the well in the temple courtyard, pours it over himself, and intones his prayer in monotonous singsong to the sound of splashing water. (4)

Similarly, the rest of the day is interspersed by the sounds of different trains that signal it is time for the other daily chores. Thus, the midday express is the sign that it is midday, time for people to have their midday meal and their afternoon siesta. And, at evening, the train from Lahore signals that it is evening, time for the evening meal. At night, a goods train lumbers through the town, its slow pace symbolizing the end of the day, signalling that it is time for the villagers to retire. "It had always been so, until the summer of 1947" (5). That summer everything is changed, and even the tiny village of Mano Majra is divided by communal disharmony — which, Singh suggests throughout, is caused not by inherent conflicts within the religions or their practitioners, but by outsiders, by political persons, by evil persons who exploit the situation for their own selfish motives. The catalyst for the change in Mano Majra is a dacoity committed by five dacoits, who have fallen out with Juggat Singh. These dacoits, led by Malli, rob the house of Lala Ram Lal, the Hindu moneylender. They are angry with Juggat Singh because he has refused to join them in further dacoities. A "number ten budmash," that is a scoundrel of the highest order who is always questioned in the case of any dacoity or murder, Juggat Singh has just been released from jail on probation. Furthermore, his sense of honour refuses to let him rob the house of a neighbour, even that of a moneylender. While the dacoits are robbing and killing Lala Ram, Juggat Singh is making love to Nooran, the daughter of the Muslim weaver who, half blind now, only calls the azaan. At the same time, Hukum Chand, the Hindu magistrate who is visiting Mano Majrais about to go to bed with the young singér-prostitute who entertained him earlier that evening. Hukum Chand is anxious that the Muslim population of the village leave "peacefully." The gunshots of the

Massacres and Madness

37

dacoits interrupt Hukum Chand's plans and prepare the police for a raid on Juggat Singh's house. Khushwant Singh stresses the absurd nature of the administration when the police arrest Juggat Singh for the murder of the moneylender but also arrest Iqbal, a Communist worker, who everyone, including the police, know came to the village the day after the

murder. Singh comments upon the police behaviour as well as the manner in which the administration used communal differences to cause tensions and then conflicts. People must have a religion, and Igbal's religion is affirmed by the simple device of having him lower his trousers. Iqbal professes to belong to no religion, but, just as the Sikh priest at the gurdwara assumes Iqbal is a Sikh— because, though Iqbal doesn't have a beard, he is wearing an iron bangle and has come to the gurdwara— similarly, the constable at the police station assumes him to be a Muslim because he is circumcised. (Jews are also circumcised, but, in the Indian subcontinent, they are

too few to disrupt the common notion that any circumcised male is undoubtedly a Muslim.) Gradually things start changing. First of all, the season changes. The dry season is followed by the monsoon and by the floods. But more important than the change of season, is the disruption in the train services. At the beginning, this disruption is slight, but then disorder sets in so that the mullah can no longer rely on the whistle of the train to alert him about the dawn. And as the mullah fails, the Sikh priest also falters in his prayers. Instead of ordering the lives of

the villagers, the train now disrupts it. The first gruesome evidence of this change is in the entrance of a silent train from Lahore. There is something very strange about this ghost train from which no passengers emerge, which makes no noise but limps to a halt at the village station. Banta Singh, the lambarder,

the village headman? asks all the villagers to collect kerosene and wood. Wood and kerosene are collected and loaded onto trucks which drive to the station. The train with its ghostly cargo is set on fire. Everyone knows what is on the train, but no one is willing to

% Originally, the lambarder was a collector of revenue, but gradually became more or less the village headman.

38

A Divided Legacy

admit it. It is the horror of this knowledge that terrifies the villagers when it starts raining. If it rains too hard, the fire will be put out and the ghastly contents of the train exposed. Hukum Chand realizes that the Muslims must be got out of the village before something happens. So far things have been all right. How is he going to achieve this evacuation without causing emotions to flare up beyond control? He thinks of using the dacoits and Iqbal. "It would have been more convenient if they had been Mussuiman. The knowledge of that and the agitator fellow being a Leaguer would have persuaded Mano Majra Sikhs to let their Muslims go" (99). Hukum Chand tells the head constable to release the five dacoits who have been arrested after Juggat Singh identified them. Hukum Chand also cleverly suggests to the head constable that he should not only release the dacoits but ask around about Muslim dacoits. This will make people suspicious about Muslims in general. The constable should also enquire about what Iqbal has been up to. These enquiries will arouse the suspicion of the villagers about the outsider Iqbal. The constabie accordingly releases Malli and his men in full view of the villagers — thereby proclaiming their innocence — and asks questions about Muslim dacoits. The constable's visit has some of

the desired result, but the two communities do not turn against

each other. Still friendly, the communities start to realize that they

cannot remain as close as they were before. The Muslims led by Imam Baksh ask the Sikhs what they should do. Banta Singh

suggests that they should take shelter in the refugee camp till things become better. "Uncle," said the lambarder in a heavy voice, "it is very hard for me to say, but seeing the sort of time we live in, I would advise you to

go to the refugee camp while this trouble is on. You lock your houses with your belongings. We will look after your cattle till you come back." (127)

Both the Muslims and Sikhs believe that the departure of the

Muslims from their homes is temporary, but, when the trucks come

to take the Muslim villagers away, they realize that they are being taken

to Pakistan. In the cruellest of moves made by the administration, +

Massacres and Madness

39

Malli is made custodian of their houses and possessions. The dacoits start looting the homes and driving off the cattle left behind by the Muslim villagers. The Sikh inhabitants of the village are unhappy, but say nothing to stop Malli and his cohorts. _ All that morning, people sat in their homes and stared despondently through their open doors. They saw Malli's men and refugees ransack Muslim homes. They saw Sikh soldiers come and go as if on their beats. They heard the piteous lowing of cattle as they were beaten and dragged along. They heard the loud cackle of hens and roosters silenced by the slash of the knife. But they did nothing but sit and sigh. (139)

The change in the villagers of Mano Majra is accompanied by the untoward weather. The hot summer has been followed by heavy rains. The heavy rains usher in floods, but the villagers, rendered apathetic by the change in human relationships, do nothing except wish that the river would rise and drown the entire village, along with Malli, his gang, the refugees and the soldiers. Then one day,

even through their miserable apathy the villagers see the horrible corpses in the swollen waters of the river. The floating bodies of human and animals are not the usual casualties of a flood. The villagers realize that the corpses in the water were not of people who had drowned but of people who had been murdered. But, even before the full impact of the scene can make itself felt or understood, another train enters. The villagers hear a moaning sound, and then they see the train. It had no lights. There was not even a headlight on the engine. Sparks flew out of the engine funnel like fireworks. As the train came over the bridge, cormorants flew silently down the river and tems flew up with shrill cries. The train came to a halt at Mano Majra Station. It was from Pakistan.

The train strikes terror in the villagers who discuss the strange features of the train. "There are no lights on the train."

"The engine did not whistle." "It is like a ghost." (142)

40

A Divided Legacy

This time the villagers are not asked to bring oil and wood. This time a bulldozer digs a huge trench into which the dead bodies are all dumped. That night the entire village seeks shelter in the gurdwara But then another stranger comes to Mano Majra. He is an extremist and more dangerous than the communist, for he incites the Sikhs against the Muslims. He taunts the Sikhs with being impotent, tells them that all Muslims are their enemies. Meet Singh protests, but "the boy" proves that all Muslims are dangerous. Khushwant Singh does not name this youthful agitator. He thus suggests that the forces that destroyed the age-old communal harmony are new and nameless. What must they do to prove their manliness, the villagers ask. The boy tells them that a trainload of Muslims will be going to Pakistan the next day. "If you are men, this train should carry as many dead to the other side as you have received" (155). Meet Singh protests. There will be Mano Majra Muslims on the train. Even dacoits have a code of honour. They do not rob and kill their neighbours. The boy tells him that it is enough that they are Muslim. Laws of peaceful co-existence do not apply to them. Malli volunteers for the deed and is joined by his four companions. Some refugees also join the volunteers. Gradually, some Sikh villagers also join in. "Some villagers who had only recently wept at the departure of their Muslim friends also stood up to volunteer. Each time any one raised his hand the youth said, ‘Bravo,' and asked him to come and sit apart. More than fifty agreed to join the escapade." The boy asks Meet Singh to lead the prayer. Meet Singh refuses. “It is your mission, Sardar Sahib," replied Meet Singh humbly. "You lead the prayer." Iqbal who had talked boldly about change for the downtrodden people of India, does nothing. In Delhi, Nehru orates about India's

tryst with destiny, but, as at Mano Majra, communal forces are used

to force people's more tragic trysts with destiny. All over India women and men keep their trysts with destiny. At Mano Majra, the dacoits have strung a thick rope across the

bridge over which the train must pass. As the train rushes through,

the people siting on top will be swept off. But the dacoit s reckon

Massacres and Madness

41

without Juggat Singh, who proves that he is not a woman to wear bangles, but a hero of a different breed. He knows that Nooran is on the train and that, no matter what might happen to him, he must keep her safe. He keeps hacking at the rope, indifferent to the hail of bullets rained upon him by Malli and his men or the train mshing towards him. The man's body slid off the rope, but he clung to it with his hands and chin. He pulled himself up, caught the rope under his left armpit, and again started hacking with his right hand. The rope had been cut in shreds. Only a thin tough strand remained. He went at it with the 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 to Pakistan. (181)

Khushwant Singh stops at this dramatic point as Juggat Singh falls to his death and the train carrying the Mano Majra Muslims rushes across, safely, to Pakistan. But even as Nooran is saved along with the others, the reader is aware of the sadness of life for her — as for the others displaced from their homes. Poor to begin with, they have nothing now. What life awaits them in the refugee camps in the new land? What fate awaits Nooran, pregnant with Juggat Singh's child? Juggat Singh's mother had told her to go, that Juggat Singh would follow and bring her back. Juggat Singh is dead, and he will never bring her back. How will Nooran live in Pakistan? Though she hasn't been raped, she will join the numbers of those who were raped and therefore be an outcast in a society that condemns the victim more than the perpetrator of the crime. Singh's story is a master work of narration, blending the land and the people with the story of communal differences and the story of how Partition changed everything. Despite the tragic ending, Singh seems to hope that the relationship between the two communities will not always be bad. He achieves this by making the villagers, Sikhs and Muslims, tolerant, if not friendly, neighbours. Furthermore, by making the villains always outsiders like "the boy" or evil-doers like the dacoits willing to commit mischief for personal gain, Singh suggests that normal people do not tum against each other. But

42

A Divided Legacy

normal people do — as Bapsi Sidhwa will show in Jce-Candy-Man or K.S. Duggal in Nahuntey Mas. Evil is not always nameless and faceless. Furthermore, it is not always the "other" that destroys. In Khushwant Singh's portrait, despite their indifference at the end and even their active collusion with "the boy," the Sikh villagers of Mano Majra, in the long run, are guiltless of shedding human blood. All the killings have been done by the other side. And "a number ten budmash" gives his life for the woman who is carrying his child. The Dark Dancer was Balachandra Rajan's first — and perhaps best — novel and drew upon elements of his own life, and upon the Hindu culture which permeated India and mired its people in mindless and expensive rites and ntuals but which also, in its essence, inspired the most beautiful relationships and most meaningful gestures of union with the divine. Focusing as the novel does on the protagonist and his relationship with two women— one his wife by an arranged marriage and the other a past girl friend —the novel seems to be not about Partition. Nevertheless, the narrative which

begins with the protagonist's retum to India, his marriage and the break-up of that marriage until he realizes the truth of the sanctity of Hindu marriage and the ideal of Hindu wifehood, also incorporates Partition. Thus, Krishnan realizes the value of his wife a little too

late. When he goes to her, communal violence has already ravaged India. The train he travels in is full of refugees and, during the journey, he is witness to murder. Krishnan manages to find his wife, but there is no retum to happiness. Kamala is working among refugees, and, though for a few people religion does not matter, the crowds see things differently. Why should Muslims be protected when across the border Muslims have killed Hindus and Sikhs? The violent climax of the novel in which Kamala is killed is inseparably tied to the horrors let loose by the communalism that attended Partition. Like Anand's Private Life, The Dark Dancer begins on a humorous note, with Rajan describing the rites and rituals that greet Krishnan as he returns to India and attempts to find a wife. Rajan entices the reader in to a world where time seems to have stood still—but for the changed perception of the Cambridgeeducated Krishnan who only gives in to these rituals to please his

Massacres and Madness

43

mother. As the novel progresses, with the humour gradually fading but never completely disappearing, Krishnan changes from a disinterested bystander unaware of the massacre at Jallianwala to the witness who has experienced the tragedies of Partition. Knishnan, like Rajan himself, becomes a civiJ servant, this brief episode allowing Rajan to dwell on the role of the civil servant during independence and Partition. But, as the novel moves on to describe the violence that occurred during the time of independence, the communal riots and the train massacres, and then narrates Kamala's meaningless death, a sombre and tragic note enters and even dominates the novel. After Kamala's death, the humour returns — though diluted now with the darkness of human madness and futility—as Krishnan's uncle, who had guided the family through the ancient rituals of India, meaningless and expensive, the rituals of return, or of choosing a bride, now guides them through the rituals that attend a Hindu death. Though Balachandra returns to this humorous and critical note, the essence of Hinduism, the beauty of its ultimate ritual, suggests "a Hindu identity" superior to the Brahminism of the chanting priest. Balachandra shows how Krishnan is changed, in the course of time and as a consequence of events, from the disinterested returnee from Cambridge. Krishnan's introduction to Indian politics and the — who comes freedom struggle begins in Cambridge when Cynthia to India to renew their relationship — tells him on their first meeting, "I can never forgive my countrymen for Jallianwala".!° Krishnan had not known about Jallianwala and had been embarrassed. That night he pours over the history of the Indian National Congress and realizes all that he had not known. But, despite his knowledge of what was happening, he is draw only reluctantly into the struggle. He is present at a demonstration because of his friend Vijayaraghavan, and it is because of the brutal attack by the police on the non-violent demonstrators that he reacts. He is, however, not arrested or taken to

jail. He is quickly removed from the scene, and, a few days later, without any difficulty, joins the administrative service.

10 Balachandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer (New Delhi: Mayfair, 1976), 69. Further references to the text will be given parenthetically.

44

A Divided Legacy

Politically clean despite his participation in the demonstration, Krishnan reports for work at the Secretariat. This provides opportunities for Rajan to describe with some humour the conditions of the civil administration. There are "seventy-two days to freedom" — the title of the chapter describing the day Krishnan joins service — but, instead of describing hectic activity, Rajan describes lethargy and red-tapism. Using the same technique of humour with which he described the Indian ways of arranging a marriage, Rajan describes the unreasonable ways of the Indian civil service — which are those of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi civil service as well. Thus, on Krishnan's first day at office, he is stopped by a chaprassi because he doesn't have a pass. How can he go in to get a pass, if he can't go in without one? "How am I to secure a pass if I can't go in to get one?" The functionary shrugged the illusion of his shoulders. He could not fit his uniform with his physique, but he had no difficulty in filling

it with his authority. "Under-Secretary Sahib will give you a pass." "Then may I see Under-Secretary Sahib?" "Certainly, if you can show me your pass." (57)

The early humour, however, gradually fades as Krishnan faces

complications of a personal and political nature. Cynthia's coming to India coincides with the growing disturbances. Rajan is able to escape detailing the riots and the violence as he focuses on Krishnan's increasing attraction to Cynthia. The absence of his wife, who has gone to attend her ill mother, gives Krishnan an opportunity to indulge

his passion for Cynthia. Meanwhile communal riots take place — the first inkling of these riots is when Krishnan and his guests, who include Cynthia, listen to the radio and hear of mounting carnage in Rawalpindi. This brief episode also gives ‘Rajan the opportunity to bring in different attitudes to Partition. Krishnan blames Cynthia's compatriots, "It's something that comes out of what you did, remember, out of two hundred years of occupation" (75). Vijayaraghavan is apprehensive of bloodshed. While he is happy that India will be free and Indians responsible for themselves, he wonders what the costs +

Massacres and Madness

45

will be. "Who knows what it will cost us and how much blood will flow? — perhaps more even than in half a century's struggle" (75). Kamala goes south to attend her mother. When she retums, she tells Krishnan that the nots of north India are absent in the south. "One isn't aware of the storm. The only tension is the expectancy of freedom" (144). While Kamala was away, Krishnan had given in to his passion for Cynthia. Now he tells his wife about Cynthia. Kamala takes it quietly — like the "traditional" Hindu wife —and leaves one day while he is away at work. After her departure, however, Krishnan realizes how strong their ties are. Krishnan is also forcibly made aware when he and Cynthia go to a temple and the priest refuses to bless them that, though he and Cynthia might be complete in their love for each other, the world of Hindu gods — which he has been least interested in — has repudiated him and his lover. The Hindu marriage is sacrosanct as extra-marital love can never be. Krishnan leaves Cynthia and goes to find Kamala who is now

working in Shantihpur among the refugees. Rajan thus not only validates Hindu marriage but also gives an excuse for Krishnan to undertake a train journey. In the train, as in Shantihpur, Krishnan will witness the horrors of the Partition as he becomes part of sectarian violence. Rajan's reader is drawn slowly, like Krishnan, into the dark abyss of communalism. Krishnan's train is packed, and he takes shelter in the toilet. He finds that it is already occupied by a man in a crumpled dhoti, "a

part of the Tilak mark on his forehead rubbed off, and the nt thread of his Brahminhood showing beneath the soiled shirt with its upper buttons undone" (191). Krishnan asks the man if he has a first class ticket. On learning that the man doesn't, Krishnan asks him to

move off the toilet seat because Krishnan does and that should entitle him to a seat. The man obliges, but fingers his thread nervously. Krishnan wonders why the man is fingering his thread and, believing that the man wants him to identify himself, explains that he too is a Brahmin. "There was a flicker that might have been interest in the man's eyes" (191). However, all Krishnan's attempts to break down the taciturnity of his companion fail. As the train

gathers speed, the man takes out a book from his bedding roll and

46

ADivided Legacy

begins to read it. Krishnan makes out the Sanskrit characters of the book and, in his continued attempt to identify himself, recites the Gayathri, the prayer recited on first donning the sacred thread. The other occupant does not recognize it and assumes it is some South Indian language. Krishnan is surprised that the man does not recognize the prayer that all male Brahmins must learn when they assume the sacred thread. He mistakenly thinks that the man is more of a renegade than he is. But the man, believing that Krishnan has recognized him as a Muslim, takes out a knife. Even at this moment, Krishnan attempts humour. "I never argue with a knife," (194) he says. The man tells him he has no sense of humour. "It got cut with my wife's throat" (194). The man nicks Krishnan to warn him against attempting anything, but Krishnan, to quieten him down, asks him to tell him what happened. The man describes how his wife was raped before his eyes, and admits his shame in leaving his wife and running away. Now that he has started to talk, he cannot stop talking. He relives his anguish, describing how things were before sectarian violence claimed its victims. Even in the midst of unhappiness —a son dead of typhoid, a daughter

married, leaving a void at home — there was a sort of happiness. Thus Rajan contrasts the traumatized lives of hapless victims with their "normal" lives before Partition. The long narrative also gives a chance to Krishnan to tum the tables on the Muslim whose guard is down. Krishnan wrests the knife from him. The Muslim had slightly nicked

Krishnan,

and, though the wound

is a nick, it has been

bleeding for some time and Krishnan starts feeling faint. Knowing that, given a chance, the man will take his knife back and kill him, he thinks of making the first move and killing his companion. But he knows that he cannot. "It was as the man said, he didn't have the guts. The truth was, he would rather die than do it" (200). The train comes to a halt and armed men board the train, killing the Muslim passengers. Krishnan throws the knife back to his companion so that he may defend himself. At this moment, the door of the toilet is flung open and a Sikh enters. What are the two of them doing there? Krishnan tells him he is a government servant and needs privacy for his priority files. The Sikh does not believe him. Krishnan produces his passport, his Secretariat pass, his fuel ration

Massacres and Madness

|47

card, and his wedding photograph. The intruder then tums to the Muslim. The man is silent. Krishnan explains he is a holy man who has taken a vow of silence. The Sikh is not convinced and asks him to take off his dhoti. The Muslim takes out his knife, but the Sikh is too quick. As the man dies, he looks gratefully at Krishnan and blesses him: "Shiva be with you" (203). The Sikh takes the knife out of the Muslim's dead body, and wipes it on the fringe of the dhoti. "When it was bright once more he clapped the flat of the blade tentatively against his thigh" (203). Krishnan is surprised to find that there is no exultation in the gesture, no "chest-beating of the triumphant animal" (203). What is Krishnan staring at, the Sikh asks, disconcerted at Krishnan's glance.

"I've never seen a murder," Krishnan responds. Whose side is he on, the Sikh asks. Krishnan responds that he is an Indian. "It may sound stupid, but I'm on the side of India" (203). The Sikh reacts violently to Krishnan. "You think I'm not Indian!" the Sikh blazed at him furiously. "You think we haven't paid for being Indian? The thousands that are dead and the millions that are left homeless. The rich land abandoned and the lives we left behind. That's been our sacrifice for making India. What have you done that gives you the right to talk?" (204)

Krishnan tries to explain that taking revenge is not a solution. "You pay and they pay and each time the bitterness is bigger and the end of it a little further off’ (204). What is the point of [evelling scores if at the end everyone is "bankrupt" (204). The Sikh refuses to

accept Krishnan's point of view. "It's easy enough for you, "the Sikh retorted, his hands clenching, the anger flaming in his face. "You people sit in air-conditioned offices, decide our fate, agree to our death-warrants.

It's noble to preach

sermons. But it's we who pay for all those fancy principles. What would you feel like if it started to happen to you? What would you do if you came home one night and found the house stripped clean of everything you possessed, and your wife dead on the floor with only the blood for her clothing? What d'you suppose you'd do then? Would you sit on the floor and preach your sermon to her? Would you put your hands in your pockets and tell yourself that somebody

48

A Divided Legacy

somewhere has to die for freedom? Or would you run into the street bellowing brotherly love, and turn the other cheek till they bashed your head in?" (204)

Krishnan apologizes. The Sikh does not hear. Like the Muslim who had mn away as his wife was being raped, the Sikh too had run away leaving his wife on the ground. "I left her there. . . I ran away from it, wanting to forget" (205). But he could not forget, and it was that memory that made him want to kill. He had never killed before. The murder that Krishnan witnessed was his first one. "When my hand went down it wasn't simply my hand. And when it was over, something else was over also. I was different, a chain had suddenly broken. I wasn't owned by the remembrance any more" (205). Krishnan apologizes once more. No, Krishnan was right, the Sikh says, "But this was something which I had to do also" (205). Krishnan agrees that "It's in all of us. . Some day the ember flares up. But most of the time we put it out before it gets to the dynamite" (205). Why was Krishnan trying to save the Muslim, the Sikh asks. Krishnan confesses that he too had wanted to kill the man, but he couldn't do it. "Trying to save him was all I had the nerve for" (206). When the Sikh still can't figure out why, Krishnan tells him, "It's because I'm a Brahmin... My reasoning processes are extremely complex" (206). It is not only the Brahmin Krishnan who has complex emotions, as Rajan shows. The Sikh, his blind need for revenge over, becomes human again. He helps to bandage Krishnan's wound and even gives him a lift in his jeep to the camp where Kamala works and where Krishnan's wounds are attended by the Medical Officer. Very soon Knishnan finds himself caught up in the life of the camp, attending the patients with Kamala and the Medical Officer. One day, a man stricken with cholera is brought into the camp hospital. One cholera victim means others must be infected-as well. But it isn't easy to warn them, the Medical Officer tells Krishnan and Kamala. "The trouble isn't simply that he has cholera. The trouble is that he's a Moslem also" (225).'' Kamala insists that something has 'l Rajan uses the spelling "Moslem." I use the spelling "Muslim" which is more phonetically correct.

Massacres and Madness

49

to be done. The Medical Officer is against going into the Muslim locality to bring in more cholera patients. If the town's people know what is happening there will be a riot. If the hospital is associated with Muslim cholera patients, the mob will destroy the hospital. "What good am I without my tools, my hospital?" (227) the doctor

asks. The doctor does, however, give in to Kamala's insistence and

the other infected persons are brought in. Then the first person infected with cholera dies, with the name of Allah on his lips. "The name of Allah was clear on the last lips, a clarion call, a prayer like a curse, a dying man's desperate, beseech-

ing supplication hung in the tense air, Shantihpur's sentence of

death" (239). The Medical Officer had taken the precaution of providing revolvers, and now he takes them out, waiting for the crowd to come. The crowds come at noon. At the beginning this crowd does not appear very threatening. The people are poorly armed, their faces somewhat bewildered. All they seem aware of is that they are in some sort of danger from the cholera victims. It is as if this is one more occasion when the Muslims threaten their lives and property. There were a hundred or so of them with a crowd's random armament, staves, stones and pieces of timber made deadly with barbed wire.

Not all of them had murder in their faces. Several had only bewilderment; others that fixed and far away look, the atrophy of many and minor defeats, so that the expression was the same, transfixed,

half-stupefied surrender, whether rebellion or submission raged beneath it. They came up slowly to the steps as if they were groping for and measuring their strength, the hurried slogan flaunted, tentatively chanted: justice for Shantihpur, they shall not destroy us, this is our town, we have a right to live here. (242)

The ringleader steps forward and tells the Medical

Officer he

means him no harm to him, to the hospital or to Kamala who looks after them. "We want no trouble, Sahib," the man repeated, fingering his knife. "We want only the four Moslems." "There are no Moslems here," the M.O. said.

50

A Divided Legacy The man's face flushed and his eyes hardened. "You trifle with us,

Sahib." "This is a hospital," the M.O. explained calmly, looking at him but speaking to them all. "Whoever comes in leaves his religion behind. There are no Hindus here or Moslems. There are only sick bodies waiting to be healed." (244)

The Medical Officer refuses to give up the patients. The ringleader insists that the crowd will not murder the Muslims, only send them away. "This place is all we have Sahib, we were driven here, we have taken refuge with you. They bumt down our old homes. Must they destroy us in our new homes also?" (244) The M.O. points out that both the refugees and those born in the place have equal rights to live there. He tells them that if they touch the cholera victims they are surely going to catch the disease and die. The crowd wavers, debates whether cholera is as contagious as the doctor says, remembers what they themselves had suffered. "It isn't as contagious as he says. It's safer to put them where they cannot harm us." "Some of us must be immune."

"There are Moslems in the town. They can carry them out and get out of Shantihpur also. It's their poison so let them die of it." "We can burn down the hospital."

"That would be killing our own."

"We can cut their throats and burn them in the back yard." "But we promised the doctor."

"We've a right to protect ourselves. Besides, I never made a promise." "Nor I." "Nor I." "It's the same thing as murder." "Murder, he says. What d'you suppose they did to us?" "My wife."

"My only son." "I couldn't even recognize my daughter. There's a limit to tolerance, they're not fit to be vermin."

"We raised no hand against them and they killed us." +

Massacres and Madness

51

"Kill them." "It's only four. It's not even retribution."

"Kill them." "We wouldn't do it if it weren't to protect us." "Kill them." (245)

The crowd now is no longer the wavering crowd that had asked for the cholera patients. It has been transformed into a mob. They began to move forward once more, weapons raised, watching the man with the revolver watching them. They had a different look now, pulled together by a common abandonment, the vacant white of the glassy eyeballs showing, the grin over the suddenly wolfish teeth snapped back in animal, standardized elation. The flash of hysteria glittered its way among them, more deadly than the gleam of the avid knives. (246)

As the crowd continues to stand there, the ringleader leaps forward. The Medical Officer shoots, wounding the man in the arm. The man expects the crowd to react. When they don't, he steps forward allowing the doctor to treat the wound. The doctor and Krishnan are not free from the desire to punish the man and, while they do attend to the man, they give him no pain killers, allowing him to suffer needlessly. When

another

cholera

victim

dies, the Medical

Officer

and

Krishnan bury him quietly. They know that the crowd will be back. While one of them sleeps, the other two attend to the cholera victims. Then, when it is Krishnan's tum to sleep, the fire starts. As the three of them attend to the fire, the cholera victims are murdered.

They realize that the fire was not an accident when they finish

putting out the fire and go back to their cholera patients. Two of them are dead, with knives in their hearts, and the third, badly wounded, dies. Kamala had sent an attendant on a bicycle to call the

police. In the moming Krishnan finds the bicycle outside. The grips on the handle bars have been torn off, the spokes in the front wheel have been bent, and the mudguard dented. On the saddle, a note has

been pinned. Krishnan opens it to the message: "THE PEOPLE ARE THE LAW NOT THE POLICE."

52

A Divided Legacy

Kamala mourns the man's death, blaming herself for sending him. Krishnan explains that Kamala hadn't forced the man to go. It was the man's own choice. "He did it because he thought it was the nght thing. In the end a man listens only to himself" (260). In this manner Rajan suggests that it isn't only people like Kamala and Krishnan and the Medical Officer who are heroes in a world gone mad, but also people like the chaprassi, just doing his duty, until one day it takes him beyond the call of duty. Finally riots do come to Shantihpur. How did they begin? Can the precise moment be pinpointed? Was it a momentous event that sparked the nots? Or was it a small incident, suddenly become larger because one person unfortunately happened to belong to a different religion? Who could tell precisely how it all began? The observer could point to a moment

of time, the edge of a knife, a watershed leading to

another country where the rivers flowed differently and the faces were altered. It might be possible to say these were the links, these were the events and process of destruction; even after the wind whispered back over the footprints, and the sand erased them, one could filch back the story. It was possible to examine the scars, sift the conflicting evidence; research could always reconstruct the illness, and prescribe the remedies that were never administered. It was always possible, since wisdom always looked back, to show that there had been an implicit coherence of error; wars were not started by apples or misfits alone, but by the complications contrived in the context, which the diagnosis could isolate so that they were never repeated. If the impartial report was ever completed —to write which the Commissioner didn't have the time, nor those concerned in reading it the interest — it would be said that much could be said on all sides and that the burden of responsibility was anonymous, everyone standing in the common guilt. (263)

With this introduction Rajan pinpoints the time when the riots began. "Undoubtedly at 11.10 on that October moming, the incident did take place, the match was applied to the tinder" (263). But was the incident of such uniqueness or magnitude to start the conflagration which consumed the town and took Kamala's life? No, as Rajan

explains. The incident which led to the riots began in the type of >

Massacres and Madness

53

quarrel one witnesses every day in the bazaars of the Indian subcontinent: "it was only the kind of quarrel that always took place, day after day, in the huddled and blustering shops, and which on any other day would not have done more than give vitality to the bargaining process" (263). Perhaps on another day the quarrel would have ended innocuously, but not on that day in October 1947 with communal feelings running high. So, when the customer accused the shopkeeper of poor quality ghee, the quarrel resulted in words and then blows. But, in the ensuing quarrel, an oil lamp tumed over. When the shopkeeper pursued the customer—who fled to the Muslim area— and the shop bummed down, it was an excuse to bum down the Muslim area. It is a chain of events that might not have led to the riots and to the circumstances in which Kamala loses her life. It is, however, as Rajan suggests, these public events which effect private people's lives. "It is possible to go back, to remember, to review, to disinter the chain, remodel the footprints. . . But the meaning was different for those whom it overwhelmed" (267). Krishnan who is affected by

what happened in the shops learns of it afterwards, "long after in the stirring of the ashes, in the contrivance of an explanation" (267). Even Kamala's death is in the nature of an accident. Bored with being cooped up in the camp, Kamala insists on going out for a walk. They are still far from the riot-stricken area when a girl runs towards them, followed by two men. The path is narrow, and Kamala and Krishnan block the pursuing men. Krishnan wants to give way, realizing what might happen if he and Kamala thwart the men, But he also realizes that perhaps this is precisely why Kamala had been so insistent on coming out for a walk. This was to be her destiny, dying to save a girl from being raped.

In a strange concatenation of events, similar to those that had led to the riots in the town, the inevitable end nears. If the girl had kept on running, if the men had lost her because she had kept on running, perhaps Kamala would not have been killed. But, unexpectedly, the

girl stops and looks around. The men are even more incensed at the two who are blocking their path. The larger man pleads with Kamala to let them go past. He uses the same excuse that the Muslim and Sikh in the train had used. "Her people burnt my house down. My

54

A Divided Legacy

father and mother were killed. My sister was taken away. If she's alive now she's somebody's chattel. Get out of the way, it's time for them to pay now. It isn't half of what they've taken from us" (276). As the girl continues to stand there, Krishnan calls out to her to run. The shorter man hits Krishnan on his wounded arm. As Krishnan crumples with the pain, Kamala steps forward. They are not going to touch the girl, she calls out. They'll have to kill her first. Krishnan desperately tries to prevent what is coming, but, in his injured state, he cannot save Kamala. The nightmare of communal conflagration fuses with Krishnan's personal pain as Rajan links the images of the riot flames in the distance with the description of Kamala's death. He rolled over, desperately reaching out to Kamala, her sari aflame

in the suddenly crimsoning distance. He couldn't touch her, couldn't even cry out to her, he could no longer join his nightmare to her fate. The haze flooded in with the man's body big as all darkness, crushing the pouring edge of it, and through the haze he saw Kamala, not simply standing fast but thrusting erectly, passionately forward, seeming almost to float against the knife. He was shocked by herbeauty, her inwardness suddenly stripped bare, the unwavering and almost eerie arrogance, as if for the first time she was meeting her true lover. Then the crimson stain spread over her rigid breasts. . . . (278)

When Krishnan wakes up, it is several days later. The MO. comes in to tell him that Kamala has been cremated. They couldn't wait for Krishnan who was unconscious. He also narrates what had happened after Krishnan drifted off into unconsciousness. Kamala had been well known, and the girl had run to the hospital to tell

them. When the M.O. found Kamala, the two men were attempting

to unclasp her necklace. They tried to flee when they saw the M.O., but their way was blocked by a crowd incensed at Kamala's death. As the M.O. tells Krishnan, Kamala would have been horrified at the vengeance the crowd extracted. The men got their punishment, but did Kamala's death make any difference? Krishnan tells the M.O. that he cannot hear any shouts though.

The streets seem to have retumed to normal. Perhaps everything seems this way because he has just woken up. Perhaps it is the

Massacres and Madness

55

effect of Kamala's death. "But couldn't it be the beginning of a difference?" (285). The Medical Officer does not agree. It isn't Kamala's death that has made this difference. It's only because every fever must come to an end. The patient dies or he gets back to normal. You think they've stopped because they've looked at themselves, because they've suddenly seen the face of conscience. It's a handsome feeling and you want Kamala framed in it. Only it doesn't happen to fit the facts. They've stopped because they've done what they wanted to, satisfied their appetite. They've given up because there's nothing left to burn down. (286)

The cremation is over, but there are other rites to be performed. Krishnan's family descends on Shantihpur along with Kruger who knows exactly what is to be done. Thirty-two deserving Brahmins have to be found, and, even if they are not wholly deserving, "moral standards are undoubtedly relative" (303). Kruger even helps by taking out a list that he had begun to prepare several days earlier. Krishnan's father resignedly pays "the final costs of death" (304). There is another ceremony on the thirteenth day, another round of gifts to Brahmins before life returns to normal. Though Rajan mocks the rites and rituals of Hinduism, the essence of Hinduism is far from mockery. Krishnan's father-in-law refers to his dead daughter as "a Hindu wife," and Krishnan understands that, even though the ideal of a Hindu wife might not be for everyone, it is the highest compliment one can pay Kamala. She was a Hindu wife, her father said. Krishnan would have thought the ideal tyrannical once, a condemnation to a life of drudgery, toiling consumptively in the smoke-filled kitchen, waiting upon the men, eating apart, walking behind them in appropriate deference, bearing their children and accepting their sins. Now under the severity of the judgement he recognized a nobility, not one that he would want to inflict upon others, but which he could understand as

a principle and pride in Kamala's life. She was a Hindu wife, he echoed, and, watching her father's eyes glow, he knew that in his strict world of dignity and duty it was hot possible to pay a higher compliment. (288)

56

A Divided Legacy

As Krishnan performs Kamala's last rite, immersing her ashes in the Ganges, the pure essence survives the charlatanry and superstition, the chaos and the dirt. Krishnan, who claimed to be a renegade, succumbs to the peace of the Sansknit prayer. Let the eye repair to the sun, the breath to the wind. As her virtues befit her, let her body be given To the ocean, the air, and the greenness of the earth, The growing life of the plants, the mingling waters. (302)

Krishnan's realization of Kamala's virtues makes it impossible for him to ever go back to Cynthia. It is therefore only fitting that Krishnan return to Delhi and say goodbye to Cynthia. Even though Kamala is dead, there can be no union with Cynthia, no happiness with this non-Indian woman. Is Kamala's memory going to live with Krishnan forever, Cynthia asks. "Not her memory," Krishnan corrects Cynthia, but the difference she made within Knshnan. Trying to understand, Cynthia tells Krishnan that she thinks that Kamala's death achieved something. But, just as the doctor had corrected Krishnan, Krishnan now corrects Cynthia. Perhaps her death did or did not have an effect, some of it good but some of it bad as well. "But if it didn't, then it still doesn't make any difference. She was true to herself and that is all that matters. It's a question of what she was, not what she did" (309). Rajan criticizes the superstitions of religion, its meaningless rites as well as the cruelties that are perpetrated in the name of religion. Nevertheless, as he shows the transformation of Krishnan

from "renegade" to a man who finds peace after the death of Kamala in a prayer from the Bhagvadgita, Rajan upholds an ideal of Hinduism that converted some twenty years later into a radical Hinduism or Hindutva. Attempting to understand the communal tensions that rent people who had dwelt side by side-for ages, attempting to understand what drove ordinary people insane and led them to rape and kill, Rajan finally comes to a religious ideal. The true heroes are people like the chaprassi doing his duty, the Medical

Officer

doing

and

his,

Kamala,

with

"the

pride

of

obedience, the sculptured sense of duty, the gentleness that floated +

Massacres and Madness

57

through the littleness" (287), standing up for what she believed was night.

After the civil disobedience and the communal riots, after public duty and personal tragedy, through the intertwining of the violent events of Partition and the small but significant deeds of heroism, Rajan reveals his protagonist standing alone with an ancient prayer on his lips. Khushwant Singh shows the triumph of humanism over communalism and sectarianism; Anand, the failure of a ruler out of

touch with the politics of his time. Though Rajan shows how religious differences have been used to inflame people — with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs alike being victims or villains, partaking of a common guilt—the words with which Rajan ends the book, and expresses Krishnan's ultimate realization, is Krishna's sermon to Arjun. He who seeks freedom,

Thrusts fear aside, Thrusts aside anger And puts off desire: Truly that man Is made free forever.

When thus he knows me The end, the author

Of every offering And all austerity,

Lord of the world And the friend of all men O son of Kunti Shall he not enter

The Peace of my presence?

As Krishnan comes to terms with his loss and with himself, it is with this new awareness of an essential Hinduism that he does so. Even as Rajan condemns communalism, Rajan creates a Hindu hero —as in Kamala he has created a Hindu heroine. Though

Rajan's villains are more often than not Hindus rather than Muslims,

58

A Divided Legacy

his novel, even while condemning his co-religionists for their actions

and even while mocking the empty rituals that accompany Hindu ‘marriage and mouming, celebrates the spirit of Hinduism. It is finally then, this new Hindu old/new nation of India.

identity that Rajan claims for the

Chapter Two

THE FIERY PLAIN: THE PARTITION IN SELECTED URDU NOVELS

Shortly after Partition, Saadat Hasan Manto moved to Pakistan. It was not a happy move. He did not believe that this homeland for the Muslims was the answer to human problems. The pen that had shocked readers with stories of human flesh, now continued to shock

readers by describing the horrors and absurdities that followed in the wake of Partition. Manto saw that violence and horror were not limited to one ethnic group or to followers of one religion. Like Manto, there were other writers who also migrated to Pakistan, simply because, like him, they too were Muslims. Unlike Manto, however, some of them were partisan and took up the pen to show the cruelties perpetrated by Sikhs and Hindus. Others, who were not partisan, revealed a deep nostalgia for a state where Hindus and Muslims had dwelt peacefully together until the coming of Partition. Thus Qurratulain Hyder who, like Manto, moved to Pakistan and

wrote Aag ka Darya (1957)!

— before moving back to India and

remaining there the rest of her life — showed how interwoven the lives of Hindus and Muslims had been before Partition. Similarly, Mumtaz

Shah

Nawaz

in Zhe

Heart

Divided

(1957)?

showed

1 Qurratulain Hyder, Aag ka Darya (Lahore: Maktaba-e-Jadid, [1957]). Hyder wrote the novel at Mauripur, Karachi between August 1956 to December 1957.

2 Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, The Heart Divided (1957; Lahore: ASR Publications, 1990).

60

A Divided Legacy

friendships and love affairs that existed among Hindus and Muslims before the coming of Partition tore them apart. (Typically, however, where it is a love affair, it is a Muslim boy who falls in love with a Hindu girl. Perhaps Yashpal in Jhoota Sach is the only writer to show a girl belonging to his own religion in love with a man belonging to another.) Neither Hyder nor Shah Nawaz dwell on the violence that attended Partition. In the case of Shah Nawaz, the novel stops short of Partition, allowing her the excuse of avoiding the blood-letting that accompanied this event. The case of Hyder is even more interesting. The novel, which begins several centuries before Partition — at a time when Buddhism was gaining popularity — and ends after Partition has taken place, completely avoids describing what transpired during the actual year of Partition. In this voluminous book, which mns into several hundred pages, Hyder allots simply two words to the year of Partition: "Hindostan— 1947." Hyder's unwillingness or inability to talk about a traumatic event is replicated in her later novel Akhri Shab ke Humsafar translated into English as Fireflies in the Mist where — after devoting several chapters to the political events in Bengal that led up to Partition — she completely avoids all description of Partition. There is a lapse of several years before she takes up the story again. Not only has Partition taken place by now, but Bangladesh has also become independent and a young Hindu woman, who had fallen in love with a Muslim Communist, returns to Bangladesh to find him comfortably ensconced in the palatial

home of a Nawab.as the only living heir, all the rest of the family

having been killed during the violence of 1971. Hyder's unease is partly matched by Abdullah Hussain's unwillingness to talk about the actual events of Partition in Udas Naslein (1962).? Though Hussain does not cover as wide an expanse of time as Hyder does, he shows a similar antipathy towards describing the

events of Partition. Thus though he begins in 1913, and ends shortly after Partition, descriptions of Partition are limited to descriptions of deserted cities — which smack more of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land than of cities deserted in the aftermath of riot and communal 3 Abdullah Hussain, Udas Naslein (1962; Lahore: Sang-i-Meel, 1996).

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

61

conflict — and of caravans of refugees. In a book which devotes considerable time to details of village life as well as to the experiences of his protagonist during World War I — shades of Wilfred Owen here —and to his experiences as a would-be terrorist, a political prisoner, etc., it is surprising that his protagonist simply becomes ill during the period of Partition and then quietly disappears from the scene. It is his younger brother Ali who is left to begin life anew in Pakistan. What is, of course, perhaps even more interesting is the case of the obviously partisan M. Aslam. In a preface to Rags-i-Iblis:

Ingilab 47 Ki Ek Khuchukan Dastan (The Dance of the Devil: A Grisly Story of the Uprising of 47),* Aslam makes it clear that he is writing the novel to reflect the cruelty of Sikhs towards Muslims. He says that he is giving only a few episodes that took place during the

time. He complains that other writers are silent and not writing about these events. Why are they silent, he asks. Is it because they are upset at the division of the land? Or is it because they cannot express whatever they wish? Nevertheless, though Aslam does narrate a number of stories recounting Sikh atrocities, he also shows the close friendship between a number of Muslims and Sikhs. For example, when Mahbub Ilahi's village is attacked and his wife abducted, it is Pritam Singh who helps Mahbub Ilahi to escape. What differentiates Aslam's book from the others is the obvious desire to make Pakistan a land of Muslims. Whereas other books speak about humanism and ties between people as human beings, Aslam's purpose is to show what true Muslims are like through the characters of Mahbub Ilahi and Dost Mohammad — who befriends Mahbub in the hotel where he has taken shelter and who later helps him to reconcile with his wife. Thus, the narrative starts with Mahbub Ilahi emerging from a mosque stressing that, despite his traumatic experience, he remains a devout Muslim. The narrator interjects comments about Muslims and their duty to God. Furthermore, Mahbub Ilahi and Dost Mohammad discuss the condition of Muslims and ponder the reasons why they have suffered. They express their surprise about the absence 4M. Aslam, Rags-i-Iblis: Ingilab 47 Ki Ek Khuchukan Dastan (Lahore: Darul Balagh,

[1950?)).

62

A Divided Legacy

of worshippers in the mosque and suggest that this reveals a dearth of devout Muslims in the land they have entered. They note that if Muslims had fulfilled their obligations as true Muslims, they would not have suffered in this way. Dost Mohammad refers to Muslims — men and women—as soldiers of Islam who must avenge the cruelties heaped upon them. The idea of every Muslim being a soldier is reiterated later by a Captain Abbas who appears in the Mohajir Hotel one day. The two friends console themselves by saying that the day is not far off when the Pakistan flag will wave over Delhi (69). They refer to Mohammad Ali Jinnah as "Hazrat Quaid-i-Azam" (74) and believe that if he had not brought Pakistan into being, "Ram Raj" would have made living impossible for Muslims. Unlike Manto who described the atrocities on both sides and

showed that, when it came to cruelty, neither Muslims nor Hindus differed from each other, Aslam is intent on showing how Hindus and Sikhs — barring a couple —are the villains of the period. Abdullah Hussain, who also does not show Muslim atrocities, blurs the perpetrators of violence. Thus, though Hussain describes the

attacks on the caravans and the abductions, it is almost reluctantly that he does so. Neither Hyder nor Shah Nawaz depict atrocities. While Shah Nawaz suggests that the Hindu Congress betrayed the Muslims, she is more inspired by the idea of Pakistan as a land of promise rather than as a place where Muslims had to go because of atrocities and communal attacks on them by non-Muslims. Even M. Aslam does not portray a world without hope. Despite the several stories of Hindu cruelties to Muslims — this partisan novel does not show Muslim cruelties to Hindus or Sikhs — Aslam suggests that,

even in the midst of the horrors and madness of Partition, individual

friendships could bridge religious differences. Raqs-i-Iblis opens on a hellish scene. There are sounds of noting. Cries of "Pakistan Zindabad," "Jai Hind," "Sat Sri Akal" mingle in the air. In the stormy atmosphere, sounds of firing mingle with the crackle of raging fires. "It is the reign of Lucifer" (30).> The narrator comments that the angels are perhaps telling God that He made > Translations from Ragqs-i-Iblis are mine.

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

63

Adam superior to them, but Adam's descendants have made a mess of the whole world. Though East Punjab has been emptied of Muslims who have gone to Pakistan, the land they left behind has remained as busy as ever with people going about their work. "Only God was forgotten and the only place deserted was God's home"

(33). Though the writer speaks of Pakistan as the land of Muslims, this line suggests that the writer is not happy with Partition. When the Muslims were in India, God's home — the mosques — were full of worshippers. Now the mosques are deserted. But even in their chosen homeland, Muslims are not flocking to the mosques. Perhaps, they are so busy searching for shelter or for relations missing in the mass migration, that they have no time for God. Thus God appears to be forgotten in the land of the pure. Even when it is time for prayers, few go to pray in the mosque. Aslam intersperses the narrative, especially at the beginning, with references to different prayer times so that the reader is continually made aware, as people are in a Muslim country where the call to prayer is made at designated times, of the Muslim ambience. Thus the narrative opens with Mahbub Ilahi — Lover of God — emerging from a mosque. After taking a room in Mohajir Hotel, Refugee Hotel — he had learned about it from one of his fellow devotees at the mosque — he hears the call for Magrib prayers. He expects that all work will stop at the hotel and everyone will hurry to the mosque. This doesn't happen. He is surprised and asks the waiter, "Don't you people pray?" The man replies, "It is a question of leisure time, Sir" (37). Mahbub Ilahi is, however, a religious man and he goes to the mosque where he meets his elderly neighbour, Dost Mohammad — Friend of

Mohammad. He tells him that he is surprised not to find any prayer rugs in the hotel. Dost Mohammad tells Mahbub Ilahi, "What you should say is that despite all this suffering, people do not remember God. ... I have been staying here for several days, but I have never seen too many people in the mosque. It is surprising because now all the people are Muslims" (44). Thus Aslam establishes the true Muslim nature of his two main characters. M. Aslam then goes on to narrate various types of atrocities, using the device of different refugees coming to the hotel with their

64

A Divided Legacy

own separate tales which are similar only in their horror. Thus, after having commented on the sad condition of Islam in his new homeland, Mahbub Ilahi explains how he came to be a refugee. He describes how the Sikhs attacked the group he was with. The refugees chased them away. They had no weapons of their own, but they snatched the weapons of the Sikhs. Mahbub Ilahi comments that the Hindu Congress is responsible for all the bloodshed, "But the banias are afraid of fighting, so they incited the Sikhs to fight" (46). Dost Mohammad comments that unless the Muslims become truly religious they will always suffer in this way. "Until Muslims become truly Muslim, they will always be victims of such cruelty... . Nowadays the Ansars do not remember God, and the Muhajirs do not fear God" (49). The writer seems torn between the desire to portray Muslims as helpless victims of atrocities and Muslims as brave and victorious. Thus the Muslims "had no weapons of their own but they snatched the weapons of the Sikhs" to chase them away. The need to explain why Muslims suffered gives rise to the idea that they have forgotten God. If they hadn't, the idea seems to be, they would not have suffered as they did. This leads the writer to urge Muslims to remember that they are Muslims and to pray the five obligatory prayers for all healthy Muslims. Narratives of Sikh atrocities perpetrated on Muslims juxtapose laments that Muslims have fallen off from true piety. Hospitals are filled with children whose limbs have been hacked off, whose eyes have been gouged out. Naked Muslim women are paraded on the

streets of cities and Muslim children waved about like flags atop spears which stream with their blood. Muslims have degenerated — owing to their colonization by the British. If they had been good Muslims, the wine shops would have been destroyed. They must become good Muslims and avenge their wrongs. But they can only avenge their wrongs if they become true Muslims. Dost Mohammad voices his fear of Hindus. Had "Hazrat Quaid-i-Azam" not brought Pakistan into being, "Ram Raj" would have made living impossible for Muslims (74). The idea of Muslims no longer being good Muslims — and therefore

suffering —is voiced several times in the book. Why have we

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

65

suffered so much, asks Dost Mohammad. "Only because Muslims are no longer Muslims — Musalman ab Musalman nahin raha" (80). Even though M. Aslam wishes to show that Muslims are different from professors of other religions, like other writers, he also shows how Muslims dwelt side by side with people of other religions. Thus, Dost Mohammad describes how Sikhs and Muslims dwelt side by side peacefully in his village. Then one day some boys came and spoke to the villagers. These boys also went to the next village. Then one day at prayer, a Sikh from a neighbouring village threw a bomb. Fortunately, the bomb fell outside the mosque and the devotees were not injured. The Sikhs of the village came to sympathize with the Muslims. Next day the police came, but, instead of searching the Sikhs, they searched the Muslims. Since then the relationship between the Sikhs and Muslims became cold. Then the muezzin was shot dead, and the Sikh-Muslim conflict came out into the open. Fearing further trouble, Dost Mohammad sent his family away, but one day, when the Sikhs attacked the villagers, he took shelter in the neighbouring fields. There he found several dead bodies. Realizing that his family too had passed that way, he started searching the bodies to see if he could recognize any of his family members. To his horror, he found the corpses of all the male members of his family. An old servant, who had not yet

expired — his ears and nose had been hacked off — told him that the women had been carried away. Even as Dost Mohammad relates the Sikh atrocities, the reader is reminded that even in Pakistan all is not well. Thus as Dost Mohammad nears the end of his story, a servant comes to tell him that the manager is waiting for Dost Mohammad to accompany him to the police station. The sub-inspector had come the night before on the pretext that there were prostitutes visiting the place. The story is unfounded. Nevertheless, the suggestion remains that even in

Pakistan vice prevails. Mahbub Ilahi's story is a similarly sad one. He was married to Khurshid who had been at college with him. On their wedding night the Sikhs attacked. His mother was killed, and Khurshid abducted. A Sikh friend, Pritam Singh, helped Mahbub Ilahi to leave the village. Thus, though Aslam portrays the Sikhs as enemies of the

66

A Divided Legacy

Muslims, he also shows them individually as good friends. Thus it is the Sikhs who throw bombs, it is the Sikhs who attack the villages of Dost Mohammad and Mahbub Ilahi, but it is also a Sikh who saves Mahbub Ilahi. M. Aslam suggests in the narrative that the reason for the Sikh attacks being so bloody is that the Sikhs in the army sided with the Hindus and helped Sikh civilians. Captain Abbas later in the narrative will also reiterate this idea, noting that the Muslim casualties were greater because armed Sikh soldiers aided their civilian brethren. Nevertheless, even in this partisan story, Aslam reveals

friendships that bridge the communal divide. Thus Mahbub Ilahi describes how he was saved by his Sikh friend Pritam Singh. Though Pritam Singh is also in the army, he remains a good friend; his friendship for Mahbub Ilahi is superior to the claims of Sikh brotherhood. Other refugees come to Mohajir Hotel, each of them with a similar story of Sikh atrocities. One of the refugees is a doctor from East Punjab whose entire family has been killed. He suggests that the reason for this violence was that Sikhs had been incited by thoughts of an independent Khalistan. Here, as well, all Sikhs are not bad, and the doctor mentions the kindly Surat Singh. The other narratives, as well, continue to portray good Sikhs. Thus, an old woman refugee who appears at the hotel, still wearing a dupatta all stained with blood, narrates the story of how she and her family had sought shelter in the home of a Sikh friend, Karam Singh. But Karam Singh had been unable to prevent the tragedy that followed. One of his own men, Mastan Singh, speared the old woman's grandson and roasted him on the fire. Then, before the eyes of the old woman and her

sons, he ate a few pieces of the child's flesh. The three sons were then killed brutally as were the women. Then Mastan Singh forced Karam Singh to put some pieces of her sons' flesh into the old woman's bag and send her to Pakistan. Captain Abbas also appears one day at the hotel and narrates his experience. He was travelling by train with a Sikh friend. On reaching his friend's village, the friend told him to break his journey as trains were not safe. He would himself escort him to the border. However, the chauffeur who came to meet them at the station

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

67

informed them that there were a number of Sikh and Hindu guests coming to dinner that day and it would be better for Captain Abbas to pass himself off as a Hindu. At dinner, however, Abbas was horrified when naked women served the food. He was told that they were Muslim women and each guest could have two women each.

Abbas pretended to be ill and left the table. He spent all night at

the station and the next moming the border.

was escorted by his friend to

Karimuddin's narrative of a train massacre adds to the number and variety of Sikh atrocities. Karimuddin narrates how he was travelling in a train with his wife and family when the Sikhs attacked. His wife was killed before his eyes, his daughter was taken away. He was saved because he was hiding behind the luggage of two Sikh officers who saved him by pretending that all Muslims had been killed. Thus, though the book begins on the express note of portraying the numerous Sikh atrocities during the Partition, the narrative gradually veers to an acceptance that not all Sikhs are bad. But — and this is significant— while all Sikhs are not bad, M. Aslam does not show one good Hindu. And, in fact, during the course of a discussion with Captain Abbas, Mahbub Ilahi predicts that one day the Sikhs and the Hindus will fall out. As the narrative proceeds, the tone of the book changes somewhat. Though the narratives of Sikh atrocities continue, and though these narratives suggest that violence, murder, rape, looting had forced the Muslims to leave their villages, a sort of peace enters

as people move back and forth across the border. Thus both Mahbub Ilahi and Dost Mohammad return to their homes, Dost Mohammad

to his lands and Mahbub Ilahi, following a message from Pritam Singh, to his factory which his friend had saved from being looted. Part of the reason for the absence of these two friends is to enable the writer to bring back Khurshid into the picture, but the movement back and forth of the two refugees suggests that, once the violence died down, it remained dead.

The abduction of Khurshid lends itself to debates on whether men should — or can — take back wives who have been abducted. Thus, we find Mahbub Ilahi mouming for Khurshid at the very beginning of the narrative. He goes back to his room and, seeing the beautiful

68

A Divided Legacy

silvery moonlight outside, remembers his beautiful bride and the attack on the village that had separated them. "His world had been ruined. His world which existed because Khurshid was alive... Khurshid" (55). But, even though he mourms for Khurshid, he wishes her dead. If she were alive, he would not take her back. Dost Mohammad rebukes him. By a-very clever device, the writer has Khurshid return, but unblemished, thus enabling the couple to be reunited. It is when both Mahbub Ilahi and Dost Mohammad have gone back over the border, the one to see to his factory the other to his lands, that a young woman who calls herself Bano appears. She befriends the old woman and looks after her when she falls ill. When Dost Mohammad returns, the woman is very ill and, before anything further can be done for her, she expires. Meanwhile Bano reveals that she is Khurshid. On learning this, Dost Mohammad sends Khurshid to a village while he waits for Mahbub Ilahi to return. Both Khurshid and Dost Mohammad wonder what will happen if Mahbub Ilahi refuses to take Khurshid back. Mahbub Ilahi returns and tells Dost Mohammad how he had gone to his village and met Karam Kaur, a Sikh woman neighbour. Karam Kaur told him how she had been in the woods the night of the Sikh attack in the village. She had seen Khurshid being carried off by a Sikh. Khurshid had managed to take the Sikh's kirpan and kill him with it. Then, coming upon the Sikh woman, she had begged for help. The woman had hidden her in the sugarcane fields and next day had conveyed her to a refugee camp. Khurshid had offered the woman her jewellery, but the woman had refused to take it. Khurshid had insisted, saying that the jewellery would endanger her life. Karam Kaur returned the jewellery to Mahbub Ilahi. At this

point it is clear that Khurshid is still "chaste." Now Dost Mohammad discloses that Khurshid is alive and waiting for Mahbub Ilahi. Thus husband and wife are united. By the device of having Khurshid kill her abductor and keeping her "pure," Aslam avoids the problem faced by thousands of women who were abducted during the rioting and found that, once they were recovered, they had no home. The issue of abducted women forms the theme of many short stories on Partition, one of the finest in this

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

69

genre being Rajinder Singh Bedi's "Lajwanti." This is a moving fictional account of a man who loves his wife and goes about preaching that there is no dishonour in taking back an abducted woman. However, when his wife Lajwanti does retum, he is unable to accept her back as his wife.® Naseem Hejazy's Khak aur Khun (Ashes and Blood, 1949) is a far more moderate book than Rags-i-Jblis, but it too shares the author's partisan attitude towards Muslims and Pakistan, and ends with a rambling exhortation, ostensibly by the protagonist, addressed to fellow Muslims. Though Ragqs-i-Jblis is also about villagers, it begins with these villagers migrating to a town subsequent to Partition and therefore does not describe what life was like in the village before Partition took place. Unlike Rags-i-Iblis, and more like the later Udas Naslein, Khak aur Khun begins in the village, devoting several chapters to ordinary village life, before moving to town. Unlike the wounded hero of Udas Naslein, a member of the sad generation, Saleem is shown as a thoughtful, but active, young man. When the novel opens, Saleem is taking his friend Majeed to see a pigeon's nest. Saleem is moved and excited by the newly hatched chicks and discloses the nest to Majeed as if letting him in on a great secret. He makes Majeed promise not to tell the other boys, but Majeed is least impressed by the nest. In this innocent world, Muslims and Sikhs dwell side by side,

engaging in fun and occasional brawls — but all in good humour. Saleem goes to college in Lahore and finds himself in the midst of the independence movement and, because of his writing abilities, is soon drawn into writing for the college magazine. This life of

innocence is shattered with the coming of Partition and the Radcliffe Award which displeases Sikhs and Muslims alike. The Sikh villagers, with a few exceptions, tum violently against the Muslim villagers, and the gentle, nature-loving, story-telling Saleem soon finds himself in the position of a company commander leading his soldiers into battle or encouraging them to hold their "fort" against the onslaught of the besieging Sikhs. 6 “Lajwanti,” translated by Alok Bhalla, is included in Stories About the Partition of India, Vol. I, ed., Alok Bhalla (New Delhi: Indus, 1994).

70

A Divided Legacy

Hejazy is keen to portray the Muslims as victims but also as heroes. So, as in Ragqs-i-Jblis, the Muslims do not attack first, -but

appear victorious in the face of great odds, often tuming their enemies' weapons against the enemies themselves. The villagers fight bravely and often victoriously, but are finally forced to leave their ancestral village and trek to Pakistan. The story-teller Saleem now uses his pen to exhort his nation to be true Muslims so that Pakistan can be a viable nation. Hejazy's narrative suffers from the same problem as that of any political fiction that attempts to tell the "truth." Thus, he departs from the fictional mode to that of the political or historical narrative to recount the actual incidents that led up to the tragedy of those Muslims who believed that they were part of Pakistan but woke up to find that their portion of land belonged to India. Like Ragqs-i-Iblis, Khak aur Khun stresses the treachery of the Hindus and the Congress. Instead of sporadic attacks, however, Hejazy portrays an organized, military-type engagement with well-armed Sikh Jathas attacking unarmed Muslim villagers. Nevertheless, Hejazy too, despite recounting the treachery and cruelty of the Sikhs, also describes the strong bonds between some Sikhs and their Muslim friends. Khak aur Khun is one of the few novels about the Partition which does not contain a romance between young people belonging to different religions. Though there is the slightest hint of a relationship between the Sikh Rupa and the Muslim Saleem, this relationship is imaged as a brother-sister relationship, also a stereotype, but much less exploited in fiction. The reason for this lack of romance results perhaps from Hejazy's attempt to portray the tre mujahid, or Muslim soldier, as an ascetic. Unlike the Sikhs who carry off Muslim women, the Muslim mujahid is portrayed as respectful towards all women, even those of his enemy. Even the Muslim who

has seen his family killed, his women dishonoured, cannot bring himself to rape a Sikh woman. He cannot even kill her.

Khak aur Khun is motivated by the same anti-India/Hindu feeling

as is Raqs-i-Iblis. However, Hejazy does devote several chapters to

the description of a life where Muslims and Sikhs dwelt side by side peacefully, unlike M. Aslam who, despite showing Sikh individuals who rise above the communal

madness, does not suggest that a

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

7]

harmonious world came to an end as a result of Partition. Furthermore,

Hejazy does not depict Muslims as victims of violence as Aslam tends to do. Instead, Hejazy portrays Muslim as heroe — whether s they are fighting the better equipped armies of the Sikhs or like Saleem, a latter-day Moses, leading his people across the bridge. Both Aslam and Hejazy use the image of the Hijrat, the migration of the Prophet Mohammad to Madina which, as Intizar Husain points out, was the great experience of the Partition’. However, Aslam's mohajirs differ from Hejazy's—as they both do from Husain's later. Thus Aslam reminds his readers that the refugees were mohajirs, performing the Hijrat, but they were also victims of violence, forced to leave their homeland and migrate to a new land lacking in faith. Hejazy's leading mohajir is a thinker tumed warrior who wields pen or sword equally for the greater glory of God and the new nation. By the time Intizar Husain wrote, the euphoria had ended, and the mohajir found himself an object of suspicion, treated as an alien in a new land. Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka Darya (The River of Fire) falls in the category of Pakistani novels simply by accident. She wrote it sitting in Karachi where she had migrated from India. Unlike Aslam and Hejazy, however, she had socialistic leanings and, instead of stressing the uniqueness and the rightness of the Muslim experience, attempted to show how many strands went into the Indian experience. Instead of a Pakistani ideology, she projects the bewilderment

of a migrant who finds herself in another land quite by chance. Instead of the militant possibilities that lay in the Hijrat, she suggests a nostalgia similar to that to be found, for example, in Sunil Gangopadhyay's Purba-Paschim. Where did Hyder herself belong? To Pakistan or India? Like the fictional Kamal in her book, she was an alien in Pakistan, but, if she were to returm to India briefly, would she be considered an alien there as well? Kamal's narrative ends with his return to Pakistan, but Qurratulain Hyder's narrative in real life does not end in Pakistan. It is not surprising that the ambivalence of her feelings should have been reflected in the book, 7 Muhammad Umar Memon, "Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain," Modern Asian

Studies, 14: 3 (1980), 337.

72

A Divided Legacy

nd, because shortly afterwards she would return to her homela not build suggesting as she does in the book, that religion need

barriers between people.

Aag ka Darya begins at the time of Chandragupta Maurya. The ti. setting is near Ayodhya, beside the banks of the river Saraswa west Buddhism is making its inroads into Hinduism, and in the the in shifts time several are Alexander is attacking India. There noment differen novel, with the characters appearing with slightly clatures throughout the book. Thus, at the beginning we are introduced to Gautam Neelamber, one of the main characters, who will recur throughout the book. Hari Shanker and three women, one of them Champa, are all brought together on the banks of the Saraswati. Thus Gautam swims across the Saraswati and sees three girls sitting on the banks of the river. One has a champa flower in her hair. She will reappear as Champa later. Similarly, Han Shanker, who appears in the temple where Gautam has gone to sleep, will reappear several times in the course of the narrative. Gautam and Hari represent the Hindu and Buddhist strands in Indian civilization and culture. But there were other strands that would enter and merge: the Muslim and the British. Hyder introduces them by time shifts. The first time shift is to the eighth century —the time of the advent of the Muslims into the Indian — with the entrance of Kamaluddin, the Muslim. The subcontinent other strain in the Indian culture is that of the British, and Hyder introduces this by another time shift to the 18th century, 1793, to be exact. The Muslims have degenerated. Kamaluddin has tumed into a boatman on the Padma, ferrying an Englishman, Cyril. Cyn represents the advent of the British in Bengal. He is an adventurer, come to India to seek his fortune. Hyder, however, does not show the first entrance of the British. By the time Cyril comes, the British have been in India for a century, and the union of Europeans and Indians has created a new race: the Eurasian, represented in this section by the lovely Maria Teresa, with whom Cyril has an affair. Champa and Gautam Neelamber reappear in the eighteenth century, but in different guises. Thus Champa becomes Champa Bai, a famous tawaif, singer-prostitute, in Lucknow, and Gautam Neelamber becomes Gautam Neelamber Dutt, a clerk in Cyril's office.

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

73

The fourth shift in time is to 1940, Lucknow, where the earlier characters reappear, again under different guises. All the three women of the first section appear here, each with a separate name and identity: Champa, Talat and Nirmala. Kamal, Shanker, Gautam and Cyril also reappear. Champa is eighteen years old, the daughter of the President of Benares City Muslim League. Hyder shows a politically active time, with the young people participating in different events. Thus, there is trouble in Calcutta and Champa wants to go there to do relief work. Gautam Neelamber doesn't want to take her as her going might endanger her father's reputation. The rest of her friends — Nirmala, Talat, Kamal, Shanker, Gautam — go

to Calcutta. There is firing there and the young men are wounded. Luckily for them, Shanker's uncle is able to move them to Gorakhpur where they are staying with the Civil Surgeon. The girls go there to meet them. When the young men are well, they go to Kapilavastu to do a little sightseeing. Though Hindu and Muslim friends are united at this point, there is increasing talk of Pakistan, and Champa debates whether she should get married to Amir Reza and go to Pakistan. The Muslim League and the Congress are going their separate ways, and Champa wonders whether there is any point to all this. What is the point of Congress? Of Muslim League? While Muslim League and Congress are politically bickering, the young people continue with their lives. Gautam leaves for Moscow. Talat and Nirmala go to Cambridge. Partition comes at this point as a brief interlude. In the briefest of chapters — simply two words long — Hyder gives the entire year of Partition: "Hindostan— 1947" (468). The silence of Hyder is very significant. Did nothing happen that year? Or was it too hormible to be noted? To those who do not know, the chapter says nothing. And for those who do, perhaps it is not necessary to repeat the descriptions of that traumatic event. Though in the narrative the year — and the chapter — do not appear to have any significance —how would a person who did not know anything about the Partition realize the

massacres and migrations that took place this year and for several years following? — nevertheless, the effects of Partition are felt in the narrative, partly by the sudden disintegration of a united group. The friends split up, separated by different countries and continents.

74

A Divided Legacy

The scene shifts to London where Cyril Drake Edwin Howard Ashley is waiting for Champa. He is a descendant of Cyril Howard Ashley who went to Bengal in the 18th century and made a lot of money in indigo. Cyril died in India, but his son retumed to England and expanded the family wealth doing business. He became a lord and sat in Parliament. His present-day descendant Cyn receives a letter from Gautam in which Gautam blames the British and the Muslims for the Partition. Unlike Naseem Hejazy, who includes whole chapters explaining the mischief of the Congress and accusing them of behaviour which caused the Partition, Hyder does not speak in her own person. Instead she uses a character to voice an opinion. Nirmala is at Cambridge where Gautam meets her. Nirmala criticizes Champa as being useless. "Champa is among those people," Nirmala says, "who always need some sort of emotional support" (482).8 Gautam asks Nirmala to marry him, but she refuses. Meanwhile Champa starts working in a publishing house. She is asked if she is a Communist. She doesn't reply. Neil tells her that she should write stories. You should write stories. I will build you up. There is a great scope for stories about Hindostan at this time. Look at R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj. You should also write. (685)

Champa tells him she cannot. Following Partition, the friends separate. Gautam is given a diplomatic assignment. Kamal goes to Cambridge, Hari Shanker to America. Champa goes to Cambridge but, by this time, Nirmala has left. Kamal returns to Lucknow. The house is disintegrating. The scene replicates that of Laila returning to the house in Sunlight on a Broken Column. Perhaps to the middle class, Partition meant the breaking down of homes and the search for new ones. This theme is repeated in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines as well, where the Hindu family returns to East Pakistan to see their former home disintegrating. The theme is also to be found in several Bengali short

stories, such as Syed Waliullah's "Ek Tulsi Gaccher Galpa" and Ashraf Siddiqui's "Pukurwala Bari.” 8 Translations from Aag ka Darya are mine.

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

75

The sudden shift of characters, who had till then been mostly in India, to England, USSR, and USA, is emblematic of the migration

that took place after Partition in 1947 and again in 1971. As V.S. Naipaul vividly narrates it in The Enigma of Arrival, England was home to the colonial. When the British left, the Indians who could followed them to England. Hyder stresses the rootlessness of people cast adrift by the Partition through the dispersal of the friends and

the movement of Kamal back and forth across the Indo-Pakistan border. Many Muslims of North India moved to Pakistan, but could never completely cut off their ties to their original home. They were aliens in both the new India and the newly created Pakistan. Hyder reveals this anguish through Kamal who has migrated to Pakistan. After visiting Chittagong, Sylhet, Rangamati, Rajshahi, Barisal in East Pakistan, Kamal returns to West Pakistan. He travels

by way of India. Only now, as an alien, he has to enter India with a visa. He feels that this land he knew so well is now a strange land. The train was travelling over unknown territory. Only a year ago this was his own country. Now he was travelling through it as an alien, a foreigner. He imagined that people were looking at him suspiciously. You are a Pakistani. Come along to the police station. Everyone's eyes were upon him. You are a Pakistani. A Muslim. A Muslim spy. The wheels of the train were repeating the refrain. Traitor. Spying traitor. Spy. He opened his eyes quickly. The train was slowly entering Charbagh Junction. His heart was still beating rapidly. (744)

Kamal meets Champa who takes him to a deserted imambara. Champa will be echoed by Sabirah in Intizar Husain's later novel

Basti. Like Champa, Sabirah too is left behind in India when the man she loves goes to Pakistan. The shattering of the Muslim society, turning those on one side of the border into refugees and the other into a minority, rendered the women particularly lonely. With the men gone, there was no one they could marry. And, in a new India, an India which would gradually leave its secular identity behind to find a new Hindu identity, it would become increasingly difficult for inter-religious marriages to take place. The time when Gautam Shanker, Talat, and Champa could be together would never

76

A Divided Legacy

again return. Though Hyder's attitude to Partition is very different from that of M. Aslam's, they are similar in suggesting that the Partition affected Islam in India adversely. Aslam's character speaks about God's home being empty, and Hyder notes the empty imambara. It was, it may be recalled, the volatility of the Shia sect, with its Moharram processions and tazias that, more than anything else, brought the Muslims into open conflict with the Hindus. While conflicts resulted from desecration of houses of worship, the Muslims were not always passive recipients of Hindu violence. the Conflicts also arose from the clash of processionis—ts bearers of the tazia, for example, versus the bearers of the goddess — and these clashes encapsulated vividly the Hindu-Muslim Durga conflict in the concrete mind. It is therefore significant that Hyder speaks about the deserted imambaras from where the Muslim agitation had gone forth. With the Partition taking place, these houses were deserted. Rahi Masoom Reza's novel, Adha Gaon, also portrays an imambara deserted because the devotees have dissipated. The celebrations have dwindled, and so has the vitality behind the celebrations.’ Hyder stresses Kamal's sense of alienation as well as moral degradation. Kamal goes to Delhi but does not meet his former friends. He takes the train to Pakistan. The train started moving. Both Indian and Pakistani soldiers boarded the train. A new country had started. Some Sikhs were standing guard on the grass outside. I am now in Pakistan. I have come from Hindostan. A mohajir, a refugee. A Muslim from U.P. A mohajir. A refugee. A homeless refugee. . . . He imagined that everyone's Hindostani. A Hindostani spy.

eyes were

upon him.

You

are a

The wheels of the train were repeating the refrain, Spy. Traitor.

Spy. Traitor.

‘

He opened his eyes with a start. The train was slowly entering the Customs area of Lahore Station. His heart was still beating rapidly. (778) ° Reza, however, shows that Hindus and Muslims’ dwelt harmoniously Partition. He shows how even Hindus paid homage to the great Tazia.

together before

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

77

Kamal feels none of the excitement that his namesake in Abu Rushd's Nongor feels about his new country. Nevertheless, both Kamals feel the same disillusionment. The new land is not the ideal which they had been promised. Hyder gives a sense of the materialistic, corrupt nature of this society by having Kamal open his diary on the plane on his way to Karachi. Now his new life was in front of him. He took out his diary. There were so many important tasks waiting for him in Karachi. He had to meet a certain uncle to plead Kaleem's case. He had to purchase iron rods and cement from the black market. He had to throw a party in the Gymkhana for Mr. X. He asked himself, What am I to do? Is it possible to remain uncorrupted in a corrupt society? (778)

While Kamal has gone to a new land, already corrupted, Gautam and Shanker remain behind in the land that had nourished and sustained people of different religions, different cultures, a land that traced its history back several thousand years, allowing the different strands to mix. In an attempt to show the age-old India that lies behind the new — and is presumably uncorrupted unlike the new state of Pakistan — Hyder takes her characters back to the banks of the Saraswati river. Gautam goes to the temple where his past incarnation had made his initial appearance in the narrative. He wonders to himself whether any foreigner could ever understand the suffering of his motherland. As he ponders over this question, he is joined by Shanker — as his past incarnation had been joined by Hari Shanker. They discuss Kamal's visit to India and criticize him for not having looked them up while in Delhi. Hari Shanker wonders where Kamal is. Gautam responds that he must be in Karachi. The narrator comments at this point that the two friends might have been thinking how "Abul Mansur Kamaluddin had entered Hindostan and how he had left it" (684). Hari Shanker leaves after a little while, and Gautam finds himself alone by the banks of the river. It is the season of the monsoon rains. Though the sky is overcast with grey clouds, these clouds are the clouds of promise. From somewhere comes the sound of farmers

78

A Divided Legacy

retuming home from their work in the fields. As they near, he hears the words of their song: May our fields be ever green, May they always be full of grain: May our lives be always fruitful, May the harvests be always good. (785)

Gautam finds himself alone once again. He is tired, but he is also happy. Hyder describes the mix of emotions and feelings in Shanker at this moment. He is defeated, but also victorious. He is dejected, but also full of hope. He remembers the words of Sakyamuni, the Buddha: May the watchfulness of the watchers be rewarded: May the written word of the law be rewarded; May there always be peace in the community; May the governance of those be rewarded

Who have found the way of peace. (786)

Slowly Shanker winds his way towards the village where his friend has preceded him. It is significant that while Khushwant Singh ends Train to Pakistan with a Sikh Prayer, and Balachandra Rajan ends The Dark Dancer with a Hindu prayer, the Muslim Qurratulain Hyder does not end Aag ka Darya with a Muslim verse but a Buddhist prayer. The novel ends on a note of optimism for Gautam and Shanker. Despite the ambivalence — the aloneness of Gautam by the river, the fact that neither Gautam nor Shanker have married —the sense remains that those who remained behind in India did not betray her. India is vast, there are many strands in it, and the Kamaluddins who left it were denying the historical process that had brought them to it. As an Indian Muslim, Hyder does not suggest that the Muslims should never have come, but that they should not have left. The book was written as noted at the end — "Mauripur, Karachi, August 1956-December 1957" — but the narrative does not end in Pakistan but in India, not with the mohajir Kamal as Hyder herself was, though temporarily, but with Gautam and Shanker who remain

The Fiery Plain: The Partition in Selected Urdu Novels

79

behind in India. It was perhaps prophetic, though none knew it at the time, because Hyder herself would be shortly retuming to India, claiming an Indian identity rather than a Pakistani one despite her religion. Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka Darya, though written in Urdu -like Aslam's novel, is devoid of any violence. Though Hyder's novel traverses centuries and includes the Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and British-Indian periods before focusing — in two-thirds of the novel —on the generation that witnessed Partition and was soon to be separated by that event, Partition itself is attended with silence. The fiction of north India, in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi — and later English — focuses on the violence attending Partition. Train massacres, murders, abductions, rapes are recurrent motifs in this fiction in which the displacement of population forms just one additional theme. Hyder's novel is therefore exceptional in its focus on nostalgia and loss as the aftermath of Partition —a feature to be found both in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column and in Bengali writers on the Partition. Mumtaz Shah Nawaz is able to omit all violence by the simple device of stopping well before the . Partition years. All these novels suffer from the absence of any development of character — though Shah Nawaz does, to some extent, show character development through the changes she effects in her characters. Part of the reason for Hyder's failure is that there are too

many characters in Hyder's novel, and the interest is more to portray the history of all India through the characters than to let the characters reveal themselves through action. Though Hyder's novel

suffers less than Shah Nawaz's novel as a narrative to hang political views on, and though unlike Shah Nawaz's novel there are no pages that simply narrate history or politics, the sense remains of an attempt to explain a socio-historical perspective through these characters. None of the characters is allowed to develop. The hovering interest of Hyder in her characters will be evident again in Fireflies in the Mist, which, like Aag ka Darya, is also about history,

but covers a much smaller canvas and ranges over a briefer period than Aag ka Darya. In this later novel too, the silence that attends the year 1947 is again in evidence, suggesting that Hyder's

80

A Divided Legacy

avoidance of this year was not accidental. She just could not talk about it. Both Hyder and Shah Nawaz were significantly Communis sympathizers if not Communists, and the Communists did not

support the Partition. They believed that India would have been better served if it had formed a state like the USSR, a state made up of several states. Thus, while Shah Nawaz went to Pakistan and also occupied a position of importance cut short by her tragic death, her Pakistan was different from what Pakistan became. Like many of her contemporaries, Shah Nawaz did not realize that the relationship between India and Pakistan would grow so bitter that they would act as enemies waging a long-drawn-out battle. It is perhaps because of these reasons that Shah Nawaz was unable to talk about the Partition as Hyder, who would soon retum to India, also was unable to discourse at any length except by describing what had happened before Partition and much after the event had taken place.

Chapter Three

DIVIDED HEARTS

Mumtaz Shah Nawaz wrote The Heart Divided between 1943-1948! The book was, however, published nine years after the death of its young author and political worker. Like Qurratulain Hyder, Shah Nawaz believed that human ties could effectively cross political and religious boundaries. But Shah Nawaz also believed that, despite all close personal ties between people of different religions, Pakistan had become inevitable. Her novel therefore traces the history which produced this inevitability. Her socialistic leanings — which Hyder also shared — led her to look forward to an equitable society, but — and here she differs from Hyder— she believed that this society would be brought about in the new country of Pakistan, in a "People's Pakistan." It is in another aspect that The Heart Divided differs from Abdullah Hussain's Udas Naslein, M. Aslam's Rags-i-Iblis, Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka Darya, and, in fact, the majority of the books written about the Partition. Mumtaz Shah Nawaz came from a well-to-do, prominent family of Lahore and independence was not synonymous for her with migration as it was for most other writers on the Partition. In the book as well, though there are episodes in Delhi, 1 Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's mother, Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz, notes in the Preface that "'Tazi’... wrote this novel between 1943-1948." Quotations from The Heart Divided are from the second edition of the book, published by ASR Lahore, 1990.

82.

A Divided Legacy

Kashmir, Amritsar, most of the action takes place in Lahore. Hence,

there is no nostalgia or uprooting. What is significant, however, is that though the book was wnitten over a period of five years, when the riots in both Bengal and the Punjab had taken place, Shah Nawaz completely ignore all violence by the simple device of ending the story before Partition. She provides only the briefest hints of violence in the image of the crimson-coloured sky which ends the book. As Shah Nawaz's brother notes in the preface to the 1990 edition, Shah Nawaz would have been disappointed in the route that Pakistan had taken. A disillusionment was beginning to set in, as Mumtaz saw the spirit of idealism receding and material self-seeking taking over the young nation. She already saw that the Pakistan that she had envisaged, the egalitarian, democratic, tolerant nation in which fairplay and justice would prevail, was being eroded and had already decided to write another book tracing the story of Pakistan from 1942 to 1947, as a reminder, as it were, for Pakistanis to remember why Pakistan was formed. (v)

Though Shah Nawaz was disappointed in the reality that Pakistan tured out to be, she lived too shortly after the birth of Pakistan to let disillusionment affect the book. Hyder was disappointed enough to return to India where she was awarded medals of honour by a government that believed in "Akhand Bharat." As with several books on the Partition, Shah Nawaz begins the book showing the close ties between Hindus and Muslims. Thus Zohra, whose sensibility inspires the book, is very close to the Hindu gitl Mohini, with whom her brother Habib falls in love. Shah Nawaz also suggests the syncretic nature of the two communities — though, in Shah Nawaz's case, this is confined to the Hindus adopting Muslim ways. The Kauls, for instance, are "Hindostani" rather than Hindu. They speak Urdu not Hindi and are as fond of Urdu poets as their cultured Muslim friends are. Hyder, however, showed how very deep-rooted the Hindu strain is by going back in history. The common past, as Hyder suggested, does not begin with the coming of the Muslims to India, but precedes it by several hundred years.

Divided Hearts

83

Neither Hyder nor Shah Nawaz dwell on the horrors of Partition. In the case of Shah Nawaz, the novel ends in 1942, that is, before

Partition, allowing her the excuse of avoiding all depiction of the grim and tragic details that accompanied independence and Partition. Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, despite beginning with close ties between Hindus and Muslims, was also concemed with justifying the need for Pakistan. Thus, throughout the book, she notes how Islam can be reinstated to its rightful place. Though she is against purdah and begins the narrative on the day that her young heroine, Zohra, has inadvertently forgotten her veil, she speaks of Islam as an equitable religion. It is Hinduism that prevents people mingling and eating together. There is no caste system in Islam. The treatment of the divorcee, Najma, who later marries Habib, is also brought in to show how progressive and enlightened Islam is. The taboo against divorce is not Islamic; divorce is, in fact, permitted under certain conditions.

Furthermore, in the acceptance by Jamaluddin of his daughter Zohra's love for the lower class Ahmed, Shah Nawaz shows an enlightenment that did not always exist in upper class Muslim

society. Both Shah Nawaz and Hyder had been influenced by — Hyder read and translated Russian, and Shah Communist ideals Nawaz had been handing out Communist leaflets when Germany invaded Russia. As her brother notes, "During the years 1939 to 1942, she wrote the best of her socialist poetry [.] June 1941 (when Germany invaded Russia) found Mumtaz selling flags asking the question ‘who lives if Russia dies' on the streets of Lahore" (iii). Neither Pakistan nor India went the way of socialism, though Nehru did flirt with it for a long time, and in West Bengal a Communist government has been returned by the electorate for three decades. Hyder moved to Pakistan and moved back again. With her roots in North India, Hyder was able to do so. Mumtaz Shah Nawaz was not given the chance to change her mind about Pakistan because, a year after independence, she died in a plane crash on her way to the United States to talk on Pakistan and Kashmir. The Heart Divided is

a posthumous book, published nine years after her death. There is no doubt to disbelieve Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz's claim that her daughter wrote the book between 1943 and 1948. In other words, when Mumtaz Shah Nawaz was writing the book, the Calcutta and

84

A Divided Legacy

Noakhali riots had wracked Bengal. the massacres in the Punjab had taken place, the caravan and train loads of people had moved across the western border, some to safety in India or Pakistan, some killed

before reaching their destination. Shah Nawaz herself had taken part in organizing relief work for victims of communal riots. Shah Nawaz's title suggests the Partition, the divided hearts caused by the division of the subcontinent. However, apart from the final chapter when Mohini's brother Vijay grieves over the break, there is no grief. Moreover, the Partition has not yet taken place. The grief, therefore — all on Vijay's part— seems excessive. Moreover, with the grief on Vijay's side, and Habib's explanations of why Pakistan had to come about, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz vindicates the Pakistani position: Pakistan had to be created because of the intransigence of the Hindu leaders. "We have failed again," [Vijay] said at last and they all bowed their heads. "I've just come from Delhi ... and I saw it all—the bickering ... the bargaining .. . the disunity ... we are going ... further and further apart... And now .. . now.even the principle of vivisection is taken for granted . . . now you want to leave us . . . to break away .. . to become another land . . . another people . . . but I tell you we shall try to keep you back with love. . ." (480)

Habib, who had loved Vijay's sister, Mohini, explains why Pakistan had to be created. If there had been more people who cared, it would not have been necessary. "Oh Vijay if there were more people like you . . . if they tried to keep us with love . . . perhaps we . we would not want to break away... ." Even Habib, however, uses the prefatory "perhaps," suggesting the inevitability, at this point, of Pakistan. It is a point that Vijay notes with grief, as he foreshadows the ensuing anguish and horror consequent on this division. "But you want to separate... Ah can you not look into the future?" He pointed as if into the distance and his eyes were haunted. "Look it comes, nearer and near it comes ... the separation and the shadow ... the darkest hour .. . and the rift between us becomes a chasm ... and the chasm a sea... . a sea of blood and tears ... of

tears and blood. . . ." (480)

Divided Hearts

85

Vijay's foreshadowing of violence is reflected very briefly in the image that follows his outburst. Habib and Najma, Zohra and Ahmad are sobered by Vijay's grief and words. Sughra, the Muslim Leaguer, alone seems unaffected. She goes to the window and looks out at the sky. The crescent moon, the symbol of Pakistan, is in the sky. But, even as Sughra thrills at the sight of this good omen, she sees the crimson sky and shudders.

Despite this foreshadowing, Shah Nawaz ends the book on an optimistic note —though significantly, the attention moves from Zohra, the erstwhile socialist, to Sughra, the ardent Muslim Leaguer.

Returning to her husband who had spent their separation in social work, she tells him that she longs to share his life and work. Together they will go towards their goal. "Towards Pakistan," he said triumphantly. Thus, though the title of the book stresses the division, the tone of the book pulls against it. Furthermore, the initial community of young people of different religions mingling and falling in love is conveniently disposed off by having the Hindu Mohini die in Kashmir. Habib, inconsolable for some time, gradually finds another woman to love: Najma. In bringing about the union of Habib and Najma, Shah Nawaz was stressing the enlightenment of Islam. The gradual shift of focus from the unity of the young people to the virtues of Islam parallels the gradual shift in focus from Zohra to

Sughra, from the Communist worker to the Muslim League worker, from the believer in a united India to the believer in an independent homeland for the Muslims. Was the shift from ardent socialist to

ardent Muslim Leaguer a betrayal? Qurratulain Hyder in her later novel Fireflies in the Mist shows the Communist hero seduced by the promises of the Muslim League. Hyder suggests that had it not been for the betrayal of the Communists, the independence of India would not have been accompanied by the division of the land. In Shah Nawaz there is no betrayal. Instead, she suggests through Sughra's words, that Islam was Marxist before Marx. "Are you a Muslim?" Sughra asks her mother who opposes Ahmad because he belongs to a "lower caste." "Have you forgotten that Islam came to abolish the barriers of tribe, class and caste, and every Muslim must believe in an international classless, casteless society" (466). Strictly

86

A Divided Legacy

speaking, by ending before Partition, 7he Heart Divided does not fall into the category of "Partition novels" but the title which stresses the division and the date of writing— 1943-48 — make it an interesting study of what a sensitive writer chooses to write about and what she chooses to ignore. Shah Nawaz's narrative begins on an evening in November 1930 when Zohra for the first time inadvertently leaves the cape of her burga behind. Zohra belongs to a purdah family, but after the incident — which is distorted by a gossiping relation into a tryst, revealing as Shah Nawaz's publisher says, that "Muslims were not all 'good'" — she receives "tacit permission" from her father to go out without a burga "as long as no one recognized her and her grandfather did not know" (17). After this whenever Zohra goes out shopping — things are brought to her in the car—she leaves her burqa behind. "Thus she took her first step towards a free and independent life, but she did not know it then" (17). In the 30's the freedom movement seemed to be entering the doldrums with the Muslim League remaining outside the freedom struggle. Shah Nawaz explains the reason for it through the refusal of Zohra's father to give more than ten mpees for a packet of contraband salt. Zohra's friend, Mohini, expects at least a hundred

rupees. It is not the money that Sheikh Jamaluddin is not willing to give but, as he explains to Mohini, "We are not in this" (25). Mohini is surprised, but Saeed Ahmed, who had gone to jail in 1919, agrees with what Sheikh Jamaluddin has said. He points out that "Freedom for the country means freedom for all, and the Muslims feel that unless their rights are safeguarded, it will not mean freedom for them..." (25). If Congress had only agreed to Jinnah's "Fourteen Points," people like Jaraluddin and Saeed Ahmed would have joined the freedom movement. Zohra, however, remains unconvinced despite this long explanation. But Sughra, to whom she voices her regrets that they are outside the struggle, asks her, "What good is freedom if it only means a change of masters — the Hindus instead of the British?" (27). Zohra wants to join in the struggle like the Hindu women who work and suffer while the Muslim women sit idle in their homes. "They are marching ahead and we are still entangled in the toils of purdah" (27).

Divided Hearts

87

As Shah Nawaz explains the divided political loyalties of her characters, she also suggests the syncretic nature of their culture. The Hindu Kauls share a common "Muslim culture." As Shah Nawaz puts it, They had always prided themselves upon their culture and learning and they spoke the pure Urdu of Delhi and Lucknow and with the correct accent and idiom, often put to shame their Punjabi friends who spoke Urdu with the guttural accent of the Punjab. In Shanti Niwas, writers and artists were

collection of rare manuscripts women of the family were well kept purdah, yet they were not visits to clubs and restaurants. . .

always welcome,

and the Kauls'

and paintings was famous. The educated and though none of them over-fond of a gay social life or . (30)

If the Muslim Zohra has problems with her family, so does the Hindu Mohini. Though her father and sister are in jail, her

grandfather has forbidden her to court arrest. She disobeys him to participate in student demonstrations. Thus Shah Nawaz shows how the younger generation strove against the wishes of the older, even though this older generation had also been active in its time. Through Mohini's thoughts, Shah Nawaz explains the situation. "She was giving pain to her family only in order to ease the pain of the larger family — the nation" (31).

Shah Nawaz juxtaposes long passages of explanatory dialogue with accounts of political activism. Thus both Mohini and Zohra take part in demonstrations, despite the strictures from their respective families against doing so. Mohini is arrested and sent to jail. Zohra participates in a meeting held to protest the arrest. Zohra's father receives a phone from the Principal telling him of Zohra's participation. He is furious. Why are they not in the fight, Zohra demands to know, and Shah Nawaz explains why even conscientious, freedom-loving Muslims distanced themselves from the freedom movement. Unless Hindus and Muslims both enjoy freedom, there can be no freedom, Jamaluddin explains. "India is a vast land . . . a subcontinent" (41). Then Jamaluddin gives a historical account going back to 712

with the first appearance of Muslims on the subcontinent and tracing - their history through the rebellion of 1857. Muslims had led the

88

A Divided Legacy

rebellion, Zohra's father tells her, and that is why after the rebellion

they were arrested and beaten. The British, he tells Zohra, encouraged the re-awakening of the Hindus.* The Muslims — crushed, killed, hanged — hated the British and shunned everything westerm. It was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan who explained to them the importance of modem education. Didn't the British help Muslim League, asks Zohra. Yes, just as they had helped the Congress. "The Muslim was now the weaker of the two and it was only a continuation of their ‘divide and rule policy' to help them" (42). Jamaluddin explains how the Muslims and the Hindus fought side by side in 1919. But why did the movement stop, asks Zohra. Partly because Gandhi called it off, fearing a violent revolution, but also because of a rising tide of Hindu nationalism. Hindus who were still educationally and politically ahead of us, began to want all the power for themselves and to grudge their share to the Muslims. Under pressure from the growing communal Hindu Mahasabha,

Congress

took a stiffer and

stiffer attitude

towards

Muslims. In 1929 we had another chance to unite, for Congress boycotted the all-British Simon Commission that had come to India, and while some

Muslims

would

not join them, others under Mr.

Jinnah joined the boycott and made it a success. But again Congress failed us, and they brought out the Nehru Report, which contained a

proposed constitution for the country that did grave injustice to the Muslims. (43)

Jamaluddin explains that Muslims were reduced to minorities in the Muslim majority areas of Bengal and the Punjab. The Muslims 2 The Bengal Renaissance, it should be noted, took place in the middle of the nineteenth century. While Michael Madhusudan was longing for Albion's shore and then, failing to get the audience he aspired to in England, using his knowledge of English poetry to write sonnets and an epic poem about Ravana in Bengali, Indians had been soundly crushed by the British. The Bengal Renaissance. written about and eulogized as the reawakening of Bengal, was the British game to control India. The Bengal poets and writers played into British hands, and, their work done, the Bengali Babus were cast out when the centre of

political and cultural control moved to North India. If Mir Jafar had allowed the entrance of the British into India through Bengal. the Bengal writers entrenched them in the nineteenth century. Intellectuals and writers have always been tools. Ram Mohun Ray and Michael Madhusudan, eulogized and valorised by succeeding generations of Bengalis, were only two of the more prominent tools of the British. This idea is briefly touched upon by Shah Nawaz in this dialogue.

Divided Hearts

89

are also to blame. They have not fought unitedly, explains Jamaluddin. Zohra comments that "Muslims like Uncle Fakhruddin and his Unionist Party"? would never join the struggle. Jamaluddin agrees, and notes that had Congress come to terms with “the right-thinking Muslims" these reactionaries would not have been able to influence the Muslim masses. As the narrative proceeds, Habib falls in love with Mohini, but even though Zohra sympathizes with her brother, she thinks it would be better if Mohini left town. Though Muslims and Hindus had lived together for centuries, and though some of the Mughal emperors had married Hindu wives, it was impossible for Hindus and Muslims to marry. Muslims married Muslims, and Hindus wedded Hindus, so it had been for centuries and so it would always be. True, some of the Moghul emperors, in the days gone-by, had taken Hindu wives, but then they were Emperors and could defy laws and convention, but even in their case, the marriages had been resented both by Hindus and by Muslims. Here and there, through the hundreds of years that they had lived side by side, there had been romantic attachments between people of the two communities, but they had almost always resulted either in the conversion of one of them to the other faith or in tragedy; and, in each case of conversion, the one who was converted, was ostracized by his or her family and community.

(154-55)

When Mohini's father and grandfather lear of Mohini's relationship with Habib they too are upset. Mohini's father repeats the ideas that Zohra had voiced about cross-religious marriages. A marniage, Mohini's father tells her, is not a private affair. It is the warp and woof of society and "no individual has any nght to disrupt this woven fabric for the sake of an imagined personal happiness." Hindus and Muslims, he tells his daughter, "do not and cannot marry each other. Why not, insists Mohini. "Because .. . it just isn't done" (190). 3 The Unionist Party did come to terms with the Muslim League, but presumably by then it was too late. Shah Nawaz makes no reference in the course of the book to this unity— partly because the period covered preceded the date of that temporary alliance.

90

A Divided Legacy

Mohini has thought long and hard about her relationship with Habib. Believing strongly in Hindu-Muslim unity, she believes that their relationship is an example of bridging communal barriers. When her father tells her to think about the laws and customs that are barners to her relationship with Habib, she throws back the words at him. Isn't the law of humanity above these laws that hinder ties? Haven't Hindus and Muslims lived side by side for centuries. "Laws? Customs? ... communal barriers" (192). When Mohini's grandfather tells her she is an idealist and that she cannot break the laws and customs of society, she tells him that unless they break down these barriers there can be no freedom. We cannot be free or great, until we are one people, and we cannot be one people unless Hindus, and Muslims, and Christians and all others break down their barriers of caste and creed to mix and mingle together... We must make the utmost sacrifice, we must cement with our blood the schisms that have arisen among [us], only then will Indians be a nation and India a country. (192-3)

Realizing that affection will move Mohini more than anger, her grandfather only warns Mohini not to do anything that will bring dishonour to the two households and rend them apart rather than bring them together. Habib's father is also concerned with honour. Thus he is furious when he learns of Habib's interest in Mohini. He tells his son, "We have always prided ourselves upon the honour of our men and the chastity of our women, with us the honour of the daughter of our meanest Hindu tenants has [been] safe and you have dared to cast your eyes upon a girl of the proud and noble Kaul family" (194). When Habib explains that he means no dishonour, that he loves Mohini and wishes to marry her, Jamaluddin is even more furious. The haughty Kashmiri pandits are as proud of their lineage and pure

blood as the Sheikhs are. It is an insult to think of marriage.

Habib questions whether it isn't time to grow out of narrowmindedness. It isn't narrow-mindedness, his father says. "It is the law." Perhaps then it is time to change the law, Habib suggests. The dialogue that ensues reiterates what has been said earlier by Zohra and the Kauls. "By what law and what custom can you unite her life >

Divided Hearts

91

with your own? Hindu law forbids it, Muslim law disallows it, Indian laws make no provision for it" (195-6). Habib reminds his father that the Mughal emperors married Hindu girls. Jamaluddin retorts, "Because they were Emperors, and even so, the marriages were not popular. The high caste Hindus resented them and the Muslims disliked them" (196). While Zohra sympathizes with Habib, Sughra doesn't. When Habib points out the common history of Hindus and Muslims for 800 years, Sughra reminds him that in this common history the heroes of one religion have been the villains of the other and vice versa. Habib points out that there was also Akbar and the common heritage embodied in Delhi and Agra and the Taj Mahal. Sughra retorts, "Delhi and Agra and the Taj are purely Muslim. As for Akbar's efforts, they came to nothing. Alas! we are still apart as we have always been, 800 years have not welded us together. We believe in one and they in many gods. We believe in the brotherhood of mankind and they in the caste system" (201). She goes on to remind him that fine phrases are all right, but many of Mohini's family will not eat with them and that, although the older Kauls speak Urdu, the younger children are being taught Hindi. She points out that talk and action are different and no matter what fine phrases are spouted and actions urged, "Hindus and Muslims are drifting further and further apart" (201). Mohini falls ill with consumption — a result of her stay in prison. She is taken to Kashmir but does not recover. Habib mourns her death, returning to the Shalimar Gardens where the two had first met. The Shalimar Gardens, built by the Mughals, are a reminder of

the legacy of the Muslim rulers of India, a reminder of the proud past that Habib is heir to. Shah Nawaz used the motif of a Hindu-Muslim love affair— as have several other writers of Partition novels—to stress the common heritage, the human ties that bind people across religious lines. But, unlike Anita Desai, for example, in the fictional Clear

Light of Day or K.S. Duggal, in real life, she was unable to break the taboo against inter-religious marriages — which, as Duggal's case reveals, was not as absolute as the writer would have us believe. Several of Shah Nawaz's male contemporaries married Hindu

92

A Divided Legacy

women.* Even today in Pakistan, one will find among the older generation these cross-religious marriages. However, like several

writers who have shown the breakdown of these relationships when the Partition fever raged, she too shows the impossibility of such an alliance. No other writer has, however, used the pages of the novel to debate the issue in as much detail as Shah Nawaz has. In her zeal for

Pakistan, Shah Nawaz goes out of her way to stress the impossibility of such an alliance, using the idea of pure blood lines to quell all arguments in favour of such marriages. However, while the blood lines of the Kashmiri pandits might be pure, the blood lines of the Sheikhs could never be so. The Pakistani Sheikh is the descendant of a convert from Hinduism to Islam. Hence it is ironical for a descendant of the Sheikhs to talk of pure blood lines. Shah Nawaz, however, seems unaware of the irony. It is Rushdie who will show how impossible it is to talk of pure blood lines through Saleem Sinai, the hero of Midnight's Children. Though Shah Nawaz is unable to break the taboo between HinduMuslim marriages, there are two other taboos that she will break, suggesting how far more enlightened Islam is than Hinduism in the case of remarriages or marriages between the classes. Through the marriage of Habib to Najma, Zohra's divorced friend, she stresses that in Islam there is no stigma attached to the divorcee. Thus though ~ there is some initial resistance on the part of Habib's family towards Najma, Shah Nawaz stresses that this resistance has no basis in Islam. Similarly, Shah Nawaz stresses through the marriage of Zohra to Ahmad, the son of her father's former clerk, that, unlike Hinduism which does not permit inter-caste marriages, Islam has no such restrictions. Islam is an egalitarian religion which has no caste or class system. As the Urdu poet Iqbal stressed in one of his poems, "When the time for prayer comes, Mahmud [the king] stands next to Ayaz [the slave]." It is surprising that Shah Nawaz could not break the taboo against Hindu-Muslim marriages when she was able to break a taboo 4 The wife of Mr. Iahi Baksh Soomro, the present Speaker of the Pakistan National Assembly, for example, was Hindu. Hindu women were supposed to be exceptionally beautiful because of their "pure" blood lines.

Divided Hearts

93

perhaps even greater than all these: the taboo against extra-marital relationships. Sughra, the true Muslim, is shown as unhappy over her marriage. The loss of a beloved child increases Sughra's unhappiness. It is at this time of extreme vulnerability that Sughra falls in love with a man named Kamal. Kamal is, however, married and Sughra is unwilling to be a second wife. Though Shah Nawaz does not suggest a physical consummation, she comes close to it. In showing Sughra's unwillingness to be a second wife, Shah Nawaz was expressing her disapproval of the Islamic allowance of polygamy. Sughra retums to Lahore and she leams how her husband — whom she could not love — has built a hospital and a school, both named _ after her. She learns how he has buried himself in social work while

she was burying herself in an affair. She realizes that she has misjudged him. He is a dedicated social worker as Sughra herself is. Sughra retums to him and together they look forward to Pakistan, a land where the ways of Islam would be established to make an exploitation-free, more equitable and just society where health care and education would be available to all. While Shah Nawaz's imagination of a Muslim socialistic country seems a contradiction in terms, the present-day examples of Libya and Syria suggest that they are not incompatible. People like Shah Nawaz and Nehm, enlightened Muslims and Hindus alike, believed that religious ideals were not incompatible with socialistic practices. Like Jinnah, Shah Nawaz envisaged a country for Muslims, not an Islamic state where the clock had been tumed back. It was this enthusiasm that filled many of those who dreamed of Pakistan. Even the Bengali writer Abu Rushd, in his novel Nongor, shows his hero Kamal looking forward to Pakistan. For Kamal, disillusionment sets in very quickly —as it did for the rest of his real-life counterparts, both those who had opted for Pakistan and those who found that they were suddenly Pakistani one moming. But even in Pakistan, as Mehr Nigar Masroor shows in her novel, Shadows of Time, people who were struggling to establish Pakistan were not struggling to establish a theocratic state but a democratic one which was not incompatible with Islam. The change that takes place in Zohra, from an upper-class woman

in purdah to an active Communist worker, reflects the change in

94

A Divided Legacy

Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's own life: Her transformation from socialist worker to Muslim Leaguer is replicated in the novel by the shifting focus from Zohra, the firm believer in Hindu-Muslim unity, to Sughra, who believes in the egalitarian aspect of Islam. While Sughra is contrasted with Zohra, in certain ways Sughra too reflects the writer herself. As her brother points out in the preface to the second edition, by 1945 Mumtaz Shah Nawaz had moved away from the idea of "a Muslim dominated area called Pakistan within a Federal India" which many people continued to believe. By this time she had started to feel that "Pakistan as a separate state had become inevitable." The union of Zohra and Ahmed also symbolizes the new Pakistan, a Pakistan where there will be no rich and poor, no class divisions. This, of, course, never happened. India— at least till the

new capitalism and free market economy was ushered in during Rajiv Gandhi's time — came closer to a socialist society. The inevitability of Partition is reiterated several times throughout the book, denying therefore that it was a well planned move by a handful of Muslim politicians or Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Nor, as Ahmed Shah Nawaz comments, did the early Pakistanis like Mumtaz Shah Nawaz quite envisage the "iron curtain" that would grow up between India and Pakistan. The Heart Divided ends in 1942, but Shah Nawaz

had seen

Partition and, though the last lines of the book are full of optimism as Sughra and Mansour see the glorious future ahead, Shah Nawaz also suggests the horror and the blood that Partition brought in its wake. There is, therefore, not only the premonition of disaster in Vijay's words, but also in the imagery used. Juxtaposed next to the "crescent moon with its accompanying star sailing in a sea of pale green" is the sunset sky. Thus, even as Sughra rejoices to see the crescent and the star, emblems of Pakistan, she too senses the horror

that lies ahead.

Najma trembled and drew nearer to Habib and Zohra caught Ahmad's hand in her own, but Sughra left her chair and walked rapidly away, like one in a dream. Straight to the open window of the room she came and looked out upon the Western sky to see high up on the horizon the crescent moon with its accompanying star sailing in a sea of pale green, and she drew a breath of gladnes s and >

Divided Hearts

95

she whispered "The herald of Pakistan?" But her eyes dropped lower and the sunset surged into them in a flood of crimson and she shuddered and turned away. (480)

The episode ends with Sughra returning to her husband whose worth she had not fully realized. She tells him that she would like to have another child. Mansour is overjoyed. Sughra asks him to let her share his life and work. She will, he promises. There is much work to be done in the new land, and it is dedicated people like himself and Sughra who will build this new land and fill it with their children. His triumphant cry "Towards Pakistan" ends the book, suggesting that, despite the foreshadowings of disaster, the creation of Pakistan Was accompanied by a joy that came from the belief that in this new land —despite the vivisection that had taken place — there would be a new equitable world order, a world where women — like Sughra— would "go forward, walk together hand in hand" (481). The question remains, however, whether Shah Nawaz would have been happy with the state of things. At the end of the book, despite the inevitability of Pakistan, the ties that bind people like Vijay, Habib, Ahmed and Zohra inspire them to see that "people of goodwill on both sides must go on trying for a settlement between the Congress and the League" (479). In these circumstances, Shah Nawaz would not have been happy with the state of perpetual war between India and Pakistan. As her brother notes, "Those who have known Mumtaz have often wondered how Mumtaz would have reacted to the ‘iron curtain' which had grown up by then between India and Pakistan. It was not what she had envisaged in the closing

chapter of 'The Heart Divided' (v). Moreover, in a narrative which begins on the day that Zohra forgets her burga, Shah Nawaz speaks as the spokeswoman of a generation of women who were breaking away from the shackles of

purdah. Like the later Mehr Nigar Masroor, who makes clear her disillusionment in Shadows of Time, Shah Nawaz would not have

been happy with the direction that Pakistan took. The years that followed would not establish an equitable socialism but a military dictatorship, followed by a rising Islamic fundamentalism that would undo all that women like the fictional Zohra and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz in real life had attempted to do. By then, of course, Mumtaz

96

A Divided Legacy

Shah Nawaz would be dead, her body scattered over Ireland. Perhaps, the only saving grace would be that her voice from the past would be resurrected to remind a new generation of Pakistanis how things had been.

Chapter Four

PUBLIC POLITICS AND PRIVATE LIVES

The opening years of the sixties saw the publication of two very different books about the Partition: Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges (1964). Hosain's novel traces the changes that take place in the years immediately preceding and following Partition on a Muslim family in Lucknow. The winds of change blow through the aristocratic house and, by the time the winds have died down, the

family has been scattered. Some have crossed the border to Pakistan, some

have been killed in the train massacres, the rest remain in

India, saddened and somewhat disillusioned, but still believing in a united India and secularism. In Hosain's book, politics appears secondary to the story of a young woman's growth to sad maturity through personal loss; politics forms the core of Malgonkar's novel. Nevertheless, even in Sunlight on a Broken Column, the young men and women in Hosain's Lucknow talk about nationalism, secularism, a new India. The differences between Muslims and Hindus, which finally break up the integrity of India, are seen as extraneous and not insurmountable. Coming from an aristocratic Muslim background, Hosain interweaves the story of the Partition of India with questions of a Muslim versus a secular identity. In Malgonkar's novel, the radical young men take oaths and make blood pledges to eradicate religious differences, but the religious differences finally entrench

themselves and rent the fabric of order. The personal relationships in

98

A Divided Legacy

Malgonkar are of secondary interest to the main political plot which interweaves family feuds, jail terms, revenge. Sunlight on a Broken Column is told through the consciousness of Laila, an orphan brought up by her aunt in her rich grandfather's home. More sensitive than her cousin Zahra, Laila confronts prejudices, cruelties and hypocrisy and finally breaks away by marrying Ameer, a friend of her cousin Asad. Simultaneous with the story of Laila's growing to young womanhood and then widowhood, when Ameer dies in World War II, is the story of the years before and immediately after Partition. Living together, not always comfortably, the Hindu and Muslim communities are unprepared for the violence that accompanied Partition. Part four of the book takes place fourteen years later and describes Laila's return to the now abandoned house in Hasanpur. The family is divided. Zahra and her husband have gone to Pakistan, the land created for the Muslims of India. But Laila and Asad have remained behind, and, in her quiet comment on the two-nation theory, Hosain makes Asad an important man in Indian politics. Laila, a widow now, is united with Asad.

Sunlight on a Broken Column portrays Lucknow during the thirties and forties, a time of transition for India but also for the old Muslim aristocracy. A first-person narrative, the novel explore s the sensibility of the girl for whom politics at the beginning is something that happens far away. But, even as Hosain depicts the growin g rift between Indians over Partition —a rift that Laila perceives as a conflict between her two cousins Saleem and Kemal, Saleem representing the Muslim League stand and Kemal representing a secular nationalist ideal — she describes the Muslim culture of Lucknow and its hypocrisies and the impact these have on the sensitive Laila. Laila, of course, questions her own insensitivity. How can she be so calm after the death of someone close to her. I wondered that I could think like this about his death. Was Zahra right when she said I was heartless and selfish? And yet I cried when reading stories and poems! What was wrong with me inside? What was "wrong" in itself, and what was "right"? Who was to tell me?! —————

' Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 31. Other references to the text will be given parenthetically. >

Public Politics and Private Lives

99

Laila is not insensitive, and her sensitivity makes her aware of the cruelties and hypocrisies of her society. Her awareness of the double standards that exist for men and women and of how women themselves collude in this is brought home to her after an incident when Nandi, the daughter of Jumman, is found together with the cleaner in the garage. She is reprimanded and called a slut, a liar and a wanton girl by Laila's uncle Mohsin. Nandi retorts that he cannot call her those names. "A slut? Wanton? And who are you to say it who would have made me one had I let you?" (38) Mohsin hits Nandi. Laila, who is fond of Nandi, tries to protect her but receives the next blow and runs to her room screaming, "I hate you, I hate you." Aunt Abida sends for Laila and tells her that she must apologize to her uncle. Laila does not want to do so. Abida reminds her of her family and of traditions. She had reprimanded Laila when she was ten for not returning the sweeper woman's salam and, now that she is fifteen, she reminds her that "good manners are the truest sign of good breeding." She must apologize to her uncle. My child, there are certain rules of conduct that must be observed in this world without question. You have a great responsibility. You must never forget the traditions of your family no matter to what outside influences you may be exposed. I have been responsible for you since the day God willed you to be without a father and mother. I do not want anyone to point a finger at you, because it will be a sign of my failure. Never forget the family into which you were born. That is all Iwanted to say to you. Now go and say your prayers. (38)

Laila ponders over what her aunt has said. Again and again she is reminded of her family and of their traditions. But is she ever allowed to forget them? She thinks about how everyone unites in reminding her of her background, of her separateness from the ordinary Indian. Laila is not good at remembering, but the traditions of the family have a way of impressing themselves upon her whether

she will or no. Never forget the family into which you were born. When we were small Ustaniji made us recite the names of our ancestors. Zahra remembered many more than I ever did who found it difficult to name even mv grandfather. But since that time five

100

A Divided Legacy

hundred years ago when the first of them had fought his way across the northern mountains through the Khyber Pass to the refuge of the green valleys many marches south, their ghosts had stood sentries over all action, speech and thought. (39) _

In addition to describing the aristocratic Muslim family coming

into conflict with the winds of change, Hosain also describes the Muslim milieu of Lucknow through the different festivals of the

community.

But, told through Laila's awareness,

the festivals of

“Shubrat," Eid and "Bakreid" are both contrasted and juxtapo sed

with the Hindu festivals. Thus Laila remembers Diwali and Holi, and that, as a child, she would be wamed against Holi. There would be "drunken singing in the men-servants' quarters, and on the streets. And Bua's admonitions not to go near the gate because those mudsplashed, colour-sprinkled hooligans made no distinction between believers and - non-believers" (41). Though Hosain describe s the friendship between Laila and Nita, it is significant that she also portrays the prejudices that the Muslim family had against Hindus. Thus, even though Hosain shows how these different traditio ns are

juxtaposed, they remain different, separate.

The Christian presence is also felt in Luckno—wif only in the appearance of the Eid moon above the steeple. As a little child Laila remembers the celebrations of Eid and the excitement of seeing the new moon. Can she see the moon, by the branch of the tree, her

father asks. "Hold me higher, Abba, higher. Ah I can see it, the

moon of Kid, stuck on the church steeple, hiding in the branches. It is smiling" (40). In the city of Lucknow, Muslims are divided into Shias and Sunnis, and Hosain shows the cousins discussing the issue of Sunnis and Shias. The issue is important because Mohar ram festivals were times when communal troubles between Muslims and Hindus tended

to break out. Hosain, however, makes it clear that Moharram proces-

sions were not brought out by all Muslims, only by Shias. Unlike

Hindu festivals, the traditional Muslim festivals tend to be simple,

and family-based after ritual prayers in the mosque.

Moharram

processions are different with the singing of marsi as or elegies

mouming the death of Imam Hossain, the grand son of the Prophet Mohammad, the public flagellation, the tazias or representations of

Public Politics and Private Lives

101

the tomb of Imam Hossain, the duldul, the horse representing the horse of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson. The image of Moharram processions loomed large during the British administration in India because those processions were occasions of communal disturbances. Hosain, with her Muslim background, brings in the issue of whether these processions are Muslim at all. Discussion on the processions starts when Mrs. Martin comes to visit and wants to see the Moharram procession. Are these processions all right? Zahid calls them "idolatrous and sinful." He points out that Islam enjoins that the dead should be buried in graves of which no sign remains. The dead are not supposed to be turned into saints. He calls Shias "worse than idolatrous" for taking out fazias. Zahra intervenes. Shias and Sunnis are all Muslims. But Shias curse Sunnis, don't they, Zahid retorts. Asad remarks, "He has learned the lesson the English teach us. . . Hate each other —love us" (56). The succeeding passage contains references to Hindu-Muslim riots and the British hand in both inciting these riots and preserving their own image as preservers of peace between the two communities. Zahid looked at his brother in surprise, then said sullenly, "Anyway it will not be safe to go out during Muharram. I have heard boys talking at school that there might be a riot this year." "Stupid schoolboy talk!" said Zahra. "Why should there be a riot?"

Asad said, "Maybe because there haven't been any for too long, not even Hindu-Muslim ones. Something must be done to prove that the British are here to enforce law and order, and stop us killing each other." (56)

Though Shias and Sunnis squabble and fight—a quarrel that hasn't got better but worse over the years as the massacres in Karachi witnessed in 1995 —even Hindus and Muslims lived side by side and occasionally even partook of the other community's customs.

Thus Jumman, whose wife wants a son, distributes sherbet to the

thirsty processionists of the tazia procession in Moharram.

"This year he is trying to please Allah and the Holy Prophet," says Ramzan. "The year before," Saliman adds, "It was his god Hanuman's

tum. He made a vow to measure his length from here to the temple

102

A Divided Legacy

across the river. It was when the roads were like the bottoms of

frying-pans off a fire." (72)

But the peace between Hindus and Muslims does not. last. Tensions are always high during certain festivals, and the tazia procession brings about the inevitable. Some villagers are going to join the big Moharram procession in the city. Outside the "big Hanumanji temple" (75) the top of their tazia gets stuck in the branches of a peepul tree. Someone from inside the temple blows a conch. One of the processionists throws a stone at "the heathen sounds" and the fighting begins. It is with this backdrop that the lives of the community continue. Asad is in love with Zahra, but Zahra accepts an arranged marriage. Laila, who knows the feelings that Asad and Zahra have for each other, questions Zahra's ready acceptance of this marriage. Her

questioning of Zahra's feelings leads to questions about her own

sensibility. Solitary in her own world, Laila is an observer of the outside world —as she also is of her own aristocratic Muslim world. She thinks about her Hindu friend Nita Chatterji who is anti-British, but cautious: "I'm not like that stupid cousin of mine who tried to shoot some pompous official and was nearly hanged for his pains. Children in politics, that is what terrorists are, heroic but misguided. To fight British imperialism we have to be organized and disciplined, and use the kind of weapons that will not misfire" (124). There is Joan Davis, an Anglo-Indian who believes in the British: "I believe in the English not only because I am an Anglo-Indian but because they have brought peace and justice and unity "(126). Stories of the Partition almost always have the story of a romanc e which cuts across communal lines. Generally Muslim authors tend to have a Muslim boy falling in love with a Hindu girl, and a Hindu writer a Hindu boy romancing a Muslim girl. While some of these relations form an important element of the story, occasio nally, as here, it is only a minor element. Thus Kemal meets Sita Agarwa l in London and wishes to marry her. She refuses. Saleem comments, "But for all her sophistication, scratch her and you'll find an orthodox Hindu full of prejudices against Muslims." Laila retorts

that a Muslim girl would also not have been able to marry a Hindu boy. Saleem goes on to comment how this love affair has made him

Public Politics and Private Lives

103

see things more clearly. Laila attempts to refute his argument, noting that all Hindus are not alike, but Saleem has made up his mind about Hindus. "I am not interested in theological arguments. But Sita's attitude opened my eyes to the realities of the communal problem. What can you expect from a religion which forbids people to eat and drink together? When even a man's shadow can defile another? How is real friendship or understanding possible?" "Ranjit is your friend, isn't he?" "He has no such stupid prejudices."

"His grandfather did not eat with Baba Jan, but was his greatest friend." "You cannot reduce a whole political and social problem to an individual one, "Saleem said imperiously. .

"And you cannot generalize," I retorted. (197)

Saleem gradually tums communal Muslims must unite against India.

and

starts

believing

that

I believe the Congress has a strong anti-Muslim element in it against which the Muslims must organize. The danger is great because it is hidden, like an iceberg. When it was just a question of fighting the British the progressive forces were uppermost; but now that power is to be acquired, now the submerged reactionary elements will surface. Muslims must unite against them. (233)

Saleem becomes the mouthpiece of the Muslim League in Sunlight on a Broken Column, expressing the reasons why the Hindus could never live at peace with the Muslims whose years of rule they grudged. The majority of Hindus have not forgotten or forgiven the Muslims for having ruled over them for hundreds of years. Now they can democratically take revenge. The British have ruled about two hundred years, and see how they are hated. (234)

His father tells Saleem that he has "learned a lot of lessons, very quickly." He himself believed that it was possible for Hindus and Muslims "to work together on a political level and live together in

104

A Divided Legacy

personal friendship." Saleem refuses to accept his father's point of view. He tells him that his best friends are Hindus, but times have

changed. It is no longer possible for Hindus and Muslims to live together. . Part Three of the book ends with Laila breaking with tradition and going off with Ameer. Part Four of the book takes place fourteen years later, years during which has Second World War taken place, communal violence racked the country, and the Indian subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan. Laila has retumed to Hasanpur to pay one last visit to the home of her childhood. Many things have happened between her departure and her retum. A wiser, sadder woman, she reflects on how the family has separated. One of the strongest images of the Partition in the north is that is the train massacre, and Hosain alludes to it in Sunlight with Laila's cousin Zahid being killed in a train massacre. Full of bright hope and triumph Zahid had boarded the train on that thirteenth day of August which was to take him to the realization of his dreams, on the eve of the birth of the country for which he had lived and worked. When it had reached its destination not a man, woman or child was found alive. (310)

The years have a cruel impact on the cousins. The Partition has changed Zahra who has left for Pakistan with her husband. Zahra is apprehensive of the possible effect too frequent visits to India will have on her husband's career. The narrator comments, "She denied the country of her birth with the zeal of a convert" (303). Though Hosain neither makes an overt comment nor takes a definite stand on the Pakistan question, the comments of Laila on Saleem and on Zahra, as well as the role assigned to Asad to whom Laila has grown attached after the death of her husband, suggest that Hosain did not accept the division of the subcontinent. Asad is imprisoned in 1942, but is released sometime later. In 1946 he goes to work in the "Easter riot-stricken areas" and later is drawn into political work at Delhi. This part of the narrative becomes vague — possibly because Hosain was as unfamiliar as her narrator with what it was that a Muslim like Asad could do in Calcutta or Noakhali — the "Eastern riot-stricken areas" referred to >

Public Politics and Private Lives

105

by the narrator. Asad's name then starts appearing in the papers as one of the promising young men of the Congress. He is sent as a delegate to the U.N. The narrator's growing love for Asad suggests that though Hosain does not take sides, she does suggest that Laila and Asad's point of view is the preferable one. In my seclusion [after the death of Ameer] the urgency of the years of change and turmoil was made real through Asad. We had dreamed when we were young of independence; he was now part of it with all its undreamt-of reality

— its triumphs and defeats, its violent

aftermath, the breaking-up of our social order, and the slow emergence of another. (318)

Asad's comment on Zahid's death also suggests that Hosain accepts the irrational violence that cropped up during the years of Partition — though she also suggests the pain that accompanies the acceptance of meaningless deaths. The manner of Zahid's death had been a terrible test for Asad's faith in non-violence. He had accepted it as such, believing that bitterness and retaliation could only breed violence and start a never-ending cycle which was a negation of life; but he was human and it needed a conscious effort of will to restrain his bitterness. (318)

The final impact of Sunlight is that of displacement and disintegration, an impact that is projected by the last book which narrates Laila's retum to the home of her childhood and adolescence. The family that occupied the house is no longer there. Age and accidents have taken their toll, but this natural process has been hastened and heightened by the Partition. This image of disintegration is projected through the picture of the decaying house, a picture that both Qurratulain Hyder and Anita Desai use. In Hyder's novel, as in Hosain's, friends and families are divided by Partition. Hyder, however, gives a slight glimpse into this disintegration, unlike Hosain and Desai where the house figures prominently. In Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, the family is affected by Partition, but she does not dwell on separation and partings, on losses and deaths. Unlike Clear Light, however, the family in Sunlight is divided between India and Pakistan. The family that dwelt in the house is no

106

A Divided Legacy

longer there. Some have left for Pakistan, and even the ones who are left behind in India— or have chosen to stay behind — can never be the same. Asad has to force himself to accept Zahid's meaningless death. This sense of loss and decay, of what the Partition meant to those who left and those who stayed behind is made vividly and poignantly clear in Intizar Husain's Basti as in his shorter fiction An Unwritten Epic. The image of the deserted and decaying house, however,

becomes

the focal point of Attia Hosain's

last

section. Thus Hosain describes the house to which Laila returns in great detail. A low fence of crude wooden poles and straggling wire cut off the main house from the garden in front of the rooms where my aunts and the women servants had once lived.

A child's toy cart was lying on its side by the rose-bushes on the divided patch of grass. A bicycle stood in the veranda, and towels hung on the railings of the upstairs balcony .... The main doors were locked, their wire gauze encrusted with dust. A panel of the glass doors behind it was cracked. The brass fittings were black . .. There were strangers living in the rooms once so private and guarded, strangers who were names in Government files balancing Saleem's name against their—she labelled "evacuee." they "refugees." Their presence here, and Saleem's in their erstwhile homeland. was part of a statistical calculation in the bargaining of bureaucrats and politicians, in which millions of uprooted human beings became just numerical figures. The official words describing them had no meaning in terms of human heartache .. . . The conservatory behind the Overgrown tennis courts was like a rubbish dump with broken flower-pots lying outside, palms with split, brown leaves, discoloured barrel-shaped pots, and plants that grew wild. (272)

The change, however, that Hosain depicts is not only the result of Partition, but also of the new India where the privil eged have lost their rights, Hundreds of thousands of families were faced with the necessity of changing habits of mind and living conditioned by centuries, hundreds of thousands of landowners and the hanger s-on who had +

Public Politics and Private Lives

107

lived on their largesse, their weaknesses and their follies, Faced by prospects of poverty, by the actual loss of privilege, there were many who lost their balance of mind when their world cracked apart. Palaces and great houses wore the signs of neglect. surgeries, brothels, and law-courts

Shops and

lost their best customers.

The

expanding city with its rash of new buildings, its new citizens had new scars added to those left when the royal era was destroyed. This was the end my uncle had [prophesied]. This was the end our theories and enthusiasm had supported. Like Death and all dissolution it was an end easier to accept with the mind than as a fact. (277)

With the passing away of the old feudal order, there is the setting in of an ugliness and disorder. The plants grow wild, the brass has not been polished, cycles and towels litter the place. There is both a sense of nostalgia in Hosain's depiction of a past which has been destroyed, as well as a sense of the inevitable. An ugliness sets in when a new order replaces an old, but Hosain, through Laila, also reflects the sadness that accompanies this change, particularly on the part of a community which has been affected. The comment can hold true not only for an aristocratic elite, but also for the Muslims of India who were divided by Partition. Hosain portrays the ambivalences that accompany change through a conversation between Laila and Asad —the observer and the participant in a changing India. When Asad once said to me, "The ugliness is inevitable. When palaces are pulled down and mud huts are exposed to view it is not a pleasant sight There is rubble and dust in any demolition. But from this debris we shall build again," I had answered impatiently, "Asad, stop talking like a text-book. The trouble with all of you who go about changing the world is that you become petrified. All that is easy to say, but when I think of the worries and despair, the material problems of my family and friends I cannot look objectively beyond them." (277-8)

Hossain touches upon the brokenness of the Muslim nation as she

does upon the broken family. Thus, as the family squabbles about who will go to Pakistan and who will not, the point that Pakistan cannot be the homeland of all Indian Muslims is stressed. But even

108

A Divided Legacy

the ones who stay are affected. Labels are convenient and necessary for governments, but distressing to the human beings to whom they are applied. Labels take no care about the human toll, the blows to personal attachments and emotions. Hosain suggests that even those who talked about Pakistan never quite understood all the effects of Pakistan on human lives. Saleem has left, is labelled an "evacuee," but while this departure has affected Saleem who has left his homeland, it also affects Kemal who stays behind. His home, "Ashiana," is divided, and the Hasanpur house is also threatened with a similar fate. Kemal would like to sell Ashiana and buy up the house in Hasanpur, but his mother cannot understand why the govemment wants to "steal" their property. Did the people who demanded Pakistan really understand what it would do to ordinary human beings? That it would mean that people who were brothers would become strangers, alien in the land of the other? Kemal's mother voices the bewilderment that must have been voiced by many people on both sides of the border. "What right have they to steal what is ours? Will they never be content with how much they rob? Is there no justice? Is this a war with Custodians for enemy property? Did they not consent to the Partition themselves? Why treat those people like enemies who went over? Were they not given a free choice? Were they warned they would lose their property and have their families harassed? If they want to drive out Muslims why not say it like honest men? Sheltering behind the false slogans of a secular state! Hypocrites! Cowards! It is good Saleem has gone away. They will destroy you and all fools like you who have trusted them. The Banias!" (279)

Meenakshi Mukherjee objects to the "individual case histories" in the fourth part of the book. While individual case histories certainly have an interest of their own, they do not in this novel contribute to its structural cohesion. Saleem's opting for Pakistan and Kamal's [sic] staying back, Zahid's cruel death on the train to Pakistan, Zaira's [sic] denial of the country of her birth with the zeal of a convert —all these have dramatic poignancy and some certain inevitability, but the documentary elements do not serve the purpose of the central theme. As a piece of social documentation Sunlight on a Broken Column is competently +

Public Politics and Private Lives

109

written, but as a novel it is not satisfactory because of its stock

situations, its predictable conflicts between love and loyalty, its overindulgence in nostalgia and sentimentality, and a general weakness of structure. It is however one of the few novels where the Partition of India is presented as the enormous event it was, and the narrator (as well as the author) being a Muslim, the issues of loyalty, idealism and expediency are fraught with a special significance.”

Mukherjee thus praises Sunlight as a social document and as a reflection of the issues that concerned Indian Muslims at the time of Partition. However, Mukherjee's cursory dismissal of the structure and the "individual case histories" reflects the same casual dismissal of the writer as Mukherjee's own casual attitude to the names of characters in the novel. While Kamal for Kemal might be accepted — the variation being one of spelling only — the substitution of Zaira for Zahra suggests Mukherjee's indifference to the book. While Sunlight does suffer the defects of any book which attempts to be true to history, the use of a first person narrator allows an indulgence in nostalgia and memory. Similarly, the use of the narrator's return to her home allows the device of reminiscence and reflection on the different individuals who once occupied the place but have now left. Despite the sense of displacement and disintegration, despite the death of ideals, Hosain ends on an optimistic note. In the description of Laila's return to the house with its dull brass and cracked glass, in the midst of the confusion of cycles and towels, there is the cry of a child. The building might be broken, but Hosain does not see a wasteland. Sunlight falls on the broken column. Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges narrates the story of Gian Talwar — the name an oxymoron, combining the words for knowledge and sword —an idealistic young man who becomes involved in the freedom movement, but gradually realizes that Gandhi's idealism has been replaced by a starker reality. Attempts to

forge a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity fail as Partition nears. Though, at the beginning of the book, with the epigraph taken from the Ramayana, there is a sense of nostalgia, this nostalgia does 2 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Twice-Born Fiction (New Delhi: Heinemann, 1971), 53.

110 . A Divided Legacy

not last beyond the epigraph: "At a bend in the Ganges, they paused to take a look at the land they were leaving."3 More than nostalgia is the ironic contrast between the non-violence that Gandhi was preaching and the violence that heralded the independence of the states of India and Pakistan as Malgonkar traces how the freedom movement changed from Hindu-Muslim unity to discord, from a striving for mutual accord to hate and violence. Malgonkar suggests ,

however, that Gandhi himself was aware of the violent depths that were hidden in the non-violence movement from Gandhi to this effect.

by using a quotation

This non-violence, therefore, seems to be due to our helpless ness. It

almost appears as if we are nursing in our bosoms the desire to take revenge the first time we get the opportunity. Can true, volunta ry 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?

Malgonkar comments on this, noting also the impact of Partition on the subcontinent. Only the violence in this story happens to be true; it came in the wake of freedom, to become a part of India's history . What was achieved through non-violence, brought with it 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, mutilat ed.

The opening chapter of the book is titled "A Ceremony of Purification" and describes the burning of Engli sh goods inspired by Gandhi. The chapter opens with the line: "They were burning British garments." Gandhi is sitting on a dais, spinning. Gian Talwar is in the audience watching Gandhi, watching the blazing fire. It is a Monday, Gandhi's day of silence, so Gandhi does not speak. Instead, the man by his side addresses the audience. He exhorts the people to become soldiers, fighting with truth and non-v iolence, exhorting the ee

3 Manohar Malgonkar, A Bend in the Ganges (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964). Subseq uent references will be noted parenthetically.

Public Politics and Private Lives

crowd to give up foreign goods finance the /athis and guns used Gian takes off his prized Malgonkar stresses the struggle his blazer.

111

which help the British economy and upon the people of India. blazer and flings it into the fire. Gian has with himself in destroying

The blazer, made of imported English material, was his most elegant garment. Indeed, it was his most prized possession. As he clutched it to his chest, it felt soft and warm, like some furry animal. He felt

a sudden desire to turn back, to fight down his irrational impulse, but it was already too late. The men crowding round the fire were making way for him shouting encouragement. He stepped forward and flung the coat into the flames. (3)

The sacrifice is especially painful because Gian's family has become impoverished owing to painful land disputes. Gian is very much the outsider, the poor boy in a university where mainly the rich and privileged go. Malgonkar will several times show Gian's struggle within himself. Afterwards, Gian will wonder whether he is following Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence merely out of cowardice. And yet later, when his brother Hari is murdered, Gian will renounce the way of non-violence. At the beginning, however, Malgonkar contrasts Gian with the other students at the university, with the other freedom

fighters who dismiss Gandhi's doctrines and Gandhi himself. Not only does Gian's struggle foreshadow other struggles that Gian will have, but the burning of garments also suggests the fires that will follow, fires that will get out of hand and be more than the burning of garments.

Gian's gesture is followed by that of a woman flinging her fur coat into the flame. After this the crowd bursts into cheers, flinging their coats and caps into the flame, shouting "Bharat-mata-ki-jai!" The meeting ends, but the "reek of the burning fur" lingers long after the meeting is over. One day, Debi-dayal, "one of the important boys at college" (6) invites Gian to a picnic at Birchi-Bagh, where the old river bed of the Chenab is an ideal spot for swimming. Gian borrows swimming trunks so as not to be embarrassed by the contrast between himself and Debi-dayal and his companions. However, when he changes into his trunks, he finds everyone staring at him.

112

A Divided Legacy

He realizes that they are looking at his sacred thread. The young men at college have become too sophisticated to wear sacred threads. One of the girls laughs, more in embarrassment than anything else. The others join in. Gian is shamed, but, at least, he thinks, he can swim much better than any of them. He leaves the pool of water and swims away into the flooded Chenab, partly to show off his skill, but also to throw away his sacred thread. The day has been mined for Gian. He realizes that he is an outsider, a poor college boy from an orthodox Hindu family. His companions represent the westernized generation. He realizes that they have nothing in common and wonders why he has been asked. It soon becomes clear to him, when the conversation steers towards

politics. He comes to realize that Debi-dayal and his friends are revolutionaries. Gian himself believes in Gandhi's non-violence. There is an interchange between him and his friend through which Malgonkar depicts the followers of Gandhi who believed in non-violence and the extremists who believed that Gandhi was the enemy of the nationalists. "Why do you wear khaddar?" Singh asked. Why did I wear khaddar, the rough homespun of the Indian peasant? Gian almost laughed. It was the uniform of the Indian National movement; it proclaimed you a soldier in the army that was dedicated to truth and non-violence. "Tam a follower of Gandhi," Gian said.

"Oh my God," Singh said softly. "And what does that mean?" "It means that I am one of those who believe that India should be freed from British rule...." "Gandhi is the enemy of Indian nationalist aspirations," Singh pronounced, and after that no one said anything for a long time. (10-11)

Singh does not believe in non-violence. He is very clear in his stand: "Non-violence is the philosophy of sheep, a creed for cowards. It is the greatest danger to this country" (12). Malgonkar shows that there is no room for Gian among his extremist friends but also that Gian himself feels awkward about his stand. This awkwardness is depicted in Gian's attitude to the sacred .

Public Politics and Private Lives

113

thread which he discards and wears only when he goes home for the holidays. While people like Gian and Singh want independence and freedom from British rule — though by different means — the lower classes are afraid of what might happen. Thus, Gian's old servant is worried. "Have you become a congress-wallah?— joined the cranks who want to send away the sahibs? What will we do without the sahibs; they don't take bribes, like our people?" (19). However, it is not only the lower classes who are apprehensive of the departure of the British and the reverting of the administration and government to the Indians. Later on in the novel, the Gurkha slaps Debi-dayal and harasses him. Gian wonders what will happen when India becomes free. He stares "at the immobile face — the typical Indian sentry drunk with the authority vested in him. It was amazing how the Empire worked, held its sway. With a crop of honest selfless officers at the top, and hordes of corrupt subhuman minor officials at the bottom. Was that the India of the Indians? What would happen if the steel frame of British officialdom was ever removed, when India became free and the people held full sway?" (119). The corruption of Indians is depicted in the flashback about the land case fought between the Little House — Gian's family — and the Big House — his uncle's family. After the death of Gian's grandfather, Gian's uncle took possession of Pibloda, a plot of land given to Gian's grandfather after he was forced to move out of the family home upon his marriage to a low caste woman. The Big House is rich, and petty officials and judges have been bribed to award judgements against Gian's family. Now, Hari has won the case and Hari comments after winning his case, "We were lucky there was a British judge —no question of bribing him, though the Big House must have done their best. Remember that. We in India can get justice only at British hands — never from our own people. They are clean — clean as grains of washed rice" (22). Hari's victory, however, is short-lived as he is killed by Vishnu Dutt. Once again the police are bribed and Vishnu Dutt is acquitted. Gian rebukes himself for not having accompanied Hari when he had followed Vishnu Dutt inside the hut. He had held back, denying that

114

A Divided Legacy

Hani's fight was also his fight. He had convinced himself that he believed in non-violence, a non-violence that arose out of courage

and

not

cowardice.

But

after

Hari's

death,

he

does

not

feel

courageous. He accuses himself of having been a coward to allow his brother to go alone. Was that why he had embraced the philosophy of non-vio lence without question — from physical cowardice, not from courage? Was this non-violence merely that of the rabbit refusing to confront the hound? (44)

Gian renounces non-violence. He rejects his old servan t Tukaram who, broken by torture and shame, had withheld eviden ce on the witness stand. Making sure that his old grand mother would be able to live by herself, Gian sets off to look for the axe with which Vishnu Dutt had killed his brother. He is lookin g for the axe not to hand it to the police as evidence, but to use it to avenge his brother's death. The swimming skill that Gian had displayed at Birchi-Bagh comes in handy as he scours the bottom of the tank for the axe. After days of searching, he finds the axe. He uses it to kill Vishnu Dutt, then goes to the police station and gives himself up. Gian is sentenced to life in the Andaman Islands, the penal colony established by the British. On the ship going to the Andam ans is Debi-dayal. Debi-dayal's route to the Andamans has been different from Gian's. After Debi-dayal and his friends realized that Gian's political

ideas did not match theirs, they did not inclu de him among

their

group of Freedom Fighters. This group of would-be terrorists eschewed communalism for terrorism. Like Debi, they pledged allegiance to the red flag of violence. Debi hated the British, as they all hated the British: that was what brought them together, Hindus and Musli ms and Sikhs, men of differing religions united in the cause of freedom as blood-brothers: the Freedom Fighters. (62)

While the Congress maintained its fight for a united India, independent of the British, the Muslim League insisted that there could not be safety for the Muslims except in a homeland of their own.

Public Politics and Private Lives

115

The narrator, however, notes that in the terrorist movement alone at the time did religious differences not seem to matter, in fact they were deliberately destroyed. In the context of the sharp differences that had now arisen between the Hindus and the Muslims heading the nationalist struggle against British rule, the terrorist movement was the last gasp of those who wanted to carry on the independence struggle united. (66)

Members renounced vegetarianism and taboos of religion. Meetings ended with their partaking a curry made of equal parts of pork and beef — pork being forbidden to Muslims and beef to Hindus. Their oath of initiation was signed in blood drawn from the little finger of the left hand. Having broken down the old taboos, they considered they were blood brothers, the elite. "They themselves were the elite, having smashed down the barriers of religion that held other Indians divided, blood-brothers in the service of the motherland" (67). At the beginning there was a strong unity among the different groups. They called themselves the Ram-Rahim Club. "'Jai-Ram!' answered by ‘Jai-Rahim!' was their secret mode of greeting. The name of Ram sacred to all Hindus, and that of Rahim equally sacred to the Muslims" (65). In order to break their taboos, they partook of

a curry made of beef and pork. They prided themselves that their leader, Shafi Usman, who at the time was passing himself off as a Sikh, was the most wanted man in the state. The Freedom Fighters had been carrying on their work for about three years, and prided themselves on being "the most successful band of terrorists outside Bengal" (65). Debi-dayal, however, was getting impatient with their paltry achievements. A college girl in Bengal had shot the governor but the Freedom Fighters had merely bumed down a forest rest house in the jungle and derailed a goods train. One day, however, Shafi suggested something really big: the destruction of an Air Force plane. He proposed to take Debi-dayal with him. Though the Freedom Fighters believed that they had overcome all communal differences, the tensions remained. Malgonkar suggests that the unity is destroyed at this level by the Muslim, Shafi, himself. Malgonkar shows that though Shafi felt proud of his band of terrorists, he also felt jealous of Debi-dayal who reminded

116

A Divided Legacy

him of "a more youthful Nehru; the theatrical good looks, the background of wealth and learning, the refinement of manner, the awareness of built-in leadership" (75). Even as Shafi chose Debi-dayal to go on the dangerous mission with him, he wondered about his feelings for Debi and about how long the unity of this group would last. The Congress and the Muslim League had come to a final parting of ways, with Hindus and Muslims separated into opposite camps, learning to hate each other with the bitterness of ages. Even their own leaders had begun to take sides. Hafiz had already written to him from Bombay complaining about the callousness of the Hindus towards the Muslims, suggesting that they should re-orientate their activities. How long would it be before the flames of communal hatred caught up with them? (75)

Though the Freedom Fighters had been careful, the destruction of the plane was laid on their doorstep. Debi had stolen the dynamite from his father's stores, and Tekchand had criticized the police inefficiency in tracing the culprit. When the police acted, Debi's part in the bombing was revealed. It is at this moment that Malgonkar shows how the growing religious differences intrude so that Shafi betrays his own organization. Hafiz Khan explained to Shafi Usman that the Muslims must separate from the Hindus: "We must now tum our backs on the Hindus, otherwise we shall become their slaves." (83) Shafi realized that this meant that they were putting the clock back, undoing all that they had done. Hafiz rebuked him and told him that he was living in the past. "The enemies of the moment are not the British; they are the Hindus" (83). Hafiz urged Shafi to tum the Freedom Fighters into a Muslim organization by eliminating the Hindu elements, otherwise, after the British left, the Hindus would take over and destroy otherwise the Muslims. He reminded Shafi that though in the Moharram riots seven people had been injured in the fighting, eighteen were killed in the police firing and all of them were Muslim. After his talk with Hafiz, Shafi learned that there was to be a raid on the Hanuman Club. The Muslim Police Inspector, who knew >

Public Politics and Private Lives

117

Shafi and his links with the Hanuman Club, warmed Shafi that the

police suspected the club of being a cover-up for terrorist activities. The club would be raided and the members arrested. The police inspector suggested that Shafi should let the regulars go to the club or he would be suspected of having warned them. Shafi decided to wam a few nevertheless. The only members that he didn't warm were the Hindus. And then he suddenly realized that all those who would be in the club at the time of the raid would be Hindus, there would not be a single Muslim among them. It was the sort of coincidence that worried Shafi for a long time, but even to himself he refused to admit that it had anything to do with the visit of Hafiz, or with the clippings he had left behind. (89)

Shafi escaped, but Debi-dayal was arrested and sentenced to life in the Andamans. Though both Gian and Debi are on the same ship, sentenced to the same life, Malgonkar contrasts the two of them. Gian, the man of non-violence, has tumed his back on non-violence, but, despite his

having accepted violence when it was to avenge his brother, Gian

doesn't hate the British as Debi does. A small incident on board ship contrasts Gian and the others. A British officer has come into the hold. His cigarette goes out, and he flings it away. Gain reaches out, but the Gurkha guarding the prisoners steps on his hand. The British officer rebukes the Gurkha. Gian thanks the officer. The officer realizes that Gian speaks English, that he was at college. He gives

him a packet of cigarettes and, when he realizes that Gian doesn't have matches, a packet of matches as well. The Gurkha is furious. He tums upon Gian and tells him that just because he speaks English, he must not expect especial favours from him. He'll get none. "You son of a thank you," he hissed. "Just because you speak English, I'll give you the Kapataan-sahib's cigarettes to smoke, you — ! And remember I will put my foot on your hand whenever I want to, understand?"

This incident begins Gian's gradual isolation from the Indians on a the island. Gian is reconciled to being on the island, and becomes

118

A New Dawn: Voices from East Pakistan

133

for roots, for the ordinary rhythms of life which political events and upheavals disrupt. Despite religious and political differences, Waliullah suggests, the human bond remains somewhere undemeath. But the people on top who make decisions do not care for human bonds, just as the officials who step in to tell the refugees that they are occupying the house illegally and have to leave do not care about human problems. Has the owner complained, one of the refugees asks. "The owner?" mocks the policeman. Where is the owner? The government has requisitioned the house. After the officials leave, the refugees grow depressed. They no longer bother about the fu/si plant or about the woman who tended it. The tulsi plant on the edge of the yard had begun to wither again. No one had given it water since the police came to the house. Nor had anyone remembered the tearful eyes of the mistress of the house.

Using the fact of illegal occupation — both Muslim and Hindu were occupying houses unlawfully on both sides of the border —Waliullah moulds it into a story of human feelings and small kindnesses. Waliullah suggests the antagonism of Hindus and Muslims, but also speaks of the human level which is not antagonistic. The rituals performed by the two religions might be different, but a common humanity reaches across these barriers. Because it is the official world that throws the refugees out, resulting in the imminent do not bother to look after t — officials destruction of the tulsi plan plants — Waliullah suggests that it is this official level that has caused the conflict to emerge and increase. Though Waliullah opted for Pakistan, he was not inspired by the two-nation theory. In Lal Salu —translated as Tree Without

Roots —Waliullah

would suggest the fraudulence and hypocrisy

behind the facade of religion. The idea that religion was not enough to hold the two wings together would slowly grow and would finally

lead to the separation of the two wings of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Rounaq Jahan ably shows in The Failure of National Integration (1971) how the political and economic disparity between East and West Pakistan led to increasing animosity. Syed Waliullah questions the rationale behind Partition. Were the differences between the two religious communities serious enough to cause Partition,

134

A Divided Legacy

or had the differences been used, magnified even, to serve a political purpose? Other East Pakistani writers would ask the question as well. Syed Waliullah was not a refugee. His home district, Noakhali, formed part of Pakistan. Abu Rushd was a refugee — though perhaps today the term "economic refugee" might be more apt. Because a novel is longer, because it can allow for changes to take place, because it gives scope to character development, Nongor provide s a valuable perspective on Muslim middle-class Bengalis in the early

fifties who left Calcutta in the wake of Partition. Most middleclass,

educated Bengalis, it may be noted, had settled in Calcutta2 Many had come to attend school and college, and most had stayed on to get jobs. With Partition, Muslims who were working in the government were allowed the choice of working for India or for Pakistan.

While some remained behind, many more opted for Pakistan , with

Bengali Muslims choosing to migrate to East Beng—al later East Pakistan. In 1946, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah declar ed August 16 as the day of resistance to the government of India. The place chosen for this demonstration was Calcutta. There are conflicting reports about this day. Some suggest that H'S. Suhrawardy, the Chief Minister of Bengal, deliberately planned a mass killing of Hindus, that goondas were hired to create terror. Figures of casualties range from around 4,000 to 20,000.3 We may discount the 2 Other Bengali novels as well note the migration to Calcutta in search of jobs. Thus in Anek

Suryer Asha Rahmat is in Calcutta looking for a job. In Sang shaptak as well, the Syeds move to Calcutta. Malu too goes to Calcutta hoping to make a career out of his singing ability. In Purba-Paschim, Pradip and Mamun, both from East Bengal, develop their friendship in Calcutta where the two have gone to college.

3 In While Memory Serves, Lieut.-General

Sir Francis Tuker titles his chapter on the Calcutta riots as "The Great Calcutta Killing." Tuker comments: "I do not know —no one knows — what the casualties were. On one night alone some four hundred and fifty corpses

were cleared from the streets by the three British battalions. For days afterwards bodies were being recovered from sewers and tanks. All one can say is that the toll of dead ran into thousands" (London: Cassell, 1950), 165. Shahid Hamid, in Disastrous Twilight: A Personal Record of the Partition of India mentions 20,000 persons being killed (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), 98. Gopal Das Khosla, in Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading up to and following the Partition of India gives a total of 3,173 dead bodies. He provides a breakdown of the figures: those collected and disposed of by government organizations

A New Dawn: Voices from East Pakistan

135

higher figure as being given several years after the event, and by a partisan writer, but it is surprising that the "great Calcutta Killing," as it came to be known, which set off riots in Noakhali and Bihar and which was cited as the forerunner of communal violence elsewhere in India, is totally absent from Nongor. Even Harun-or-

Rashid in The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim Politics 1936-1947 believes that the riots in Bengal were precursors of communal riots centring on Partition: "The great Calcutta Killing, as it came to be known, was followed

by Noakhali-Tippera (East Bengal) and Bihar riots. As a matter of fact, the Calcutta massacre triggered warfare in different parts of India."4

off prolonged

communal

Nongor opens in Calcutta with the hero thinking about Lord Mountbatten's announcement of June 3. The announcement leaves no doubt that the country will be partitioned, that Hindus and Muslims who dwelt side by side since the coming of Mohammed bin Qasim will now separate. Abu Rushd, however, does note that there were quarrels and conflicts, but makes Kamal regret the parting. Then Kamal thinks about the partitioning of Bengal and Punjab. Mountbatten's anti-Muslim bias is clearly revealed from the announcement of June 3. Kamal bitterly thinks how grudgingly Mountbatten has accepted Pakistan. It's as if he's saying, "Here, take

your Pakistan."° In perhaps the only reference to communal riots, Rushd makes Kamal ask himself, "Was it for this that thousands of Muslims in Bihar and Calcutta sacrificed their lives?" (2). However, Rushd does not dwell on these communal conflicts and has Kamal thinking about leaving Calcutta for Pakistan. Rushd does

not stress the idea that Kamal has to leave because things have (1,182), the Anjuman Mofidul Islam (1,761) and by Hindu Satkar Samity (1,230). Khosla points out that "this figure does not represent the total number of deaths caused in the riots. Many dead bodies were bumt in houses, many others floated down the river to the sea" ({New Delhi]: n.p. [1949]) 65. Khosla also mentions the figure given in The Statesman. On August 20, 1946 the paper announced that the death toll was between 2,000 and 3.000. On August 28, it noted that 3,468 deaths had taken place.

4 Harun-or-Rashid, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslin League and Muslim Politics 1936-1947 (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1987), 261. % Nongor (Chittagong: Boi Ghar, 1967), 2. Translations are mine.

136

A Divided Legacy

become uncertain in Calcutta. Instead he suggests that the option was completely open, one could choose to go to Pakistan or to stay behind in India. Kamal tells his parents that he wants to go to Pakistan. Kamal's father gives him permission to do so, but will not go himself. "What will Pakistan gain from old people like me? You young men should go and build the country" (5). Kamal's brother, however, has no intention of leaving. He represents the Indian Muslims who did not believe in Pakistan. He asks his brother, "Why do you wish to leave your country and go to die in Pakistan? How long will Pakistan survive?" When Kamal asks him why he has this opinion, Rahim points out that Pakistan has no natural resources except for jute, and jute will not always be enough. "Any fool knows that the so-called Pakistan has nothing. No coal, no iron, no oil, it only has jute. One day even jute will not be enough to save Pakistan" (6).° Rahim represents the sceptic, Kamal the young man inspired by thoughts of building a new nation. Rahim's words do not depress Kamal. He retorts that it is because Pakistan has nothing that there is all the more reason for people to go to help build this new land. Most Partition novels contain a Hindu-Muslim romance which breaks up during the communal tensions of Partition, or because the lovers are separated. Nongor is no different. However, the romance between the Muslim Kamal and the Hindu Latika is hardly very passionate; it seems to have begun more as a result of Latika's

overtures than because of a mutual passion. The relationship between Kamal and Latika is, moreover, doomed to fail. They are apart not only in religion, but in culture as well. Kamal, for example, does not like Tagore's poetry. In Intermediate he had read Book I of Paradise Lost and he prefers that to Tagore's poetry. For most Bengalis, this preference would be almost sacrilegious. The writer suggests Kamal's growing alienation from Hindu Bengal. Thus Kamal, the prospective Pakistani, is shown as critical © The line is both prophetic and ironic. Jute became the sore point for the Bengalis from East Pakistan who claimed, not without some justification, that jute, produced in East Pakistan, was helping to build West Pakistan. The fight between East and West Pakistan was as much over language as over jute. After independence, Bangladesh learmed that neither Bengali nor jute were enough to "save it." Bangladesh has diversified its industries and, twenty-five years after discarding English, has acknowledged its necessity.

A New Dawn: Voices from East Pakistan

137

of Shantiniketan. He is disappointed with the Guest House, outside which stand sickly trees amidst red earth. He is also disgusted with a bare-bodied servant in a dirty dhoti who comes to inform Kamal that he can bathe in the bathroom behind. The only thing Kamal enjoys is the food, which he finds different from that he is used to eating — thus, Rushd suggests that the food of Bengali Hindus is different from that of Bengali Muslims. This is a point that the Bangladeshi poet and writer, Taslima Nasreen contradicts in her "Poems of Exile." Bengalis — both East and West — she suggests, eat the same thing, fish and rice. Similarly, Kamal, the new Pakistani, dislikes dancing and soon gets bored at the function he has gone to attend. All that he notices are movements of hands and feet, and gets up to leave before the function is over. Latika is also present at the dance, and she asks him why he is leaving. Kamal replies that he doesn't want to see "Hefty women jumping around." Latika calls Kamal uncultured, and their relationship sours from that moment. As in Naseem Hejazy's Khak aur Khun, in Nongor as well, there are rumours about where the boundary will be drawn between India and Pakistan. Similarly, Radcliffe is portrayed as a villain, easily corrupted by the Indians who want certain places to remain in India. In a major difference from Hejazy, Abu Rushd does not write chapters which simply narrate historical events or contain an analysis of political events and decisions — all from the perspective that Muslims are heroes fighting a holy war. Kamal is not a warrior, simply a middle-class young man, quite content with his government

job, which is ironically that of a tax officer. Kamal's reasons for going to Pakistan are simple: there are better prospects there. Kamal does not leave because of communal

riots. However,

Rushd does

— that Partition itself — like other writers on the Partition suggest aroused suspicions and raised walls between the communities which till then had co-existed peacefully, if not happily. Thus, Kamal is shown as going to the barber shop where the barber tells him of the rumour that Radcliffe has promised Nazimuddin that Calcutta, from Sealdah to Park Circus — where the

majority of the well-to-do Muslims lived in Calcutta— would go to Pakistan. Of course, none of this is known by the people. Jinnah has


A New Dawn: Voices from East Pakistan

153

bigotry?" (201). In an attempt to prove that they do not suffer from the same prejudices, that it is important to be able to eat together if any meaningful co-existence is necessary, Mukul tells his mother that Kamal will have his lunch there. Mukul's mother is most upset. Even if she were to ignore the strictures of her religion, she says, would Kamal's religion permit him to eat with them? Forget religion, says Mukul. In the name of religion people have killed each other. In the name of religion a hundred thousand women have been abducted in the Punjab. "Religion, religion, religion alone is responsible for all this. No more religion, I want no more religion" (205). It is not just eating together that is important if Hindus and Muslims must dwell together peacefully, but intermarriage. Mukul, who knows the feelings of Maya and Kamal, suggests to his mother that she should agree to their marriage. Both mother and daughter are very upset at this, and, though Kamal does finally eat in Mukul's home, a sense of unease broods over the meal. Maya loves Kamal.

but her mother cannot accept their relationship nor can she at this moment. Maya and her mother leave for Calcutta, but they find it difficult to settle down. The mother feels suffocated in Calcutta after the freedom of the East Bengal countryside. Moreover, communal tension is very strong in the city. Any spark can set it alight. Thus a

Moharram procession leads to a riot with countless being killed and wounded. If Pakistan is tuming Islamic, India is in no way truly secular as Maya realizes after the riots. "Is this secularism?

Is this what India prides itself on?" Maya asks Mukul when he returns home after extended duty at the hospital. Maya dreams of a land where there are no riots, no killing in the name of religion. "Where [Kamal] will not be a Muslim and I a Hindu ... where this difference between us will no longer exist. Where all that matters will be that you are a human being, that I am a human being" (264). Meanwhile, in Pakistan, things are growing worse. After the

death of Charu Babu, Yunus had been appointed headmaster. Yunus

was both politically inclined as well as a religious bigot. Charu Babu believed that all religions should be taught in the school. Yunus refuses to let any religion but Islam be taught. "Since Pakistan is

154

A Divided Legacy

an Islamic country, only Islam will be taught here, its ideals, its traditions, its history" (272). Though Jamal had been a madrassah

teacher before coming to Ichchakhali School. Jamal is broadminded. His views about Islam come into conflict with Yunus's. Jamal tells Yunus that "History did not begin in 570 A.D.. History existed before that date, the sun and the moon existed before then. good people. great people. existed before then" (273). He points out that the Prophet of Islam had been broadminded, telling people to go as far as China in search of knowledge. China, he reminds Yunus, was

not an Islamic country. Yunus calls Jamal "an enemy of Pakistan" (275). Kamal is upset. Yunus tells Kamal that it is people like him who are destroying Pakistan. He can no longer continue as Headmaster in these circumstances. It is shortly after this that the school burns down. Kamal, who had gone to put out the fire, is badly bumed. Most writers who bring in Hindu-Muslim romances to show the close relationship that existed between people of different religions do so at the beginning. Consequent upon Partition, these romances break up. Abul Fazl, however, shows that the romance between Kamal and Maya does not come to an end. When Maya hears the news of Kamal's injury, she hastens to Chittagong. Mukul, who believes that the only answer to the communal conflicts and tensions is socialism, blesses their relationship. He tells Kamal. "Marry her, according to whatever rite you wish. Muslim, Hindu. Christian, civil . . Whatever. It does not matter to me" (291). Mukul repeats his belief that socialism is the only answer to the problems of India and Pakistan. He knows that there is no going back now to an undivided Indian subcontinent. But he believes that it is possible for the people on both sides of the border to dwell peacefully if both countries adopt socialism. After blessing Maya's relationship with Kamal. he tells them that his religion is humanism. The political reflection of humanism is socialism. The only religion I believe in is humanism. The social and political reflection of humanism is socialism. The two of you should write the introduction to that religion. I never doubte —d nor do I-doubt today — that your marriage will be happy despite your religious differences. Build the country anew. Why just our country? You

A New Dawn: Voices from East Pakistan

155

must plan to rebuild the whole world anew. All human beings belong to one family, no one is a stranger. This is the message of socialism. (291)

After Mukul's departure, Maya and Kamal go to the beach. The writer uses this romantic moment to stress his belief that it is only by overcoming religious differences that there will really be a new beginning. a new dawn. The Quran permits marriages only between Muslims and "people of the book." Abul Fazl does not show Maya as converting to Islam, but he has Maya say that Islam is the best religion. It is the only religion that contains within it the seeds of democracy and socialism. As Maya notes. Islam ts the religion of the desert.

It is thus in its nature

to obliterate

differences,

to make

everything equal. She reiterates Mukul's philosophy that their religion will be socialism. They will include the great teachings of all religions. "Still, your religion is the religion of the desert. its nature is to make everything one.... Even though you think of communism as your enemy, your religion is based on the ideals of socialism" (294). As the young couple talk, the sun rises. and the writer suggests that it will be through overcoming religious differences that the

subcontinent can experience some hope. It is through this new dawn that a new society will be created, free of social and religious differences. There is, of course, no reason for the reader to believe

that this new dawn will truly come about — even in the fictional world of Ranga Prabhat. Neither the killer of Charu Babu nor the arsonist who set fire to Ichchakhali School are discovered or punished. Though there were people like Kamal and Maya, the Partition would lead to a growing separation between the people of India and Pakistan. The growing sense of a Bengali identity, coupled with the resentment at being treated as colonial subjects and secondclass citizens. would result in the creation of Bangladesh. What was saddest of all was that the desire — or need — for a separate identity would lead to growing religious fundamentalism on both sides ofthe border. In India it would mean that four decades after the creation of a secular India. the BJP. an avowedly Hindu political party, would gain clectoral triumphs: in Bangladesh it would mean that. apart

156

A Divided Legacy

from the entrenchment of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the growing sense of difference would lead subtly and in insidious ways to an Islamization of society and culture.'! The winds of change, of religious fundamentalism that had started to blow during Partition would not stop.

M Apart from the inclusion of “Bismillahir Rahman Nir Rahim" in the Constitution. the very fact that Awami Leaguers should feel the need to preface their speeches by "Mahan karunamay Allahr nam diye arambha kari"—the Bengali translation of the Arabic sentence. that Sheikh Hasina should feel obliged to perform the Hajj and to cover her hair completely. suggests the inroad of religion in the political arena. In society. a simple glance at wedding cards before and after 1971 will show how Bangladesh, built on secularism and socialism, has gone Islamic. Most wedding cards are prefaced by the Arabic verse or its translation into Bengali or English. >

Chapter Six

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES: BENGALI NOVELS OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Published two years earlier than Nongor, Shaheedullah Kaiser's Sangshaptak (The Crusader) is a far more involved novel than Nongor or Ranga Prabhat. Instead of a single protagonist like Nongor, or two families and ties of friendship and romance between them as in Ranga Prabhat, Sangshaptak has a variety of characters and a divided focus as it moves from Hurmati to Felu Mian, Malu,

Zahed, Leku and Rabu. While Malu appears at times to be the narrator through whose perspective the stories of the different characters

are told, there is much

in these stories that is outside

Malu's knowledge and cannot be part of his narrative. Both Nongor and Sardar Jainuddin's Anek Suryer Asha focus on the two cities of Calcutta and Dhaka: in Nongor Kamal leaves Calcutta for Dhaka, as does Rahmat in Anek Suryer Asha. Sangshaptak moves from the village of Bakuliya to the city of Calcutta and then, after Partition, to the city of Dhaka. The opening pages of Sangshaptak read like a scene transmuted from The Scarlet Letter with an adulteress being branded. But whereas Hawthome's concern was moral — How do adultery and sin affect different people? — Kaiser's is social. Thus, though the book

begins with Hurmati and her suffering for bearing an illegitimate child, Kaiser moves on to other social problems: the relation of a village landlord to his tenants and to the moneylender from whom he

158

A Divided Legacy

borrows money; the rise of profiteers and extortionists to high places in society; the transformation of a passionate Muslim Leaguer into a unionist/nationalist and then into a communist: the change in fortunes of a young village boy, a little too fond of the jatra, into as he tums an acclaimed singer. As a socialist, Kaiser was committed to an egalitarian society. Therefore he condemned the difference between rich and poor, specially as it pertained to the village structure, where the power hierarchy was even more deeply entrenched than in the city. Kaiser, however, despite his intellectual commitment to the cause of socialism, was not emotionally ready for it. Thus his protagonist in Sangshaptak is not Malu nor Hurmati, but Zahed who also belongs to the upper class but who, like Kaiser himself, is shown as gradually committing himselfto the progressive cause of socialism. The hypocrisy associated with organized religion and a hierarchical society focused on so graphically at the beginning of the book is dissipated as the narrative shifts its focus onto other characters in the village. Kaiser appears more interested in showing how young women from the upper classes are also subject to the whims of society. Thus Rabu, who is interested in Zahed. is married to an old. religious man chosen by her dervish father. Hurmati appears in a

number of other scenes, once as the mistress of an Englishman, and

then, towards the end, ill and impecunious, but her fate interests Kaiser less than does that of Zahed. the political activist, first Muslim Leaguer and then "Unionist." Towards the end of the book, when all the characters get together once more in the village, Hurmati cooks for them, apparently reversing once more to her gendered, lower-class role of servant. Though Ramzan has profiteered from his predatory nature by taking a cut from every deal and from blackmarketeering during the war, Hurmati remains where she was. The novel ends with the arrest of Zahed for his. socialist

sympathies. The novelist gives no reasons for this arrest, nor does he

provide any hope that Zahed will be soon freed. The struggle had not ended and the progressive intellectual, like the communist, could only yow to carry on the fight. The incompletion of the narrative and the lack of closure reflect the writer's views on his contempor ary political situation. In the sixties. all progressive politics veered

The Struggle Continues

159

towards communism, and the government of Pakistan kept a close eye on writers like Kaiser. All communists feared being followed or arrested and, consequently, many communists worked underground. On December 14, 1971, when the Indian army and the Bangladeshi freedom fighters were approaching Dhaka and the fall of the city was imminent,

many

Bengali

intellectuals,

doctors,

and writers

were

picked up. Among them was Shaheedullah Kaiser. Kaiser's dead body was found along with the mutilated bodies of other Bengali intellectuals in the hastily dug mass grave at Rayer Bazaar. Kaiser's attitude to Partition is different from that of Abu Rushd,

perhaps for the simple reason that Abu Rushd himself belonged to the establishment unlike Shaheedullah Kaiser. Nevertheless, Kaiser too is a Pakistani writer and does not question the creation of Pakistan. Abu Rushd makes his protagonist choose Pakistan but, in

Sangshaptak the move to East Pakistan is far more casual. One day Malu, Rabu, Zahed are in Calcutta. On another, they are in Pakistan. In neither of the books. however. is the suggestion made that Muslims are forced to leave Calcutta. While, unlike Rushd, Kaiser touches upon the riots in Calcutta, with Malu having to hide from the rioters who are in a murderous mood looking for Muslims, there is no suggestion that Malu and Zahed are forced to leave Calcutta. Moreover, there is a reconciliation between Muslims and Hindus in the book. If Kaiser is critical of the conflict between Hindus and Muslims it is a gentle criticism. Though in Sangshaptak Kaiser criticises the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and though Zahed is proved wrong in supporting the Muslim League, it is interesting to examine the perspective in which Kaiser pictures Felu Mian and the moneylender to whom he is indebted and who cormpts Ramzan. Felu Mian is a tyrannical landlord, bullying his ryofs, but he too is a victim of the Hindu moneylender. Felu Mian's repressive actions against his ryots is

compounded by Ramzan, who benefits from both Felu Mian and the moneylender from whom he gets a commission. The reader's initial feeling towards Felu Mian is antipathetic: Felu Mian is a landlord and, unlike his father, indifferent to the independence movement.

However, Felu Mian waiting to talk to the moneylender, is in a sorry situation. There is no money, mainly because his father had joined

160

A Divided Legacy

the non-cooperation, swadeshi, movement because of Gandhi. His father had to go to jail, where his health suffered. Meanwhile, the "usurer" Ramdayal gobbled up increasing amounts of his land. Felu Mian tries to get back his land, but Ramdayal asks for ten thousand — an exorbitant sun at the time. That's too much, protests Felu Mian. Ramdayal tells Felu Mian that it is difficult to get money from people. Why does Felu Mian not buy some land and cultivate the land himself? A war is imminent. Food prices will rise, and Felu Mian will profit immensely. The narrator has no sympathy for Felu Mian, but the character of the Hindu moneylender, Ramdayal, is even uglier. He has squeezed villagers dry, poor and rich alike, and with the money has bought property and shops in the village. If anyone is well off it is not the Muslim landlord, but the Hindu moneylender. Thus Kaiser touches upon the economic aspect of Partition: the Muslims of East Bengal looked towards Partition as a means of escaping the clutches of Hindu moneylenders. Thus, even if unconsciously, Kaiser suggests one of the reasons for the Hindu-Muslim animosity in Bengal. Overt criticism, however, as in Sardar Jainuddin's Anek Suryer Asha and Alauddin Al Azad's Kshuda O Asha, is reserved for the

British who are the real villains, having snatched away the power and

the wealth of Bengal. Thus, as Felu Mian retums, unsuccessful from

his mission to Ramdayal, he gives an analysis of why the Muslims of Bengal are in this sorry situation. He tells Ramzan that he is the true descendant of the Mughals, of Akbar and Nawab Alivardi Khan. It is the British who have brought the Muslims to this pass. That Akbar, he was the king of entire India. And that Nawab Alivardi, he was the ruler of Subah Bangla. We are their descendants, this land is ours. ... But those British sons of pigs, they snatched

away our throne. We who were once kings and the sons of kings,

are now the sons of beggars. !

:

Though Kaiser does not suggest that the animosity between Hindus and Muslims was such that the two had to separate. like his ' Shaheedullah Kaiser, Sang shaptak (Dhaka: Muktadhara. 1965), 54. Translations are mine. Further references to the text will be noted parenthetically.

The Struggle Continues

16]

contemporary East Bengali writers. he too includes a number of instances of Hindu-Muslim animosity and misunderstanding. Thus Malu. who is fond of seeing jatras, is befriended by Sugrib; one of the actors. Sugrib takes Malu to see their stage properties. Sugrib asks Malu his name. Malu tells him, "My name is Malu, Abdul Malek of Bakuliya" (65). Sugnb is taken aback for a moment. "'"What? You're a Muslim? Nere, circumcised?’ It was as if Sugrib had suddenly stepped upon a snake" (65). Malu's face falls. Then Sugrib takes hold of himself and says, "Well, what does it matter if you are a Muslim. You are nice-looking" (65). Thus, even though Sugrib does control himself, with Kaiser suggesting that there were people like Sugrib willing to overcome their prejudices, the very fact of his voicing his feelings reflects existing Hindu antipathies and animosities. Furthermore, even when Sugrib takes hold of himself, it is as a concession to Malu's good looks. This concession reflects an

aspect of Hindu-Muslim relations that was often noted in real-life with a good-looking Muslim male being told that he was so goodlooking that he could pass off as a Brahmin's son.* In Alauddin Al Azad's novel, Kshuda O Asha, as well, Aghor Chatterji tells Mohammed Ali that he is so good-looking that he could be a Brahmin's son. Felu's pride in being a Muslim and his sorrow at their plight is echoed by his nephew Zahed, an ardent Muslim Leaguer at the beginning of the novel. The master Sekander is secular. Naturally, the two have a violent argument. Seckander does not believe in the propaganda of the Muslim League. Independence is imminent. It is only a matter of time before the British have to leave, granting India independence. But independence does not mean swaraj, says Zahed. Swaraj mean Hinduraj —rule of the Hindus. What benefit will Muslims get from it? We have suffered the repression of the British 2 Qazi Shahiduzzaman. who was Managing Director of Bangladesh Shipping Corporation for some time. once told me in conversation of a similar experience. He had been travelling by train when a fellow passenger asked him his name. The man was surprised on learning it and said that he had assumed Qazi Shahiduzzaman

skin. Similarly, Omdatul exceptionally

Brahmin.

was a Brahmin

Islam. Professor of Mathematics

fair and with a sharp nose.

He was

because. of his fair

at Chittagong College. was

often mistakenly

assumed

to be a

162

A Divided Legacy

for about two hundred years. If swaraj comes, we will suffer the repression of banias and mutsuddis. Aren't you seeing an example of their rule now? (131)

Sekander is surprised to hear these words from Zahed. He wants to speak but does not. Zahed continues, telling him how in Aligarh his eyes were opened to the present reality. I realized

that the entire

[Hindu]

nation

had

roused

itself, had

started to progress even. But the Muslim populace? It was still lagging behind, it was still sleeping. Having fought for over a century, they were suffering from battle fatigue. The fight against illiteracy, superstition, that had burst forth like a spark, that too seemed to have died down. (131)

The condition of the Bengali Muslim is even worse, Zahed points

out. They are starving, naked, illiterate. Zahed is fired with a passion

to improve their lot. He asks Sekander's help is spreading his message. It is important right now, says Zahed, because elections are nearing. The Congress has bought over some Maulanas to carry on a propaganda against the Muslim League. Though the narrator suggests that Sekander's secular attitude is preferable to Zahed's, the suggestion that Congress had bought over some Muslim religious leaders suggests an ambivalence on the writer's part. Were the Maulanas really bought over? Or was Zahed biased against these religious leaders who were on the side of truth and justice? It is interesting to note that in Train to Pakistan and lwice Born Twice Dead as well the appearance of Muslim religious leaders results in the creation of conflict between neighbou rs. In Mehr Nigar Masroor's Shadows of Time, a Brahmin incites communal violence. At the beginning of the narrative, Zahed is an ardent Muslim Leaguer. He holds a meeting where he proclaims the Muslim League message. He points out the sorry condition of the Muslims at present and refers to their past glories and possible glorious future. You have no food. you have no clothes. you have no power. Is this the meaning of existence? Kamal Ataturk's Turkey, Zaglul's Egypt, Bokhara, Samarkand, everywhere Muslims are acquiri ng a new energy, a new strength. The entire Muslim world is arousing +

The Struggle Continues

163

itself... . Will the ten crore Muslims of India continue to sleep? How long will they continue to bear the rule of the British infidels? (138)

Zahed's message sets the countryside aflame, but he still has to convince Sekander that the enemies of freedom are both the British and the Hindus. Zahed tells Sekander, "Our enemies are not one, but two — first,

the

British,

and

secondly.

the

Hindu

banias

and

mahajans. Do you think it will take the Muslim populace long to understand this?" (160). Their conversation tums towards the weather. The drought is continuing. If it doesn't rain this year too there will be several deaths through starvation. says Sekander. They died last year, says Zahed, they died the year before, and the year before that. They have always died. That is what they deserve. "Can you all do anything but die in this manner, senselessly?" asks Zahed. This time Sekander gets excited, "I will stop this dying. I will conquer death. I will announce the defeat of death. I will announce the message of the deathless" (161).

Zahed is somewhat alarmed at Sekander's reaction. He doesn't want him to fall into the clutches of the swadeshis. Nor does he want him to follow the path of communism and engage in a class struggle. What is Sekander fighting for, asks Zahed. For freedom. Whose freedom, asks Zahed. "For the freedom of those whose fields burn in the sun, whose stomachs burn with hunger, those who die prema-

turely for their freedom," replies Sekander. "Don't the Muslims of India fall into this category," asks Zahed. "No," replies Sekander. "Do you want to tell me that you and Felu Mian fall into the same category as Leku and Fazar Ali?" Zahed is angry at Sekander for this response and, as the conversation continues, he asks Sekander whether he is a Muslim. No,

replies Sekander. He is a human being. Aren't I a human being, asks Zahed. No, replies Sekander, "You are a Muslim." Of course, replies Zahed. "I am first a Muslim and then a human being" (163). Sekander corrects Zahed, "You are wrong, Zahed, wrong. Humanity. must come first, then religion. Religion is meant for human beings. not human beings for religion" (163). Does that mean that Sekander will not be working for the Muslim League, asks Zahed. No, he will, answers Sekander.

164

A Divided Legacy

It is strange that after all this argument, Sekander should tamely say that he is working for the Muslim League. Thus, despite Kaiser's criticism of the Muslim League propaganda, he suggests that even humanists like Sekander worked for the Muslim League in the 1940s. First of all, this was not just because they were Muslims, but. as suggested by Mumtaz Shah Nawaz in The Heart Divided and by Abul Fazl in Ranga Prabhat, because they believed that true Islam was not opposed to equal nghts and social justice. Many socialists joined the Muslim League not just because they sold out as Qurratulain Hyder suggests in Fireflies in the Mist, but because, like Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Abul Fazl, they believed that Islam and socialism — or humanism — were not opposed. It was only after the creation of East Pakistan, that progressives and socialists started thinking that one could not be a true humanist if one belonged to any religion, particularly Islam. Though Sangshaptak, like Nongor, voices the question of identity that East Bengalis were asking themselves in the sixties, it also attempts to portray a true picture of the Partition period — not always in the foregrounded action, but in the sub-text—of the spirit of those humanists who joined the independence struggle and strove for Partition. It is significant that even the humanist Sekander does not deny the Muslim League and that, even after Zahed becomes convinced of Sekander's point of view — when he worked for Hindu-Muslim unity in Calcutta — he moves to East Pakistan. In the late thirties and early forties. Calcutta was the centre of Bengal, attracting Bengalis from the provinces with opportunities of education and jobs. This fact is reflected in the fiction of the period as well. Thus, in Anek Suryer Asha, for example, Rahmat goes to Calcutta in search of a job. In Purba-Paschim, both the Hindu Pratap and the Muslim Mamun from East Bengal go to Calcutta for education. In Sangshaptak, as well, the Syed family and the lone Malu move to Calcutta. This move gives a chance to the writer to describe the communal tensions that grip the city. In Calcutta Malu seeks out his friend Ashok, who has been as passionately in love with music as Malu himself. In Calcutta, Ashok tells Malu, he has to himself off as a Hindu. There are some bad people here, Ashok says, people who are conservative and hate >

The Struggle Continues

165

Muslims. It is for their sake that he should avoid disclosing his true identity. Instead of Abdul Malek, now Malu must pass himself ofas Molin Kumar. In Calcutta. Malu carves a place for himself asa radio singer, but is not always safe in the tension-filled city. Thus, on one occasion, he has to hide from a blood-thirsty crowd. Words that inspire people of different religions have now become battle cries, threatening those who belong to. other communities. Malu hears cries of "Allah o Akbar" and "Bande Mataram." He ponders over their transformation. "Today, however. the sounds are only the battle cries of violence. Naked, violent announcements of death are hidden in those cries" (250). There are people who rise above the communal conflict. Thus Malu and his friend Rakib are saved by the Hindu Sachin Babu, who comes to tell Malu that the two Muslim houses in the lane behind have been bummed to the ground. No one has been saved. Sachin Babu tells the two Muslims to hide. It is not

a moment too soon,

because the mob forces itself inside. But Malu and Rakib have been hidden well, inside the coal room, and they escape. Though both communities are equally involved as perpetrators of violence as well as victims of violence, much of the effect of the riots seems to fall on the Muslim community.

Though Kaiser provides vivid descriptions of the turmoil in Calcutta. these are more generalized than the account of Malu's escape. Thus, trams do not run. the streets are littered with dead bodies; fires set by arsonists and looters light up the sky. Kaiser provides no clues as to the ethnic or religious identities of those who perpetrate the violence or of those who fall victims to this violence. He stresses, therefore, that in a communal violence all sides are equally affected. If Malu had to hide, and if Muslim huts were burned. Ranudi too has been killed. Human

beings become

immune

to death, "cauterized,"

as Wilfrid Owen put it in another context. Thus Malu, horrified at the sight of the dead bodies, can still jump over them as if corpses in streets are normal occurrences. Rabu comments that the two hundred years of colonization have perhaps resulted in this situation. It is a sin to suffer servitude. We have been infected by the poison of servitude. This is perhaps the result of our past... . Otherwise why should we forget the foreign enemy and tum against cach other? (260)

166

A Divided Legacy

Despite Kaiser's refusal to blame any one community for the communal violence. the narrative focuses on the plight of Muslims in Calcutta. Thus it is Malu who has to hide from the mob, Rabu who has to be rescued from her hostel and taken to a refugee camp. and Zahed who is wounded by a bomb thrown at him. After the Calcutta riots, there were efforts at bringing about communal harmony, with Gandhi fasting and being joined in his peace efforts by H.S. Suhrawardy. Kaiser includes his characters in this effort. Thus both Rabu and Zahed are actively involved in peace committees and attempt to preserve Hindu-Muslim harmony. A procession is also taken out. but “goondas” attack this procession. Evil-doers have no religion, no identity other than that oftheir evil. Though Rabu has thrown off her purdah, though Zahed works for Hindu-Muslim unity, and though Kaiser shows that both Hindus and Muslims were affected by the communal violence. Malu. Rabu and Zahed all move to East Pakistan. The only explanation that Kaiser gives for this migration is through the perspective of Malu who is sick of Calcutta. the large city where people kill each other. The news of Ranudi's death makes him think of leaving this cage of violence. The town reeks of death. The vultures are still spreading their venom. They are still flying around and sprinkling their venom everywhere. Imbibing that venom people have forgotten their humanity, they have blackened their souls, they have distorted their mind... . Malu walks fast. He wants to escape this cage of death and live. (296)

The migration of Muslims from Calcutta is described briefly, by both Abu Rushd and Sardar Jainuddin. Kaiser does not show the actual migration.

One day Malu, Rabu and Zahed are in Calcutta,

and on another they are in East Pakistan. Malu gets programmes at the new radio station on Nazimuddin Road. He even finds love here when Rehana comes to him to learn singing and falls in love with him. Later. of course, Rehana leams that Malu was from the lower class. and loses interest in him. But the early days after migration coincide with Malu's happiness with Rehana. and there is a sense of cuphoria as the two of them roam around the villages of East Pakistan: "Sylhet. Rangamati, Chittagong. North Bengal with its

The Struggle Continues

167

yellow earth. They travel by train. They enjoy boat rides. They travel by bullock carts. buffalo carts" (325).

The search for a home that occupied Syed Waliullah's refugees in"The Story of a Tulsi Plant" and forms the focus of Ashraf Siddiqui's “Ek Dui Tala Bari." does not seem a problem for Kaiser's evacuees —all of whom come from East Bengal. The move from village to city, however, proves to be a permanent one. When Rabu's family returns to East Bengal. they move to Dhaka. Rabu's family has exchanged their house in Park Street with a double-storied house in Shantinagar. Though Zahed has moved to East Pakistan, he is a very different Zahed from the one who criticized the swadeshi movement. His cousin Arifa says to Malu who goes looking for Zahed, "I knew that Hindus do swadeshi. Why should Muslims do swadeshi? This does not suit Muslims" (342). She tells Malu to tell Zahed to stop doing

swadeshi. At this time swadeshi is no longer the movement against the British. but against the government of Pakistan which has merely replaced the British without bringing any benefits to the common people. The struggle of the East Bengalis/East Pakistanis in the sixties was a mixture of Bengali nationalism and socialism. On the one hand Bengali nationalists sang praises of the motherland. and on the other demanded equality and social justice. Songs like Sikander Abu Zafar's “Janatar Sangram Cholbe”" (The People's Struggle will Continue) and Gazi Mazharul Anwar's “Joy Bangla" (Victory to Bengal) project this struggle for a liberated Bengal. This struggle is also reflected in Sangshaptak with Kaiser suggesting that. though independence had come, true freedom had not. The political

struggle continued. The activists were the same. but their target had changed. The last chapters of the book find Zahed, Malu and Rabu in Taltali village. Sekander is looking after the school where now there are many more Muslim pupils than there were before Partition— suggesting that Partition had brought some benefits for the Muslims. But Partition has also brought other evils. Ramzan, who has become rich by fleecing Felu Mian, by his "commissions" on every deal, and by black-marketing goods during the war, is now the leading man in the village.

168

A Divided Legacy

Though, for a time, the peace of the village reigns, though Sekander can ask Hurmati to cook koral fish for them all, and though they can sit and talk of old times, the talk is not only of the days of their childhood, but also of the memories of Partition and of the riots. And, what is more important. of the lack of true effort in

this new land to eliminate social injustices. There is no end to their stories. The stories of Taltali. of Bakuliya, the stones of the war, the stories of the famine, the stories of the nots, the stories of the

departure of the British, the stories of people like Ramzan who profited from the war, the stories of refugees who have lost their homes — all these stories make up their story. There are so many stories in each of their stories. No one knows the whole story. People who, like Zahed, attempt to bring about change, are labelled. Perhaps the label is not the correct one, perhaps the word swadeshi implies the independence movement before Partition, the movement led by Gandhi. But people like Zahed, who strive to better the lot of their countrymen are also swadeshi—both of and for their own country.

Unlike Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Abul Fazl, Kaiser does not see Pakistan and socialism as synonymous. Zahed. the Muslim Leaguer turned "swadeshi," is arrested. Kaiser does not say that Zahed is a communist or that he is a communist sympathizer, but Zahed's arrest

at the end implies this in its resemblance to the arrests of young men and women in the fifties —all of whom were suspected of communist ideas and leanings. Zahed's transformation from Muslim Leaguer to Communist suggests parallels with many Bengali Muslims who had actively supported Muslim League because it promised freedom from the tyranny of Hindu moneylenders and landlords only to become disillusioned afterwards. Economic exploitation had not ended: the exploiters alone had changed. In 7he Heart Divided, Shah Nawaz stressed that Islam was a socialistic religion, the writer herself moving from socialism to Muslim nationalism. In Ranga Prabhat, as well. Abul Fazl stressed that Islam is a socialistic religion. (Though one should distinguish between a writer and his characters, the fact that Abul Fazl has both Mukul and Maya on different occasions stress the socialistic aspect of Islam, suggests that Abul

The Struggle Continues

169

Fazl too was of his characters' opinion.) However, when Pakistan came into being, though the middle class benefited, the ordinary Muslim who had hoped for change was disappointed. Rather, one should say, the educated middle-class who took it upon themselves to speak for the disadvantaged classes saw that independence had not brought social and economic changes for the poor in its wake. This was perhaps the leading reason why the Muslim Bengali in the fifties and sixties was so heavily inclined towards socialism, with all the leading intellectuals of East Pakistan inclined towards socialism and often, like Munier Chowdhury, serving prison sentences for their beliefs. In the sixties these intellectuals suffered imprisonment; in 1971, like Shaheedullah Kaiser, they were hand-picked and killed. Kaiser's depiction of Partition is only a small part of his vast canvas, but it is significant that though Kaiser describes the violence and the riots in some detail, he elides the actual division.

Like Qurratulain Hyder's silences about the Partition itself in Aag ka Darya—where the Partition is dismissed in two words: "Hindostan— 1947" — and Fireflies in the Mist —where there are chapters about Communist activities in the thirties and then an abrupt jump to Bangladesh in the early seventies, Kaiser too is silent about the Partition. There is a before and an after, not the Partition itself. The Partition had taken place, people like Kaiser had moved to or back to East Pakistan. Had it been a wrong move? Could the Partition itself have been prevented? By the time Kaiser wrote

Sangshaptak, the enemies of East Pakistanis were no longer Indians but West Pakistanis. Narratives of the Partition such as Sangshaptak,

Nongor and Anek Suryer Asha, described an earlier time but also reflected contemporary attitudes and asked questions about issues and concerns that were pertinent to the East Bengali of the sixties. It was not just the fictional Zahed who was picked up on suspicion of being a Communist sympathizers. Both Communists and Indian "spies" were arrested — as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would be a few

years after Kaiser wrote Sangshaptak. While history could not be — riots did take place, and both Muslims and Hindus were denied killed in those nots—they could be made shadowy so that no known character was killed. One's involvement in that history could be blurred. Thus why Zahed, the man who works for Hindu-Muslim

170

A Divided Legacy

harmony should come to East Pakistan, why Rabu who throws off her burga should also come to East Pakistan is never made clear. They came like other Muslims, back to the homes that they had left to go to Calcutta in the first place. But there were also Muslims who migrated to East Pakistan leaving homes behind in West Bengal, Bihar, U.P. Why did these people come? The Bengali novelist is silent here. Though Kaiser criticizes religious bigotry and condemns the communal riots, his narrative does not, unlike most Partition novels,

include the motif of an intra-communal love affair. Nor does Kaiser show how Hindus and Muslims dwelt peacefully together before the Partition disrupted this harmony. It is perhaps only Malu who has close friends among Hindus — partly owing to his bohemian lifestyle — though even these, as in the case of Sugrib, have their misperceptions about Muslims. The only Hindu who forms part of the normal life of the village is the Hindu-moneylender. Otherwise Hindus and Muslims live in fairly watertight compartments, in a divided world. The Partition of India was perhaps the manifestation of this division, only on a much larger, more traumatic scale. Sangshaptak was perhaps the first Bengali novel that told the tale of two cities, Calcutta and Dhaka. Sardar Jainuddin would write his

novel a few years later, but it would not be till Sunil Gangopadhyay's more voluminous Purba-Paschim that a writer would portray people on both sides of the Bengal divide. Sunil Gangopadhyay had the advantage of looking back at Partition after the break-up of Pakistan. When Kaiser wrote, Pakistan seemed firmly entrenched. The only danger to Pakistan was from socialism, and the novel ends with the arrest of the “swadeshi" Zahed. Ending on this unfinished note, Sangshaptak is very different from both Ranga Prabhat and Nongor, each of which, in its own way, justifies the need for Pakistan. It is similar to Alauddin Al Azad's Kshuda O Asha and Sardar Jainuddin's Anek Suryer Asha in that all three are about a struggle that has not ended. _ Alauddin Al Azad's novel Kshuda O Asha was published in 1964, that is, it is earlier than the novels by Shaheedullah Kaiser and Abu Rushd. Kshuda O Asha is not strictly a Partition novel as it ends before

Partition.

However,

it raises

the issue

of Partition

and

The Struggle Continues

171

discusses both the communal conflict that resulted in this division and the communal harmony that was disrupted by the division. Furthermore, though it ends before Partition, it suggests the hope that people saw independence and the creation of a new nation. It belongs with Sangshaptak and Anek Suryer Asha in bringing in the issues that had been left unresolved with independence. Azad's novel is even more concerned with the disadvantaged than is Sangshaptak. For example, though Malu is one of Kaiser's major characters — with the interest hovering between Zahed and Malu — Malu does not suffer the terrible poverty that Azad depicts in his novel. Azad focuses on the poor in more than half the book, depicting the dire poverty suffered by the villagers Fatema, Hanif and their children Zoha and Zohu. Intermittently at this stage there are glimpses of the well-to-do. As in Sangshaptak, there is a ruralurban migration and, in the city, Fatema and her family, instead of getting relief from their grinding poverty, come to know tragedy. This migration from the village to the city also allows a shift in focus from the rural poor to the urban middle class, so that from page 138, the interest is centred mainly around the political-student activist Mohammad Ali. Zoha becomes a part of the heterogeneous city crowd. Though the novel is situated during the time of the Bengal famine, Azad brings in a number of contemporary issues that concerned the East Pakistani during the sixties. One of these issues was that of the Bengali culture. At this time the Pakistan government was attempting to ban the singing of Tagore songs.* Tagore's songs — like the songs of Atul Prasad and Jibanananda Das— were, however, considered to be quintessentially Bengali, common to both the West and the East Bengali. There is, therefore, a strange paradox in the novel: though there is a famine raging in the land — a famine which the writer tells us was man-made, in effect British-made — lines

from Bengali songs praising the beauty of the land are quoted. To perhaps reduce the absurdity of this juxtaposition, Azad has "Pagla 3 One ofthe jokes at this time centred upon Monem Khan, governor of East Pakistan. Blindly loyal to the government that he served, he is said to have rebuked the poets at a meeting: "Can't you write Tagore songs?"

172

A Divided Legacy

Master," the mad master, recite from D.L. Ray. Like Sekander in

Sangshaptak, Pagla Master is the voice of both reason and Bengali nationalism. My beautiful land, brimming with flower and grain, This best of all lands;

Where will you find this land, The queen of all lands?*

But in this most beautiful land, prices have gone up. The village teashop is empty. The price of tea has increased. A cup of tea used to cost one paisa; now it costs three annas —if it is sweetened with molasses and four if it is sweetened with sugar. It is not only the price that has reduced the gathering at the teashop. Things have become unsettled. "A new wind is blowing now" (7). A number of violent incidents have taken place, so the place closes down early. Pagla Master blames the British for the famine in the land. He incites the villagers to attack the rice godown. He tells them that the Bnitish are afraid of Bengalis and are deliberately killing them off. We are dying but what is that to the British? This is his fight, but he must keep his colony. ... And this way he kills two birds with one stone. Carry on the fight; kill the Bengalis . . . there is plenty of food in the Punjab, couldn't he bring it here? I understand everything. And the Bengali bastards are in league with the British. (12)

Why should the British want to kill Bengalis, Pagla Master is asked. Don't they have to rule this land? That is precisely why they must kill, says Pagla Master. "The Britisher is very afraid of the tiger of Bengal, afraid of his blow" (12). The poor starve. But there are some people who continue to be well off. One of them is Fatema's childhood friend, Ranibala. Ranibala is fond of Fatema, and insists on feeding the* children. It is interesting to note that while the Muslims are described as terribly poor, the few well-off people during the famine should be depicted as Fatema's Hindu friend Ranibala and then Aghor 4 Alauddin Al Azad, Kshuda O Asha (Dhaka: Muktadhara,

Further references to the text will be noted parenthetically.

1964), 6. Translations are mine.

The Struggle Continues

173

Chatterji's family which is kind enough to give Fatema's family food when they .go to town. Kshuda O Asha is split into two stories: the story of the poor and their struggle to survive, and the story of the educated middle class and their struggle for independence. Azad unites these two stories by making Zoha come to town and serve the family of Lina. Lina is interested in Mohammad Ali — who is, like Zahed, in Sangshaptak, a proponent for people's rights. Thus Zoha comes in contact with the young people struggling for independence. The split, however, remains, with the earlier half of the story concentrating on the family of Fatema and Hanif and their two children Zoha and Zohu. The search for food brings the family to town, and it is in town that the family is given food by Aghor Chatterji's family. Aghor Chatterji's daughter is Sujata, who is in love with Mohammad Ali. In town, the novel follows what happens to the villagers: Hanif is killed in an accident, Zohu is raped when she goes looking for food. It is after all this happens that the focus suddenly shifts to Ali and Sujata. Ali is in love with Sujata, but is unable to marry her. The father has no objection, but Pakistan is in the offing and there is too much of a barrier between the people of the two religions. Ali is arrested for his "treasonable" actions. The focus shifts once more to Zoha who goes to search for Zohu. He doesn't find her but befriends a young woman — someone whose plight is similar to Zohu's. The novel ends with the woman giving birth to a child. There is no. sense of closure in the book, partly because, writing in the 60s, Azad, like Shaheedullah Kaiser, knew that Partition and independence hadn't brought any of the good things that people had expected. Even

though communalism had been responsible for Partition, and even though people like Azad and Kaiser were against communal divisions, they realized in their fiction at least, if not in their public discourse, that these divisions had been long standing. Neither Azad nor Kaiser, therefore, focus on communal harmony. Instead, both of

them turn to the possibilities that lay in the socialist struggle. Thus, Mohammad Ali and Sujata do not marry. The fate of Mohammad

Ali — like that of Zahed — was also perhaps the only fate that the East Bengali could foresee for the political activist. Though the political activists like Gandhi and Nehru had gone to prison and

174

A Divided Legacy

been freed and brought about independence, the Pakistan movement had no such heroes. The heroes after Partition, the enlightened Bengali intellectuals in the 60s were communists. But the only certainty the communists faced in Pakistan was the certainty of prison. Thus both Zahed and Ali go to jail towards the end of the books. There is no promise that they will be released from jail. There is thus in both Kaiser and Azad a pessimism that lasts beyond the pages of the book. Kshuda O Asha is written with the backdrop of the Bengal famine, that is the war years which were also the years of the independence movement as well as the movement for Partition. However, while, much of the book —in line with Azad's political views — shows the struggle of the poor, this theme is relegated to the earlier portion of the book. The latter portion of the book concentrates on the tension between Hindus and Muslims, and the

attitude of enlightened people on both sides to independence and imminent Partition. In this division, the class struggle disappears. One of the significant themes becomes the Hindu-Muslim romance, which, as in the case of other writers, is used to depict the close

friendships between the two communities before Partition disrupted this unity. In an attempt to show that friendships and romances cross religious barriers, Azad shows the friendship between Fatema and Ranibala and the love between Ali and Sujata. These episodes, however, may be read in radically opposed ways. Thus, one reading may be that Hindus were better off than Muslims. Fatema's family is given succour on two occasions by a Hindu family, that of her best friend Ranibala and that of the rich lawyer, Aghor Chatterji. Of course, Azad's intention is to show that there were some people for whom these religious differences did not matter. But even Azad is unable to show that everyone in the family shared the same enlightened views. There are some family members who cannot ignore religious differences. Thus though Aghor Chatterji is an enlightened man who can say, "All young men of Bangladesh who are my son's age are my sons. There is no question here of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian" (179), his sister, Pishi, cannot tolerate Ali's entering her room. She is so obsessed with questions of purity and impurity, that she has the place purified. Even that is not

The Struggle Continues

175

enough, and she changes her room. But even Sujata's mother, kindly though she is, has certain biases. Thus, when Sujata's father tries to explain to Ali how fond they are of him, he says that Sujata's mother told him that Ali did not look like a Muslim youth. Even Aghor Chatterji cannot do anything to bridge these differences. When he realizes that Ali is interested in his daughter, he can only lament the social and political realities that prevent him from blessing their relationship. He tells Ali that the differences between Hindus and Muslims are too great and of too long a duration to be ignored. They are not only Hindus, they are Brahmins, Aghor Chatterji tells Ali. What is most important is that the Muslims are going to get Pakistan. The country will be divided. Ali is an educated boy and should realize the impossibility of any union between him and Sujata. You are getting Pakistan. That means that India is going to be divided and we are going to be separated forever. The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it... . No, none of us can do anything. Neither Hindus nor Muslims nor the English. This is the trial of history. What Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow. Lies, lies. Folly, ignorant folly to think so. We will have to pay for this. But I cannot imagine that, at the end of all this destruction and death, in a free and independent India, Bengal will be crippled. Tell me, can you not include Bengal, the whole of Bengal, in Pakistan? (181-2)

As Ali continues to look at Aghor Chatterji, Aghor provides his own answer. No, Bengal cannot be included in Pakistan because the Hindus are responsible for the divisions between the two communities. No, no, you cannot. We have despised you, have called you beasts and animals. We have called you all sorts of names: mlecche, nere,

jaban. How can you include us? You cannot. (182)

Sujata's mother tries to correct her husband. What does it matter if Pakistan comes into being or no. "Pakistan will be our country, the dear land where we were born" (184). This, of course, is not to be.

176

The Fires of Partition

223

crass village boy — "crab-eater" as the people from the Konkan coast are called — to brash townsman and indoctrinated National Guardsman are also reflected in the letters. Thus, on one occasion, Fakir

shows off his urban sophistication and Muslim League indoctrination by telling his mother that Islam is in danger. His mother asks who Islam is, and notes that his urban friends have strange names. This is also the way, of course, in which Mukaddam mocks the tendency of Muslim politicians before Partition to cry "Islam is in danger" when threatened. Through this Mukaddam also suggests that if we remember our roots in the villages, we will forget the urban differences that separate Hindus and Muslims. During the course of illustrating this, Mukaddam also touches upon the differences between the upper and the lower classes. With Fakir taking a series of jobs, Mukaddam can show how the upper classes use the lower classes; even a girl seemingly as kind and gentle as Nargis can accuse Fakir of forcing himself upon her. The job of working as a waiter is fraught with difficulties. Not only is the young boy in the financial grip of Behram whose debt he has to repay, but he is also in danger of being forced to satisfy his homosexual desires. Though Mukaddam's book lacks the literary qualities one finds in Singh or Desai, what he does give, as no other writer so far has done, is a fictional biography of a follower of the Muslim League Guard. However, Mukaddam stresses how all the indoctrination of the Muslim League cannot destroy the bonds of childhood and the village. Thus August 15, the day of Indian independence, when people are going to the cities to celebrate, finds Fakir released from prison where he has been incarcerated following

his participation in communal disturbances, learning from Shankar that they are milk brothers and going back home. Mukaddam touches upon prejudices quite early in the book,

initially through Kammo, the cook in the house of the Lakdivallas where Fakir is first employed. Kammo looks down upon Fakir, calling him a "crab-eater" (37). But Kammo looks down upon other communities as well. The Parsis she called "crow-eaters," after their practice of exposing their dead to the crows and vultures. The Banias were dubbed "dhotivallas," because of the dhoti, or loincloth, worn by most Bania men, and the "bhayyas," or farm hands from the north, were known by

224

A Divided Legacy

her as "shendi-vallas" because of the long tuft of hair they grew on their otherwise clean-shaven skulls. This contemptuous nicknaming in fact helped Fakir, for it made the sobriquet of "crab-eater" seem

somewhat less offensive to him. (40)

Prejudices extend to language. Muslims leam Urdu, Gujrati Hindus Marathi. Fakir knows both Urdu and Marathi, from school. Urdu was the main language of instruction, but Marathi was a second language. The Lakdivalla girls know English; and the two older girls ridicule Fakir for not knowing it. Nargis, the younger girl, kinder and fonder of him, does not make fun of him, but she too chides him for knowing Marathi: "How can you, a Muslim, learn the Hindu language and still claim to be a Muslim?" (45). This rebuke merits a retort from him about her knowing English,

the language of Christians. Nargis, however, explains to him that English is important and without English Indians will get nowhere. "No, no, you're wrong, Fakir," she emphasized. "English is the language of the educated and cultured. It's the language of the rulers, the King Emperor and the Viceroy. . . . Anyway, it's no use arguing with a junglee villager like you.... "She bit her lip. "I'm sorry, Fakir. I shouldn't have said that. But you must realize that without English you'll get nowhere in life. Nowhere at all." (45)

It is Fakir's realization of his ignorance that leads to his being enrolled in a community school. Mukaddam uses Fakir's growing awareness of the world outside to slowly bring in the political turbulence of the city. Forced to read outside the house for fear of being disturbed by Kammo, Fakir spends as much time outside as possible. He grows aware of the political posters on the walls and starts reading them. Mukaddam comments on the language of the posters through the eyes of Fakir. The political posters held for him a particular fascination, their extravagant promises and urgent pleas for votes filling his simple mind with awe. Some posters cried for justice and fair play, others for equal rights. Some urged the reader to join the armed forces, others to wage a continuing battle against the ruling British. Never had he come across such flowery language, such passionate display of human feeling, such earnest appeals to sentiment, to patriotism,

The Fires of Partition

225

to communal and religious zeal, such frank debate of right and wrong. It confused him, confounded him, but he persisted in his studies, determined in time to learn the meaning and message of his words. (47)

The conflicting political opinions of people are conveyed through Fakir's participating in or overhearing the conversation of others. — obviously echoing the sentiments of their The Lakdivalla girls

parents — think that there is no substitute for the rule of the British. Nargis, however, thinks that Muslims should support Jinnah and the Muslim League. "You'd better learn to respect the British, and the Quaid-i-Azam too. Only he can save the Muslims from the Hindus. Without him, Islam would be in great peril..." (43). Mukaddam suggests the dichotomy in people when he portrays Fakir's master as normally wearing European clothes but donning sherwani and churidar when he goes to political meetings. Among the many duties that Fakir has in the Lakdivalla household is looking out for vendors. But as he watched for vendors, he also starts noticing the demonstrations and rallies below. There are processions: people chant slogans, brandish fists. Banners of different colours are waved, with different emblems. Muslim Leaguers race down on the street on cycles, shouting "Muslim League" and "Zindabad," followed by a group of Congressites shouting "Congress" and "Zindabad." But then, slowly, things tum violent. There is the

sound of gunfire on one occasion, and Kammo tells him that there is a Hindu-Muslim riot going on somewhere. There are many amusing things going on in the city: performing bears, dancing monkeys, singing and dancing gypsies. But no one is interested in these things any more. As the political situation in the country became

tense, with the

Congress leaders demanding immediate transfer of power and the Muslim League leaders clamouring for Pakistan, riots began to break out with increasing frequency. They would often occur during religious festivals and on many occasions, big and small, when one or the other community took part in a procession. A cow slaughtered by Muslims in public, a Hindu procession continuing to play music as it passed by a Muslim mosque; cricket matches between teams of the rival communities, even a rumour or a scandal were enough to

226

A Divided Legacy

trigger a riot. Each community kept its powder keg of hatred perennially dry, and Fakir wondered why there was so much bad blood between men and men. However, these were the ways of a great city people, and he was a mere villager, a backward, boorish crabeater from the secluded Konkan coast. (51-52)

Hindus blame Muslims, Muslims blame Hindus. Nargis blames the Hindus when Fakir asks her who is responsible for the riots. “You mean Muslims never incite trouble?" "Never." "The Hindus of the city must be very militant." "Oh, they are — they are! Throughout the country they are. They think that they can browbeat Muslims simply because we're in the minority. That's why Daddy says the British must stay on in India for many, many years, until the Muslims become strong enough to resist the Hindus. We must also win a separate homeland where we can be safe from the Hindus. The Quaid-i-Azam is fighting for it now." "I hope he succeeds," Fakir would murmur, without understanding

what the fight was about. He would be a volunteer for the cause of Islam, simply to please Nargis, never mind whether it was right or wrong. (52)

The contradictions among the Muslims are conveyed through the scene of Nargis's birthday party — the cause as it happens of Fakir's being thrown out of the Lakdivalla house. There is lavish food, and people come dressed in the best. Fakir thinks to himself that his teacher had spoken about Islam being in danger, but the affluent couldn't care less if it was. Between raising mouthfuls of rich, greasy food, the guests discuss politics. Let Gandhi fast to the death. He can't fool Jinnah. For the occasion, a bottle of brandy has been allowed. As the guests dutifully do justice to the brandy, they talk about preserving the values of Islam and its culture: "We must have our homeland to preserve our special Muslim culture, our traditions, our special way oflife" (56).

Mukaddam is critical of the Muslim upper-class. Even though initially Nargis had appeared to be a kind girl — though suffering from some of the prejudices of her class —Mukaddam shows how she too is tainted by the hypocrisy of the rich. It transpires that in

The Fires of Partition

order to buy a gift for Nargis, Fakir has stolen some theft is discovered and he is sent to his room to get Nargis comes for him and asks if he has really stolen Fakir explains. The girl kisses him, but her father has

227

money. His the money. the money. entered the

room, and, terrified, Nargis tells her father that Fakir had forced

himself upon her. Fakir is thrown out. It is after his summary departure from the Lakdivalla household that Fakir is exposed to the seamier side of Bombay life. This marks a second stage in Fakir's life, when he is more or less exposed to the real world. He meets a penniless poet, Bankey Mian, alias Inquilab Moradabadi, who believes that a homeland for

Muslims is important; he serves at the home of an Anglo-Indian collector of Customs, and then at the restaurant of Behrarn Seth. He

escapes from Behram Seth, but when he returns to his uncle he finds that his uncle has drowned. The second part tums to Fakir's friend Shankar who is in a bus, Bombay-bound. Hindus also suffer from prejudices, and Shankar recalls his stepmother criticizing him for being friendly with the Muslim Fakir. But one day, Shankar's father explains to him how, after the death of his own mother, Fakir's mother had secretly nursed him. He owes his life to Fakir's mother. As he ruminates over this fact, he thinks about how and why she kept quiet. In Bombay, meanwhile, Fakir has joined the Muslim National Guard in order to escape from the wrath of Behram Seth. He is not interested in its political philosophy but in its protecting him from the seth. Shankar, who comes to Bombay, is persuaded to attend an

RSS meeting. There are riots in Bombay. Curfew is imposed. When Shankar is critical of the role of the RSS, he is told that, in the Muslim majority areas, it is Muslims who perpetrate atrocities. When Shankar and Fakir meet, Fakir spouts the pat phrases of the Muslim League. The Muslims need a land where they will be free to pray in a mosque without Hindus playing music or making a racket outside, where Hindus will not slaughter pigs just to upset Muslims. The Muslims are a nation. Shankar tells Fakir that "The people of this country are a nation. People belonging all faiths and castes" (141). Fakir refuses to listen to Shankar. Though he had not joined the National Guards because he believed in their political ideas,

228

A Divided Legacy

he has become indoctrinated. He refuses to accept the opinions of his friend. "No, no — you've got your facts all wrong, Shankar. This glib Hindu talk has already cost the Muslims their empire. I know the game; browbeat the gullible Muslims into believing that once the British depart they'll get a fair deal. My friend, once the Hindus find themselves

lords of the land, they'll squeeze

the minorities

and

throttle them into submission." (141)

Afterwards, Shankar is forced to acknowledge that there were reasons for Fakir to be suspicious of the Congress. Most of the Congress leaders, with the exception perhaps of Nehru, were devout Hindus. They dressed, behaved, spoke like caste Hindus, permitted their wrinkled foreheads to be smeared with welcoming vermilion at receptions, inaugurated meetings and seminars with Hindu rituals. They performed Hindu ceremonies while laying foundation stones. How could these public acts kindle secular credibility in the nonMuslim minorities? (167)

Shankar wishes he and Fakir were back in the village. Religious differences grew in the city. They were not significant back in the village. How he wished they were both still in Devnagar, he and Fakir, instead of being exposed to and absorbed by the trappings of the city. He longed for the simple, uncomplicated life of the village, where a Hindu was a good Hindu, a Muslim a good Muslim, each a good human being with fellow-feeling, sensitive to the pain he might cause to another, careful not to show any unkindness. A good Hindu. A good Muslim. Good neighbours. . . . (168)

Mukaddam suggests that, while Fakir has been moulded beahis stay in the city, Shankar is able to think for himself. Fakir is soon obliged to leave the city for the village home he had left behind. But the village too has been affected by now with the Hindu-Muslim conflict. Other villagers too have gone to the city, and they return with talk of the impossibility of Hindus and Muslims remaining side by side. Despite this talk of Hindu-Muslim differences, Fakir realizes how intertwined the religions and the rituals are in the

The Fires of Partition

229

village. The first realization comes to him when he gets married, and Hindus and Muslims join in the celebrations. He is welcomed by a neighbour's wife holding a lighted brass oil lamp. "How very Hindu" (245) Fakir thinks, but is not displeased by the custom. Fakir soon gets bored with his marriage. His wife does not please him as the poetry-loving Gulbadan had. But he cannot go back to the city. Gulbadan has been murdered. It is not safe for Fakir to go to the city. Bored with life in the village, Fakir goes to see a play. He comments loudly about Hindu mythology and is beaten by Babuaro, the local RSS leader. Fakir becomes convinced that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together. They "were like oil and water. They could not mix" (217). Politics has finally reached the village.

Scomful now of the village, indoctrinated by his Muslim League ideas, Fakir disrupts the communal harmony of the village. Fakir is reprimanded by the Mutawalli who tells him that he was wrong to insult the Hindu gods. How would he like it if the Hindus started insulting Muslim saints? He tells Fakir that he has a responsibility to see that peace remains and, if people like Fakir come to disturb village peace, they should stay away. I have a great responsibility on my shoulders. ... The Hindus and Muslims have been living together in peace for centuries, and must remain so for many more years to come. If you city men think you can come here and make trouble by opening your big mouths, you're wrong. Don't come to our village dramas with your fancy clothes and fiery political talk. If you can't discipline yourselves, stay away... . (218)

Fakir does not take the Mutawalli's waming to heart. He continues to wax angry at the ways of his village. At the Moharram celebrations, Fakir is scornful. The same syncretism which had not bothered him when the neighbour's wife welcomed him with a lighted brass lamp, now bothers him. Moharram is a time of mourning, he thinks. Not of merry-making. "We drink and dance as though it were Imam Hussain's birthday. This is nothing less than the Hindus’ Gokul Ashtami, the festival of Lord Krishna's birthday. When will we Muslims come to our senses? When?" (222). He gathers some villagers who have returned from Bombay for the Moharram festival

230

A Divided Legacy

and comments about the injustices that the Muslims have suffered at the hands of the Hindus. The communal violence that has rent the city also affects the village. Mukaddam, however, suggests that the village has the seeds of unity — unlike the city. When the peace of the village is disturbed, the villagers ensure peace by punishing both Hindu and Muslim ring-leaders equally. Fakir is one of the two Muslims punished for disturbing the village peace. Fakir is released on the day of Indian independence. He feels a sense of having been abandoned. After all the talk of an independent homeland for the Muslims, Jinnah had started saying that the minorities in Pakistan would be safe, had started asking Muslims in India to remain where they were. Abandoned! It was nothing less than that, no matter how hard he pondered. The very people who had sacrificed so much for the realization of Pakistan had been abandoned. Forgotten. Done away with. There was a hint that Hindu minorities still in Pakistan would be held hostage to assure the safety of Muslims left in India. but Fakir knew in his heart of hearts that the Muslims would make mincemeat of whatever members of the Hindu community remained behind in Pakistan. (239)

Mukaddam,

however, shows that Fakir is mistaken in repeating

the Muslim League line that the Muslims were a separate nation. The Muslim League slogans and pat phrases. Mukaddam stresses, had misled people and divided those who had lived together for ages. He uses the friendship of Shankar and the relationship of Shankar to Fakir's mother to suggest the closeness of Hindu-Muslim ties. As Fakir ponders his plight and wonders whether he should leave for Pakistan, Shankar comes to tell him that he is going to be a father. Though Fakir had not felt any particular love for his bride, the news, despite himself, brings him some joy. Furthermore, Shankar tells him that this is his land, that he is not just a friend but his brother.

He then relates to him the story that his father had told him about how Fakir's mother had suckled him after his own mother's death. Fakir need no longer assume the pretensions of poet or political guard. He was what was more important: "Brother Fakira." >

The Fires of Partition

231

Published within a year of each other, no two books could be more different than Desai's Clear Light of Day and Mukaddam's When Freedom Came. The fires of Partition in Desai's books are at a distant — until one realizes how they have affected the lives of everyone. Mukaddam's story is obviously about Partition and about the Hindu-Muslim conflict that rent the land into two. While Mukaddam fleshes out the political dialogue by providing characters and by providing the local colour of Bombay, the thesis is obvious for any reader. He brings in, additionally, the class conflict, suggesting the difference between the nch, urban classes and the village

poor who often have to seek work in cities. Desai's story, on the other hand, shows history as it impinges on the lives shows how people, despite themselves, are tied to it shows the ambivalences of people's emotions, human lives caught in a mesh of circumstance and

of her characters, others. Above all, of the futility of accident.

i

.

a

PidESi peinimathagans oi

midds Sisiiiieiell ae ony aattions

02 roan di cert pow alien lded:e ing ap poline 3 \ Rozeovit ndltahotnsis crear eds bon caaiinnd ued,ok #

hbedely|..qnacs

nohi Wy whore

meal

pony ot

Daag

-vbauld

aitostborlo aptiahony ed sygoheile brani ns, 02t Haul) sseakotoneal austivede ¢haieddt odtyyscee tp tales soo! mt biog om

Rushdie in Midnight's Children uses his master's voice as he will, > Bill Ashcroft. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (london: Routledge, 1989), 38.

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

237

translating Indian words or phrases or retaining them in the original. Thus he bends language to accommodate his culture. He uses Indianisms such as "Ten-chip" or "Jathi charged," translates Urdu phrases such as "Life-of-mine" (jaan-e-man) and "Piece-of-the-moon" (chand ka tukra), though he will also use the Urdu phrase without translation. Some of these terms are funny — if one has a knowledge of Urdu. Thus, Aadam Aziz's friend is the Rani of Cooch Nahin — Kuch Nahin being the Urdu for "nothing." The post-colonial is not over-awed by his master's voice. Rushdie makes fun of the colonial who, when as the British were departing, wishes to impress by his ability to imitate that language. Thus, Ahmed Sinai is shown "apeing Oxford drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman."° Unlike writers of the R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao generation, the post-colonial like Rushdie refuses to be awed by rules. This affects not only choice of words, but also the construction of sentences. Rushdie often omits commas, so that words seem to come tumbling forth. Sentences are deliberately fused for a similar purpose. Post-colonial critics note that one of the common themes of different literatures in English is the theme of celebration of the struggle towards independence.’ The partition of the sub-continent thus is an event that almost every writer in English has focused on in at least one novel. Like these writers, Rushdie and Tharoor use the

language of the centre to describe the moment in history when that a centre was forced to relinquish its hold on the empire. However,

to great difference between writers like Khushwant Singh in Train Chaman Ganges, the in Pakistan, Manohar Malgonkar in A Bend Nahal in Azadi and Rushdie and Tharoor is the manner in which they a use this historical fact. Tharoor uses the legends of the Mahabharat Yudishtra, Drona, that so to describe this historical moment, affects Draupadi, Karna once more participate in the cataclysm that the entire land, tuming it into a kurukshetra. Rushdie also describes Saleem this moment, but through its effect on the life of his narrator

in a Sinai, who, due to a deliberate mix-up at birth, grows up

i

6 salman

Rushdie,

Midnight's

Children

(New

York:

references to the text will be noted parenthetically.

7 Ashcroft et al., 27.

Avon

Books,

1982),

127.

Further

238

A Divided Legacy

Muslim milieu. Thus Rushdie is able to describe the historicalpolitical event of Partition, the socio-cultural milieu of the Indian Muslim, and the idiosyncrasies of the post-colonial. Through this mode not only is the political and historical past focused on, but also the rich ethnic, religious, cultural mix that is India. As the narrator notes in Midnight's Children, "If | seem.a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance .. . perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque" (126). Thus while both Tharoor and Rushdie use English to portray a moment in history when the English would leave, their use of English shows a blend of their colonial past and their own heritage — a hybridity that is the mark of the post-colonial. As Tharoor's narrator notes, the post-colonial is familiar with both cultures — sometimes leading to absurdity. Didn't think I knew much about cricket, did you? As I told you,

Ganapathi, I know a great deal. Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket. I move, my large young man, to the strains of a moming raga in

perfect evening dress.8

It is this richness of heritage that marks the post-colonial writer, inspiring someone like Rushdie to blend the strands that go into the making of his complex culture. Rushdie exploits his Indian Muslim background, but also shows a grasp of Hindu legend that makes Midnight's Children a rich blend of the complex ethnic, religious, cultural heritage of India. Using his own Indian Muslim background, Rushdie puts in Hindu legends as he does his colonial heritage. As Saleem says when Padma walks out in a huff, he is not the first storyteller. Other men have recited stories before me: other men were. not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him halfway? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite 8 Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989), 65. Further references to the text will be noted parenthetically.

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

239

my Muslim background, I'm enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I'm fond of the image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!) (177)

The complex blend of midnight's child is epitomized in the narrator, Saleem Sinai, who notes elsewhere, "Bom and raised in the Muslim

tradition, I find myself overwhelmed by an older learning" (233). Furthermore, it is not only the Hindu and Muslim traditions which go into the making of the midnight's child, but the English influence as well. Rushdie epitomizes this blend through the character of Saleem, the child bom in 1947, who tums out to be not the legitimate son of the Muslim father we — along with Padma, his audience — had been led to believe, but the illegitimate son of the Hindu Vanita fathered by the departing Englishman Methwold and brought up in a Muslim household. For the greater part of the story, the reader —and Padma — is led to believe that the narrator is a Muslim. And while Aadam Aziz — the grandfather, who afterwards turns out not to be Saleem Sinai's grandfather, rejects Islam simply because he hurt his nose while praying, being Muslim is more than believing in a certain religion: it is living a way of life that devolves from that religion. Thus, even though Saleem tums out not to be a bom Muslim, his upbringing makes him Muslim. Since Rushdie is not talking about faith, this does not really matter. What is interesting, however, is that Rushdie does not make Saleem the child of a Muslim mother and non-Muslim father. The milieu of Midnight's Children, despite its mingling of many traditions, is largely Muslim. Rushdie gives details of life in a Muslim Indian household, how the grandfather is forced to woo his wife through a sheet with a hole —referring to the strict purdah

which prevented even doctors from examining their patients. He uses allusions to Islamic customs. The narrator points out that he will relate his family history without censoring it. Rushdie uses the idea of what is permitted and not permitted by using a metaphor from Islamic dietary laws. Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions

240

A Divided Legacy

of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on. (64)

Rushdie gives the sense of that blending of religions and cultures that is characteristic of India — and that, until communalism raises its ugly head, is its wealth. Thus, the narrator talks of being "Bom

and raised in the Muslim tradition" but being "overwhelmed by an older learning" (233). The legends of Islam blend with those of India, as well as with those of Europe. "Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepbum" (311). Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack, adulterous lovers whose affair Saleem reveals to Lila's husband, are Hero and Leander. With Midnight's Children, Indo-Anglian fiction came into its own. Earlier, despite Narayan, Anand and Raja Rao, there had been a sense that English fiction written by Indians was somehow not up to par with the fiction written by those whose first language was English. A concession was made for Joseph Conrad, but at least he

was a European who became an English resident. Changing his name, writing sentences that, if ponderous, were flawless English, Conrad quietly defied all arguments that no one who was not bom to the language could be a master in it. In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov cast another stone at the language barrier with his irreverent use of English to tell the story of a middle-aged man's infatuation for a nymphet. The appearance of Midnight's Children on the literary stage might be said to mark a third stage in the development of the international novel in English, a stage that finally cast down the language barrier. Raja Rao had spoken of a unique idiom, so, too, much later, had critics like P. Lal and C. Narasimhaiah. With Rushdie there was finally a writer who wrested the English language into the idiom that

Indo-Anglian writers had been talking about but had not quite succeeded in achieving. It was not a question of using an Indianism or two, of using local colour, but of completely remaking the

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

241

language, of using its resources to tell the story of a hero whose birth coincided with the birth of India. The English language bubbles and effervesces in Midnight's Children, synonyms keep tumbling along with the incorporation of Indian words in a manner common to students who have been to English medium schools, a manner that has been audio-visualized by the appearance of Zee TV. Midnight's Children draws upon the resources of the English language as made popular— in the original meaning of the word— in India. It is not just the tale but the telling of it that makes Midnight's Children, a unique book. The magic realism might be the influence of Gabriel Marquez, the language is pure India. Salman Rushdie is not Caliban cursing in his master's language; he is Caliban's child, having leamed the language well and using it to tell his own tale which is one of many tales, one of which includes the English colonization of India as well as the departure of the British leaving behind a land tom in two—three if we see the actual division into the Indian Union, West and East Pakistan — with East Pakistan

becoming the separate nation of Bangladesh in 1971.” Midnight's Children begins with a bang on Aug. 15, 1947, the opening paragraph combining theme and tone. Despite the fantastic nature of the narrative, the reader is reminded of the historical truths that underlie the tale which, as in other books describing the Partition, insists upon dates. I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from that date: I] was bom in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more... . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as | came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, | tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke ? Though Bangladesh emerged only in 1971. the seeds of Bangladesh were sown much earlier. In 1905 Bengal had been partitioned. the division of 1947 was a second partition. Furthermore, separated by a thousand miles from West Pakistan. East Pakistan grew further and further apart. The centralization of the government only helped to accelerate the separation.

242

A Divided Legacy

his big toe: but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in the benighted moment, because thanks to the occult mysteries of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indisgolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate — at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my nose.at the time. (3)

Much later, of course, the reader will learn along with Padma that Saleem Sinai is not Saleem Sinai after all, but the illegitimate son of an Englishman and a Hindu woman. The hybridity of the hero is reflected in the story and points to Rushdie's refusal to maintain the pure blood lines that are admired and insisted upon by all Indians, Hindu or Muslim. Rushdie was here using a favourite theme of Indian movies where children of different castes and religions are mixed up deliberately or mistakenly. He was also emphasizing that religious differences did not matter. Moreover, by giving Saleem a Hindu mother, an English father and a Muslim upbringing, Rushdie was emphasizing the inextricable nature of the different strands that had gone into the making of the composite Indian character. Rushdie insists on his British nationality, and perhaps he is right to do so, but Midnight's Children, despite its essentially urban — specificall y Bombay ambience and upper-middle-class setting epitomizes what is increasingly —thanks to Star and Zee TV — becoming the face of India. At the beginning, the reader is given an intimate look at Indian Muslim culture with the story of Saleem Sinai's grandfather Aadam

Aziz and his falling in love with a woman whom he had never seen

except in bits, thanks to the strict purdah under which she was kept

and which allowed a doctor to see a patient only through a sheet. By beginning with Saleem's grandfather, Rushdie is able to bring ina reference to the Rowlatt Act against political agitation, and describ e, through Aadam Aziz's presence in Amritsar that day, the incident of Dyer's firing at the unarmed crowd in Jallianwala Bagh in 1919.

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

243

Saleem is very particular about giving the dates: "April 6th, 1919," (30), "April

7th.

1919"

(33), “April

13th, and they are still in

Amritsar" (34). When General Dyer orders his soldiers to fire into a crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, Aadam Aziz too is there. Fortunately for him, his nose tickles and, just as Dyer issues his command, Aadam

Aziz sneezes and "falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life" (35). Jallianwala Bagh arouses vehement emotions even today. Queen Elizabeth's proposed visit to Amritsar in 1997 was criticized, with the English monarch being asked not to visit the city. Rushdie, however, juxtaposes the tragedy at Jallianwala with comedy. This juxtaposition of irreverent humour with major historical events appears throughout the book, in a marked contrast with other historical novels dealing with Partition. Tharoor would use this irreverence in The Great Indian Novel, but

even he cannot be as irreverent as Rushdie who can explain how some people escaped the Jallianwala massacre by so comic a thing as a sneeze. Ralph J. Crane notes that "Rushdie authenticates his narrative by historical signposts scattered throughout Midnight's Children."'° However, the nght word does not seem to be "authenticate," because Rushdie, like his narrator Saleem, is well aware that history cannot tell the truth. Putting in "historical signposts" is what all historical narrative does. Thus, Abu Rushd's Nongor begins on June 3, 1947 as does Chaman Nahal's Azadi; in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, Bim's potential romance comes to an end because, while she is waiting for a bus, the news of Gandhi's assignation is broadcast on the radio. The difference between these other novels and Midnight's Children is the number of dates given by Rushdie and the irreverent juxtaposition of history and fiction. Nadir Khan vanishes on the day that the bomb is dropped at Hiroshima. Saleem is born on August 15, 1947. Aadam Sinai is bom on June 25, 1975. Each of these historical dates is connected irreverently to a fictive event. Thus Rushdie repeats Nehru's speech and juxtaposes it with the howls of children being bom. Aadam Sinai is born on June 25, 1975 when the 19 Ralph J. Crane, Inventing India: A History of India in English Language Fiction (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 174.

244

A Divided Legacy

Emergency

was declared, and the narrator echoes the lines that

heralded the birth of Saleem: "On the stroke of midnight . . . at the precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency. . ." (419). A wrong date is given of Gandhi's assassination by the narrator. No novelist so far has been so casual about so important a date. The juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy, of history and fiction repeatedly stress the link between history and fiction as well as the impossibility of treating history as infallible. If fiction is a construct, history too is a construct.

Padma complains of too much detail. At this rate Saleem will never be born in the story. She urges him to hurry up the narration. Saleem jumps to 1942 and the beginning of talks about partitioning India. The Muslim League wants Partition; "the Free Islam Convo- cation" opposes it. Nadir Khan is the lieutenant of Mian Abdullah, the founder of the convocation whose favourite anti-Partition quotation is a line from Iqbal "Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?" (49). Thus Rushdie brings in the fact that all Muslims were not in favour of Partition and even Iqbal who later voiced the idea of Partition was, at the beginning, an Indian, thinking of India as the home of the Muslims.

Rushdie blends fact into fiction, as he

describes how assassins kill Abdullah. Nadir Khan flees and manages to find shelter in the home of Aziz. There he will meet and marry Mumtaz. But it isn't Nadir Khan who is to be the ostensible father of Saleem, but Ahmed

Sinai. With the introduction of Ahmed

Sinai,

Rushdie introduces the Ravana gang which posed as an anti-Partition gang but was "a bnilliantly conceived commercially conceived enterprise" (80). They pretended to be anti-Partition but were engaged in blackmail. Unless the Muslim businessmen paid them, they would

burn down their establishments. Rushdie describes the joy that heralded independence — though he also notes the riots and the killings. Thus in Bombay there is joy. A nation was getting independence that had never been a nation, a myth was being created. But how grand it all was. [T]here was an extra festival in the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had

five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

245

chess and traded with the Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by efforts of a phenomenal collective will except in a dream we all agreed to dream: it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat. and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. (129-130)

Saleem tells Padma that he will not dwell upon the more public events that took place at the same time as his birth. "After all, one is not bom every day" (130). But even as he says he will not describe what happened, he does refer to it — thus eliding it and including it at the same time. The violence that accompanied Partition is not Rushdie's subject, but there is no getting away from it completely. I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of the Punjab (where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in one another's blood, and a certain punchinello-faced Captain Zulfikar is buying refugee property at absurdly low prices, laying the foundations of a fortune that will rival the Nizam of Hyderabad's); I shall avert my eyes from the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walks of Mahatma Gandhi. Selfish? Narrowminded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion. After all, one is not born every day. (130)

But even though Rushdie does not dwell on the violence, he juxtaposes the excitement with the violence and the incongruities of the moment. As Rushdie's fictive child is born, India celebrates independence with fireworks and colours, but all the fireworks and colours are not of national rejoicing, much of it is tragic violence. By juxtaposing the joyous and the tragic, Rushdie insists upon the complexity of the Partition, a complexity that cannot be narrated in a straightforward, rational, non-emotional narrative. And in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the Punjab, with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world.

246

A Divided Legacy

And the city of Lahore, too, is burning. The wiry serious man is getting to his feet. Anointed with holy water from the Tanjore River, he rises: his forehead smeared with sanctified ash, he clears his throat. Without written speech in hand, without having memorized any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins: "... Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny: and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. . . ." (134)

But even

as Saleem

Sinai describes the moment

of his birth,

he also describes —in what was a very popular motif in Indian cinema — the exchange of babies. Mary Pereira, in love with the Communist Joseph, switches name tags. It is not only Kashmiris like Aadam Aziz who have big noses, and the child of Ahmed and Amina Sinai is given to Wee Willie Winkie, Vanita's husband, who never learns of his wife's unfaithfulness. The illegitimate child of Vanita and Methwold is brought to Amina. Padma is horrified. "An Anglo? ... What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?" (136). She accuses him of being a monster. No, he is not a monster. Nor is he guilty of trickery. He provided clues. Even when he discovered who he really was, the narrator

notes, it didn't really matter. The children of midnight have many parents: Hindu, Muslim, English. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared. children

were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents — the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. (137)

Though India was to be a secular state, Rushdie notes how the violence and mistrust ushered in by Partition continued after 1947. Muslims were held in suspicion, and Ahmed Sinai's accounts are frozen. Gandhi is killed, and Amina is grateful that it is not a Muslim who killed Gandhi. "By being Godse he has saved our lives" (169). Though there were several attempts to prove that India was secular, the very fact of Partition led to an increasing Hindu identity, with quite a few Muslims — or Hindus — migrating years after Partition. Rushdie shows this through the migration of the Sinais to Pakistan.

Caliban’s Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

247

This migration permits the child to be present at the secret meetings preceding the army coup of 1958. Was the coup also a midnight's child, the result of the colonization and then the violent Partition? Midnight has many children: the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violcnce. cormuption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots. ... | had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I— even I — had dreamed. (350)

As the narrative proceeds, the reader is introduced to other midnight's children, particularly to Shiva— who should really have been Saleem Sinai — and Parvati. The narrative traces the history of India including the assassination of Gandhi, the incorporation of the native Indian states, the reorganization of Indian states on the basis of languages spoken, the growing differences between Hindus and Muslims leading to the migration of Saleem's parents to Pakistan, through the Sino-Indian and Indo-Pak wars, the liberation war in Bangladesh and the Emergency. Juxtaposing history with fiction, Rushdie narrates Saleem's part in the Bangladesh war which leads to his returning to India with the Pakistani prisoners of war. Though Rushdie uses historical "facts," as Linda Hutcheon notes, "historiographic metafiction"'! is self-reflexive, and, even while speaking of political and historical realities, is conscious that history and fiction are constructs. Post-modem fiction, as Hutcheon points out, does not attempt to tell truth, but asks if truth can be told. We

cannot know — though we may enjoy the telling. As Ralph J. Crane notes, "In Midnight's Children, Rushdie takes fiction and history as far as they have ever been taken together."!?

The question has sometimes been asked, What is Salman Rushdie's nationality? He claims to be a British citizen, which he is. He was for some time in Pakistan. The writer blends with the narrator as

Saleem

comments

that Pakistan was not his country.

"Not my

country, although I stayed in it as refugee, not citizen" (350). While

Saleem goes to Pakistan, Shiva remains in India and epitomizes all 1! The other novels that Linda Hutcheon mentions are The French-Lieutenant's Woman, Ragtime, Legs, G., Famous Last Words. A Poetics of Post Modernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge. 1988). 5. 12 Crane, 189.

248

A Divided Legacy

the violence that India has known after Partition. As Rushdie juxta-

poses fact and fiction, he has Saleem picked up and vasectomized so that he can never father a child. He traces the growing radicalism of Indian politics by having the children of midnight hounded down so that finally at the end there is the fear that he too will be destroyed like the other midnight's children and that all the promise that was present at the birth of the nation will have been destroyed. "Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching. . . ." (552). Rushdie's Midnight's Children incorporates images, facts, backgrounds in a manner that has been described as similar to that of Laurence Sterne. This style gives Rushdie's narrative the multiplicity that makes up the complex historical and sociological background of the subcontinent. As Saleem comments: "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world" (126). Referring to the style of the narrative, Saleem points out, "If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance . . . perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque" (126). To get the full flavour of the discourse, a

reader needs something like "A Companion to Midnight's Children" to explain the multitude of references. These references too often juxtapose the serious and the absurd. For example, Rushdie uses the incidence of purdah to bring in a sheet with a hole through which Aadam Aziz sees Nadeem. In 1947, Aziz takes the sheet out of the trunk and sees that the sheet has got moth holes in it. "Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in naphthalene balls!" (129). “Moth-eaten" was how Jinnah had described the land that he was getting. Juxtaposing the serious with the tragic, Rushdie was writing in a manner that no previous Indian writer of the Partition ever had. Rushdie's British nationality perhaps enabled him to do so, but we may also remember that Naipaul, writing about his family, was also only able to write about it in a comic manner.: It is this comedy that the west accepts—and perhaps that is why, later Rushdie played up to the west's notions to his own detriment. Readers and critics alike tend to miss the pessimism with which

Midnight's Children ends, partly because of the mirth of the majority of the pages, perhaps also because Midnight's Children gave rise to the birth of a new genre of writing, and because, despite his British

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

249

nationality, here was an Indian writing, in an Indian manner, uncowed by the niceties of the English language or its proprieties. It is this significance that makes Tharoor in The Great Indian Novel,

a book that is obviously influenced by Rushdie, include Rushdie in the pantheon of writers on the Indian-English scene. It is perhaps in the use of language and the juxtaposition of fact and myth that Rushdie is Tharoor's guru. The use of language by Rushdie and Tharoor is poles apart from that of the writers of the Raja Rao-R.K. Narayan generation who use correct English while conveying an Indian flavour. Far from moaning that English is not their own, both these writers revel in the immense possibilities of language.. Language — even the master's language —can be tamed. Rushdie incorporates Indian-Muslim idioms into English; Tharoor plays with the idiosyncrasies of the English language. Some of the funniest parts of The Great Indian Novel are when Tharoor shows how the English masters fail to acquire the language of their subjects. Towards the beginning of the novel there is a scene in which Sir Richard, the English Resident, is discussing the anti-British agitation with his equerry, Heaslop — the

name, of course, recalling Adela Quested's fiancé in A Passage

to India. Sir Richard is proud of his command of the native tongue. He has leamed a few phrases which can help him. He tells his equerry — after ordering the bearer to bring whisky and water— that there is nothing to language. These native languages don't really have much to them, you know. And it's not as if you have to write poetry in them. A few crucial words, sufficient English for ballast, and you're sailing smoothly. "In fact," his voice became confidential, "I even have a couple of

tricks up my sleeve." He leaned towards the young man, his eyes, mouth and face all round in concentration. "There was a banned crow," he intoned sonorously. " 'There was a cold day.' Not bad, eh? I learned those on the boat. Sounds like perfect Urdu, I'm told."

However, language is not that easy, as Sir Richard himself has to admit. How does one remember which sentence to use when?

He paused and frowned. "The devil of it is remembering which one means,

‘Close the door,’ and which will get someone

to open it.

250

A Divided Legacy

Well, never mind," he said, as his companion opened his mouth in

diffident helpfulness, "we're not here for a language lesson." (37)

Things are more difficult, however, than remembering which phrase to use when. Just before the Resident had pontificated on language, he had ordered whisky and water. The problem was that, having been told by Heaslop that bhisti was not a person who cleaned toilets but a water-carrier—they had been discussing the idiosyncrasies of Gandhi, who appears as Ganga Datta in the novel — he had understood Dhisti to be a container to carry water. Accordingly, Sir Richard had asked the doddering old bearer — called "boy" — to bring the water not in a little Jota but in a bhisti: "Bhisti men lao" (37). The servitor, astonished but obedient, had hurried off to oblige his master. Very much later, the bhisti is triumphantly produced by the bearer to the utter astonishment of the Resident who had no idea what he had asked for. Though the Resident shows his utter incapacity for the native language, with comical results, the narrator is in complete control of his master's language —as is Tharoor himself —and puns and plays with words as he dictates his memoirs or waxes eloquent on the differences between himself and the Indian writer cowed down by the language he uses. Thus Ved Vyas—or V.V. as he refers to himself — while dictating his memoirs to Ganapathi, apologizes for allowing himself to run away with language, especially when the older writers have established a tradition of correctness in writing. But you must keep me in check, Ganapathi. I must learn to control my own excesses of phrase. It is all very well, at this stage of my life and career, to let myself go and unleash a few choice and pithy epithets I have been storing up for the purpose. But that would fly in the face of what has now become the Indian autobiographical tradition, laid down by a succession of eminent baldheads from Rajaji to Chagla. The principle is simple: the more cantankerous the

old man and the more controversial his memoirs, the more rigidly

conventional is his writing. Look at Nirad Chaudhuri, who wrote his

Autobiography of an Unknown Indian on that basis and promptly ceased to live up to its title. It is not a principle that these memoirs of a forgotten Indian can afford to abandon. (35)

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

251

Tharoor's narrator, like Rushdie's, is exuberantly unconventional in language, punning, playing with the idiosyncrasies of the English language, coining words at will, allowing sentences to tumble and make somersaults — always landing right side up. V.V. cannot keep himself in check, and writes poems extolling the golden age or describing the fate of Pandu — Subash Chandra Bose — coins words like "anglovorous" to describe a mosquito which bites the English Resident and his equerry, puns at will: "No one was quite sure how far Britannia meant to waive the rules" (42); plays with the idiosyncrasies of language: "the indigenes who pulled the levers and mechanical looms were paid the proverbial pittance (their proverb Ganapathi, our pittance") (94). All Indians do not speak what is called "Babu English." And, even if many do, perhaps they have learned it from their masters and use it because it is expected of them. After all, how can an Indian speak or write English as well as an Englishman? In the chapter titled "The Man Who Could Not Be King" —the chapter title echoing the title of Kipling's famous story, "The Man Who Would Be King" — India has gained independence. During the confusion and riots — Tharoor, like Rushdie, includes the traumatic events of Partition but does not let these control the story — Ronald Heaslop happens to lose everything. He is brought to Drona by a Sir Beverly Twitty —whose name Drona refuses to remember, paying the British back for their inability to remember correctly the names of their Indian subjects. Drona reminds Heaslop that once in the past he

had approached Heaslop, but Heaslop had denied knowing him. Now that the English have been forced to quit, the Indian has the upper hand. Drona reminds Heaslop, in sentences of Indian-English construction, of the past incident. At the same time he mocks the sentence in which Sir Beverly has explained Heaslop's plight. "Now let me see, "Drona examined the paper before him with exaggerated care. "What is it you are proposing, Sir Brewerley? 'Special one-time grant in partial restitution for losses suffered to private property in performance of service-related functions.’ My my, what long sentence, Sir Brewerlily. I must be learning now to write like this soon. Otherwise how I will manage when you and your fellow British are no longer remaining here?" (241)

252

A Divided Legacy

Both Rushdie and Tharoor exploit their own histories and traditions to write their novels (Rushdie got into serious trouble a few years later with The Satanic Verses precisely because he attempted to use his Islamic tradition in the same brash manner as he had used his Indo-Anglian background in Midnight's Children). Even while writing in English and therefore for an Anglophone audience, neither Tharoor nor Rushdie attempt to explain their culture, but assume that their audience will share their knowledge — which is not perhaps true of the great majority of people reading their books. Both require, therefore, the same sort of glossing that most of us found necessary when we read English books in school. Myths and legends that would be familiar to a child born in England had to be explained to us before we could appreciate the allusions. In the same way Tharoor and Rushdie require a familiarity on the part of their audience with Indian history and myths and legends to fully appreciate their writing. While Rushdie refers to the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses, Tharoor requires an even greater familiarity with the Mahabharata, which he appropriates to tell the story of the Partition and the struggle between the separate factions of the Congress the Kauravas represented by Prya Duryodhani/Indira Gandhi and the Pandavas led by Yudhisthir/Morarji Desai. Only a reader familiar with this epic can fully appreciate the brilliance of the appropriation. By this retelling, Tharoor not only elevates recent history to epic levels, but also sends the reader back to the original — which must be read, if one has not done so, to appreciate the relevance. Again and again, the post-colonial writer makes us aware of the multiplicity of his/her experience, as well as the living nature of the indigenous tradition. Post-colonial writers are acutely conscious of the literary baggage left behind by the British. Both Rushdie and Tharoor exploit this inheritance. Thus, while Rushdie refers to Romeo, Juliet, Leander, Tharoor

reminds his readers of the colonial encounter in literature in his chapter headings and the names of some of his characters. Thus, apart from "The Man Who Could Not Be King," he gives us "A Raj Quartet," "The Powers of Silence," "The Son Also Rises," 'Passages Through India," "The Bungle Book." The narrative also alludes to almost all the

famous

stories written by western writers about India — though

Caliban's Children: Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor

253

Tharoor also takes into account Rushdie's influential novel, titling one chapter "Midnight's Parents." Thus Tharoor suggests that IndoAnglian writing is also part of the literary equipage his reader must possess. Unlike the melancholy reminiscences of the narrator in Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, Tharoor's narrator incorporates Anglo-Indian and Indo-Anglian stories and their writers, as well as numerous persons who have affected the history of the Indian subcontinent into his narrative. Blending history and literature, Tharoor makes Colonel Rudyard Kipling order the firing at Bibigarh Gardens. Bibigarh Gardens, we remember, is the fictive location of the rape scene in Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. Forster too makes a cameo

appearance in the novel in the guise of Maurice Forster — Maurice being the title of Forster's book. Tharoor has Heaslop, the English — thus using a character from a novel to equerry describe Forster describe the author who created him. The description of Maurice Forster cleverly combines a comment on Forster's personal proclivities with a reference to the confusion that is at the centre of A Passage to India. Well, there is Forster, sir, Maurice Forster, just down from Cambridge,

Ibelieve. But he seems to, ah, prefer tutoring young boys to performing his more routine secretarial duties. I have the impression he doesn't take many initiatives, sir. Never quite managed to get the hang of what India's all about. Considers it all a mystery and muddle, or so he keeps saying. (62)

Rushdie and Tharoor agree with each other—and differ from earlier Indo-Anglian writers — in the irreverent humour with which

they deal with their subject, even when it is the historical moment of Partition. The pain of Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan or Chaman Nahal's Azadi is thus diluted. The Partition of India becomes an

accepted fact and part of a multitude of experiences. The narrator in Midnight's Children babbles to Padma while delirious with fever, Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 — but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which a the cow of mortality has been reduced to standing, teeteringly, on single leg! (233)

254

A Divided Legacy

For both Tharoor and Rushdie, Partition is the legacy of the

British who, as Tharoor makes clear, played "Divide and Rule." Hindu and Muslim rulers engaged ministers and generals without regard to their religion, Tharoor's narrator points out. Aurangzeb employed

Rajputs in his army;

Marathas,

Peshwas,

and Turkish

captains. "No, Ganapathi, religion had never had much to do with our national politics. It was the British civil servant who made our people collectively bite the apple of discord" (134). Rushdie too emphasizes the absurdity of divisions into Hindu, Muslim, or Christian by making his narrator Saleem Sinai all three. Thus both Tharoor and Rushdie stress the absurdity of these divisions but, as Tharoor notes, Indians allowed themselves "to be defined in terms imposed upon them by their conquerors" (135). Caliban's children use Prospero's language to tell the story of the departure of Prospero and the legends of their land. But they make

the language theirs as they mould it to tell their stories in their way. Now that Prospero has left, they can include the story of how he conquered their land as well as the story of his departure. They cannot, however, tell the story without him — even as they realize the constructs, literary and political, by which they were colonized. Accepting the facts of history, they recover their own past, replacing Caliban's rage by a critical awareness and an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of experience. The British are part of our postcolonial heritage, but, as both Rushdie and Tharoor emphasize, we

are more than just the former subjects of the British. Aziz can accept Fielding's offer of friendship.

Chapter Ten

BEGINNING AGAIN: BAPSI SIDHWA AND MAHMUD SIPRA

In the Indian fiction of the eighties, the writers were, despite their

differences, emphasizing the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic aspect of - India. As Viney Kirpal points out, "The 1980s novels reflect, as never before, the theme of the mixed Indian tradition. The controlling temper of the period is synthesis, polymorphism where all religions, all communal groups including the minorities have an important place."! This polymorphism is reflected not only in the richness of the Indian tradition, but in the writer's insistence that the Indian tradition is made up of many traditions. Thus in Rushdie we note the blending of Hindu myths, North-Indian Muslim culture, the cosmopolitan ambience of Bombay life, the legacy of the British Raj, and in Tharoor a return to the myths of the Mahabharata to portray recent political history. Indian culture becomes all-embracing, the many strands become inseparable. This is, of course, not to say that this multi-ethnic, multi-religious, this all-embracing nature of India is absent from earlier India writers. In fact, the acclaimed Indian

— all proclaim — as much as the acclaimed Indian movies writers that India is large enough to include all races, all cultures, all

religions and that it was a mistake for Pakistan to have ever come J Viney Kirpal, The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1990), xii.

256

A Divided Legacy

into being on the basis of the two-nation theory. India is many nations in one. It is not, in other words, only America which can lay claim to multli-racialism, to being a nation of many nations. Thus we see in Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, for example, how al] three major religions of Northem India co-existed

until Partition disrupted this harmony. The difference between the earlier Indian writers and writers like Rushdie and Tharoor is that while the earlier portray the communal conflict, the latter, while not denying it, off-centre it. Rushdie, while not denying the turbulence of Partition, foregrounds the birth of the midnight's children so that they become the focus of the novel, rather than what happened to the masses forced to move. Furthermore, even though, migration takes place in Midnight's Children, it is not portrayed as the mass movement of novels like A Bend in the Ganges or Azadi, nor as trains carrying loads of corpses. When people migrate, they migrate in bits and spurts. Rushdie's narrator is never happy in Pakistan. It is there that he realizes that his telepathic powers linking him to other midnight's children have left him. The Bangladesh war finds him in Bangladesh, and, after the defeat of Pakistan army, he manages to get himself smuggled back to India. The migration and retum migration is termed in terms of individual movements, thus eliding the mass migrations and the mass bloodshed that erupted consequent to Partition. In other words, in the writing of the eighties, the conflict of the 1940s, while not denied, is shown as not inherent. A culture

that is so tolerant of differences — by including it all — cannot be held responsible for the division that rent the people and led to the mutilation of the land. Thus even while writing about the Partition,

the Indian writer, accepting it as a historical fact, doesn't need to

explain or justify it. By contrast, when we tum to Pakistani writing of the eighties we find the opposite is true. It is not just the Urdu novelist writing shortly after Partition who feels the need to explain Partition and justify it on grounds both political and religious. It is striking that

Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra, both so different in background and temperament, should both have begun their first novels with a

description of a train massacre. Though Sipra's intent in Pawn to

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

257

King Three? is to tell a story in the nature of Frederick Forsyth or Harold Robbins, he includes a vignette of Jinnah and explains Jinnah's role in encouraging Pakistani businessmen. In Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man, the narrator, Lenny, muses about the absurdity of the Partition of the Indian sub-continent: "I am Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that."3 Most people born before 1947 became Indian or Pakistani in a snap. Nevertheless, despite her narrator's musing over the absurdity of Partition, Sidhwa's Pakistani perspective is evident in her writings — as is Mahmud Sipra's in the one novel he has written.“ Ice-Candy-Man was not, however, Sidhwa's first novel. Depending on whether first means written first, her first novel was The Bride;> if first means published first, it was The Crow Eaters.© Though The Crow Eaters was the book that made Sidhwa famous — and therefore made it possible for The Bride to be published — it is interesting to note how The Bride, like Sipra's novel, begins with independence, and, in particular, the train massacres. The focus on Partition is so strong in Ice-Candy-Man, Sidhwa's third book, that when it was published in the United States in 1991 the title was changed to Cracking India. The case of Sidhwa's The Bride is interesting as an example of how a minority writer needs to establish a political identity. This book, as Sidhwa has told several people, was inspired by the story of a tribal woman who had been killed by her husband because of 1985). References 2 Mahmud Sipra, Pawn to King Three (London: Michael Joseph/Rainbird, ally. parenthetic noted be will text the to 140. Further References WwW Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989),

to the text will be noted parenthetically. A number of Mahmud Sipra's authorship of Pawn to King Three has been questioned. a book. writing of incapable was Pakistanis with whom I discussed Sipra, said that Sipra a charlatan and fraud a was book, his of hero the like much Sipra, that They suggested suggested, had been and wanted the prestige of being considered a writer. The book, they written by someone

else. Even

if this is so, what remains

is that to be considered

a

a condemnation "Pakistani author,” there must be a Pakistani perspective in the book, Jinnah. Ali Mohammad of presented of Sikh atrocities and a positive image edition I have used was > Bapsi Sidhwa's The Bride was first published in 1983. The

published by Liberty Books in 1987. used was published by 6 The Crow Eaters was first published in 1978. The edition I have Fontana in 1982.

258 A Divided Legacy infidelity. The horror of this story led Sidhwa to write a story of a young Pakistani woman whose husband attempts to kill her because of a distorted sense of honour. What is interesting, however, is that,

instead of beginning with the story of the young girl, Sidhwa begins with the story of Qasim, a hillman, who leaves the hills for the plains of Jullunder and then has to flee the communal forces there. The train Qasim is travelling on is attacked by Sikhs and, in the camage, Qasim comes upon a little girl whose parents have been killed in the massacre. This little girl becomes the bride whose husband attempts to kill her. Beginning shortly before Partition, Sidhwa can bring in the train massacre and then trace the early days of independence. The need, in other words, to establish her credentials as a Pakistani writer alone can explain why Sidhwa had to begin this far back. If, as Sidhwa proclaimed, her inspiration came from the murdered tribal woman, there should have been no need for Sidhwa to begin with the story of Qasim before going on to the story of Munni or Zaitoon. By telling these two stories, by combining her feminist concerns with a compulsion to explain her Pakistani heritage, Sidhwa produced a book that, even as it gave its readers an insight into a society permeated with the mores of purdah and a distorted sense of honour, also suffered from a structural weakness.” Sidhwa's treatment of the train massacre allows the reader to share what was the most horrible association of the Partition of India for dwellers in the Punjab: the train massacres. Qasim is fleeing Jullunder where communal tensions have grown strong. Before he leaves, however, he wreaks drastic vengeance on a Hindu colleague 7 The pattern of story-telling in the Indian subcontinent, it has often been pointed out, is similar to the pattern of the tales in the Arabian Nights. In other words, one story, or kissa, can lead to another and the first story never be finished. If we accept this pattem, then Sidhwa's The Bride is not very different from the indigenous forms. However, Sidhwa, brought up on English fiction, was not familiar with indigenous tales. The similarity of The Bride to the kissa must be considered simply coincidental. However, it may also be noted that the structure of The Bride also bears a close resemblance to many Indian/Pakist ani movies which begin with the story of one person and then go on to tell the story of the second

generation.

These

movies,

however,

attempt

to

connect

the

story ' of the

father/mother with the son/daughter in a way that Sidhwa's does not. Qasim never leams” about what his attachment to the hill country has done to his daughter. Nor, of course, is there any way that he will ever lear that his daughter is alive. :

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

259

who had, in Qasim's eyes, dishonoured him.® While this incident may be taken as an example of Sidhwa's ability to see evil on both sides of the border, Qasim's action is individualized, whereas the train massacre represents group action and senseless killing. The detailed and vivid description of the massacre allows Sidhwa's audience to experience the horror of Partition. Only now does the engine-driver realise there is something further down the track. A roar rises from the mass of jolted refugees. The train's single headlight flashes on. It spotlights the barricade of logs and some unaligned rails. White singlets flicker in and out of the glare. The train brakes heavily and the engine crashes into the logs. People are flung from their scant hold on the footboards, roof and buffer. Women and children pour from the crammed compartments. Now the mob runs toward the train with lighted flares. Qasim sees the men clearly. They are Sikhs. Tall, crazed men wave swords. A cry: "Bole so Nihal." and the answering roar, "Sat Sri Akal!" Torches unevenly light the scene and Qasim watches the massacre as in a cinema. An eerie clamour rises. Sounds of firing explode above agonized shrieks. ( 28)

Two persons escape the carnage: Qasim and a little girl who has lost her parents. Mistaking Qasim for her father, she clings to him.

Qasim tries to shake her off, but fails to do so. He finally accepts her as a substitute for the little girl he had lost and renames her Zaitoon after his dead daughter. The novel then follows Qasim and Zaitoon to Lahore where they attempt to make a new life for themselves. In the new land some people, including Qasim's new-found friend

Nikka, make fortunes for themselves — not always honestly. And Sidhwa— as critic — depicts the corruption and coercion that Qasim

experiences at second-hand. After a brief digression, which also includes a trip with Qasim to Hira Mandi, the red-light district of

Lahore, Sidhwa returns to the story of Zaitoon. 8 Sidhwa's black humour is omnipresent. Qasim, the hillman, uses pieces of stone and glass in the toilet instead of water in the traditional Indian fashion. The result of this is that the toilets in the office are blocked up. A Hindu colleague discovers that it is Qasim who has caused the blockage and rebukes him. Qasim feels that he has been shamed, so, before he leaves Jullunder for Lahore, he murders the Hindu.

260

A Divided Legacy

Qasim, who hails from the hills, is nostalgic for the life of his youth, and he marries his adopted daughter to Sakhi, a distant nephew. Zaitoon, used by now to the freer, easier life in Lahore, chafes in the hills and runs away from her husband. Sakhi follows her, attempting to wipe out the dishonour she has brought upon him by killing her. While Zaitoon is more fortunate than the woman whose fate inspired Sidhwa to write this novel, she does not escape absolutely unharmed. She is raped and left torn and bleeding by some men who come upon her in the hills. Mushtaq, a young army officer — whose function until this point has been to seduce the American wife of a friend — sees Zaitoon and manages to rescue her from the wrath of her husband. The novel ends on a note of some happiness for Zaitoon. Though she can never go back to the adopted father who loves her, she might find some sort of happiness with Mushtaq's driver — aptly named Ashiq. The plight of Zaitoon, as of other Pakistani women, even those who belong to the urban areas and to the fairly well-to-do classes is further focused through the character of the American Carol. It is Carol who comes upon the head of a young woman floating in the river — an incident that is inspired by the story of the unfortunate woman who was killed. Carol's thoughts, in response to her husband's comment that the woman must have deserved it, focus on a

society where women can be hidden away or killed for honour. By the end of the book, the Partition and Pakistan's early days have been left far behind, and it is not till Sidhwa's third book, Jce-Candy-Man,

that the focus on Partition will help to tighten the structure of the narrative. In The Bride, Sidhwa revealed her Pakistani identity by beginning with the train massacres; in [ce-Candy-Man, she would strengthen this identity even further by once more bringing in the Indian atrocities committed in the Punjab, and by, reappraising the character of Jinnah and attempting to improve this image, stress that the British supported the Indians and were deliberately unfair to both Pakistan and Jinnah. The Bride remained unpublished until Sidhwa's success with The Crow Eaters, which described the customs and lives of Parsis, a

community that had, till then more or less kept its ways secret. The Parsis are a small minority in both Pakistan and India, and, for the

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

261

most part, apolitical. In The Crow Eaters, which traces the fortunes of Faredoon Junglewalla as he becomes one of the most important businessmen in Lahore, Sidhwa comments on the attitude of the Parsis to Partition. Faredoon Junglewalla is about to die and is asked

by friends and relatives who surround him what they should do. Freddy had been a shrewd businessman, and, for him, things were going all right despite the talk of throwing off British yoke until "that misguided Parsi from Bombay, Dadabhoy Navroji" started “something called the Congress" (282). The result is the breaking up of the country and Freddy imagines a total disintegration of the subcontinent. "The fools will break up the country. The Hindus will have one part, Muslims the other, Sikhs, Bengalis, Tamils and God knows who else will have their share; and they won't want you" (283). Where will all the Parsis go, asks Freddy's son-in-law. Nowhere, replies Freddy. "We will stay where we are . . . let Hindus, Sikhs, or whoever, rule. What does it matter? The sun will continue to rise — and the sun continue to set — in their arses. . ." (283). Tracing the fortunes of Freddy, who leaves his home in India

some time at the end of the nineteenth century for the fertile plains of Punjab, settling down in Lahore, The Crow Eaters might easily pass off as an Indian rather than a Pakistani novel. While much of the story is situated in Lahore, the story takes place before Partition, and the Junglewallas seek a bride from Bombay for their son. Furthermore, Sidhwa herself seemed to see the book as Indian, by explaining that the title is taken from an idiom belonging to the Indian sub-continent: "The title is borrowed from an idiom which

belongs to the subcontinent. Anyone who talks too much is said to

have eaten crows." Early critics too saw the book as Indian. Judy Cooke, for example, in the New Statesman says, "Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters is an excellent novel, her first, a book about

India... ." Similarly, Frank Rudman in the Spectator notes that "The Crow Eaters is a wholly charming passage to India." That critics should have seen The Crow Eaters as an Indian book rather than a Pakistani one is not surprising: pre-Partition Lahore — or even Anglo-Indian. Thus, no one may be Indian or Pakistani would call Ved Mehta a Pakistani writer because he writes about Lahore, or Kipling either. But with Sidhwa's international recognition

262

A Divided Legacy

came the need for ethnic and political identity, and Sidhwa — and her publishers —latched on to her Pakistani nationality. The Fontana/Collins edition, for example, made a point of stressing that The Crow Eaters is Pakistani by noting on the cover that it is "A Novel of Pakistan." However, neither The Bride nor Ice-CandyMan need to be similarly identified. They are clearly Pakistani in setting and sensibility. Nevertheless, to prevent any possible confusion, the 1990 Penguin India edition of The Bride is renamed The Pakistani Bride. In Ice-Candy-Man Sidhwa kept to the Parsi milieu that she had focused upon in The Crow Eaters, but, as in The Bride, she brought in her feminist concerns. At the same time, she narrowed the canvas of the book by concentrating upon the years of the Partition which she reveals through the eyes of a young Parsi? girl named Lenny.!° The story of the growth of Lenny and her awakening into sexual awareness merges with her awakening into history. Sidhwa's humour blends with horror and pity as she tells the story of Partition through a child's perspective. Lenny's comprehension of the events of Partition is told through the story of what happens to her beloved Hindu Ayah. When the story begins, Ayah is surrounded by many admirers, Hindu and Muslim. Among these many admirers is the Ice-candy-man after whom the novel is named. As Partition nears, Muslims and Hindus become enemies. Some Hindus in an attempt to save themselves become Christian. Some Hindus leave Lahore. Ayah is Hindu, but, protected by her Parsi employers, she assumes that she is in no danger. Unfortunately, her charms lead to her abduction by a group led by the Ice-candy-man. Ice-candy-man keeps Ayah, renamed Mumtaz, hidden in Hira Mandi. Ayah begs to be rescued and she finally is by Godmother —in a departure from The Bride where the rescue of Zaitoon was effected by aman. With a certain detachment,

Sidhwa sees the excesses to which

religious intolerance takes one. shows how violence marks everyone, but makes a point of stressing how the British and the Indians > The word is spelled both "Parsi" and "Parsee." In The Crow Eaters Sidhwa uses the first

spelling, in Jce-Candy-Man the second. 10 Sidhwa denies that Lenny is a self-portrait, but Lenny suffers from an illness — as Sidhwa herself did — which prevents her from going to school.

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

263

deprived Pakistan of its rightful share of land and assets. She also points out how Indians and westerners continue to denigrate the image of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Sidhwa stresses that Jinnah was no monster, and notes how Partition favoured India over Pakistan. The Hindus are being favoured over the Muslims by the remnants of the Raj. Now that its objective to divide India is achieved, the British favour Nehru over Jinnah. Nehru is Kashmiri, they grant him Kashmir. Spuring logic, defying rationale, ignoring the consequence of bequeathing a Muslim State to the Hindus: while Jinnah futilely protests: "Statesmen cannot eat their words!"

Statesmen do. They grant Nehru Gurdaspur and Pathankot without which Muslim Kashmir cannot be secured. (159)

Shashi Tharoor objects to Sidhwa's use of the word "grant," noting that the British did not grant Kashmir to India. True, the British did not "grant" Kashmir to India: it was a frightened Maharaja who signed the instrument of accession: But that the Radcliffe Award was unfair to Pakistan is corroborated by Radcliffe's failing to abide by the strictures laid on him: to award contiguous Muslim majority areas to Pakistan. By all logic Gurdaspur should have gone to Pakistan. It was contiguous to Pakistan and it was a Muslim majority area. Even G.D. Khosla, for instance, notes that Gurdaspur — like Malda and Murshidabad — was a Muslim majority areas and hence to accrue to Pakistan. The anger and bewilderment of many Pakistanis who found that they were indeed given a truncated Pakistan are replicated in Lenny's voiced anger. Recent research in the India Office Library has unearthed correspondence which suggests that Radcliffe was persuaded to change his mind. S.M. Burke and Salim Al-Din Quraishi in The British Raj include a letter from Noel-Baker to Atlee, dated February 26, 1948 which suggests that Radcliffe had shown the

planned division to someone.'! In other words, Radcliffe did not abide by the conditions of the award. The awarding of the Muslim majority area of Gurdaspur to India could only have been done after 1] ¢M. Burke and Salim Al-Din Quraishi. The British Raj in India: An Historical Overview (Karachi: O.U.P., 1995), Appendix F.

264

A Divided Legacy

receiving suggestions from people interested in withholding the area from Pakistan and allowing India access to Kashmir. True, Lenny is not Sidhwa, but, as Laurel Graeber points out, "Bapsi Sidhwa has attempted to give a Pakistani perspective to the partition of India."!* Graeber quotes her a telephonic interview with Sidhwa who told Graeber that the British glorified Mountbatten, the Indians Gandhi. "Gandhi really sowed the seeds of Partition and tumed the whole independence struggle into a Hindu movement. It's hard for people in the west, where he is deified, to regard him as a pretty manipulative politician." As a Pakistani, Sidhwa feels it incumbent upon herself to defend Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the Muslim nation. The reference to Jinnah is made aptly in the context of the Parsi family that is the focus of the novel. Lenny comes across the picture of an "astonishingly beautiful woman" and is told that it is the picture of Jinnah's wife. A Parsi, she married the Muslim Jinnah, braving her family's displeasure. The marriage was not a happy one, for the beautiful woman in the picture died of a broken heart. While Sidhwa cannot completely exonerate Jinnah here, she manages to blur the criticism by noting that Jinnah too died of a broken heart. She also makes it clear that she is on Jinnah's side. But didn't Jinnah, too, die of a broken heart? And today, forty years later, in films of Gandhi's and Mountbatten's lives, in books by British and Indian scholars, Jinnah, who for a decade was known as "Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity," is caricatured, and portrayed as a monster. (160)

Is this Lenny speaking or Sidhwa herself? Only recently has the image of the cold, unfeeling Jinnah been corrected. Stanley Wolpert in Jinnah of Pakistan has provided a far more human picture of Jinnah than his earlier biographers. Sidhwa has also stressed this human side of Jinnah in /ce-Candy-Man.

Sidhwa, however, rises above petty nationalism. Jce-Candy-Man does not stress the two-nation theory behind the creation of Pakistan. In other words,

Sidhwa

does

not stress the belief of Pakistani

127 aurel Graeber, "The Seeds of Partition," New York Times, Oct. 6, 1991: 11. *

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

265

Muslims of the necessity of Partition and the creation of Pakistan. In fact, Ice-Candy-Man suggests that religious and cultural differences are artificially created and deliberately fostered. Through Lenny's perspective, Sidhwa shows how religious differences were exploited on the eve of Partition. Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Iqbal, Tara Singh, Mountbatten are names I hear.

And I become aware of religious differences. It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves — and the next day

they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling

into symbols. Ayah is no longer my all-encompassing Ayah— she is also a token, a Hindu. Carried away by a renewed devotional fervour, she expends a small fortune in joss-sticks, flowers and sweets on the gods and goddesses in the temples. Imam Din and Yousaf, turning into religious zealots, warn Mother

that they will take Friday afternoons off for the Jumha prayers. On Fridays they set about preparing themselves ostentatiously. . . . Sometimes, at odd hours of the day, they spread their mats on the front lawn and pray when the muezzin calls. Crammed into a narrow religious slot they too are diminished: as are Jinnah and Iqbai, Ice-candy-man, Masseur.

Hari

and

Moti-the-sweeper

and

his

wife

Muccho,

and

their

untouchable daughter Papoo, become even more untouchable as they are entrenched deeper in their low Hindu caste. While the are like Nehru, Brahmins and the Daulatrams, Sharmas ks. caste-mar and dehumanised by their lofty caste The Rogers of Birdwood Barracks, Queen Victoria and King George are English Christians: they look down their noses upon the Pens who are Anglo-Indian, who look down theirs on the Phailbuses who are Indian-Christian, who look down upon all non-Christians,

are Godmother, Slavesister, Electric-aunt and my nuclear family (93-4) Parsee. are we — atures nomencl nt reduced to irreleva

At the beginning, Ayah is a cementing force. Hindu, Muslim, change, Sikh admirers flock around her. Gradually, however, things and this change is depicted in the dwindling of the group around "twos Ayah. Though they still come it is no longer together, but in violent. and ugly tuming or threes, or singly" (147). Things start English Houses are looted and bumt. There are riots. Lenny watches

266

A Divided Legacy

soldiers being chased by a mob of Sikhs, "their wild long hair and beards rampant, large fevered eyes glowing in fanatic faces ... roaring slogans, holding curved swords, shoring up a manic wave of violence that sets Ayah to trembling as she holds me tight. 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" (134-5). Lenny would like to attack the mob, but she knows it is useless: "the creature has too many stony hearts, too many sightless eyes, deaf ears, mindless brains and tons of entwined entrails..." (135). The Sikh mob is followed by a Muslim one. And, as Lenny watches, she sees the destruction and the killing. "Every short while a group of men, like a whirling eddy, stalls — and like the widening circles of a treacherous eddy dissolving in the mainstream, leaves in its centre the pulpy red flotsam of a mangled body" (135). Ayah moans at the horror of the scene and collapses, but the violence excites many, among them Ice-candy-man: "the muscles in his face [are] tight with a strange exhilaration" that the narrator says she never wishes to see again (135). Whole areas are set on fire. Shalmi, with its Hindu population, is set ablaze, and the watchers on the

rooftops enjoy the spectacle. Even Lenny at first is mesmerized. It is like a gigantic fireworks display in which stiff figures looking like spread-eagled stick-dolls leap into the air, black against the magenta furnace. Trapped by the spreading flames the panicked Hindus rush in droves from one end of the street to the other. Many disappear down the smoking lanes. Some collapse in the street. Charred limbs and burnt logs are falling from the sky. (137)

When Lenny finally starts sobbing and screaming, Ice-candy-man tells her and Ayah, "You must make your hearts stout.... The

fucking bastards! They thought they'd drive us out of Bhatti! We've shown them!" (137). In a world gone topsy-turvy, friends tum to foes. In an attempt to save their lives, many convert. Some Hindus convert to Islam, some tum Christian. Everyone is not saved. Hari is humiliated. Ayah,

whom everyone had flirted with, is abducted. Masseur is killed. Personal scores are settled. Sidhwa brilliantly contrasts earlier, playful games with cruelty and brutality after religious differences begin

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

267

separating Hindu from Muslim, Christian from Sikh. Thus, Hari had often been teased by the Muslims who, intrigued by his wisp of a dhoti, tugged at it, pretending that they would pull it off completely. The game, though boisterous and vulgar, was, at the beginning, just a game. Later, it ceases to be so. The dhoti does come off, and Hari

is revealed in his pitiable nakedness, his very genitals shrunk with fear. Similarly, Ayah who had always attracted attention, once more becomes the focus of caressing hands. The situation has, however, changed. The amorous, playful caresses of the earlier scenes become lustful, threatening, violent. In minute detail, juxtaposing sexual images with images of violence, Sidhwa describes the scene of Ayah's abduction. The men drag her in grotesque strides to the cart and their harsh hands, supporting her with careless intimacy, lift her into it. Four men stand pressed against her, propping her body upright, their lips stretched in triumphant grimaces. (183)

For some time, Lenny's family is unaware of Ayah's whereabouts, believing that she is dead. It is soon revealed, however, that Ayah is alive and living in Hira Mandi, the Lahore red-light area. Icecandy-man has married her. He tells Godmother who rebukes him for having been a party to her abduction: "I saved her. . . . They would've . . . killed her. . . I married her" (249). While violence has affected everyone, tuming Lenny's beloved Ice-candy-man into a villain, Sidhwa is careful to reveal how the bloodthirstiness of the Sikhs stands out. Sidhwa does not show a train massacre as she had earlier in The Bride, but she describes one briefly through the eyes of Ice-candy-man. "A train from Gurdaspur has just come in. . . . Everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead. Only two gunny-bags full of women's breasts" (149). Ice-candy-man would like to avenge those deaths, those rapes, and mutilations. He cannot get the murderers but he can get Sher Singh. What does it matter that

Sher Singh has not committed those atrocities? He is of the same faith as those who did. Masseur is one of the few to point out that Guru Nanak wore a shirt with inscriptions from the Quran and that the Sikh faith was an attempt to create Hindu-Muslim harmony.

268

A Divided Legacy

The role of the Sikhs in the massacres is expanded by Sidhwa's inclusion of a village massacre when the Sikhs wipe out an entire village, putting the men to the sword and raping the women.

Sidhwa describes the destruction of the Muslim village of Pir Pindo which Lenny had visited earlier during happier times. The villagers had been wamed to leave, but they do not, and Ranna

describes the mass murder that takes place. Sidhwa does not narrate this incident through Lenny but through Ranna. Ranna saw his uncle beheaded. Sikhs were among them like bloodied swords, dragging them about the fringes, their faces

His older brothers, his cousins. The hairy vengeful demons, wielding out as a handful of Hindus, darting vaguely familiar, pointed out and

identified the Mussulmans by name. He felt a blow cleave the back of his head and the warm flow of blood. Ranna fell just inside the door on a tangled pole of unrecognizable bodies. Someone fell on him, drenching him in blood. (201)

Left for dead, Ranna comes to and hears the shrieks and wails of women. Outside their courtyard he hears the anguished sobs of a woman, and at intervals her screams "You'll kill me! Hai Allah. . . Y'all will kill me!". (202) However, it should be pointed out that the train massacre as well as the destruction of Pir Pindo is not foregrounded. The villains are nameless strangers. Nevertheless, the story of Ranna would be taken up again by Sidhwa. Sidhwa retells Ranna's story in "Defend Yourself Against Me." This short story, written after Sidhwa's fame led to appointments in the United States, also contains a new theme — that of the IndianPakistani-Bangladeshi diaspora. In the states, Sidhwa sees the Indian sub-continent from a wider perspective. Away from the sub-continent, the differences between the religious communities have been blurred with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs forming one large "Indian". community. Ata dinner in Houston, Mrs. Jacobs from Lahore meets Sikander

Khan, whom, she realizes, she knew long ago in Lahore. She recalls how she had met Sikander as a small boy when he and his mother had fled India during Partition and settled next door to her. The little boy had had a deep scar and his mother had been raped and brutalized. It is several years later, but the hate, terror, pain of the >

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra_

past emerges

again as the mother meets

some

269

Sikh friends of

Sikander. In the explosive climax of this story, the Sikh men ask forgiveness for their fathers' sins. Ammijee, Sikander's mother,

forgives the men—as, she says, she had forgiven their fathers, because without forgiving them she could not have survived. Thus, in this story Sidhwa also suggests that though the past cannot be forgotten, it can be forgiven. Let not the crimes of the fathers be visited on their sons — but then the sons must be conscious of their fathers' sins and ask for forgiveness. The United States enabled Sidhwa to give this "happy" ending to the story of Partition, but here too it may be seen how the victim is a Muslim woman, the perpetrators of the rape Sikhs. Though Sidhwa emphasizes the vulnerability of women, like almost all who write on the Partition, Sidhwa is different in her refusal to make women only

victims. Ammijee has survived. And what is important is that Sidhwa

anticipates by several years the demand of world feminists to recognize rape as a war crime. Ammijee's response to the Sikhs is significant. After refusing for some time to speak, she finally does speak, telling the Sikhs that she forgave their fathers long ago. Otherwise how could she have survived? Using the recurrent motifs associated with Partition fiction, Sidhwa refuses to let them remain where they were. Ammijee is different from the girl in the Manto story who, at the end, mad and bewildered, lost to reality, does not hear her father's voice but only the voice of her rapists and opens her shalwar strings. Sidhwa recognizes the inhumanity that accompanies communal violence, but also suggests the need to ask for forgiveness and to give it. Even as Sidhwa fits her stories into the Pakistani context, however, she aims beyond the political and historical. In The Bride, as well what stands out is her quiet stance that women must be more than victims. Even in this world where young girls are married off without their consent, where women are killed, seduced, raped, there is a strength that Sidhwa gives to her women. This strength is voiced to by Carol. Bored, with time on her hands, she has allowed herself

be seduced. But two events pierce Carol's boredom: the appearance

the of Zaitoon, obediently marrying a man not of her choice, and

sight of the dead woman's head. Thinking about Zaitoon, about her

270

A Divided Legacy

meek acceptance, Carol is, by contrast, reminded of Iqbal's concept of the superman. While Iqbal is the "poet-philosopher" who tumed from pan-Islamism to "Muslim nationalism," he is also the poet who spoke about the need to have a sense of selfhood or “khudi."” As Carol looks at Zaitoon, behind the shyness, the speechlessness, she sees Zaitoon's "khudi." Iqbal did not associate "khudi” with women, but Carol, and Sidhwa, see its presence in women as well. But when Carol comes across the dead woman's head and when Zaitoon is raped attempting to escape from her murderous husband, it seems that khudi is not enough. In the change that Sidhwa made to her story, she allowed the woman to escape —though she does give Zaitoon a form of death, when Zaitoon hallucinates and imagines that she is being killed by Sakhi. Zaitoon, however, is not killed, and Sidhwa refuses to let Zaitoon think about killing herself after being raped. Thus, despite being victim, Zaitoon is given a khudi — however attenuated — in order to survive. Thus Sidhwa not only brings in the train massacres, she also cites Iqbal — the Pakistani poet — but gives a reading of Iqbal that no one else has done. Sidhwa's refusal to let women remain victims is apparent in Ice-Candy-Man as well. Using the motif of rape and abduction associated with Partition, she again refuses to allow the raped woman to be discarded. Furthermore, going a step beyond The Bride where Zaitoon is saved by a man to be spirited away into a mountain hideout by another, in Jce~-Candy-Man, Ayah is rescued by Godmother. Nor is it just Godmother who helps people. Lenny's mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage, is strong enough to ferry her Sikh and Hindu friends out of Lahore. In this world, Sidhwa stresses, women have to help themselves and each other. Thus using the story of Partition, using all the motifs associated with it— rape, widening differences between different religious communities, train massacres,

abductions, mutilations — Sidhwa is able to proclaim her Pakistani identity even as she shares her feminist concerns. In 1985, another Pakistani joined Sidhwa

on the international

scene: Mahmud Sipra with his first novel, Pawn to King Three. Sipra, copywriter, media man, international entrepreneur, shipping

magnate, polo-player, international playboy, tells an exciting tale of sexual adventures and business intrigue. His hero, Adnan Walid,

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

271

takes his place among the adventurers of Frederick Forsyth, the spies of Le Carré, and the ruthless, rich businessmen of Harold Robbins. All this is, however, expressed in the Pakistani context. The entire story is not only framed by train massacres, but other Pakistani elements come in as well. Beginning with the pledge that the Quaidi-Azam extracts from Ajmal Hussain to Sawal Ali, through the intricate relationship of Pakistani businesses to the Middle’ East and Pakistani nuclear capabilities, the Pakistani interest is closely woven into the story — without once losing sight of the international milieu which forms the background of big business. The ruthlessness of Pawn to King Three was replicated in — as it was perhaps inspired by —a bank, begun by a Pakistani but funded by Arab money and run by bright and ruthless young men. For some time, in the international world of business and commerce, this bank made some

ripples until the intricate and shady deals which elevated the BCCI to its spectacular height also brought about its downfall. Pawn to King Three reveals some of the excitement, as it does the sleaze of that success in fiction. Different though they are from each other, the serious Sidhwa and the flamboyant Sipra are equally Pakistani in their political stance. Thus both seem equally committed to revealing their pro-Pakistani stance and focus on Indian atrocities during Partition. Both highlight the train massacres and, by giving a favourable picture of Quaid-iAzam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, contradict the portraits given by Indian and western writers. (Stanley Wolpert is one of the few western writers to have given a more human portrayal of Jinnah. Otherwise most western writers share the antipathy of Nehm and Mountbatten towards Jinnah.) There are more obvious differences than similarities between Sidhwa and Sipra. Unlike Sidhwa, three of whose novels are set in Lahore and whose fourth novel moves between Lahore and New — his York/Houston, Sipra's one claim to international authorship internaan has — nbird Joseph/Rai Michael by novel was published

tional stage. The story follows its characters across the globe: Lahore,

New Delhi, Houston, Washington DC, London, Paris, Dubai, New York, Islamabad, Palm Springs, Tehran. Unlike Sidhwa too, Sipra belongs to the Punjabi mainstream. Perhaps the greatest difference

272

A Divided Legacy

between Sidhwa and Sipra is that while Sidhwa, like many writers spent her childhood immersed in books, Sipra is better known as a playboy and international wheeler-dealer. Nevertheless, not only does Sipra's Pawn to King Three make interesting reading as a story of international business and political intrigue, it also suggests the

need for Pakistani antecedents for a Pakistani story. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Pawn to King Three begins in August 1947. Rushdie, however, by beginning Midnight's Children on August 15, established his Indianness. At the same time, by exploiting his Indian-Muslim heritage, he revealed his difference from Hindu India. (His increasing need to draw upon his

own heritage led to The Satanic Verses and the unfortunate fall-out.) Some of this same need to establish their own political and cultural identity also inspired Sidhwa and Sipra. Rushdie makes it clear that, while he is a Muslim, he is not a Pakistani; similarly, Sidhwa makes it clear that while she is Parsi, her political identity is with the people west of the Indo-Pakistan border. Similarly, Sipra makes it clear that while he belongs to the jet set, his political heart is where it should be: in Pakistan. Thus while Rushdie traces his manystranded Indian past — Hindu, Muslim, English, Anglo-Indian, in a

rich mosaic or a bewildering maelstrom — Sipra looks back only as far as August 1947 and the creation of Pakistan, the inspiration of its leaders to create a country politically independent and economically viable. Rushdie claims an Anglo-Indian political past and an IndianMuslim cultural heritage along with a present British nationality. Sipra proclaims his Pakistani present/presence. Rushdie's novel opens with the chaotic turbulence of Partition, Sipra's novel opens with the horror of the train massacre. In both The Bride and Ice-Candy-Man, Sidhwa includes scenes of train massacres. In The Bride, the massacre happens early in the book and then is forgotten. In Jce-Candy-Man, the eponymous character describes a train massacre. However, in Pawn to King Three, the train massacre is not something that happens at the beginning of the book or is referred to somewhere towards the end. Instead, in Sipra's book, the train massacre which begins the novel is remembered by the dying protagonist Walid at the end of the book. The massacre therefore sandwiches the novel as it does not in either

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

of Sidhwa's books. At the much in the historical past, is relegated to these few greater detail, the treatment dwell on Indian atrocities.

273

same time, as Sipra is not interested so as in the present, the anguish of Partition pages. However, described by Sipra in suggests a greater need on Sipra's part to

For the first few seconds the horror of it completely paralysed him, physically and mentally. He could neither move nor think. The interior of the compartment was a reeking charnel-house of human meat. Hideous details slowly began to register in the Colonel's brain: the decapitated corpse of an elderly man, his naked legs spread-eagled, his genitals mutilated; a younger woman with her breasts sliced off and a gaping gash across her throat; a child whose eyes had been gouged out; dismembered limbs, here a hand, there a leg; butchery beyond anything the Colonel had ever witnessed in his long career or ever had imagined possible. Absurdly he found himself wondering how the engineer had escaped. The solution dawned on him. Of course, the man was a half-caste. Neither the Hindus, nor the Muslims, nor the Sikhs would have attacked him; their knives were meant only for each other. In this particular case the victims had all been Muslims. And then, above the relentless drone of the flies, he heard a human sound. A child's cry. A trembling, pitiful moaning.

Gulping back the bile that burned his throat, the Colonel moved forward, stepping over corpses, trying to avoid contact with dead flesh. He concentrated on identifying the point from which the child's cry was coming. The body of a young woman was lying half under a seat. Her buttocks and thighs were a confused mass of stab wounds. Gritting his teeth, the Colonel pulled at her leg, clumsily heaved her clear of the seat, choking and retching. (5-6)

This description,

like Sidhwa's,

dwells

on the horror of the

massacre in the train from Amritsar, the horror that is perpetrated on the Muslims. Like Sidhwa at the same time, Sipra is honest enough — Hindus, to admit that the violence was committed by all alike

Muslims, Sikhs. But, like Sidhwa, he is Pakistani and therefore the

atrocity that is described in detail is that committed by the Sikhs upon the Muslims.

274

A Divided Legacy

Unlike Sidhwa, whose images of Partition are related in the one novel to the story of Qasim and his adopted daughter, and in the other to Lenny and her Ayah, Sipra develops his story of Adnan Walid in the backdrop of Pakistan, and traces the humble beginnings of this country to its growing status in the world of Islamic nations —a status that was partially reflected in the growth of the Bank of International Credit and Commerce, whose bankers must have been

something like Adnan Walid — or like Sipra himself. The historical figures in Sidhwa remain shadowy and far away. The closest Jinnah comes into the picture is when his marriage to a Parsi is noticed, thus bringing him into the circle of the Parsis in the book. Sipra is more interested in the political figures, who initially play some part in the story. Like Sidhwa too, Sipra gives a favourable picture of Jinnah, though unlike Sidhwa's treatment Sipra's is far more

aggressive. Jinnah appears early on in the novel. And though this appearance

is brief, it is enough to reflect the veneration in which the average

Pakistani held — or holds — Jinnah. This veneration, is of course, in

complete contrast to the usual picture given of Jinnah by Indian and westem historians. Thus Sipra describes Jinnah through the effect that he has on Sawal Ali and Ajmal Hussain, rich Muslims who have "been active in the Pakistan movement" (9). My God, he's a walking skeleton, Ali thought. The struggle for Pakistan had taken its toll. His eyes looked feverish; they had the glint of an alert cat. The once handsome face was now gaunt; yet he still exuded power, in spite of the weakness in his flesh and bones. The man undoubtedly had presence. (10)

Jinnah's fictional encounter with the two businessmen is only the introduction to the main story, but, through it, Sipra attempts to convey Jinnah's magnetic personality, his shrewdness, his busines s sense. Sipra also makes Jinnah give his blessing to Pakista ni business enterpri — which se forms the central interest of the story, with the young Adnan Walid vying with the older businessmen who have been blessed by Jinnah. In the speeches that Sipra allots to Jinnah, he creates a figure very different from the compro mising politician who accepted a divided and weak Pakistan. This Jinnah *

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

275

makes sure that Pakistan will stand strong on the feet of commerce and finance. He rose suddenly, stood ramrod straight. burning again. "Let me tell you the price I have paid for Pakistan. How do you think I persuaded the British to give us our land? How do you think I was able to prevent them from letting their oh so charming Nehru sweep us into what will now be Hindu India.? There was only one way: the threat of unleashing the Pathans on them, tying them down in a guerrilla war, bleeding them to political and economic death. It was the only way, I tell you. It is the only way. It is the reality that lies behind all the conferences, the bargaining, the fine phrases. The result is that Pakistan will exist. But it will be defenseless. When the British go they will bequeath their arsenal to India — the tanks, the planes, the ships, everything. In my victory lies the seed of ultimate defeat. I have no illusions left. I know what I have done. I may have fathered a new nation — but the child is sickly... . It is not enough that Pakistan should merely exist. It is not enough that it should merely survive, the cripple of Asia, limping through the future with a begging bowl. It is not enough that it should be a footnote in the history books. It must become strong, powerful, proud, secure. That is why I say to you— go. Go now, take what you have with you and make it grow, a thousandfold, a millionfold. I know what you are capable of better than you know it yourselves. I have watched you both. I have studied you. You are of the type that can turn air into money. I say to you: build, amass. I open the gates into the wider world for you. I open it in the name of the people of Pakistan—our people—and in return I- demand a pledge, I demand that you never forget that from this moment on, everything you have, you hold in trust; that you never forget that your wealth is Pakistan's wealth, your strength her strength, your future her future. Will you give me your pledge?" (11-12)

Sawal Ali and Ajmal Hussain give Jinnah their pledge, mesmerized by the man. Thus Sipra in this brief encounter at the beginning of the book not only reverses the portrait of Jinnah popular in the Indian and western presses, but, through Jinnah's blessings on Ali and Hussain, legitimizes and glorifies the world of commerce and Pakistan's entrance into the international world of banking and commerce. (It was about the same time that young Pakistani and

276

A Divided Legacy

Bangladeshi men were making inroads into the world of international banking with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The ruthlessness and the "illegal" character of some of the transactions were conducted in a manner similar to that of Sipra's book.) Sipra suggests that Pakistan can only be accepted in the world when it is commercially viable, and his novel traces the rise of Ali and Hussain — the old guard — as well as the rise of the new stock, more enterprising, more daring, less inhibited than the old. Thus the novel traces the rise of Adnan, beginning with his miraculous escape from the Sikh knives in the train massacre through his job as a media man to his standing for election. In the process, Sipra writes a thrilling book in the manner of Harold Robbins in The Adventurers as Adnan gets out of difficult situations, wreaks vengeance on old enemies, has countless affairs. Sipra interweaves a story of sex and revenge with growing business and commerce. The scene quickly shifts to the United States and Washington DC where Adnan meets Farah Ali, niece of

Sawal Ali. Farah's mother believes Adnan to be of unworthy of her daughter, and plots to end the affair. She sets about it very cleverly, by arranging for her brother to offer Adnan a job with the shady Kassem. Adnan accepts the job in good faith, but is soon trapped because he has, unknowingly, carried drugs. He has also been kept so busy that he cannot communicate with Farah. Farah's mother arranges for Farah to catch a glimpse of Adnan in Paris and believe that he has been bought off by Farah's family. Realizing the treachery, and realizing that he has to escape the trap, Adnan seeks the help of the wealthy Sheikh Wadud whose family is indebted to his as Adnan's grandfather had saved Sheikh Wadud's father. Adnan is helped by Sheikh Wadud to set up a new company. Sheikh Wadud also provides him a bodyguard in the shape of Hoki. Ironically, it will be Sheikh Wadud who will order Hoki to kill Adnan when Adnan does not do what Sheikh Wadud, in his role as leader of the

Islamic order, had expected him to. Set up independently for the time being, Adnan soars in the business world and at the same time embarks upon his career of revenge. While pursuing his goal of humiliating those who had separated him from Farah, he seduces and uses Rachel, Sawal's daughter. He succeeds in almost bringing the

Beginning Again: Bapsi Sidhwa and Mahmud Sipra

277

business concerns established by Sawal Ali and Ajmal Hussain, Mid-East Mercantile Bank and Trans-Global Maritime, to ruin.

It seems that Adnan will stride from one success to another, but

he overplays his hand when, in an attempt to be both patriotic and clever, he becomes involved with shipping nuclear cargo. Adnan flees the United States very cleverly. Accepting nomination as candidate for premiership of Pakistan, he acquires diplomatic immunity. At the same time, Adnan also acquires a new patriotism. He is interviewed by Mr. Hyman who asks him whether he is not under obligation to share the nuclear capabilities his country possesses with the Islamic countries that have financed the bomb — that he insists on terming the "Islamic bomb." Adnan states his position and thereby seals his own doom. Mr. Hyman, there is a difference between our acquiring nuclear capability and irresponsibility. Should my country achieve such capability, rest assured that such technology will not be for barter, s or trade, or sale... . I wish it to be on record that this country' bility responsi with handled be will ogy technol nuclear acquisition of that it and as a sacred trust, and utilized for all the positive aspects offers. (260)

on Adnan's unwillingness to cooperate with the Arab Sheikhs to les Marseil from l materia whose behalf he had shipped nuclear Wadud, Sheikh Karachi angers the Sheikhs. Sheikh Rashid tells thought. But Adnan Walid helped us in our project, yes. Or so we logy with techno nuclear of now he says he will not share the secrets says the He ous. danger too be his Islamic brothers. He says it would e of defenc the — e defenc in bomb will never be used except used ly cynical most been Pakistan. So it is we who have helped, and must He power. great and betrayed by a man who may soon acquire part in what be both punished and eliminated. He can be allowed no we do and are. (263)

red and Wadud is forced to sacrifice Adnan whom he had sponso

t Adnan, is now protected. Hoki, who had been given orders to protec

at a public ordered to kill him. Hoki saves Adnan twice, once (258), the Party" meeting from "an adherent of the defunct Populist to get close to him, second time from the crowd which, in its fervour

278

A Divided Legacy

almost crushes him against the side of the train. The train and the mob bring back memories of the past. Adnan panics, and Hoki lifts him onto the train and into the compartment. But the compartment is not safe, and Hoki, who is under orders to kill Adnan, does so and then later commits suicide. The scene of the killing, by taking place in the train compartment, brings the novel full circle. That is where Adnan's story had begun: in a train compartment, being taken out from the bloodied corpse of his mother in an image symbolic of a birth. Now Adnan dies in another train compartment. And then as the blade flashed up at Adnan's throat, there were

suddenly a hundred blades and Hoki became a hundred men, mad-

dened with blood lust, leaping was a shriek of women and nothing but the obscene and had raped the earth and would

and slashing and gouging, and the air old men and babies and there was senseless ferocity of the species that destroy it and everything in it. (267)

Bringing readers back to the opening scene of the story, Sipra does not allow them to forget the scene of camage that ushered in Pakistan. As writers, both Sidhwa and Sipra seem committed not only to telling a story but also to providing a Pakistani context to the story. Thus, despite their differences, Sidhwa's The Bride and Ice-Ca ndyMan and Sipra's Pawn to King Three are firmly rooted in a historicalpolitical consciousness which concems directly or indirec tly, the

partition of the Indian sub-continent and the creation of the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. In an attempt perhap s to

cash in on their Pakistani identity, both these writers stress a Pakistani perspective. Thus both of them attempt to explain Jinnah.

Sipra makes Jinnah a charismatic leader who exhorts his people to build a prosperous land; Sidhwa makes him a tragic figure who dies of a broken heart. Because Sidhwa is not only Pakista ni but also a

minority writer, there is a more complex note in her writing than there is in Sipra's book as she includes stereotypes of Sikh atrocities while at the same time revealing the evil inherent in mainstream society. It is not without some significance that Sidhwa and Sipra, so different from each other and writing thirty years after Partition, should both have focused on the same image to begin their first books. >

Chapter Eleven

BETRAYAL IN BENGAL: IN THE SHADOWS OF FIREFLIES

Neither Qurratulain Hyder nor Mehr Nigar Masroor are from Bengal, nor did they settle there. It is therefore interesting to note that Masroor's only novel, Shadows of Time (1987) begins in Bengal before going on to U.P. and Punjab. Masroor begins by tracing the effects of the Rowlatt Act on Bengal! and describing the terrorist activities there before going on to describe the anti-British activities all over India. Independence and Partition result in a shift to Pakistan, with the writer describing how the new Islamic fundamentalism has affected life and politics. In the final chapters the writer seems to be forgetting that she is writing fiction — perhaps this is the problem

with writing about the recent past in a realistic manner, a problem that both Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor have conveniently circumvented by "magic realism." The writer's very strong antipathy towards the successors of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, particularly Ziaul Haq, becomes evident as she shows how Pakistan had veered away from its promise to allow an Islamic fundamentalism that was both stifling and destructive. 1 There is some confusion on the writer's part here. The narrative begins in 1883 and discussion centres upon the Rowlatt Act. However,

it was the Ilbert Bill that had been

passed. The Ilbert Bill put Indian judges on the same footing as European in the Bengal Presidency. The Rowlatt Act allowed judges to try political cases without jury and allowed

internment without trial.

280

A Divided Legacy

Qurratulain Hyder's Fireflies in the Mist (1994) was originally written in Urdu as Akhri Shab ke Humsafar and published in 1979. Hyder's canvas in Fireflies is narrower than that of Shadows as well as of her earlier novel Aag ka Darya. Hyder keeps her focus in Fireflies on Bengal, and East Bengal at that, with one section in the West Indies where the novel takes the protagonist after the Partition. Unlike her earlier novel as well, the time span in this novel is much shorter, beginning only with the advent of the Europeans in Bengal. Both Hyder— in Fireflies, at least — and Masroor stress that the independence movement started in Bengal but dissipated. Hyder and Masroor, however, differ in the reasons why the movement petered out in Bengal. Hyder suggests that it was because the Muslim Communists betrayed the cause, being tempted by the promises of the Muslim League. Masroor suggests that the terrorist activities led the British to shift the capital to Delhi, resulting in the downgrading of Bengal into the periphery. After the shift of capital it was no longer the Bengali political activists who mattered, but the politicians from the North, from the U.P. and the Punjab. Both Hyder and Masroor depict love affairs that cross communal lines. In both cases there is parting and separation. Hyder links the idea of political betrayal with an emotional betrayal. Masroor, whose main theme towards the end is anti-fundamentalist, shows that, while the love between her Muslim protagonist of the forties and his Hindu lover did not end in marriage, it was an indestructible love. Masroor's narrative attempts to criticize both the two-nation theory propagated to justify the creation of Pakistan as well as the religious righteousness of her contemporary Pakistan. Perhaps the greatest difference between these two books, both of which decry the Partition is Hyder's refusal, once again, to talk about the Partition. While Masroor describes the riots that destroy the harmony between Hindu and Muslim, Hyder is silent. Her penultimate chapter ends

before Partition, her last begins after the creation of Bangladesh. Like Aag ka Darya, Fireflies in the Mist begins with a river. This time, however, it is not the Saraswati, but the Ganges, precisely

that part of which flows through East Bengal, the Buriganga, spelled in the book as "Boorhi" or Old Ganga. On the banks of the river, a

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

281

Scotsman called Malcolm Macdonnel has built a house. Hyder traces the changing vicissitudes of ownership, with the house first falling into the hands of the Hindu Romesh Baboo and then slowly decaying being occupied by his doctor son who is unable to make ends meet. However, the reader soon realizes that Hyder is not interested so much in showing how the house falls into the hands of different religious or ethnic groups as in showing how the granddaughter of Romesh Baboo becomes emotionally involved with a Communist and even participates in terrorist activities. Hyder's writing is poorly organized, and she fails to develop the characters or the stories which she introduces at the beginning. However, she does make comments which are pertinent to conveying to her reader a sense of the contrasting communities that dwelt side by side. Thus she describes the difference between Romesh Baboo and the Muslim Fakhrul Zaman Chowdhury. Like most Bengalis Romesh Baboo was interested in music and poetry — while the Muslims continued to write poetry in Bengali and Urdu, the Bhadralog — the westernized Hindus — had gone in for versification in English. They lived in neo-Georgian houses and. composed poems in heroic couplets. The Hindu zamindar class was created by the British after the Permanent Settlement. The new landed gentry, and the merchant princes of Calcutta lived in the style of the former Nawabs of Murshidabad, but had also modernized themselves. Romesh Baboo began to follow the same trend, which was also prevalent in Dacca.”

Hyder also describes Muslim society, their resentment at having lost political power, their refusal to accept western education, but, at the same time, their aping of western ways. Those were stirring times. The upper and middle classes of Bengal had been anglicised for quite some time. In 1845 the titular NawabNazim of Murshidabad had got three enormous wedding cakes made for himself. Each of them was three feet high and eighteen feet in circumference. These cakes notwithstanding, most Muslims 2 Qurratulain Hyder, Fireflies in the Mist (New Delhi: Sterling, 1994), 6. Other references will be given parenthetically.

282

A Divided Legacy

had continued to sulk after their traumatic defeat at Plassey in 1757, and had lagged behind. (6)

Romesh Baboo learns the ways of nawabs and dies leaving behind huge debts. His older son, Benoy, becomes a doctor; the younger becomes a terrorist and is hanged in Alipur jail. The remaining property, except for the house on the banks of the river, is confiscated. Benoy takes part in the non-cooperation movement of the 1920's and is arrested, When he emerges from jail after serving his sentence, his practice has been ruined. "By 1939, the once resplendent Chandrakunj had turned into a semi ruin" (17). These several pages are a preliminary to the story proper which begins on a December evening in 1939 with Benoy's daughter,

Deepali, stealing her dead mother's Baluchar bootedar sari from the camphor box in which it is kept to be aired out once a year. Deepali has become interested in a gang of terrorists, and the sale of the sari will help fund some of their activities. But Deepali becomes even more closely involved, passing letters from "Rehan-da" — the* juxtaposition of the Muslim name with the Hindu term for brother, suggesting that, for these political activists, religion was no barrier. She starts attending meetings, and even, under instruction of Rehan, masquerades as an ayah in the house of the English officer William Cantwell to learn about impending arrests. When the police finally raid the hideouts of Rehan and his comrades, they are not there. Despite the slight touch of excitement that this episode provide — Will Deepali be discovered? —the whole episode seems pointless. The terrorists did not have to send Deepali into the house to realize that they were being hunted. Since Rehan knows that the police are

going to raid the Communist hideouts, he can easily arrange to

whisk his comrades away without having Deepali masquerade as a

Muslim ayah. However, apart from the excitement, this episode ~ provides Hyder the chance of showing how indistinguishable Hindus and Muslims are as Deepali easily fools both the English employers as well as the Muslim employees. It also give Hyder a chance to make fun of the obtuse British. Thus, Deepali who is looking for information, is inadvertently helped by Mrs. Plumer, the wife of the police officer. Mrs. Plumer upsets her husband's files one day. Deepali pretends to be unable to put the papers together properly.

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

283

The English woman scolds Deepali for her folly but Deepali gets her chance to read the secret files. "Give the lot to me. You people are so stupid. Illiterate fools. Don't you know this reads from left to right? Now you have doubled the work for me. Look, you just sit there and keep giving each sheet to me. Oh, bother!"

The job took nearly half an hour and was finished at last. (82)

It is interesting to note that, though Hyder describes the history of this region in great detail, she elides the Partition itself. Deepali's departure for Calcutta is described in conversation with Yasmin some years after the event. However, though Hyder avoids describing the Partition itself, she analyses the different attitudes towards Partition. Thus, Deepali takes advantage of the close relationship between Romesh Baboo's family and the family of the Nawab Qammul Zaman Chowdhury to discuss the nawab's attitude to Partition — which was of course, the general Muslim attitude towards Partition. Rehan is not communal, so Deepali wonders what it is that makes other Muslims want Partition. She asks Nawab Qamrul Zaman this question, pleads with him not to let India be partitioned. "Child," the Nawab replied calmly, "You and I belong to two entirely different schools of thought. Look. We welcomed the Partition of Bengal in 1905. In order to undo the Partition you started the Terrorist movement, and began throwing bombs at innocent people. Do you know that in Dacca alone there were five hundred secret groups who flung hand grenades at Englishmen?" "Five hundred?" she repeated wide-eyed, and thought: I belong to the tradition of bomb-throwers. He represents the opposite camp. Why did this polarization occur among the Bengals?

Rehan had said: The British had snatched the rule of Bengal from the Muslims, so they crushed them and created a new loyal Hindu land-owning class who later became leaders of the Hindu renaissance. Muslims became the underdogs. Tagore belonged to this new Hindu zamindar class... . Nawab Qamrul Zaman continued. "The Muslims are in the majority in Bengal. They would have gained from the partition in 1905, and

284

A Divided Legacy

now the establishment of Pakistan would benefit them.... You have not seen the plight of the Muslim peasantry groaning gin the clutches of the Hindu zamindar and moneylender."

"You are a landowner too, Uncle!" she said defiantly (134).

As Deepali continues to listen to him, she realizes the bitterness in him and wonders whether she and Rehan are wrong. "Are Rehan and I and all the other leftists living in an unreal, intellectual world created by our theories...?" (135). Can they not work together for the unity of India she pleads, rather than for partition. There is no unity, replies Qamrul Zaman. "The anti-Muslim Arya Samaj of Punjab and the Hindu militancy of Maharashtra and Bengal ... are they symbols of peace and goodwill?" (135). He reminds Deepali that these movements were started before there was thought of setting up a separate political platform. But don't Hindus and Muslims share a common culture, in Bengal at least, Deepali asks. The question allows Hyder to discuss issues that are part of an on-going debate in Bangladesh. Thus the Nawab reminds Deepali that Muslims contributed much to Bengali culture, but this fact is conveniently being ignored by Hindus who stress that Bengali culture is their making. He reminds her of the prejudices that exist among the literati. "Did your community ever admit the fact that the folk music and folk literature of Bengal are largely the contribution of the Muslims? By ‘Bengali cuiture' you only mean Hindu culture. During the last century ‘your press even started the language controversy. They said Bengali was not the language of the Muslims. They declared that Bengali literature and culture were exclusively the heritage of the Hindus. I can show you newspapers in my files." He gestured towards a bookshelf. "By God, Deepali, we wanted unity. But now such hatred for us. Such contempt. Like the Christians have for the Jews in Europe. ... Have you read Anand Math. .. ." NG

"Your Bengali Hindu press called Nawab Sir Salimullah a toady. All these Hindu knights of Bengal . . . are they not toadies. . .? Till a hundred and fifty years ago there certainly was unity. The Hindu gentry wore Mughal dress and read Persian. .. ." >

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

285

"Because the Muslims were the dominant, ruling class," Deepali put in, but the Nawab went on with increasing fervour, "Persian and Arabic words form twenty per cent of the Bengali language." "But, Uncle," she cut in impatiently, "both communities started their revivalist movements and were encouraged by the... ." "British! I agree. Well. why did we let ourselves be manipulated by them?" (137)

Deepali leaves the Nawab, realizing that they will not see eye to eye. The Nawab represents his class and both "the Congress and the Muslim League represent the bourgeoisie" (137). The early phase of the relationship between Rehan and Deepali not only provides a romantic interest, but also enables Hyder to describe the cultural make-up of Bengalis. Thus Deepali goes to Shantiniketan, partly to learn singing but also because Rehan has asked her to do so. Things however become complicated— or Hyder doesn't quite know what exactly Deepali can do. What Deepali's trip to Shantiniketan however, does do, is give Deepali greater freedom to meet Rehan. Rehan asks Deepali to get some information from her Indian-Christian friend Rosie, but Rosie, who has disappointed her parents by refusing the marriage they had arranged for her, tears up the letter. The lack of information doesn't seem to do any harm, and Rehan, anxious to avoid the new commissioner whose grandfather had sent revolutionaries to the gallows, moves to the Sunderbans. He asks Deepali to join him there. This episode gives Hyder the opportunity to describe the Bengal countryside as well as provide a romantic interlude for Rehan and Deepali. Thus, Rehan and Deepali go to a temple where the priest puts red paste on their foreheads. The chap has married us, Rehan jokes. When Deepali blushes, Rehan suggests that, with their belief in Marxism,

they should not be

bothered about temples and mosques and churches. It is while Deepali and Rehan are in the Sunderbans that Rehan

tells Deepali that Hitler has attacked the Soviet Union. "This . . . this radically alters the entire situation" (120). Hyder thus points out how the Soviet alliance with Britain led the Indian Marxists to step down their activities against the British. Later on Rehan and Uma Roy, another Communist sympathizer, will quietly disassociate themselves from terrorist activities. Rehan's betrayal of his Marxist ideals will

286

A Divided Legacy

be aligned to his associating himself with the Muslim League and with his succumbing to the easy life, first as Uma's guest and then as the only living descendant of Nawab Fakhrul Zaman. Hyder does not dwell too long or too deeply on the point that Rehan made to Deepali in the Sunderbans. What effect did this altered situation have on the independence movement? The unstated assumption is that had the Soviet Union not allied itself with Great Britain, the Partition of India might not have taken place, and entire India might have tumed Communist. But, just as Gorbachev and Yeltsin, by aligning themselves with the United States, let down the Communists of the world in the late eighties, Stalin, by aligning himself on the side of Britain, successfully ended the Marxist movement in the forties. Subash Bose aligned himself with the Japanese, but he should rightly have aligned himself with the Marxists. But world politics takes strange tums, and this tum ensured that it would not be revolutionary politics that would succeed in India but the politics of Nehru and Gandhi and Jinnah. Deepali is accused of tuming into a "toady," a loyalist, "a British agent" by Rosie. Deepali denies this. She is merely following "the latest Party directive. We do not approve of the present outbrea k of violence against the British. According to the correct analysis of the situation, we ought to help the Allies. It's no longer the imperia lists war. It is the people's struggle against Fascism" (160). Gradually, however, Deepali grows disenchanted with Rehan as much for his politics as for his personal relationships with other women. She comes across a photograph of his addres sed to his cousin Jehan Ara. He spends much time with Uma Roy, and the two of them are seen with British officials. When he meets Deepali , he tells her that the Communists have to work closely with the Muslim League. "We, the Communists, shall have to come close to the Muslim League. We shall provide progressive leaders hip to our masses. I am predicting this tonight... in the month of August, 1942" (171). Rehan will be going to Dacca, will be meeting Qamru l Zaman. Deepali has talked to Qamrul Zaman and knows how reactionary he is. Female jealousy also crops up. Rehan will perhap s meet Jehan Ara. Deepali has never cleared up the mystery, but now, with his

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

287

changing politics, despite her love for him, she is growing disillu-

sioned. When Rehan tells her that he will be staying openly in Woodland, Uma Roy's home, "now that the CPI has become legal" (171), she realizes that for her Rehan is no longer the demi-god for whom she had been willing to do anything two and a half years ago. "So much had happened since then. I have grown up, she wanted to tell him. Can't be fooled by you any longer" (171). Initially Rehan imagines, like Zohra in Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's The Heart Divided and Kamal in Abul Fazl's Ranga Prabhat, that the ideals of socialism are not very different from those of Pakistan. He believes that a socialist government will function in Pakistan. During his last meeting with Deepali before leaving for what would become West Pakistan, Rehan prophesies what will happen. The English will leave. We will have a socialist government and sooner than you think we may have real communism. Pakistan will come into being. It will also be a socialist democracy, for the simple reason that the people of the entire subcontinent have the same economic problems. (220)

Rehan is to go to Lahore, and will return to Calcutta by the end of October. He intends to send Deepali a telegram from there asking her to come. They will have a "Party wedding" there. The wedding, however, does not take place — thanks to the machinations of Uma, who is jealous of Deepali and Rehan. Uma tells Deepali that Rehan

is still bound to marry his cousin Jehan Ara, in whose room Deepali came across a photograph of Rehan's. Rehan returns after Partition to Dacca, but he and Deepali do not get married. Deepali, along with

her father and aunt, goes to Calcutta and then to the West Indies where an uncle had settled years ago. Jehan Ara is married off to someone twice as old as her, and Rosie, who had become involved in terrorist activities and was wounded and arrested, is released on

bail by a Mr. Das, whom she marries after converting to Hinduism. The third part of the book begins after Partition, and enlarges the

role of Yasmin whom Rosie had taught for a time. Yasmin has become a famous dancer and the government of Pakistan — in the initial years after Partition wishing to proclaim its patronage of the

arts — sends her abroad where she gets a chance to meet Deepali.

288

A Divided Legacy

Yasmin is a stanch Pakistani and takes umbrage when she is confused with "Indian." Yasmin's cultural inclinations take her to Germany and England. Instead of acquiring fame, however, Yasmin disintegrates. She is married in a fake ceremony to a gay Englishman who deserts her, leaving her with a daughter who grows up to despise her mother and her mother's generation. While Deepali goes off to the West Indies and loses all her political activism, Rosie settles down to life as the wife of Mr. Das. Neglecting her parents, she refuses to go to see her father before his death, and allows her mother to spend her declining days as a dining hall supervisor in the women's hostel of Dacca University. Her role in the terrorist movement has dwindled into her acting hostess to a Fulbright scholar who has come to India to write a book about the terrorists of Bengal. As Hyder traces the history of this region, she describes the tragic effects of public policies on private lives and the strange circumstances which turned former friends into enemies, turned staunch

Pakistanis into Bangladeshis. Thus Nasira explains to Deepali, who is visiting Dacca a few years before the 1965 Indo-Pak war, that East Pakistanis are loyal citizens of Pakistan. Though highly conscious of

their Bengali identity and vocal against West Pakistani imperialism, they are staunch Pakistanis. Please do not get the impression that since we are against Urdu imperialism, or because West Pakistan is exploiting us, we would join India. Most certainly not. When it comes to confrontation with India, we shall die fighting for Pakistan. We shall fight to the last drop of our blood. We are staunch Pakistanis. (237)

Like Nasira, Jehan Ara's son Akmal is a staunch Pakistani. When war breaks out in 1965 between India and Pakistan, he is killed. In

the Indo-Pak war, Bengali soldiers — some of whom would join the ‘Mukti Bahini — fought and died. Hyder touches upon the grim ironies of the subcontinent where friends tum to foes. Years later, the narrativ e shows how loyal Pakistanis tum disloyal. Thus, when Deepali retums

after the creation of Bangladesh, she learns how the staunchly loyal Nasira tumed into a freedom fighter, fighting for independence, against the soldiers sent to "preserve the unity and integrity of Pakistan." >

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

289

The rich do not suffer, suggests Hyder: As Deepali tells Yasmin, "Partition didn't create problems for the super rich" (269). Nor do the very rich suffer after the creation of Bangladesh. But people who are not well off do, and Hyder describes the personal misery of Yasmin. The creation of Bangladesh causes Yasmin to lose her job in the Pakistani restaurant at Hamburg. Unable to make it as a dancer, Yasmin, the bright and talented woman from Dacca, is destroyed slowly. She dies alone and unloved in a foreign land. Scherezade Christina Belmont, daughter of Yasmin and the gay Englishman, writes to Deepali after the death of her mother. She encloses Yasmin's diary which she cannot read in its entirety as it is written in Urdu and Bengali in addition to English. Scherezade calls Deepali's generation sick and hypocritical and wonders at the meaningless of the independence her generation strove for. Some revolutionaries have become exiles and misfits, others have joined those they helped throw out. The independence you achieved so bravely was such that it drove you out of your own country. I have also seen your great revolutionary hero Mr. Rehan Ahmed. Saw him in London's Playboy Club, dining with his opponents from India and Pakistan. On the conference table, in international forums, they issue venomous statements against one [another] which lead to greater misery and tension for their common people. After conference hours they laugh and get together and chat, visit the same night clubs and chase the same white women.... Sick sick sick. Your generation has disillusioned me no end, Mrs. Sen. The world you have made for us is pretty horrible. (303)

Yasmin's death gives Hyder a chance to comment on the changes that have taken place after the creation of Bangladesh, in the region but also the world at large. She notes the tragic irony that allows a

woman to be neglected and left to die miserably, while being celebrated and eulogized. Does the younger generation at all remember

people like Yasmin — or Deepali? No, Deepali realizes, no one does.

They do not know that Deepali was a famous singer once and that the terrorists of the past, when not tumed into successful entrepreneurs, are not just cranky leftovers of the Raj.

290

A Divided Legacy

Back in Dacca several decades later, she refuses to talk about her life in the underground. She is described as a "bad-tempered old woman" behind her back. Charles Barlow's son, Richard Barlow, vegetarian, atheist, homosexual, tells her that the new generation gloat in their frankness. "Hypocrisy was the hallmark of your times" (336). Now only a cranky remnant of the Raj, Deepali gets tired of the self-righteousness of Bangladeshi's. As she hears them declaim against the Pakistanis, she attempts to set the record straight. "If Mr. Jinnah

had

not

created

Pakistan,

there

would

have

been

no

Bangladesh today. Actually, he is the founder of this new country as well" (332). She continues to talk, expanding on her point. Perhaps Deepali has tumed into an ,eccentric old woman —or is she only seeing more than she did as a young woman? She encapsulates the entire history of the region in one paragraph. The concept of Mother India had been given to the rest of the country by the terrorists of Bengal. They worshipped Divine Power in the image of Kali the destroyer. They believed in the pre-historic [Dravidian] concept of the mother goddess. The British branded them as terrorists. Indians called them revolutionaries. Many among them were anti-Muslim as well. Bankim Chandra's novel Anand Math was their Bible. The cross-currents of the politics of Bengali's Hindu Bhadralog and Muslim gentry gave birth to East Pakistan, and the internal politics of West and East Pakistan created Bangladesh. Individual personality clashes and temperaments and actions of political leaders build or destroy entire nations." (332)

As Deepali looks at Furqan, Rehan's son, she wonders at the difference between her generation and his. Furgan Ahmed's outlook had been formed by the attitudes of the West's contemporary young generation. He was post-Tariq Ali and for him the New Left of France had also become passé. Does this lad know that once in British India if you wrote revoluti onary poems you could be sent to the Andamans? Are the doors of history going to be closed on us? Who remembers my uncle Dinesh Chandra Sarkar or Ashfaque Ullah Khan of Shahjehanpur? (332)

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

291

What hope is there when people like Rehan join the establishment? There are many weak points in the book, and Rehan's sudden transformation from Marxist to Nawab, following the extermination of his entire family in a bombing carried out during the liberation war, is one of them. This transformation, however, provides Hyder the opportunity to show the transformation of a revolutionary middle-class into entrepreneurs and members of the establishment. Deepali, who is perhaps in many ways the eye/I of the novelist, does some soul-searching. What did her generation achieve? How much are they to blame for the contemporary situation? What did we do? What did our generation achieve? Now it seems to me we were hitch-hikers who stood by the highway, raising our thumbs for a ride. A car stopped by and took some of us to Moscow. Another to Washington. Some of our friends got on to a camel's back and retumed to Mecca. Others climbed on a bullock cart and went back to Benares. The car which stopped for me broke down in the middle of the road. (323)

Rehan tells Deepali that it is "a drastically changed world" (322). Revolutionaries have joined the establishment, descendants of English missionaries have tumed into rabid Hindu missionaries. In East Bengal the fight against exploitation didn't tum East Bengal into an equitable society. He reminds Deepali that, though she might criticize him, she herself has opted out. She is merely a spectator, an observer now. You see, Deepali, to keep the lamp burning requires a great quantity of oil. And the trouble is that sometimes the oil runs out pretty soon. Now you have become a ring-side spectator. You have your sympathy for the down-trodden. You hate injustices and wars. But you are no longer in the actual arena. To remain consistently inside the spheres of misery and struggle, requires a hell of a lot of courage. Those who do so are considered eccentrics or plain fools. (323)

Was there then no positive result of all their struggle, Deepali asks, was it all in vain? No, Rehan says, there was. The effect of the socialist movement meant that in Bengal at least there has been a secularism absent elsewhere in India. There are Hindu-Muslim riots in many states in India except Bengal. Why? Because of Bengal's strong Leftist tradition which was created

292

A Divided Legacy

by people like you and me. Some of us did fall by the roadside, but many more are still there. (324)

Deepali is unhappy at what she sees of Bangladesh. She travels to India. Is India better? Though she does not see rich people in West Bengal, she realizes that life for the poor has not changed. Deepali travels second-class "for she wanted to see India's common people" (337). It is thirty years after independence, but life has not become better for them as she realizes seeing the people in her compartment. Widows still have to shave their heads and wear coarse white cotton. Child marriages still continue. The farmer is as poor as ever. Though the rich have not been effected monetarily by Partition, time has effected a change. Uma, the revolutionary, the patron of revolutionaries, the would-be lover of Rehan, the would-be wife of Deepali's

father, has dwindled into an eccentric old woman. Perhaps the only reality is that of Kali, and even Kali has changed from the goddess of shakti, who inspired the terrorists, to the goddess of kites, who sits watching as her kites are cut off to disappear into the sky. Deepali's disappointment.perhaps parallels the disappointment of the writer. Progressive and non-communal as Hyder was, she could not have failed to be disappointed at the failure of the Communists and the failure of the promise of independence. Narrating Deepali's infatuation for Rehan and then her increasing disappointment at the change in him, Hyder has also succeeded in describing how the

progressives of the past became lost, like Rehan had, of high finance" (334). The change in Rehan may also an analogy for the change not only in the politics of Bangladesh but India in general: from the non-aligned Nehru to the capitalism of Rajiv Gandhi. Like Qurratulain Hyder's Fireflies in the Mist,

"in the world be said to be East Bengal/ socialism of

Mehr Nigar Masroor's novel Shadows of Time (1987) begins in Bengal. However, unlike Hyder's novel, Masroor's moves out of Bengal

through North India to end in Pakistan. Both Hyder and Masroor

3 Like Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's novel, The Heart Divided, Shadows of Time is a posthumous novel. Interestingly, it was first published in India by Chanakya because the writer wanted her novel to be published in India rather than in Pakistan. Textual references to Shadows of Time will be noted parenthetically. >

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows ofFireflies

293

depict love affairs between people of different religions. In Fireflies the love affair between Deepali and Rehan comes to an end partly because of the machinations of Uma but also because Rehan's ideas are changing. In Shadows, the love affair between Sarla and Farhan does not end in marriage, but Masroor shows the lovers loyal till the very end. Hyder tries to analyse why socialism failed, Masroor to condemn the growing fundamentalism in Pakistan. Shadows of Time begins in 1883. The Muslim/Mughal power has been long in decline. The Hindu middle class is growing in importance. Sisir and Manilal are administrative officers under the British; Keshab is a doctor. The waning of Muslim political power has been accompanied by a waning of Muslim cultural influence. The political power of the British is growing and so is the impact of westem ideas upon the newly awakened Hindus, conscious of the centuries deprivation of political power. This change is manifested through the character of Mani. Over the centuries a synthesis had taken place between brahmin thought and the Muslim ideas espoused by the ruling Mughals. Manilal had inherited the mighty tradition of a Hindu awakening and a desire for absorption of western ideas and practices which had given the British supremacy in India. (2)

The changed power structure is depicted through Sisir's rela-

tionship with Gul Rukh, the daughter of Darogha Roedad Khan. However, when Gul Rukh becomes pregnant, Sisir is terrified and angry. Though the Muslims have lost their power, it is not the Hindu who has gained. Sisir serves the British. He is afraid of the disgrace, afraid of what the scandal will do to his career even as he voices his resentment at past humiliations of Hindu womanhood. will Keshab, can you imagine the scandal, the disgrace? My career

ty be finished, not to mention the Hindu-Muslim feelings of animosi s centurie these all it! it will arouse in the district.... Damn Islam, to them ed convert the bloody Muslims raped our Hindu girls but today this will arouse the Englishman to despise the Bengali Babu — as he calls us. (42)

es Keshab promises to help. He cannot have children and so persuad . his wife to adopt the baby girl whom they name Kamini

294

A Divided Legacy

At the same time, Masroor stresses that communal harmony persisted between Hindus and Muslims. Thus, when Akbar, son of Nawab Amir Khan of Murshidabad, leaves home after a quarrel, he moves in with his friend Manilal. Manilal's sister Jyoti ties a rakhi

bandhan on Akb — suggestin ar g the close ties that still existed between Muslims and Hindus. As the story progresses, Akbar moves to Delhi, and his mother takes to visiting shrines. At one shrine she sees a lovely but sad looking girl praying. It is Gul Rukh. Akbar's mother marries her to her younger son, Asghar, and gives Gul Rukh a new name: Iqbal Begum. Despite showing the close ties and intimacies between Hindus and Muslims, Masroor stresses that the signs of Hindu resurgence presaged growing conflict. She not only depicts this through the fictional characters, but also refers to historical events that reflecte d the growth of a self-conscious Hindu identity. This Hindu identity defined itself against the Muslim culture that had dominated the

Indian scene for four centuries. Masroor's narrative reflects the contributions of Vivekananda and Tilak in this regard. She notes that the Hindu identity was given a boost by Vivekananda's appeara nce on the international scene in 1893 when he spoke on Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Vivekananda expounded Vedanta philosophy and spoke of the loftiness of Hindu spiritua lism. The narrator notes the significance of this occasion: "To the Hindus of India, for centuries crushed under the Muslim and then the British, it was the one acclaim needed to restore cultural confidence and the Hindu nation was born" (68). Masroor also notes how Tilak revived the annual festival of Ganesh and the old theme songs that echoed Hindu-Muslim vendettas. Time passes. Manilal retires. So does Keshab whose adopted daughter, Kamini, has grown tall and beautiful. Sisir and his wife have two sons: Nosho and Khoso. Masroor shows how the earlier Bengali subservience to the British is replaced by Bengal i terrorism. She notes how Bengal reacted to Curzon's annou ncement of the partition of Bengal. "Hindu Bengal reacted sharpl y. It was consid-

ered an attack on national solidarity and a rebuke to Benga l for being

at the forefront of the political agitation. A gigant ic mass movement

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

295

sprang up over-night" (74). Amlok, son of Manilal, unknown to his father, had been taken as a child by his mother to Kali's temple where he had sworn loyalty to Kali. At a meeting, Amlok vituperates

against the partition: "Blood, sacrifice and violence were the themes of Amlok's speech" (76). Amlok plays a prominent part in the newly started swadeshi movement. Kamini, Keshab's adopted daughter and

Nosho attend the meetings. Meanwhile Sisir has married again. His wife is Malti, the daughter of his first wife's cousin. Malti; who is years younger than Sisir, seduces Khoso. One day Nosho comes upon Khoso and Malti in a

compromising situation. He threatens Malti and tells her to leave his brother alone. Malti laughs at him and discloses that the girl he is interested in happens to be his half-sister. Nosho reveals what he has leaned to Kamini who confronts her father, asking for the truth. On learning that she is indeed Nosho's half-sister, she commits suicide. The terrorist movement starts. Amlok sacrifices to Kali and then proceeds to murder Englishmen. Learning that Amlok has become a follower of Kali and a terrorist, Mani disowns his son who is caught and executed. Mani grieves for his son and realizes that "The

partition of Bengal was a calculated muse to divide the Hindu and Muslim communities"

(109). Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in India

Wins Freedom also notes the calculated motives behind the partition of Bengal. [Bengal] was politically the most advanced part of India, and the Hindus of Bengal had taken a leading part in Indian political awakening. In 1905, Lord Curzon decided to partition the province in the belief that this would weaken the Hindus and create a permanent division between the Hindus and the Muslims of Bengal.*

Masroor shows, however, that it wasn't only the Bengali Hindus who were agitating against the British. Thus she brings in the arrest of Arif, the son of Iqbal Begum and Asghar. This episode brings back an early thread of the story as Arif is to be tried court under Sisir's jurisdiction. Iqbal Begum goes to Sisir. threatens Sisir that if he does not release Arif, she will disclose 2 India Wins Freedom (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1988), 4.

also in a She that

296

A Divided Legacy

he took away her first-bom. Her reputation and marriage will be in ruins, but so will his career.

The involvement of Muslims is also averred by Abul Kalam Azad who notes that it was only at the beginning of the terrorist movement that the revolutionaries, were exclusively from the Hindu middle classes. The reason for this, according to Azad, was partly owing to the British playing one group against the other. The British were suspicious of the Hindus who were highly political. In order to deal with Hindu revolutionary activities, the British therefore brought in Muslims from U.P. According to Azad, he was able to persuade the revolutionaries that all Muslims were not against freedom and democracy. He managed to join the revolutionaries "and within two years of the time that [he] joined, secret societies were established in several important towns of Northem India and Bombay "(6).

Masroor ties in historical events with her narrative. Thus she notes how, in 1911, George V held his Durbar and proclaimed the transfer of the seat of government from Bengal to Delhi. Simultaneously, he cancelled the partition of Bengal. Masroor reflects the

impact of this decision on Indian politics through her characters. Thus Akbar comes to Calcutta and meets Manilal. Manilal, who has lost his son because of the Bengal partition, expounds to Akbar the brilliance of the British move. It was a cruel joke to play, Akbar, but I seriously think the English did it knowingly. This partition embittered the Hindus, drove a deep wedge between the Hindus and Muslims of Bengal, and now the Muslims are feeling that they have been let down. (112)

Despite Manilal's comment, personal friendships and intimacies between people of the two religions continue. Thus; Nosho falls in love with Gul Rukh's daughter, Mehnaz, who resembles Kamini: "had she worn a saree with a bindi on her forehead, she could

have been mistaken for Kamini" (112). Though Mehnaz is shocked when Nosho reveals his love— "What are’ you: saying? You are a

Hindu, Iam a Muslim, it can never be" — she gives in when she

realizes the depth of his love. Nosho converts to Islam and the two are married.

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

297

The First World War breaks out. Gandhi retums to India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah is impressed by Gandhi and says "Gandhi alone can be our man" (136). Masroor reminds her readers that, at

the beginning of his political career, Jinnah was "an ardent Congressman. He was the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity." He had joined the League in 1913, and under his leadership the annual sessions of Congress and the League took place in the same place. In 1916 the Lucknow Pact was signed. Bapsi Sidhwa in Ice-Candy-Man

also points out that Jinnah had been non-communal

until Nehru

drove him to the wall. She had also quoted Sarojini Naidu's praise of Jinnah as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. However, Sidhwa had conveyed this information through Lenny, the narrator of her novel. Masroor, however, allows the omniscient narrator to point this out in an attempt to convey the truth as she sees it. In other words, Masroor makes it quite clear that Shadows of Time is not simply fiction. While she is fictionalizing history, "real history" must remain unchanged. This is why Masroor — like other wniters of political-historical fiction — keeps referring to dates in an attempt to stress that while the fiction is unreal, actual events did take place on such and such a date. Deconstructionist and post-colonial critics say that no work of art stands outside time. There is, they say, no objective history. If even history is not objective, where does Masroor stand? Very obviously at this point Masroor is not very different from Sidhwa: both want to refute the picture of Jinnah as given by the western press and by India. Thus, Masroor —like Sidhwa's Lenny — explains Jinnah to the reader. She points out that Jinnah was pragmatic. "Not for Jinnah the laments for lost empires. He accepted the realities, the major one being that with the overthrow of Mughal rule, the Muslims were now but a minority in a predominantly Hindu India, and he was seeking freedom and harmony between these two

groups" (136). Masroor's inclusion of Jinnah at this point coincides with the fading importance of Bengal after the annulment of partition and the transfer of the seat of administration to Delhi. This change is also manifested in the narrative by a shift of the fictive scene to Delhi. Thus a meeting takes place at Nawab Abdul Salam's

298

A Divided Legacy

house in Delhi to discuss the mass civil disobedience movement planned for March 30, 1919. Gandhi has both supporters and opponents at the meeting. Thus, Akbar— now belonging to the older generation — points out that he does not wholly support Gandhi's attitude. I don't like the angle Gandhi is giving to his mass disobedience movement. A hartal is alright, all communities can join but this business of self-purification by taking a bath in the sea or river,

fasting and prayer smacks too much of Hinduism. (139)

Anif agrees with him and deplores the religious colour being given to the political movement. He points out that people from Bengal know "the awesome consequences" of mixing religion and politics. Akbar pronounces his negative attitude to Gandhi: "I say with great regret, I don't trust Gandhi; his leadership does not augur well for the Muslims." Masroor depicts how the Muslims were divided on the issue through the reaction

of Farhan,

the grandson

of the Nawab,

to

Akbar's statement. Farhan is upset. "For the first time the Hindus and Muslims are determined to do something against the British, why do you all view it with suspicion" (139). Akbar responds that the reason why he is upset is that the issues should not be religious. He notes that "The battle is for political rights for Indians, with the Muslim's viewpoint being that, in that process the Muslim community must be given due representation" (139). Farhan's refusal to be communal is reflected in his friendship with the Sikh Jaswant Singh. Masroor uses this relationship to show not only their initial closeness — which allows Farhan to comment on Hindu-Muslim relationships in the Punjab—but also enables Masroor to move further north and west. The centre of political

activity will no longer be confined to the east. Farhan's friendship with a Punjabi also makes it logical for him to travel through the Punjab with Jaswant Singh and gives scope to Masroor to describe

the incident at Jallianwala Bagh. After the Partition, Jaswant will turn against Farhan, but at this time they are close friends. Farhan likes Jaswant; he feels free in his lively company. This thought leads Farhan to think about Sikhs *

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

299

in general and the relationship of Muslims and Sikhs in the Punjab in particular. Farhan felt safe following Jaswant. Sikhs seemed to take to jokes and banter and drink with a natural air. No false hypocrisies seemed to envelope them. They did not seem bound by centuries of tradition. "Perhaps it is due to their comparatively newer religion, perhaps it is the conscious synthesis of Hindu and Muslim expressed in the heartland of the Punjab which has given them this easier comraderie [sic], which for others has been stifled in the confining city streets. Could it be that wearing the kirpan has assured them of their pride and manhood, when all others had to submit to the detested feringhee?" wondered Farhan to himself. (143)

Masroor describes the incident at Jallianwala Bagh through the experience of Farhan and Jaswant who happen to be there at the time of General Dyer's attack on unarmed civilians. Farhan and Jaswant vow vengeance. Meanwhile Gandhi calls off the satyagraha movement, saying that he had miscalculated the extent of the discipline of the people and underestimated the forces of evil. Masroor comments, "A surprised India complied, but popular feeling remained at the point of ignition" (147). Masroor is critical of the political leadership which she stresses failed India at a time when a strong leadership was needed. The result of this weakness was that "the unity forged between the two major communities dwindled away" (147). The Khilafat movement also drew people to it and divided the Muslims. Masroor points out the detrimental effect of the transfer of leadership to the ulemas who were behind the times. "The anti-west bias latent in Muslim society which Sir Sayed had worked so hard to diminish had surfaced again" (152). 1920 brought an end to Jinnah's close association with the Congress, though Masroor notes how Jinnah tried several times afterwards to lessen the tensions between the two communities and forge some sort of harmony. Thus, she notes how, in 1927, Jinnah

tried to solve the Hindu-Muslim problem by persuading the Muslim leaders to give up the scheme of separate electorates. Jinnah proposed that Congress in return give one-third of the seats in the

300

A Divided Legacy

capital legislature to the Muslims. But even as Jinnah attempted to forge unity of the Hindus and Muslims, Masroor suggests that antiMuslim forces were at play. The narrative describes how, at a party where Farhan and Sarla meet, a secret meeting is going on between Vijay, Anand, a bearded and turbaned Sikh and a Brahmin pundit. The pundit tells the gathering, "Have all the political parties you need, but never forget, this is one desh which the Muslim conquerors vandalized, our time has come now" (162). Masroor thus shows that the Hindu-Muslims relations were not simply always either friendly or antipathetic. Even while Farhan and Sarla fall in love with a love that withstands marriage, time, children, Partition, there are forces bent on destroying this harmony. Farhan and Sarla do not get married, but Salman, Farhan's brother,

does fall in love and marry the Christian Reena. Through these intrareligious love affairs, Masroor makes clear that human ties cross religious barriers and loving someone of another religion does not mean that one is denigrating one's own religion or culture. Thus when Farhan's mother gets upset that both of her sons should fall in love with non-Muslims, Farhan tries to pacify her. He explained patiently how both Salman and he had grown because of active participation in events such as the Jallianwala massacre and the Khilafat movement. And it were [sic] these experiences which had broadened their outlook on life. Of course they were Muslims and proud of their Muslim culture but their vision had now stretched to all India and embraced all communities. In fact their vision was a peculiar Mughal gift to the sub-continent, and Farhan wanted to show that the Muslims were still capable of greatness. (173)

Farhan leaves for Lucknow where the Muslim League — joining Congress — is boycotting the Simon Commission. Meanwhile Sarla

is pregnant with Farhan's child. She tells Vijay that she wants to go for higher studies to London. Vijay is unwilling to let her:go without him. Sarla urges Vijay to set the date quickly which he does. By the time Farhan returns, Sarla is married and has gone to Bombay. Farhan is distraught and leaves for England. Masroor at this point goes back to political history, showing how the British agreed to let Congress draft a constitution for India. Under the pressure of "Hindu communalism," Masroor suggests, the >

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

301

Nehru Committee ignored the demands of the Muslims. It dispensed with communal electorates, but provided no reservation of seats for any community in Parliament. Masroor notes how Jinnah protested, but did not succeed in dissuading the Congress from its path. "Jinnah lost. He left Calcutta broken-hearted and with tears in his eyes said to a friend, "This is a parting of the ways' " (178). Retuming to the narrative, Masroor shows how Farhan retums from England and is stunned to see the political situation. "When he had left India it was a parting between lovers, now it had become a parting between two nations" (178). Masroor brings in her older characters too to comment on the changed situation. Thus Manilal regrets on the communal conflict and points out how it will destroy the subcontinent. In the 1880's we were fighting for rights from the English rulers, forty years later we are planning how to destroy each other. . .. The richness that diversity of cultures gives us will be negated. If the struggle is for power, then I ask, power for what? Tyranny of your own rulers is no less than tyranny of aliens.... Until both communities realize that we have to tolerate each other's religion, there will be no peace. (180)

Manilal is old and thoughts of death arise in him. He attempts to analyse why religion is the cause of tension between the different communities. When he dies, says Manilal, a priest will chant in Sanskrit. When another man dies, bearded men will recite in Arabic. e all — it's Arabic or Sanskrit, does it signify our special differenc of man double dutch to the Indians ... after all the common that — India understands neither Sanskrit nor Arabic nor Dutch is precisely why the Brahmins and Maulvis have such a hold on the minds —they recite in words they call holy which no one can comprehend.... (180)

Manilal thinks about the effect that translating the bible had on Europe. He believes that the only way for religion to stop being a barrier in India is by translating the holy books. "Men will never

be free unless they free themselves from the senseless repetition of so-called sacred verses" (181).

302

A Divided Legacy

Manilal dies, and, with the death of Manilal, the narrative shifts

to Farhan and the politics of northern India. Masroor blends fiction with large bits of history to show how Pakistan and India independence but break up the land. Farhan goes to Lahore again to his uncle's place. Farhan feels at home in the enlightened, hospitable home. Punjab is different from the rest of India, Farhan is told. "Farhan in the United Provinces of British India, you all learned much hate. We in Punjab, heard the preachings of our poets which espoused the ethics of tolerance, saying that all religions were true and led to salvation" (199).

Farhan settles down in Lahore. Though he is still in love with Sarala, he gets married to Nuzhat and they have a daughter Maheen. Meanwhile Sisir dies. His chita is lit by Nosho even though he is now a Muslim. The climate has changed. Nosho remarks how the partition of Bengal had resulted in violent protests. Now the partition of the continent is imminent. "I remember how we raged at the partition of Bengal. Today the great Urdu poet Iqbal has virtually asked for the partition of India" (213). Farhan goes to Delhi and meets Sarla again. Farhan and Sarla renew their love — though politically they belong to opposing parties: Farhan works for the Muslim League, Sarla for the Congress. The rift the between Congress and the Muslim League is complete. "Jinnah, the one time ambassador of unity, was now staunchly fighting to preserve Muslim rights" (231). As with Anita Desai and Chaman Nehal, Masroor also brings in the issue of language. Reena, Sarla, the controversy over Hindi and Urdu: "It's another point of difference to excite our erudite scholars, the grammar is the same, it's spoken in the same way, the only matter is the choice of words, fill it with Sanskrit and it becomes

Hindi, select Persian and Arabic and it becomes Urdu" (243). Masroor continually juxtaposes fiction and history. She notes how elections took place with Congress winning. In the Punjab the Unionist Party candidates — Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs — won the elections. The Muslim League lost miserably in all the provinces of India. Jinnah continued to propound his idea that India consisted of two nations. In March 1940 the Pakistan resolution was passed in Lahore.

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies ‘ 303

The fictional characters react to the idea of partitioning India. Thus Sarla is violently upset at the thought of partition which will "tear the motherland into shreds" (285). She wonders, "How could Farhan support such a move?" (285). Masroor suggests that fundamentalist Muslims were against Partition. One radical maulana notes "Jinnah is hardly a Muslim" (289). Another notes, "We can only hope to have ascendancy over the Muslims

in a united India, because distrust and hatred of the

Hindus will keep them anchored to religion." "Islam will be in danger," says another "if Pakistan is made" (289). The reader may well wonder which side Masroor is on. Though Sarla is opposed to Partition, Farhan is in favour of it. Above all, the reasons why the Muslim maulanas want a united India is not for positive reasons, but to keep alive the flame of hate against the Hindus. Despite her broadmindedness, therefore, Masroor suggests that the Partition of India was necessary at this point of time. Through the character of Maheen, Masroor also shows the Communist influence on the younger generation in the early forties. On coming to learn that her mother has been unfaithful to Farhan, Maheen starts gravitating to her friends at college. As a result she becomes friendly with Ramesh, a Communist. Masroor stresses that Jinnah was forced by the Congress to insist on the break-up of India. Thus she notes how closely Congress and Jinnah were still working at the time. "Jinnah said he was prepared to accept a large Pakistan within the Indian Union. Congress also said it was willing to concede as much autonomy as was consistent with the preservation of the Indian Union" (308). Things seemed to be working out well, but then, on July 7, Jawaharlal Nehru took over

the Congress presidency and declared that the Congress was not bound by the Cabinet Mission plan, except to participate in the Constituent Assembly. Again, juxtaposing historical detail and fictional narrative, Masroor's i — Malti's scene changes to Calcutta where there are riots. Shant — get caught in the riots. son n — Renuka's and Aru er daught— "Allah Akbar." Voices of by answered Shouts of "Jai-Hind" are women can be heard pleading to be spared. Again rot effects everyone, but in the Hindu majority Calcutta, though Shanti and

304

A Divided Legacy

Arun have to flee the rioteers, the Muslim women and children are

more tragically effected. - Then the crowd was upon them, men with knives ran past while

Shanti and Arun crouched behind a garbage dump. Shouts of Jai Hind were answered by Allah Akbar and then the agonized screams of men whose flesh is rent, whose blood gushes out, were heard. . . . More wild running, as if men were rushing up steps and then could be heard the voices of women pleading, "Spare us, spare our children, take our wealth, for Allah's sake not my child. Take me,

let my child live." (316)

As Shanti and Arun hide, a bundle is thrown from above. Shanti and

Arun find it is a child. They flee with the bundle in their arms. Back home, Shanti realizes it is a Muslim boy. "It was a male child whose circumscribed penis revealed his Muslim ancestry" (317). The child is just a few months old. Most Muslims babies are not circumcised soon after birth. Masroor's inclusion of the circumcision is therefore to show the effect of the communal riots on people belonging to different communities. Both Malti and Renuka want the child to be killed. Malti calls it a Muslim snake and both Malti and Renuka call upon Shanti to kill it. Riots break out in the Punjab as well. Masroor comments on the ferocity of the riots. Like other Pakistanis she ascribes the violence in the Punjab to the unfairness of the division. "The most brutal atrocities occurred in Punjab, where the majority Muslim divisions of Gurdaspur and Ferozepur were given to India by a rapacious Radcliffe, accepting the traditional nazrana" (321). Old friends meet or part under the changed circumstances. Thus,

Farhan and Jaswant meet under the walls of the Red Fort. Farhan has stayed behind in order to look after the Muslim refugees; Jaswant is heading a contingent deputed to protect the refugees. There are many partings: Farhan parts from Sarla; Maheen from her Sikh and Muslim friends. But the birth of a new nation brings joy as well. Masroor shows this through Maheen whose friendship with Akram makes her aware of the meaning of Pakistan. "The ugly faces of the wounds she had nursed seemed to heal, the sadness at parting from her Hindu college friends lessened, and a new awareness stole over her, of a homeland meant for the Muslims of this area, now in

Betrayal in Bengal: In the Shadows of Fireflies

305

control of their own destiny" (349). Maheen and Akram get married secretly, but Maheen slowly starts feeling unfulfilled. Shortly after their marriage, Akram is killed in an accident on a new road that the Pakistan Army is building in the Titwal sector. Meanwhile, Farhan visits Dacca, then Delhi. At Delhi, he meets Sarla who discloses that

Suraj is his son. Masroor does not allow her readers to forget history. Thus she notes that on March 23, 1956, Pakistan was declared the Islamic

Republic of Pakistan. Relations between India and Pakistan grew sour. Linking another fictive event to a historical one, Masroor narrates how, in the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, Farhan's son Suraj is killed in an air attack over Pakistan. Shortly afterwards, Farhan goes to India, longing to see the land of his youth once more. "A strange longing filled him to se the land of his youth once more" (41). He halts at Arahi din ka Magbara and dies there. The narrative which began in late nineteenth-century Bengal ends in late twentieth-century Pakistan. Political history juxtaposes personal tragedy as Masroor's final protagonist, Maheen, learns that she has cancer. Deciding to end her life, one day she walks into the Rawal river. She leaves a letter for her friend, explaining that she did not want to prolong her life with chemotherapy. I decided it's my life and it's my choice how to go. So I chose the Indus, to mingle forever with the soil and sun | love so much....

It's my right to die as I choose, and I am living with the waters of the Indus, not dying with doses of pethidine." (437)

Maheen voices a deep love for the soil and water of Pakistan, but the omniscient narrator is disappointed with present-day Pakistan. The story of Maheen's generation is accompanied by detailed accounts of the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan. Much of it is just chunks of political history. This undigested bit of political history might have been the result of the writer's own battle with cancer which did not permit her to interweave these passages into the fiction as well as she had the earlier passages. In fact, her reading of the politics of Bengal and her moulding it to fit her fictional characters is better than is her use of political history in the later section of the book. One reason for this might also be that she was

306

A Divided Legacy

much closer to this history, and, unwilling to depart from "facts," was forced to keep the facts as undiluted as possible While these pages do provide a. detailed account of the growing Islamization of Pakistan after the death of Jinnah, they detract from the novel as fiction. What comes out very clearly then is that, despite Masroor's feeling that differences between Hindus and Muslims were created rather than

inherent,

she is uncritical

of Jinnah,

even

at times

appearing to hero-worship him. Though she criticizes Hindu-Muslim communal conflict, she does not say that Partition was wrong. What she sees as wrong was not Partition, but the direction that Pakistan took after the early death of Jinnah. Qurratulain Hyder returned to India after writing Aag ka Darya. Masroor, from the Punjab could not "retum" to India. But the posthumous publication of Shadows of Time from India symbolically negates the Partition. Despite the "Pakistani" narrative, Shadows of Time becomes an Indian book.

Chapter Twelve

NOSTALGIC SHADOWS: THE PARTITION IN SUNIL GANGOPADHYAY, AMITAV GHOSH, AND TASLIMA NASREEN

At Oxford, during Trinity term in 1996, I happened to meet a former SAVSP fellow. We got to talking over a cup of coffee. When I told her that I was researching novels written on the Partition, she mentioned an acquaintance who had left West Punjab as a child in the wake of the Partition and had mentioned to her that no one had yet written a book on the Partition comparable to A Tale of Two Cities. | was not quite sure that my companion had not mixed up 4 Tale of Two Cities with War and Peace or whether her acquaintance had meant that no one had described the effect of the Partition on two cities on opposite sides of the border. Perhaps her acquaintance had merely meant that no one had, during the Partition, laid down his life for another, exclaiming as he did so, "It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done." | mentioned to my chance acquaintance that I was not quite sure what her friend had meant, but if he meant a book that talked about two cities there was Sunil

Gangopadhyay's book, Purba-Paschim, which tells the tale of two friends across the border. Purba-Paschim has not been translated

into English, so he would not have been able to read it, but there was

also Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines which was also about two cities, as well as a man's laying down his life for another. True, the swashbuckling romance of A Tale of Two Cities was missing, but it

308

A Divided Legacy

could not but be so with an event so recent in our history. There was also a third book I could have mentioned which was also about two cities, Calcutta and Mymensingh, but Taslima Nasreen's Fera was woman-centred and did not quite fit into the category of A Tale of Two Cities or Purba-Paschim. In a hurry to get back to work, I never did take down the woman's name or the name of her friend. I wonder whether either of them finally found books of the type they wanted. There is, of course, no dearth of books about the Partition, or which bring in, even if briefly, the Partition even when not quite about the Partition. In the fiftieth year after the Partition it is quite possible that there will be a further resurgence of interest in looking back at the Partition both for critical as well as creative writers. It is of course also possible that with globalization and the electronic media, the borders of the subcontinent will crumble as the borders of Europe have crumbled. Alliances like the SAARC and SAPTA, high level talks between the Premiers of India and Pakistan, as well as a younger generation rebelling against its fathers as is the wont of younger generations, all suggest that the years to come will see a tempering of cross-border conflict. Nevertheless, for several years after Partition, the truth

remains that there have been tensions both before and after Partition, most of these tensions caused by the Partition. While this is a theme that is touched upon by almost all writers on the Partition, perhaps it is not said as clearly as in these three books which are about an ethnic group speaking the same language, celebrating the same writers, eating the same food, wearing the same dress, who were separated

for political reasons and grew apart and at the same time paradoxically came closer than ever before because of this division. No one has perhaps said this better than Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines when he notes how close the two Bengals became following Partition. I was struck with wonder that there really had been a time, not so

long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines; I had to remind myself that they were not to be blamed for believing that there was something admirable in moving violence to the borders and dealing with it through science and factories, for

Nostalgic Shadows

that was the pattern of the world. They had believing in that pattern, in the enchantment once they had etched their borders upon the land would sail sway from each other like the prehistoric Gondwanaland.

309

drawn their borders, of lines, hoping that map, the two bits of shifting plates of the

What had they felt, I wondered, when

they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet — the irony that killed Tridib: the simple fact undiscovered irony that there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had

to look drawn their lines— so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only

the into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was by symmetry le irreversib inverted image of the other, locked into an border.! lass the line that was to set us free — our looking-g

d Ghosh is here referring to how both Calcutta and Dhaka respon Dhaka. in the same way to events, how riots in Calcutta are mirrored is also reitHis allusion to the closer ties between the two Bengals remembers ally continu who erated by his description of grandmother by Sunil echoed is Dhaka. Grandmother's nostalgia for Dhaka and not Gangopadhyay's Pratap, whose last memories are of Dhaka

States and of the son he has lost, nor of the son who is in the United

Shadow Lines, has not bothered to come back. Though like The east and west the with Purba-Paschim has a remarkably large stage also to the but of the title referring not only to West and East Bengal West and the East, the United Kingdom

and the United States as

And as in well as Bengal, it is Bengal that is the focus of the book. London and Cairo like The Shadow Lines, which is also about places on ally continu and Sri Lanka—but which focuses always and — the focus in Purba-Paschim is always and Calcutta and Dhaka finally the inextricable ties of the two cities. — even when Ghosh suggests it is a misThis terrible nostalgia Partition fiction of taken nostalgia — is perhaps the dominant note in the focus of West Bengai. It is this sense of nostalgia that also forms adesh of a Bangl to return Taslima Nasreen's novel Fera about the

en, interestingly young woman who had left after the Partition. Nasre roee S enn

Ravi Dayal, 1988), 233. Further references 1 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: to the text will be made parenthetically.

310

A Divided Legacy

enough, uses a Hindu woman as her protagonist rather than a Muslim woman. In Lajja as well, Nasreen who attempts to speak for the minority, uses the Hindu as her protagonist to describe the aftermath of the communal violence that ensured after the destruction of Babri Masjid. Though in Fera Nasreen stresses how inextricable is the link between the two Bengals, it is interesting to note that it is the Hindu woman whose nostalgia makes her remember all the incidents of the past. The Partition, which had caused the separation, has only served to make the link with her birthplace stronger. The same, however, is

not the case with the friend whom she comes to visit. Her friend has completely forgotten her— or pretends to forget her. Instead of a warm, loving friend and a bright, enthusiastic woman, Kalyani finds a lethargic, sloppy, dull wife and mother. While this portrait is Nasreen's critique of what Islamization has done, it is also interesting to note that it is a valid portrait of the result of Partition on the Hindu and Muslim communities. The Hindu community which had to leave East Bengal can never forget their birthplace, but the East Bengalis are unconcemed and even indifferent towards their former friends. In other words, if there was no conflict or distance before

Partition, the Partition

served

to create

this separation.

Can

it

therefore be said that, after Partition, the links of the Hindu migrants

became stronger to the land they had left? What about the Muslim migrants who had left West Bengal. Were their feelings as acute? Strangely enough, even when there is nostalgia in real life, no writer has portrayed this nostalgia in fiction.2 In Lajja Nasreen stresses that Partition was wrong, in Fera she notes how partition changed the people of East Bengal, tumed them into automatons or fundamentalists. In Gangopadhyay as well as Nasreen we see the attempt to define the self. What difference have borders made? How real are borders? It is the same question that inspires Ghosh. The real difference it seems to me between these three books — two written’in Bengali and one in English — is the humour that Ghosh allows into his novel * The columnist Mesbahuddin Ahmed, in Holiday, however, often writes nostalgically about

Calcutta. In a column written on May 16, 1997 for example, he notes the different persons he knew in Calcutta, the different places he was wont to visit. and the eating houses he frequented. In fiction, however, this sense of nostalgia is absent. +

Nostalgic Shadows

311

even though he is wnting of a tragic moment. Whether it is in his description of grandmother or of how brotherly differences affected the two brothers — suggesting an analogy with the Partition — or whether it his description of how starkly different reality is from the memory of the past, or in his treatment of the unlikely hero, Tridib, who is killed in the riots, Ghosh allows a humour which, though different from the humour of Rushdie and Tharoor, suggests a refusal to remain strictly within the confines of proper nostalgia when writing about the tragedy of the Partition. It is in this post-modem sense then that Ghosh is different from both Gangopadhyay and Nasreen, both of whom attempt to tell the historical truth through fiction. Ghosh knows, like his narrator, that there can only be an approximation, never an exact recounting of what took place in the past. All three books are in the nature of flashbacks. Though Gangopadhyay's book is not structured as a flashback, the original version which was serialized in Desh was in the form of a flashback and it was envisioned as such.? In Purba-Paschim and Fera this form relates to the sense of the past, a nostalgic past which is remembered as reality. In The Shadow Lines, however, the use of flashback is in the form of reconstruction. We reconstruct the past, we idealize and fictionalize it, and there is no way of really knowing what happened. The past that is being reconstructed is two pasts: the past which grandmother recalls and recounts to the narrator, and the past when Tridib died. These two pasts are contrasted. Grandmother's past, nostalgic and unreal is also the reason why she goes back to Dhaka with Tridib. The second past, the past where the narrator was not present but which he attempts to reconstruct, is more real but also always unknowable as pasts are. The past that Grandmother remembers is the pre-Partition past, the past when she went to school, when Bengal was inspired by the freedom movement and when a young terrorist could just happen to be the quiet young man in one's classroom. This is the past Grandmother tells the narrator about, the past of the «refugee. But when Grandmother goes back to her birthplace, things have changed beyond recognition. Was the past 3 Personal interview, December 19, 1996.

312

A Divided Legacy

then different? Or was the change caused by the subsequent events that have taken place? Can our past be the same as our grandparents’ past? Can our heroes be the same or are they different? Tridib, a wastrel in Grandmother's eyes, is a hero in Dhaka — but his death has been caused by the obstinacy of Grandmother, and both her hand in his death and his heroism is something that she will never understand. But though Grandmother's memories were false and though she caused Tridib's death, the book suggests that the present must confront the past and look it in they eye. What was the reality of that past and how much is that past our common past? As the book ends, with the narrator in London sleeping with the girl Tridib loved, perhaps he has come to terms with that past in the only way possible, by knowing the futility of ever knowing the exact truth. By the time Amitav Ghosh was writing, Indian fiction in English had come into its own. Though Indians had been writing for a considerable period of time, Rushdie was the first Indian-bom writer to win a major literary prize, beating the English at their own game. Perhaps it was this triumph that paved the way for the spate of writings in English, with writers no longer having to justify their use of English. Indian writers in English become free then to explore political or social issues, free to explore human relationships. free to explore their Anglo-Indian tradition as they become free to exploit linguistic resources and narrative structures. But the deliberate refusal to play the game of writing according to English rules while inspiring Tharoor to write his The Great Indian Novel has a self-consciousness about it that can be wearying. It is perhaps the freedom to write in English that Rushdie ushered in but without his Sternian style that makes The Shadow Lines an eminently readable novel. Like Rushdie, Ghosh explores the legacy of Partition, but, with his Bengali background, Ghosh is caught up in questions of identit y as much as he is in questions of veracity. Like the Bengal i writer using his native language, Ghosh too reveals the nostalgia felt by the migrant from East Bengal with memories of a golden past that had come to an end with Partition. But Ghosh has a critical perspective which allows him to question the memory of this golden past. Grandmother tells the boy narrator about a pre-Par tition past, a

Nostalgic Shadows

313

past when Bengal was one, and Grandmother herself was young in a house on Jindabahar Lane in old Dhaka. From her too the boy learns about the heroes who defied the British and _ sacrificed their young lives for freedom. She tells him how she went to college and describes how one of her classmates had been a terrorist. How she wished she had known him better, she tells the narrator, when the police came to arrest him and she realized that her unimpressive classmate was a terrorist, engaged in activities that she only dreamed about. Many of Grandmother's memories are evoked by her disapproval of the present and of characters like Tridib and Ila. Tridib, Grandmother says, is "a loafer and a wastrel" (4). And Grandmother has only scom for Ila who lives in London because she wants to be free. What do people like Ila know about wanting to be free? Freedom is what people of Grandmother's generation strove for. "She wants to be left alone to do what she pleases. ... But that is not what it means to be free" (86). For Grandmother, who has lived

through the freedom movement and independence, freedom means freedom from British domination, but also sacrifice and bloodshed. She can neither understand nor appreciate Ila's desire for freedom —

which to her simply means that Ila would like to live like a whore. Nor can she understand Tridib's desire for freedom — which to her seems suspiciously like not wanting to do his duty to his family or his country. She tells the narrator about young people who were different from Tridib and Ila, young people who performed heroic deeds, who defied the British. She tells him about "the heroism of Khudiram Bose and the sad death of Bagha Jatin, hunted down on the banks of the Buribalam river, betrayed by villagers who had been bought with

English money" (38). Grandmother would have liked to do something for the terrorists, and in the process "steal a little bit of their

glory for herself" (38). She imagines that she would have killed the English magistrate who sentenced the boy who had been in college with her in the early twenties. Would she really have killed the magistrate, the boy asks. "I would have been frightened, she said.

But I would have prayed for strength, and God willing, Yes, I would have killed him. It was for our freedom. I would have done anything

314

A Divided Legacy

to be free" (39). The narrator ponders the meaning of freedom and the desire to be free. Tridib wants to be free, Ila wants to be free, Grandmother wants to be free. I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound; whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of voices within

me. (86)

Despite her stories, however, despite her boast of doing anything to be free, Grandmother has done nothing to be free and it is her attempt to do something that creates the violent climax of the novel. (The Grandmother in Mukul Kesevan's Looking Through Glass is perhaps an echo of Ghosh's Grandmother. Even more than Ghosh's Grandmother, the Grandmother of Kesevan's narrator suffers from

feelings of guilt — not because of what she has not done, but because she hasn't done what she is believed to have done. It is Grandmother's feelings of guilt that cause the narrator to journey to Benares with her ashes in an attempt to atone for her sins. This journey leads to the narrator's fantastic voyage back in time when Grandmother was still young.) Playing upon the nostalgia for a past when all Bengal was one, Ghosh brings home to the reader the unpleasant truths about that past. Even though Dhaka has changed so that Grandmother cannot recognize it, Ghosh makes the reader aware that Grandmother's past is a figment of her imagination. The loving uncle she is going to rescue doesn't want to be rescued and never

was loving, and, in an attempt to meddle with other people's lives and rectify lapses in the past, Grandmother succeeds only in bringing about the deaths of three people. Thanks to the setting up of a diplomatic mission in Dhaka,

headed by her brother-in-law, Grandmother is able to visit Dhaka.

Her main purpose is to bring back her uncle, Jethamoshai. But Jethamoshai is no loving old man. He cannot recognize Grandmother, and all he recalls of his nieces is unflattering. The events in Dhaka shatter illusions and reveal that Grandmother's truths are as much stories as any that Tridib has told. The Dhaka she has longed for is not only different from the Dhaka she remembers, but, in fact, as the

Nostalgic Shadows

315

reader soon realizes, extant only in her imagination. She has told the narrator fondly about her ancestral home and how happy she had been there, but that home had been divided down the middle — as the land had been divided — suggesting the tensions that caused the division in the first place. She remembers a loving uncle, but Jethamoshai openly remembers that he didn't like his brother or his brother's family and that, of his two nieces, one had the face of a vulture and the other, though "pretty and goody-goody to look at," was "poisonous as a cobra" (210). Despite Jethamoshai's refusal to accompany Grandmother, he is forced into a rickshaw pulled by the man who looks after him in the absence of his relatives. Dhaka is not safe, however. There have been riots in Calcutta, not perhaps with serious consequences, because, as the narrator tries to recollect the time when Tridib was killed, all he remembers of the riots in Calcutta was the fact that a Muslim boy had not come to school. In Dhaka, however, things turn more serious than that. And as the car carrying Grandmother and Tridib enters a lane followed by the rickshaw carrying Jethamoshai,

the mob comes closer and closer. i While it is Tridib's death that the narrator tries to reconstruct with the help of May, what is conveyed very clearly is Grandmother's role in that unnecessary death. And that Grandmother who had talked about freedom and sacrifice was quite willing to leave the old man to his fate. It was Tridib the wastrel, the loafer who had gone to the old man's defence, but had been unable to resist the mob. The events in Dhaka therefore stress not only the unreliability of

Grandmother's memories but also the tensions of the present, tensions that cross the borders, that are mirror images of what transpires across the borders. Above all, the riots in Dhaka—the

shadow of

events in Calcutta where mobs wait for passers-by — remind us of the violence that lurks below the surface, ready to flare up at any moment. What happens in Dhaka affects Calcutta, just as what

happens in Calcutta affects Dhaka. This is fiction in The Shadow Lines, but also fact as evidenced time and again when communal tension has caused similar tension across the border. Ghosh suggests that after Partition the two sides of the border came closer than ever before, but though it is the Partition that causes

316

A Divided Legacy

Grandmother to long for her childhood home — the longing would not have been so acute if the need for passports had not arisen — it is also true that the Partition created distances between the two Bengals. Though the attempted creation of a single Pakistani culture was resented by East Bengalis who insisted on a common Bengali culture, it is also significant that Partition led to a widening gulf between the two Bengals. The creation of Bangladesh suggests the entrenchment of that difference, despite the fact that the question of whether citizens of Bangladesh are Bangladeshi or Bengali is still unresolved. However, despite the refusal of many to accept the Bangladeshi identity, the fact that the leaders of the Awami League see fit to pay repeated Haj visits and that the Prime Minister and other women leaders cover their heads in Islamic fashion suggests otherwise. In other words, Ghosh's insistence that the two Bengals came closer after Partition suggests the same nostalgia that occurs on a more sentimental level in the reminiscences of East Bengali migrants in India, and that inspires Purba-Paschim's Pratap who longs for a past that has ended with Partition. But though Ghosh demonstrates that one cannot go home again, he suggests that Partition has brought a longing to return that might never have been there had the Partition

not happened. While this is true for the Hindu migrant to West Bengal, it is not as true of the West Bengali who moved to Pakistan. Abu Rushd, for instance, in Nongor, describes a new identity in a

new homeland and Shaukat Osman who considers the Partition a tragedy or an absurdity ignores the Partition in his creative writings. Purba-Paschim is more of a linear narrative than The Shadow Lines with nostalgic flashbacks reliving the past when Hindus and Muslims, despite prejudices and taboos that separated the communities, could be friends like Pratap and Mamun who were so close that they were called "Tal-Betal" at college and even loved the same woman. Though Mamun also loved and even wrote poems to her, this love was in the nature of a platonic love with the object of his passion completely unaware of the feelings she aroused. Gangopadhyay shows not only how the Partition separates the two friends but also how communalism and politics affect the land. While Gangopadhyay's narration includes the politics of both Bengals, his portrait of Pratap is more gripping than his portrait of Mamun.

Nostalgic Shadows

317

The inclusion of politics seems forced — brought in as in Masroor’s book — purposefully as politics not as fiction. Gangopadhyay's portrait of Mamun also smacks of caricature: this is what a Muslim Bengali who opted for Pakistan is like and see what happens to him. The tragedies of daily life, of the small things that happen everyday are minutely portrayed in Pratap's case, but not in that of Mamun. Perhaps it is not possible for a person to know so closely someone who belongs to another community, despite the common ethnicity. Gangopadhyay brings in both political and cultural issues to show the road that East Bengal took after Partition. Thus political figures like Md. Toaha ridicule Jibanananda Das — who happened to be a teacher of English at Brojomohan College. "Talk about our poets," Md. Toaha exhorts the students. The students have better sense than the politicians and shout him down. "Jibanananda Das is not the poet of West Bengal or East Bengal only. He is the poet of all Bengal."* Mamun tums away from both politics and poetry. He finds no solace at home because his second wife — the widow of a friend who was killed during the Noakhali riots —is over-religious. She forces him to fast and pray. Though Mamun's heart not in religion —he was almost an atheist in college —he realizes that there is no place for an atheist in Pakistan and starts to study the Quran and Hadith and often quotes from them. In flashbacks, Gangopadhyay shows how growing communal feelings before Partition had led Mamun to become more conscious of his Muslim background. Comments such as "Oh my, this boy's a Muslim. I thought he was a Bengali" (93) had hurt Mamun, particularly when they came from people to whom he felt close. Hindus are also gradually alienated. After the death of Pratap's father, there are two dacoities in their home. When Pratap goes to complain to the police, he is asked, "Are there no dacoities in India?" The Pakistan government was anxious to get rid of Hindus so that they could provide houses for the migrants from Bengal and Bihar. A class of 4 Sunil Gangopadhyay, Purba-Paschim (Dhaka: Ananda, 1995), 80. Translations Purba-Paschim are mine. Further references are noted parenthetically.

from

318

A Divided Legacy

Muslims, encouraged by the Muslim League, had been quite active in acquiring Hindu property in this manner. Pratap too was never particularly religious. While he did observe the pujas, it was more out of fun than any religious feeling. After migrating, Pratap observes puja in West Bengal, and thinks how the days of fun are over. "The Radcliffe Commission had put an end to all those days of fun" (92). The memory of the past makes Pratap nostalgic: "that house filled with memories of one's ancestors, that pond, that mango orchard, all was gone. The sound of those drums, the smell of that paddy, those known faces, nothing was the same. Only the sky remained" (92). Pratap's mother wants to go back to their village. But Pratap tells her that she cannot. Their village home is no longer theirs. "Now this is our land. This is our home" (92). It is interesting to contrast Gangopadhyay's treatment of the migrant with Chaman Nahal's. Even though Nahal's protagonist Kanshi Lal is unhappy in Delhi, there is an excitement in being a citizen of an independent land. Even though the politicians have brought him to this pass, he takes a gift offering to Nehru. In Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges as well, despite the loss, the closing image of the book is of moving onwards to India. In Nation of Fools, in which Balraj Khanna depicts how Sikh migrants from West Punjab settle down to a new life, the mood is also optimistic as Khatri and his son Omi make a new life for themselves. The migrants from East Bengal, however, could never forget the land and the trees and the ponds and the fish they had left behind. Settling in Calcutta or Delhi when they were not shunted off into the jungles, they missed the soil of East Bengal —a soil that was as much an ideal as a golden

past. Pratap's mother is reminded, but gently, that she cannot go

back, but she is never told that that past did not exist as Grandmother in Ghosh leas in the tragic climax of her visit to Jindabahar Lane. Like Abu Rushd and Sardar Jainuddin, Gangopadhyay brings in the issue of language. When did Bengali Muslims make the demand for Bengali as their language? Gangopadhyay suggests that though most people refer to 1952 or earlier to 1948, the issue of Bengali was raised even earlier, in 1937. He also suggests that, in the thirties, it was the Bengali Muslim who was more consciously Bengali, and

Nostalgic Shadows

319

suggests that it was the short-sightedness of politicians that led to communalism in Bengal. The true Bengalis were the Muslim members of the Legislative branch of undivided Bengal. Previously the politicians had been big landlords, lawyers, barristers, Rai Bahadurs and Khan Bahadurs. They wore either western clothes or chogas and chapkans. Their language was always English. But the Muslim representatives of rural Bengal brought in the Bengali language into the Legislative Assembly. They did not hesitate to wear /ungis and punjabis.° In

West Bengal Muslims also wore dhotis regularly. They started presenting their speeches in Bengali. At that time the rule was that if any member spoke in Bengali the speech was not recorded. Only the English summary was noted down. Nevertheless, they insisted on speaking in Bengali. (97)

Gangopadhyay notes that Bengali Muslims contributed significantly to the nationalist movement, perhaps in a way more than Hindu Bengalis, specially where language was concermed. "Bengali Hindus had taken up wearing khaddar, dhotis and punjabis, but when they spoke they spoke in English . . . lest people think that they did not know English" (97). The Muslim Bengalis had no such qualms. Gangopadhyay suggests that, left to themselves, Bengalis would not have tilted the political situation. But non-Bengalis started pouring into Bengal and completely changed the situation. Despite this detailed account of the period, Gangopadhyay omits description of the riots that took place during Direct Action Day. Mamun had left Calcutta at the beginning of 1946, so he did not experience Direct Action Day, and it is only indirectly that Gangopadhyay touches upon this event. Mamun is travelling to the funeral of an acquaintance from his Calcutta days named Siddique. Siddique had not left during 1947, but had been forced to do so after the riots in 1950 when rioters bumed his shop and broke his legs. 5 In Bengal, the loose upper garment called kurta is generally referred to as punjabi. Reference to this garment as punjabi is often confusing for non-Bengalis. A popular joke during 1971 when West Pakistani soldiers let loose a reign of terror in East Pakistan is about a Bengali being asked by a soldier what he has in his bag. The terrified Bengali replies, "Only a punjabi, Sir." The soldier imagines a gory sight, but finds on opening the bag only a kurta.

320

A Divided Legacy

Mamun too had experienced rioting in 1950, in Barisal, and recalls the scenes of departing Hindu families, weeping for their lost ones and for the homes they were leaving behind. Mamun wonders whether the Partition had meant that the Bengali race was to be divided into two and these two parts were to become enemies? The Partition of 1947, was, however, it should be remembered not the first partition of Bengal. That first partition, into what the British called "administrative divisions," had been met by protests and by the terrorist movement. The Muslims had, however, welcomed that

partition. When the British government had been forced to annul the

partition of Bengal in 1911, they had consoled Muslim Bengal by founding a university — the University of Dhaka. And then, to ensure that politics would never interfere again with administration, they had shifted the capital to Delhi. Masroor documents this move and suggests that, with this move, the importance of Bengal faded in politics. The last struggle of Bengal was when Jinnah chose Calcutta as the scent of his demonstration. But from henceforth it would be U.P. that would dominate Indian politics. Not Bengal. Gangopadhyay follows the politics on both sides of the border in detail, traces the war of 1965, the Naxalite movement in which Pratap's young son gets involved, brings in the Bangladesh liberation war, traces the changing Indian scene with the younger generation opting to go to UK or the US. What is interesting, however, is the detail with which Gangopadhyay traces the political changes in East Bengal through the character of Mamun. Though the narrative also contains accounts of Mamun's personal relationships, all these seem to be threads upon which to hang a political tale. Thus as Mamun proceeds to Babul Siddique's funeral, he thinks about the haste with which Pakistan was created and the position of the Bengali Muslim in Pakistan. At the time of the Lahore Resolution in 1940, had anyone believed that Pakistan would come into being in just seven years? In those seven years unbelievable things happened with great rapidity. No one had really thought about what Pakistan would be like. Were all Pakistanis happy with the Pakistan that was created? Even Jinnah didn't like the Pakistan he received. He had said angrily, What am I to do with this moth-eaten Pakistan? And the crores of Muslims

Nostalgic Shadows

321

who had remained behind in India and had earlier raised their voices for Pakistan, didn't they feel betrayed by their Muslim brothers? They had to remain behind on the Indian side. (103)

Mamun thinks about the irony that Bengalis who had been strongest in their support for Pakistan should start feeling alienated after the creation of Pakistan. The Bengali Muslims had been strongest in their demands for Pakistan. The Bengali Muslim vote for Pakistan had been 96%, the Punjabi vote had been only 49%. But what Pakistan had they voted for? When in 1946 there had been talk of partitioning Bengal, many people like Mamun had been dumbfounded. The Muslims would have no rights to Calcutta, to the granaries of Burdwan, to Tagore's

Shantiniketan in Birbhum, to the Twenty-four Parganas, home of Furfura Sharif, to Murshidabad with its history of Nawabs, they would be deprived of all this. Hadn't they tried till the end to preserve a united Bengal? (103)

Through Mamun's thoughts, Gangopadhyay thus tries to portray the thoughts of the progressive East Bengali towards the Partition. By contrast, apart from a deep nostalgia, Pratap does not think about the Partition. Perhaps one of the main reason for this is that Pratap — like countless refugees from East Bengal — had to struggle with the demands of daily life. Coming to a city that, despite the migrations was set in its ways, people like Pratap had to wedge their way in. It wasn't always easy. Thus, while the sense of Pratap being an exile shadows the narrative, the foregrounded action is taken up with the details of daily life. The major political problem that Gangopadhyay takes up in Calcutta is the Naxalite Movement in which Pratap's son‘also becomes involved. India affects the East Bengali in a different way. There is no time for nostalgia. People are suspected of being "Bharater Dalal" Indian agents, if they talk too much about Calcutta. Gangopadhyay reflects the suspicion that shadowed people in Pakistan. Anything strange, such as a visit from an unknown young man, is room for doubt. Is the man a government spy? Gangopadhyay very beautifully portrays

the aura of suspicion that surrounded

intellectuals through the

incident of a chance visitor to Mamun. Nor, in real life, were fears of

being shadowed always imaginary.

322

A Divided Legacy

Mamun's fears are unwarranted. The man whom Mamun suspects of being a spy is not, however, a spy. And among other things, his arrival is used to show how Mamun is gradually changing. Though Mamun had been unhappy when people discriminated between him and his friend, now he suffers from the same prejudices. Altaf tells him that he wants him to speak on his behalf to a Hindu lawyer whose daughter he wants to marry. Mamun, who had said in an interview that there should be more Hindu-Muslim marriages, is averse to the idea. Shouldn't words and deeds go together, asks Altaf. But he is only testing Mamun. Mamun doesn't have to speak for him. The Hindu lawyer is broadminded as it tums out, and has accepted Altaf as his son-in-law. While in East Bengal the language movement, questions of identity, questions about the creation of Pakistan are taking up Mamun's thoughts, in India the business of living engrosses people. The refugees from East Bengal are occupying Sealdah station or people's homes. It is in the scuffle to rid the occupied houses of refugees

that Asatbaran,

Pratap's

brother-in-law,

is killed.

Harit

Mondal is the leader of the refugees who have occupied this house and, in succeeding pages, Gangopadhyay details the problems that refugees were creating as well as facing. Many refugees were forced out of Calcutta, many were forced into working as servants — in the homes of better off Calcuttans. Young girls tumed to prostitution. Some, like Harit's own son, tured to crime. Political problems, rather than problems of daily life, take centrestage in East Pakistan. Thus Gangopadhyay traces how, in the fifties,

there is growing unhappiness over how East Pakistanis are discriminated against. Though Suhrawardy is Prime Minister of Pakistan and Fazlul Haq the governor, East Bengalis feel they are being treated as second-class citizen. Suhrawardy, who had spoken about autonomy, is now quite happy to be a puppet in the hands of West Pakistanis. At a meeting that Mamun attends, Bhashani proclaims that if West Pakistan doesn't give East Pakistan autonomy then East Pakistan will go its own separate way. Mamun is unhappy over talk like this. "This is secessionist talk. Pakistan has been achieved after so much sacrifice. Many mistakes might have been made, but there is no question of breaking up Pakistan" (226).

Nostalgic Shadows

323

Even as Mamun objects to thoughts of secession, he is made to stand up for Bengali identity. His niece tells him that her college friends have told her it is a sin to sing Tagore's songs. This, of course, is in reference to the Pakistan Government's policy against Tagore's songs. Abu Rushd too has referred to this ban in Nongor and made his protagonist Kamal stand up for the nght to sing Tagore songs. Mamun tells Bula, "Songs are things of the heart. Fatwas cannot be placed on them" (275). While Gangopadhyay details the conflict of identity that perplexed people like Mamun, by contrast it is the daily problem of living that bothers his friend. Thus Pratap thinks how, before Partition, fish was plentiful in Calcutta. After Partition fish has stopped coming from East Bengal. Pratap cannot get the different varieties he used to get. Again this memory reminds him of how he used to catch fish at his village home before Partition made him a refugee. Nostalgia dominates Pratap's thoughts of the home he left behind. Gangopadhyay spends some time on Pratap's thoughts on the occasion of Independence Day, 1957. This is an important year. It was in 1757 that the Battle of Plassey was lost. It was in 1857 that the Sepoy Mutiny took place, the result of which was that India came directly under British rule. Pratap wonders what the significance of 1957 will be. Will Subash Bose return? Independence Day celebrations bring out pictures of Gandhi everywhere. But Pratap wonders how important Gandhi continues to be. Politicians have stopped referring to him. Gandhi's philosophy is forgotten. At Sealdah Station Pratap comes across refugees. The people of Calcutta are sick of refugees. Pratap however empathizes with the refugees. He too is a refugee. Jagatpati feeds people on Independence Day. He tells Pratap proudly that everything comes from his own lands. Pratap feels like weeping. "The price of independence is different for each person" (287). Urban living brings not only discomfort, but tragedy as well. The death of Pratap's older son is indirectly related to their displacement. One day Pratap's wife and sons go to the ghat. The older boy can swim, but the younger boy, Bablu, cannot. Had they been in Bengal, he would have known how to swim. Bablu gets into the water.

324

A Divided Legacy

Pikloo attempts to save him, but, in jumping into the water, he hits

his head against a buoy and dies. At this point Gangopadhyay's story becomes slightly more involved. Though the focal character in Calcutta remains Pratap, as Mamun does in East Pakistan, a welter of other characters come in — relations, friends, acquaintances — many with their separate stories. Gangopadhyay describes the growing Pakistani fear of sedition in East Pakistan. Thus when, in 1965, the Indo-Pakistan war breaks out, several Bengalis are arrested including Mamun, who has started

working as an editor. Mamun reflects on the irony of the situation. He had fought for Pakistan. "Where were Ayub Khan and Monem Khan then?" (640). This is not his first stint in jail. He had been incarcerated earlier, during the language movement, but times have changed. Then he was with several others, he was young. It had seemed like a picnic. Now he is alone and ill. He realizes he is growing old. The difference in Gangopadhyay's treatment of Pratap and Mamun is clearly manifested in their different ways of aging. Thus Pratap's sense of aging comes with the death of his eldest son, but Mamun's with that of his imprisonment during the sixties. The second volume of Gangopadhyay's book details the events of the seventies, including the liberation war and the involvement of India in that war. At the same time, the space occupied by the novel

expands to include England and the United States as well. Younger people go to both England and the United States. It is in England that Pratap's niece can marry a Muslim. Her mother is furious when she hears of it. How can her daughter think of marrying a Muslim? Was it not because of Muslims that their family had lost everything? I'll accept a Muslim son-in-law? Never. Didn't we have to leave our land because of them? We lost everything. They pushed us out, they killed so many. Hundreds of thousands of refugees turned up here penniless. My husband lost his life at the hands of these refugees. Muslims are responsible for all this. How can she forget these insults? These crimes? .... What has my daughter done, Khokan?

She has blackened our faces, Khokan. (744)

The ideas and ideals that had inspired Pratap's generation no

longer hold true for his son's. While Pratap is struggling to make >

Nostalgic Shadows

325

another life for himself, his son becomes involved with the Naxalites.

He has to flee Calcutta to escape arrest. His flight becomes permanent. It is in New York that Bablu hears the news of his father's illness, but he does not go back. Pratap does not recover from his illness. As he lies in the nursing home with tubes in his body, his mind returns to the past, to his home in East Bengal. Pratap saw once more that same house, that eight-roofed cottage, on three sides of the courtyard the houses of his aunts stood as they always had. That same mango tree, on the other side the pomelo tree, on the south the pond full of fish, opposite it the mysterious jungle just as they always had been. Father would appear any moment now. How sweet the air was here, so much better than in Calcutta. (623)

As Pratap dies, he imagines that he is going to meet his mother. His feet are dirty. He must wash his feet. Why just his feet? Why not his entire body? He enters the water. The final scene, thus, welds both Bengals in one as Pratap dies with thoughts of his mother, in the home he had left behind in East Bengal. This nostalgia for one's birthplace, for the place left behind in East Bengal, projected so sharply in Gangopadhyay's novel, is also to be found in Fera by the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen. As in Lajja, Nasreen's protagonist in Fera is not a Muslim but a Hindu. In Lajja, the protagonist was male, in Fera it is Kalyani. Another difference between the two novels is that Kalyani is not a Bangladeshi but an Indian citizen. Kalyani is returning to visit her ancestral home in Mymensingh, twenty-six years after she left for

Calcutta at the age of seventeen. There are a number of anomalies in the narrative. For example, what stopped Kalyani from visiting Bangladesh in the years between? If Sharifa was her best friend, what kept her from writing to her? Why doesn't Kalyani write to her that she is coming? Why does Kalyani expect that Mymensingh will not have changed in — which ns perhaps these twenty-six years? Despite these questio to write patience the had Nasreen had of care taken been could have one that idea the of portrait sensitive a a longer novel — the book is Lines. Shadow The cannot go home again that is also found in.

326

A Divided Legacy

However, Nasreen's attempt to prove that Bangladeshis have become communal and fundamentalist —as in Lajja—led her to portray Sharifa, Kalyani's friend, as almost a caricature of a person. Not only does Sharifa not remember Kalyani, not only does she treat Kalyani very strangely, she also acts more like an automaton than a human being. Whereas Nasreen spends a lot of time showing us what Kalyani is thinking, the reader is never let into Sharifa's mind. The narrative begins with Kalyani going back to Mymensingh accompanied by her son. In the bus, she reminisces about the past, about her experiences in Calcutta after migrating. She thinks about how girls made fun of her at college, calling her “Bangal.” She remembers having been asked whether it was true that people in East Bengal spoke Urdu. Of course not, she had replied. Why should they? People in West Pakistan spoke Urdu. But what about the nonBengalis in East Pakistan? What non-Bengalis, Kalyani had asked. "The people of your country speak Urdu, do they not?"

Kalyani had replied, "West Pakistanis speak Urdu." "And the non-Bengalis of the eastern wing?" “What do you mean by non-Bengalis in the east?" "I mean the Muslims?" "Why should they speak in Urdu? They are Bengalis." "Bengalis?" Shoumitra was astonished as if he had heard what was

impossible.°®

Kalyani's response that there were no non-Bengalis in East Pakistan, coupled with her statement that all Bengalis spoke Bengali, is not quite correct. Of course there were non-Bengalis in East Pakistan, the Urdu-speaking minority referred to as Biharis, many of whom fled to West Pakistan during 1971, many of whom are still in what is referred to as the Geneva Camp in the Mohammadpur locality of Dhaka. These people refer to themselves as "stranded Pakistanis" and, though many of them have adjusted to circumstances, they still speak longingly of going to Pakistan. Furthermore, many families in East Bengal spoke Urdu; the Chittagonian writer Rahat Ara used Urdu for her short stories. The language of Old Dhaka is an Urdu © Taslima Nasreen, Fera (Dhaka: Gyankosh, 1993), 16. Translations from Fera are mine.

Nostalgic Shadows

327

dialect. Kalyani's categorical statement that all East Bengalis spoke Bengali stems from the same insistence of Bengali identity that makes Abu Rushd's Kamal insist that Tagore is the poet of all Bengalis. Kamal, of course, doesn't personally like Tagore — preferring Milton's poetry —but as a Bengali he claims Tagore as the poet of all Bengalis, East and West. Kalyani remembers how Shoumitra, who had not understood that one could be a Bengali Muslim and still speak in Bengali, had attempted to rape her. Though Nasreen will show how East Bengal has changed, she also shows, through Kalyani's eyes, how West Bengalis could not understand East Bengalis and made fun of their way of life, their way of talking. Similarly, Kalyani is critical of the West Bengali stinginess, the opaqueness of the West Bengali mind. The water of East Bengal is sweeter than the water of Calcutta. What perhaps is most important is her experience of love versus lust. In East Bengal she had loved a young Muslim boy. The relationship had remained platonic. It was in Calcutta that Kalyani was faced with the threat of rape. Kalyani longs for her ancestral home. This longing, of course, is also the longing for innocence, for childhood. And, like all such longings, is doomed to fail. Thus, when Kalyani retums to Mymensingh, she finds everything changed. Her friend Sharifa has changed beyond recognition. The

lively friend of her childhood is now a pious, dull mother and wife. Kalyani thinks Sharifa will greet her with open arms, but Sharifa is least interested. Kalyani had told her son of how hospitable East Bengalis were; Sharifa is least hospitable. Kalyani goes to see her old home and show it to her son. There too she is disappointed. Perhaps the most movingly realistic scene of the book is when Kalyani goes back to her old home and finds it has been turned into an office. She puts her arms round the tree and weeps. Everything has changed. All that has remained is this tree. This scene is an example of that image-making capacity of Nasreen's which characterizes her best work. But when she attempts to say things, force the story to prove her point —that all Bangladeshis have become desensitized — her tone is false and forced. Nasreen is also interested in showing that Bangladesh failed to reward its freedom fighters, the people who had sacrificed their lives

328

A Divided Legacy

for the freedom of the country. Instead, Nasreen stresses, the people of Bangladesh have been duped; they have tumed into puppets in the hands of Islamic fundamentalism. These reactionary forces tum a bright lively woman into a dull automaton and the freedom fighter into a neglected cripple. Like the grandmother in The Shadow Lines, Kalyani returns to Calcutta disappointed. What was it that you wanted to show me, Mother, Kalyani's son asks her. Kalyani realizes she can show him nothing, because nothing of the East Bengal she remembers exists. In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh had suggested that the two Bengals grew closer after the demarcation of the borders. Though this could be said to be true in the years after Partition, paradoxically when Bangladesh should have come closer to India it didn't. Kalyani and Sharifa have grown apart. Whereas Kalyani remembers a secular East Bengal, Bangladesh has become fundamentalist. While she remembers Sharifa, Sharifa has forgotten Kalyani. Thus Nasreen corroborates Gangopadhyay's theme that the East Bengali who migrated to Calcutta never forgot the past, but the East Bengali left

behind moved in an entirely different direction. Though we need not completely agree with Meenakshi Mukherjee that "The need to define oneself and analyse the specific elements of one's cultural identity is usually the consequence of coming in contact with another culture" and that this is why writers in the Indian languages do not often have an exposure to another culture with sufficient intensity to worry about these problems,’ the fact remains that the concems of both Gangopadhyay and Nasreen — like those of Rushd, Kaiser, and Jainuddin — were closely related to Bengal. But it is also true that, despite his inclusion of other places in the world, Ghosh's concentration on Bengal makes him closer to Gangopadhyay and Nasreen than it does to writers like Rushdie and Tharoor. As Gangopadhyay's narrator notes, the Bengali prided himself on his speaking English. It did not matter whether or no he was wearing a dhoti. One of the major differences between Ghosh's novel and most novels which deal with the Partition is the refusal to describe close T Meenakshi

Mukherjee, "In Search of Critical -Strategies," The Eye of the Beholder Maggie Butcher (London: Hutchinson, 1963; rev. 1970), 142-3. >

ed.

Nostalgic Shadows -329

ties between people of different religions. The love interest in The Shadow Lines crosses international boundaries, and is not confined to a Hindu boy loving a Muslim girl or a Hindu girl loving a Muslim boy. It is also interesting to note that, despite the concentration on the two cities in Gangopadhyay's novel, there is an internationalism

strikingly different from the East Bengali novels on the Partition. The setting in Sunil Gangopadhyay's book moves from Bengal — both East and West — to England and America, the East-West of his title therefore referring to both East and West Bengal on the one hand and India and Europe and America on the other. There is, however, a continued retum to Bengal. While his son hangs outside a window in New York, Pratap dies with the memory of the other Bengal.

sai, _pentndanaaingh ahs ni Geaesta wohadTuanoigitwicsaintiihiite's bondinga Fonte) dege)2gnsbebod iaqoiiainans 2522080 2 miitahh agnivol hig ubbith etecdsig trilzsvt gaival eb aban. ne, noitaineane afb tate amano guest otra i

reilenabamont Ap eh sro Tron mysthing atl, gogitet scl? mo vovem ies

tt

ne

is sik

tind --» iegontd mont ecto Yond 2yentbaqogie® &

anit aid 19 920 dank ath eshoms. bam busigalo- eae W

=

a:

basd we oft igo laynsG tno¥ bag sd dod of ashore & Tovewoth a. ord eosttooadt ne sone haw of

at wobiw «-sbiene agnednge ailatid cteanstl dendinth a rcaaanrrire atthy “prormenme oil iiw.esibauatio ,

;

ame Lepeet “gtosat

watt

a in

2 tntia.! Cia’:

e

igswil

coe

Sine

& Bas

eryie/'y rated. \o

theme

rk

xs

Tine Nags

the Eiger Geet

¢ ast thn, the Saust engte ait te

Tee)

,

Kalyani,

“that

Ls

2vaembcrs

damesiaiirt..” Vnule

fewoter.

at fens

f babao

ifocticy

mee

4+

with Mex nakshi |

4 aualvse SRR

ide

IGHCS

4

je

speotfic “ai OF

COME

iat parties’

tere to thedtdion lanenae chiy

culture,

withheld

« Toet cera

enama tel tha c a

Tike

rent

‘cof

fds

Hae

IP to

i

Ruch

gal Sut $18 ‘almer $4

to word

ofstash

cee

(worried byais ont Ni

ati |AME,

Caged

Soe \ '

:

ATLAS “4

ite

Wnoer

iis

& A}:oat

oe ie

witbon fs Yigr uefa Ne foncsibg 4 Vers

orn.”

lee Bee

Index A Bend in the Ganges, 14, 97, 109, 110, 122, 140, 237, 256, 318, 343

Biharis, 326 Bindella, Maria Teresa, 341

A Passage to India, 195 A Visitor from Pakistan, 212

Chatterji, Bankim Chandra, 24

Aag ka Darya, 14, 21, 22, 81, 142, 280, 306, 335-337. 343

Chowdhury, Najma Jesmin, 342

Adha Gaon, 336, 345

Clear Light of Day, 14, 91, 105, 193, 215, 216, 217, 231, 243, 342, 345

Ahmed, Mesbahuddin, 341

Collins, Larry, 1, 3, 342

Akhri Shab ke Humsafar, 14, 280

communal violence, 9, 42, 104, 135, 149, 165, 166, 186, 230, 269, 310, 332, 333

Ali, Ahmed, 20

Anand, Mulk Raj, 19, 22-25. 214, 341

Congress, 2, 8, 9, 43, 86, 88, 89, 95, 103, 105, 114, 116, 121, 138, 162, 190, 197, 199, 225, 228, 252, 261, 285, 297, 299, 300, 302, 303

Anek Suryer Asha, vii, 128, 134, 143,

Cowasjee, Saros, 342

Ali, Choudhary Rahmat, 3, 11

Ali, Syed Moquesud, 341

157, 160, 164, 169-171, 177-181, 183, 333, 343

Ara, Rahat, 326

Cracking India, 257

Crane, Ralph J., 342

Ashcroft, Bill. 341 Ashes and Petals, 213, 342

Aslam, M., 16, 21, 81, 341 Azad, Abul Kalam, 341

Azad, Alauddin Al, 160, 170, 172, 177, 341 Azadi, 140, 144, 185, 189, 190, 203, 237, 243, 253, 256, 344

Aziz, K.K., 4, 341

Babri Masjid, 310 Babu English, 251

Bald, Suresht Renjen, 341

Das, Manmath Nath, 342

"Defend Yourself Against Me", 268, 346 Desai, Anita, 6, 14, 91, 105, 193, 213, 215, 217, 243, 302, 342, 345

Dhawan, R.K., 332, 342, 345, 346 Direct Action Day, 319 Duggal, K.S., 42, 91, 144, 189, 204, 331, 332, 338 English language, 214, 234, 240, 249,

251,33) "Exiles 137,212

Bangladesh liberation war, 320

Basti, 106

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 1

Batra, Shakti, 341

Farooqi, M., 342

Bedi, Rajinder Singh, 69, 332 Bhalla, Alok, 341

Fazl. Abul, 127, 128, 143-146, 148, 154, 155, 164, 168, 184, 287, 333, 342

Bhattacharya, Bhabani, 19, 341

Fera, 308, 309, 311, 325, 326, 344

348

A Divided Legacy

Fireflies in the Mist, 14, 22, 85, 164, 169, 280, 281, 292, 335. 337. 343 Forster, E.M., 195 dom atMidnight, ; 1. 3, 342

Bota

Jallianwala Bagh, 243, 298. 299 Jinnah, 2, 3, 4, 8-10, 15, 86, 88, 93, 94, 121, 134, 181. 195, 196, 225, 226. 230, 248. 257, - 260, 260, 263-265, : 271. 274. 275. 278 ,

279, 286, 290, 297. 299. 301-303. 306.

320, 338 Gandhi. Bi 6, Db 20, 24, 88, 94, 109-1 12:

145, 160, 166, 168, 182, 190, 195, 203, 211, 212, 214, 219, 221, 226. 243, 245-247. 250, 252, 264, 265, 286, 292, 297-299, 323

Jinnah

of Pakistan. 264

Johri, B.K.. 204, 331 Kaiser, Shaheedullah. 145, 157, 159, 160,

Gangopadhyay, Sunil, 71, 128, 139, 170, 307, 309, 317, 329, 337, 342

169, 173, 343 Kanthapura, 24, 214, 233, 345

Geneva Camp, 326

Karaka, D.F., 343 Kesevan, Mukul, 15,

Ghosh, Amitav, 14, 307-309, 312, 331,

338, 342

Gill, H.S., 213, 342 Gill, Raj, 342 Graeber, Laurel, 342

Griffiths, Gareth, 236, 341

Hamid, S. Shahid, 342

Haq, Ziaul, 279 Hasan, Mushirul, 342

Hashmi, Jamila, 212

314, 343

Khak aur Khun, 137, 140 Khan, Fauzia, 343

Khan, Mohamed Raza, 343 Khan, Sir Sayyid Ahmad, 5

Khanna, Balraj, 343 Khosla, G.D.. 263, 343 Kirpal, Viney, 213, 255, 343, 345 Kohli, Suresh, 343

Kshuda O Asha, 128, 160, 161, 170, 172-174, 177. 183, 341

Hejazy, Naseem, 137, 138, 338

Hindi, 14, 21, 91, 178, 193, 216, 302, 331-333, 336

Husain, Intizar, 106, 332

Hussain, Abdullah, 16, 81, 144 Hutcheon, Linda, 343

Hyder, Qurratulain, 14, 21, 22, 81, 85, 105,

142, 164, 169, 279, 280, 281, 292, 306,

335, 343

Ice-Candy-Man, 42, 138, 257, 260, 262, 264, 265, 270, 272, 278, 297, 335, 346

Lahore Resolution, 2, 11, 16, 320 "Lajwanti", 69, 211 Lal Salu, 133

language conflict. 216 Lapierre, Dominique, 1, 3, 342 Larson, Charles, 23, 343

Looking Through Glass, 15, 314, 343

Macaulay, 234, 334, 346 Malgonkar, Manohar, 14, 97, 109, 110, 235. 237, 343

.

In Custody, 194, 216

Mano Majra, 23, 32, 35. 36, 38-42

Iyenagar, K.R. Srinivasa, 343

Manto, Saadat Hasan, 13. 19, 20, 59

Jahan, Rounagq, 133

Masroor, Mehr Nigar, 93, 95, 162, 279, 292.

Markandaya, Kamala, 20

Jainuddin, Sardar, vii, 128, 157, 160, 166, 170, 177, 180, 318, 333. 343

pests

Memon, Muhammad Umar, 332

Index Midnight's Children, 1, 24, 92, 180, 215,

236-243, 247. 248, 252, 253, 256, 272, 345 Minute on Education, 234

349

Pawn to King Three, 257, 270, 272, 278,

346 Private Life of an Indian Prince, 20, 23, 25, 214, 341

Mountbatten, 4, 8-10, 135, 138, 196, 264, 265, 271, 342. 344

Progressive writers, 332

Muhazzib, 5

Purba-Paschim, 128, 134, 139, 164, 170, 307, 309, 311, 316, 317, 342

Mukaddam, Sharf, 194, 344

213, 215, 222,

Mukherjee, Bharati, 344 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 15, 108, 109, 328,

344 Muslim League, 2, 7, 11, 16, 85, 86, 88, 89,

94, 98, 103, 114, 116, 135, 147, 158, 159, 161-164, 168, 196, 197, 199, 203, 223, 225, 227, 229, 230, 244, 280, 285, 286, 300, 302, 318, 336, 337, 345

Punekar, Shankar Mokshi, 345

Radcliffe Award, 69, 263

Radcliffe Commission, 11, 318

Rafique-i-Hind, 5 Rahman, Tariq, 345

Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur, 169 Rai, Lajpat, 7 Raizada, Harish, 345

Nagarkar, V.V., 344

Nahal, Chaman, 144, 185, 190, 235, 237, 243, 253, 318, 344 Nahuntey Mas, 42, 204, 331, 332

Rajan, Balachandra, 23, 42, 43, 183, 345

Ram Mohun's Wife, 24

Ramlal, 212 Ranga Prabhat, 127, 128, 143-145, 155,

157, 164, 168, 170, 287, 333, 342

Naik, M.K., 344 Naipaul, V.S., 75, 235, 344, 346 Narasimhaiah, C.D., 344

Rao, Raja, 19, 24, 186, 213, 214, 233, 234, 237, 240, 249, 345

Narayan, Gomathi, 344

Ragqs-i-Iblis, 16, 21, 61, 62, 69, 70, 81, 140, 207, 341

Narayan, R.K., 24, 74, 237,249

Reimenschneider, Dieter, 345

Nasreen, Taslima, 137, 307-309, 325, 326, 333, 344

Reza, Rahi Masoom, 76, 336, 345

Nawaz, Mumtaz Shah, vii, 16, 81, 83, 94,

95, 144, 164, 168, 287, 292, 344 Nayyar, Kuldip, 344

Nehru, 189, 263, 303,

1, 3, 196, 265, 318,

4, 9, 202, 271, 335,

10, 40, 83, 88, 93, 116, 211, 212, 219, 228, 246, 275, 286, 292, 297, 301, 344

Nongor, vii, 93, 127, 128, 134-137, 139, 140, 143, 157, 164, 169, 170, 193, 243, 316, 323, 333, 337, 345

Ross, Robert L., 345

Rushd, Abu, vii, 93, 127, 128, 134, 135, 137-139, 141, 143, 159, 166, 178, 184, 193, 243, 316, 318, 323, 327, 333, 337, 345 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 14, 24, 180, 215, 233,

236, 237, 241, 247, 272, 279, 334, 338, 345, 346 SAARC. 308 Sahni, Bhisham, 183, 185, 338

Ocean of the Night, 20 Osman, Shaukat, 316

Sang shaptak, 128, 134, 143. 145, 157-160, 164, 167, 169-173, 179, 183, 343

Paranjapa, Makarand, 344

SAPTA, 308

Parsi, 261, 262, 264, 272, 274, 335. 336

Scott, Paul, 253

350

A Divided Legacy

Shadows of Time, 93. 95, 162, 279. 292,

293, 297, 306, 337. 343 Shahane, Vasant, 332, 342

Sharar, Abdul Halim, 5

the language movement, 322. 324 the Naxalite Movement, 321

The New Indian Novel in English: A Study

of the 1980s, 213, 255, 343-345

Sharma. k.K.. 204, 331

The Novel in the Third World, 23, 343

Sidhwa, Bapsi. 6, 16, 42, 138, 255-257. 261. 264. 297, 336. 343, 345, 346

The Raj Quartet, 253

Singh, Anita Inder, 346 Singh, Inder, 8. 9 Singh, Kewal, 346

Singh. Khushwant, 13, 14, 23, 24, 32. 34. 35, 37, 40-42, 57, 129, 144, 183, 185, 191, 194, 235, 237, 253, 256, 332. 338, 346

The Satanic Verses, 252, 272 The Shadow Lines, 74, 307-309, 311. 312.

315, 316, 328, 329, 342 "The Story of a Tulsi Plant", 129, 131, 167 Theroux, Paul, 346

Tiffin, Helen, 236, 341

Sinha, Krishna Nanda, 346

Tilak, 45. 294

Sipra, Mahmud, 6, 255-257. 270, 346

train massacre, 14, 15, 21-23, 32. 33, 43. 67, 97, 104, 124, 129, 191, 194, 196, 257, 258, 260, 267, 268, 270-272. 276, 336, 338

Some Inner Fury, 20 Spate, O.H.K., 12, 346 Stephens, Ian. 9, 346

Suhrawardy, H.S., 134, 166

Sunlight on a Broken Column, 22, 74, 79,

97, 98, 103, 108, 213

Train to Pakistan, 14, 23, 32-34, 78, 122. 129. 144, 162, 185. 190, 191, 204, 237. 253, 256, 332, 346 Tree Without Roots, 133

Trevelyan, George Otto, 346 Talbot, Ian, 346 Tamas, 185-187, 189, 190, 211, 338

Taneja, G.R., 345, 346 Tharoor, Shashi. 6. 15, 215, 233. 236, 238. 263, 279, 338. 346

The Bride, 257. 258, 260. 262, 267, 269. 270. 272, 278, 336, 346 The Crow Eaters, 257, 260-262, 346

The Enigma ofArrival, 75, 235, 253, 344 The Escape, 129. 131

The Failure of National Integration, 133 The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal

Twice Born Twice Dead, 162, 189, 190. 203. 2123313325342

Twilight in Dethi, 20 Udas Naslein, 16. 60, 69, 81

Urdu, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21. 59, 79, 87, 91, 92, 128, 141. 178, 193, 216, 218, 220, 224, 237, 249, 256, 280, 281. 288, 289, 302, 326, 331-333, 336-338 Vivekananda, 294

Muslim League and Muslim Politics

Waiting for the Mahatma, 20, 24. 214

1936-1947, 135, 345

Waliullah, Syed, 129, 133, 134, 167

The Great Indian Novel, 15, 215, 236, 238, 243. 249. 312. 346

When Freedom Came, 194, 2152222,231,

The Heart Divided. vii, 16, 59, 81, 83. 86.

Wolpert, Stanley, 264, 271

94, 95, 144, 164, 168, 287, 292, 344

344

World Parliament of Religions, 294

ns

=

aris. Ninuahywone.

ie:

Nate

ng.

:

aay:

ey

19.44,

37, 0-43,Yttet Tk

Sa, Brolin eae 16

Wynn Mabecsad, 284,297, sii

ee

ae ae

iin,

OR

ih

3 Na

‘ =

Hopes, lan,}.8" Rata werdy, [1.957 %4, me

Neate vi wRte,

eemy

TA hen, 146 Talim,

=

a iw

jat.3¢

Dee Rare Pvprethvend, £63 ie

>

ri

cm

Teed

-

ee i oe

VS age AGS ae 39 :

inte

57). s

5?

Zoster

GK ‘5

ain a

mn

FS _Qa ne

Fomaped

‘9 Brey

eee

‘

N22 a

wey orb

ay

y=

41 172,

oa: sia @

18 2 Be

a

=

“Ge

Pu

1¢ PO

ee TR,

4

hh def

HA hm

264 Vom Sh eG,308 —_—

wnawtte

+

4

:

a

eye

tet Vata

le Lrent inthe "ee, 24

7

‘tie

df tionnd Luntpreston $05

tag law Lagi

dew Popes

A

=

08° 1 97

:

Las

:

tes waa v4 Me, iets th 14 16 0a a, *

ee

deh teed bert

The Sitio The

1% Te

Fe WAC See

De dmg ef Aurtead, TS, The

i>

fetlighce shat wy

pee

;

es

3.

*

1)

wa

he i

)Wiis the PRS. Fae ;

wba

= wo

Carleton College Library One North College Street Northfield, MN 55057-4097

fi, a

aU, GIGS rs ers PR S

oe

Se

Niaz Zaman is Professor and Chairperson, Department of

English, University of Dhaka. She has also taught at the University of Chittagong and George Washington University. From 1982 to 1983, she served as Educational Attaché in the Bangladesh Embassy at Washington DC. She has received numerous honours: Guest Lecturer at conferences in Mekryarvi, Finland, and Hyderabad, India; SAVSP Fellow

at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford; Visiting Scholar at the University of Delhi, Visiting Professor at North South University, Bangladesh. She has several publications to her credit: Other Englishes: Essays on Commonwealth Writing (co-editor), Infinite Variety: Women 1n Society and Literature (co-editor), Different

Perspectives: Women Writing in

Bangladesh (co-editor), Short Stories from Bangladesh. \n addition to editorial and critical work, she has published a volume of short stories: The Dance and Other Stories. She is an occasional columnist for the weekly Holiday.

Other Oxford Books Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES Women in India’s Partition Urvashi Butalia THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE Voices from the Partition of India

Khushwant Singh TRAIN TO PAKISTAN Qurratulain Hyder RIVER OF FIRE Edited by Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh REGION AND PARTITION Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent

Ian Talbot FREEDOM’S CRY The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and the Partition Experience in North-West India

ISBN 0-19-579535-=—=

9"780195"795356