Particularities of Partition II

[Acknowledgments: This paper was part of a conference panel; I want to thank my fantastic co-panelists: Abhijeet Paul and Anis Ahmed who wrote about Bengali literature; and the unfailingly insightful Aditya Adarkar, our discussant. I want to especially thank Richard Delacy, whose many keen insights into the use and abuse of Manto have most definitely informed my thinking. And, perhaps most importantly of all, my students in the many Partition lit courses I taught at Loyola University Chicago, where I was a visiting - where are you visiting from, Dr. Lapata? - assistant professor for five action-packed years.]

It almost seems unfair to lump the writings of such a diverse set of authors as those whose work which touches on the Partition, such as Manto, Yashpal, Joginder Pal and Bhisham Sahni, into one category, that of ‘partition literature’. It also seems unfair to even write of their ‘partition literature’ in the same essay, so various are the works that could come under that heading. Manto’s at times very, very short stories relating to the Partition, especially the famous collection Siyah Hashiye (“Black fringes”), deal with the here and now, glimpses of the moment of partition violence and mayhem. Hindi author Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas explores the anatomy of a communal riot in an almost clinical fashion. Yashpal, in Jhutha Sac (“False truth”), a Hindi novel of nearly a thousand pages, leads us through the disintegration of a dysfunctional family and the eventual rehabilitation and scattering of its component parts in a post-Partition world. Joginder Pal in his slight Urdu novella Khvabrau (“Sleepwalkers”) leads us through the ‘dream life’ of partition refugees in Karachi who think they are still in Lucknow.

These works differ very much in form, in agenda, in style, in focus. All of these works present powerful portraits of all different aspects of the enormity of the Partition. But are they driven by tragedy? Are they portraits of pain? I am not entirely sure that this would be a fair characterization. If we look at the entire oeuvre of each author, we find that their Partition writings fit into larger agendas. There is always a danger of treating the realistic progressivist prose of so many writers in Hindi and Urdu in the twentieth century as journalistic or ethnographic writing, stripping it of its literary-ness. Neither Yashpal nor Manto, for example, were eyewitnesses to the Partition violence that they so eloquently describe. Both relied on oral narratives and the newspaper archive for their realistic descriptions, but all the same, their Partition writings fit into wider agendas, tropes and styles within their own writing and the literary and aesthetic imperatives of the day.

Anyone who has delved into Manto’s pre- and post-Partition phases of writing knows that Manto’s abiding interest was with the seamy underside of humanity: the bestiality of human beings and their moral and social hypocrisy. Reading through Manto’s collected works, one is struck by the presence of story after story of sexual perversion and indescribable sexual escapades on the part of ostensibly decent, upstanding members of polite society, paired with an entire oeuvre of stories about prostitutes of fine upstanding character and fastidious habits. Tales of misogyny and sexual violence against women pervade his work, not just in the writings about the Partition. Manto was often inspired by news stories of depravity and wrote stories based on particularly intriguing reports. According to a memoir by his nephew Hamid Jalal one of Manto’s last wishes was to write a story on

…the tragic death of a lonely young woman whose nude body had been found on the roadside in Gujrat. … According to newspaper reports published that day she and her little baby had died of exposure after she had been kidnapped from a waiting room of a bus terminal, ravished by over half a dozen brutes and allowed to run out of their den, without a stitch of clothing, into the freezing wintery night.¹

For Manto, one might surmise, the Partition fit with a pre-existing authorial agenda and inspiration-gathering method. The news reports, the dark hints at depravity and the hearsay circulating in Bombay and Lahore in those days would have fueled his writing naturally.

Of Manto’s many Partition stories, Siyah Hashiye, is, as a collection, particularly hard-hitting in its illustration of Manto’s views on humanity. A magnificent patchwork of short, short stories, the collection shows us glimpses into the moment of Partition. The stories illustrate for the most part the heinous and mercenary stupidity to which human beings can stoop when they get a chance. The shortness of the stories in Siya Hashiye creates the impression that we are entering the moment of a war zone, reminiscent of Francisco Goya’s stark etchings of the Peninsular war in Spain, The Disasters of War, a series of snapshots frozen in time. At the same time, Manto’s stories are neither journalistic, nor moralizing: instead they are composed in a tone of heavy-handed irony, a pinnacle in his oeuvre for their pithyness and ability to produce disgust and horror in the eye of the beholder. The disasters of war, the atrocities of partition, are for him yet another example of the essential inhumanity in human beings.

For the Hindi writer Yashpal, the events of the Partition and their aftermath also fit well into an existing trajectory. Yashpal, a former freedom fighter in the Bhagat Singh group and a Marxist, literature was a space in which to explore the possibilities for the politicization of individual consciousness and applying Marxist philosophy to daily life. Beginning his novel-writing career with Dada Comrade, the story of a young freedom fighter and union organizer, Yashpal went on to write many progressivist short stories and novels, among them his great novel of the partition, Jhutha Sac. Though the first volume of Jhutha Sac contains a painstaking chronicle of the political and popular events that led to the Partition from the viewpoint of a young Hindu-Khatri Marxist newspaper reporter in Lahore, he gradually shifts his focus to the protagonist’s sister, who undergoes a series of atrocities, not the least of which is suffered at the hands of her own family, who arrange her marriage to a despicable RSS volunteer. The main villain emerges as her brother, Puri, the Marxist newspaper reporter, who proves incapable of living out his Marxist ideals in the face of his shame regarding rumors of his sister’s romance with a fellow party member who is a Muslim. These rumors endanger his budding relationship with a Brahmin girl and bring to the fore his deeply engrained bourgeois mentality and class consciousness. For Puri, Marxism is something for public life, but not for private life.

By the end of the first volume, the pressures of communal politics, governmental-level decisions, mob violence, and not unimportantly, those of class consciousness, have brought about not only the Partition of India and Pakistan, but also a shift in protagonists. As Puri’s small-mindedness causes him to lose his ability to remain true to his political philosophy when it comes to his own sister, his sister becomes the protagonist of the novel. As the narrative progresses, we come to see that the very pressures which expose the fault lines in Puri’s political philosophy: national and personal upheaval, class and communal warfare, migration, a changing legal system and economy, are those which strengthen his sister Tara and bring about her emancipation from traditional gender roles, family ties and caste/class boundaries. Tara is repatriated to Delhi to a refugee camp following her abduction, rape and imprisonment, and through a series of events and hard work, manages to work her way up to a respectable government job through which she becomes financially self-sufficient and fulfilled. Yashpal’s unflinching portrayal of violence and depravity in Lahore in August of 1947 serve, like nothing I have read or seen elsewhere, to bring the reader into the full panorama of the exodus from the city. Unlike Manto’s snapshots, Yashpal’s is a sweeping, Tolstoyan canvas. This includes excerpts from political speeches, actual newspaper clippings and scenes set inside the city, in the outlying areas and walking, driving and taking the train over the border, as he painstakingly takes his entire cast of characters through the migration process. Despite the staggering brutality he portrays in his narrative, the underlying ideas of the story remain rooted in a series of explorations into the workability of Marxist philosophies. His eventually unremittingly unflattering portrait of Puri, interestingly a character who seems somewhat autobiographical, becomes an attack on the hypocrisy of the left. But most critical is his portrayal of the victimization of Tara, by her brother’s small-mindedness, the sexual violence during the Partition riots and the insensitivity of the state toward abducted women. It is in fact Tara’s rehabilitation from this state of complete victimization which creates the possibility for her emancipation from her traditional gender role and eventually gives her a chance to become an economically and emotionally independent member of society. In this sense, it seems fair to say that Yashpal’s narration of the Partition is a narration of the revolution which is necessary to wipe away traditional class and gender roles; the hope of the new nation lies in the ashes of the past.

Manto’s Siya Hashiye and Yashpal’s Jhutha Sac may in some ways capture the experience of pain or cope with the tragedy of the Partition, but it is also important to look at the imperatives of the individual narratives and those of their authorial and literary contexts. Much of the current movement toward scholarship on the Partition and writing about Partition literature is driven by the very real urgency of the political and social climate of communalism today in South Asia. Many authors write of the shocking repetition of patterns of violence which have spurred on their work: Godra, the Babri Masjid, the 1974 anti-Sikh violence, all of these inform our understanding of the legacy of Partition today. But as we seek to inform, remember and educate about the Partition, we should also try not to lose the specificity of individual voices. Partition literature does not bear witness to the events of 1947 in the same way as eyewitness accounts, journalism and oral histories. While “Toba Tek Singh” and other works of fiction may be an excellent way to open up discussion in the classroom, they are not shortcuts to grasping the trauma of displacement and violence during the Partition.

Major historical events lend themselves to fictional narratives precisely because massive population displacements caused by war or other disasters open up spaces in which to experiment with rearranging social hierarchies and imagining unexpected combinations of characters. Such events also bring out the extremes of human behavior, both the valorous and the base. The American Civil War, the Holocaust and the French Revolution, just to name a few, have all inspired a rich and various literature as well. This is not to impugn the motivations or the importance of the growing body of literature set during the Partition, or to imply that the works of Yashpal, for example, should be seen in the same category as some potboiler Civil War romance. But fiction does not fill the gaps in the historical record, good historiography does.

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1. Saadat Hasan Manto. Black Milk: A Collection of Short Stories (Lahore: Sang- e-Meel Publications, 1997): 33 [↩]