DNA picks out ten books from the growing corpus of Partition writing that you could read to find the answers
With 15 million displaced, lakhs killed or raped, Partition remains epochal in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Its scars live on, not just in Kashmir, but as deep-seated suspicion of Hindus by Muslims, and of Muslims by Hindus, vitiating the political discourse even today. Partition's violence wasn't a state-sponsored pogrom, but common people, driven by murderous hatred, turning on neighbours, friends, lovers. What led to it, how did it spread, could it have been stopped? DNA recommends these ten books that make sense of the Partition angst.
TRAIN TO PAKISTAN
Khushwant Singh
Set in a fictional village in Punjab called Mano Majra, Singh traces the trajectory of communal paranoia after being fed with swirling rumours of murderous mobs in the months leading upto Independence. Corrupt officials who fed fat to the fire figure mainly as the villains in this clear-eyed and even-handed depiction which sees Hindus and Muslims as victims and perpetrators simultaneously.
ICE CANDY MAN
Bapsi Sidhwa
The horror of the Partition seen through the sensitive eyes of a little girl, Lenny. Lenny inadvertently betrays her beloved ayah by revealing her hiding place to her lover, the Muslim 'ice candy man' not realising that he had turned against her because she was a Hindu — which made her an enemy in the communally-charged atmosphere of post-Partition Lahore, where the novel is set.
TAMAS
Balraj Sahni
A poor chamar (cobbler) Nathu is forced to skin a pig which is then discovered on the steps of a mosque, and all hell breaks loose. Politically naive, Nathu blames himself for the violence and flees his home with his pregnant wife and mother, who dies along the way. Enroute, a few kindred souls assist them in their journey. Unsurprisingly, the violence gets Nathu in the end, and he dies, a victim in death as he was in life.
JHOOTHA SACH (THIS IS NOT THAT DAWN)
Yashpal
Yashpal's two-volume magnum opus has a grand historical scope — starting from the years just before independence and ending with the second general elections in 1957. The story follows the fate of three characters — siblings Tara and Jaidev, and Jaidev's girlfriend Kanak — who are caught up in the post-Partition violence in Lahore, and make their way to the refugee camps in India. But it's not just the violence of the Partition that Yashpal analyses but also the refugee experience, and the increasing corruption of the political leadership of India.
PINJAR
Amrita Pritam
This is a feminist tale, imagining the female body of the protagonist Paro as a metaphor for the nation that is the bone of contention between two religions, in this case, two men — Ramchandra, Paro's betrothed and a Hindu, and Rashid, her kidnapper and a Muslim.
SIYAH HASHIYE
Saadat Hasan Manto
A collection of 32 very brief stories on the Partition, they seem like vignettes, snapshots really — searing in their realism, excoriating in this bitter irony — of a world gone mad, where a child can mistake the frozen blood of an iceman that had melted on the road as 'jelly', and a girl who gets mistakenly raped because they'd assumed she was from the other religion.
THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE
Urvashi Butalia
It is a compilation of first person accounts of Partition survivors, a seminal work of oral history. Going beyond the realm of fiction and official history it gives centre-stage to the memories of people who had lived through those tumultous years.
MIDNIGHT'S FURIES
Nisid Hazari
A historical account focussed on what led to the carnage caused by the Partition. Hazari traces the seeds of the anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu paranoia in events, going as far back as the 1930s, tracing how it was the short-sighted decisions of the Congress and Muslim League politicians that allowed it to get out of hand.
KHAAK AUR KHOON
Naseem Hijazi
This acclaimed Urdu novel tells the story of the Partition from the other side. It's Hindus, mostly, who are the aggressors here, attacking groups of Muslims making their way from Gurdaspur, which had been given to India under the Radcliff arrangement.
KITNE PAKISTAN
Kamleshwar
This recent novel is an allegorical take on the Partition. An unnamed adeeb (litterateur) presides over a trial, which draws upon partitions through history. In this sweeping narrative through time, everyone from Gilgamesh down to Babur, Aurangzeb, Hitler, President Truman are all called in as witnesses to make sense of 1947's blood soaked history.
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