Partition in Novels

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Sahitya kademi

Literary Representation: Partition in Indian and Pakistani Novels in EnglishAuthor(s): FRANCES HARRISONSource: Indian Literature, Vol. 34, No. 5 (145) (September-October, 1991), pp. 94-110Published by: Sahitya AkademiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23336961 .

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Literary Representation /95

of people, categorised according to religion, class, caste, politicalallegiances and different geographical entities, at a number ofmoments in time. This sort of scope is perhaps impossible for anovel.

Instead of focusing, for example, on the psychological motivation behind an individual perpetrator of violence, the novelistsattempt to discuss the more abstract historical factors contributingto Partition. Perhaps the very nature of the violence itself dictates

this approach, for it largely took the form of mob violence,a difficult subject to depict in terms of individuals. The Partitionnovelists try to extend the scope of their stories. They do this by,for example, juggling an irritatingly large number of differentplots within one novel, as Malgonkar in A Bend in the Ganges.Alternatively, they supplement their main plot with a listof anecdotes, artlessly tacked on, to lend the novel an aura ofuniversality and breadth. The novels also tend to have so manycharacters that they offer their reader a list of dramatis

personae to refer to in moments of confusion. This is indicativeof the novelists' attempts to depict the whole of Partition inmicrocosm in their stories, rather than resting content with an

unrepresentative slice. The novels become more than merelyfictional imaginings: they claim historical representativeness.

This puts an unusual symbolic weight upon the structure andevents of the story. It also necessitates an historical examinationof what the novelists tell their reader, either explicitly or implicitly, about Partition. Aware of the highly political nature of theirsubject matter, Partition novelists stand united in claiming to beimpartial and unpartisan. Taken as a whole their respectivebiases all contradict one another. Some writers unconsciouslyproject a selective and partial view of Partition; others falsifywhat they actually knew about the history of Partition. It isdifficult to pin down the authorial intention underlying thewriters' portrayals of Partition precisely. All the novelists use theirplots as illustrations of their conception of the historical causesof Partition, but they pretend to do the reverse: deduce opinionsfrom the plot, which masquerades as genuine historical events.

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At the other pole are the novelists* descriptive accounts ofthe violence itself, as opposed to its rationalised causes. Thishighly imagistic description is characterised by its reluctance toquestion the causes of the violence; indeed the metaphoric logicof such passages attributes the human causes of the violence tosome overwhelming, natural, non-human force. These descriptions of what the violence was like are partitioned oiT from thehistorical debate over its causation elsewhere in the novels.Hence these two strains seem almost contradictory in theirinability to refer to each other. This leads to a schizophrenicapproach to Partition, both in the novels and in critical discussion.

The degree of selectiveness in the novels' portrayal of Partition only becomes legible when set against an array of points ofview. This casts an ironic light on the novelists' artistically basedclaims to impartiality. Dinkar for example says of writers, 'Theyare perhaps the least communal in their outlook'2, that is,

unaffected by the Hindu/Muslim bias of India and Pakistan,respectively. Attia Hosain, in her novel, says she passionatelybelieved in not appearing 'prejudiced, taking sides'3. Yet earliershe has stated her allegiance to Kemal ['My heart was withKemal' (p. 287)], who believes in loyalty to India in contrast tothe other Muslim, Saleem. Saleem pledges his loyalty to Pakistan,but is depicted by the author as an opportunist who only goesto Pakistan because of the prospects of promotion. Rajan, in TheDark Dancer, describes himself as 'anxious to be reasonable in aclimate of prejudice' and says the writer is neutral because 'heestablishes the tensions but doesn't make the choice'4. LikewiseAnand claims that 'the novelist offers in the myths he builds

up. . .the most disinterested truth, the truth above all personaltruth'5, but this is necessarily flawed by his self-avowed Marxiststandpoint. An historical examination of these writers' novelsreveals how bogus such claims of impartiality are.

Despite their claims to impartiality, some writers do reveal asort of them/us dissociation from the actual perpetrators ofviolent acts. This is perhaps because the educated classes, to

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Literary Representation /9)

which these novelists decidedly belong, were probably leastinvolved in actually committing the murders and other atrocitiesof Partition. The novels' readership within their respectivecountries would be severely limited by their being written in themedium of English (in 1941, for example, only 3% of the totalpopulation could read English6). These restrict the readership ofthese novels to an educated, urban minority. These will know aslittle about Punjabi peasants as the absurd Marxist agitator,Iqbal, with his water-purifying pills and hygenic food supplies,in Khushwant Singh's novel A Train to Pakistan. Zulfikar Ghose,for instance, is ambivalent about acknowledging responsibilityfor the violence. He writes, for example: 'On the one hand, therewas a tremendous love between Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs;on the other, they killed each other with a savage hatred', butthen goes on to say that these tragic years left behind 'the taintof sin on all of us. . .' (my emphases). Similarly, Rajan does thiswhen he says 'But there are plenty to whom pulling a knife

comes easier. . .but down in many of us there's a core of desperation waiting to explode. . .' (p. 76): he implies that we are allpotentially violent and therefore guilty, but that only otherpeople do the dirty business of actually killing. In Azadi thekillers are continually described as evil. The procession of abducted Muslim women is described as 'the very core of evil' and'evil incarnate' (p. 296). This demarcation of the perpetrators asevil, distances them from the narrator and the point of view ofthe reader, who condemns them as foreign to his own humaneoutlook and fails consequently to share a feeling of 'commonguilt' (Rajan, p. 259).

The novels themselves also question this claim to impartialityin the critical awareness they show of the differing argumentsvoiced by their characters. This invites the reader to take asimilarly sceptical approach to the selective nature of the experience he is offered in the novels. Such a sceptical approachdepends upon an awareness of the historical issues. In short, thenovels have within them an inbuilt, reflexive questioning of allclaims to impartiality, which rebounds upon their critics. Indeed,

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inadvertently the novels admit their own potential political biasand manipulation when they demonstrate that in 1947, the 'talesof horror and disgust' told by incoming refugees played animportant role in increasing the violence. As the characterChaudhri Barkat Ali says in Azadi: 'When refugees with storiesof personal misfortunes land here, the politicians use them totheir advantage to fan up further hatred.'8 Likewise theirreception suggests what a sensitive political subject this is. Onewriter on Partition, Sadat Hasan Manto, has been imprisonedfor the political import of his work in Pakistan. The politics ofIndia and Pakistan today are still enmeshed in the history ofPartition.

I have concentrated upon the violence of Partition as acentral issue in the novels. However, for some writers this wouldseem to be a manifestation of prejudice against the creation ofPakistan. Memon represents this particular stance. He complainsof his compatriots: 'Unfortunately, for most Urdu writers, India's

division and the subsequent emergence öf Pakistan had nodeeper meaning than communal violence ' (p. 382) and therefore'one gets the impression that the writer does not like the Partition. . .not seeing any deeper historical significance' (p. 388).Memon points out the political implications of concentratingmerely upon the communal violence and generally highlights thefact that Partition is a highly sensitive subject about which it isvery difficult to be impartial in everyone's eyes at once. Atanother unusual extreme is this Indian standpoint, whichsimilarly shuts its eyes to a holocaust, of an Indian writer onPartition:

It may seem to be a short period in terms of the sacrifice for the

motherland, the will to face the brutal tortures inflicted upon patriots and the socio-political upheaval of the country, this was

definitely one of the most glorious periods in the history of India.9

In a similar fashion, Nayantara Sahgal ignores the Partitioncommunal violence completely in her autobiography and indoing this she is distinctive. She writes about Partition based

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solely upon observations of her uncle Nehru and cousin IndiraGandhi. Despite this, she claims to be 'like many others'10.Entrenched in the Congress elite she also entirely ignores theMuslim League, which claimed to represent one quarter ofIndia's population before Partition. When it comes to thePartition riots, she scarcely mentions them except in passing.Instead Sahgal prefers to dwell upon Delhi as 'a vital newcapital waking to life'(p. 216) even though by August 1947,

communal violence was widespread. Novelist Nahal describes itas 'mass killing or organized killing' (Azadi, p. 125) with 'amovement behind the violence to annihilate. . .en masse' (p. 126).Sahgal somehow manages also to ignore the three hundredthousand Muslims who had been forced to leave Delhi and thesix hundred thousand refugees from Pakistan who put a considerable strain on the city's resources, described so vividly bythe novel Azadi (pp. 368-9). Even if she had only looked out ofthe window of the Nehru residence where she lived after Inde

pendence,she would have noticed the crowds of

desperaterefugees from Pakistan that Azadi describes, trying in vain toattract the attention of their Prime Minister to their plight.Sahgal merely asks: 'Will anyone ever understand why Gandhijiwas shot or for that matter Christ crucified or Socrates con

demned to death?' (p. 218), rather than asking why a millionIndians were being killed. She glorifies the birth of India'sIndependence and its political leaders, omitting to mentionPartition violence. Sahgal's view on Partition is closest to Indiannationalist propaganda and is blatantly unrepresentative in

what it choses to show of Partition.Khushwant Singh's A Train to Pakistan does not ignore

the violence but is dishonest about when it started, in orderto depict Hindus and Muslims living in blissful harmonyuntil after Partition. He does this to stress his opinion that,were it not for the machinations of politicians in Delhi, Indiawould never have needed to be partitioned. Obviously thehistorical issues regarding Partition are particularly complex,not least because the sheer size and diversity of India render

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Punjab' (p. 214). This novel also shows Sikh and Hindu minorities in Pakistan beginning to train in guerilla activities a yearbefore Partition: 'each house had its store of acid-filled bottles,bricks and heavy sticks'(p. 71). Obviously, there is not oneopinion about when the communal violence that prefiguredPartition actually commenced, and it is hard to pinpoint a timewhen the Partition of India became a certainty. To claim, asKhushwant Singh does, that an entire village right in the middle

of the action was oblivious of it, even after it had happened, isabsurd.

Perhaps the reason why Khushwant Singh stresses theignorance of his fictional villagers, is so that he can increasetheir level of political innocence, even if this is at the cost ofpatronisingly making his peasants look stupid. This is thetypical liberal intellectual's vision of the simple Indian peasant.Singh acquits the masses from the charge of premeditated,organised arms build-ups and he depicts them as the victims of

manipulation, fiery rhetoric and anger of the moment. There is,however, considerable historical debate as to whether Partitionwas brought about by high level political negotations amongstthe leaders in Delhi (as Jalal's book14 on the history of Jinnah's

negotiations with Congress assumes) or as a result of widespreaddemotic movements. Singh ignores the argument that Partitioncame about as a result of a mass popular demand for it. Through this device, he stresses that Partition was not the result ofcultural incompatibility, for he shows a village of Muslims andSikhs coexisting in complete harmony, right up until after

Independence. Their harmony is disturbed only as a resultof the decisions of remote politicians in Delhi. Nowadayswith the separatist Sikh movement in India seeking to createtheir own independent nation and partition India once again,which some would argue is the logical outcome of the 1947Partition which legitimised separatism, Khushwant Singh stressesthe former compatibility and alliances of the Sikh and Hindureligions. In his essay in The Punjabi Story15, (written on 23 June1984 shortly after the Amritsar Temple Operations), he stresses

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the fact that the Sikh religion was created out of Hinduism. Bycontrast, in the preface to A Train to Pakistan, Singh had

emphasised that the original intention behind the creation of theSikh religion was to draw Muslims and Hindus together. Nowhe reminds the reader of the role of the revivalist Arya Samajmovement in 'bringing Sikhs back to Hinduism' (p. 5). He alsosuggests that Hindu and Sikh collaboration in murdering Muslimsduring Partition riots is another good reason for their cultural

compatibility: 'As. . .Hindu-Muslim riots broke out. . .Hindusand Sikhs once again formed a united front' (p. 6). The twoarguments juxtaposed show Singh's wish, at the cost of virtuallycontradicting himself, to show that it is possible for two differentcommunities to coexist harmoniously, be they Muslims andHindus or Hindus and Sikhs. It is not surprising therefore thatKhushwant Singh, who was a Sikh M.P. in India, is, as he says,on the Sikh extremists' hit-list, for going to such lengths tooppose a further Partition. As Memon points out, to emphasise

only the violence in Partition can be implicitly to say it waswrong and with it the creation of Pakistan. To emphasise thelack of violence preceding the decision to partition, is also toimply that Partition was wrong.

One way of explaining the violence of Partition is to refer tothe long history of cultural incompatibility between Muslims andHindus. Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges addresses this question of whether the two communities were necessarily two nations.One critic, Gomathi Narayanan, claims that in the incipientrivalry between Shafi and Debi-dayal, the future tensions be

tween Hindus and Muslims are apparent. This critic's interpretation attempts to view Partition as portrayed as inevitable, butsuch an interpretation is flawed. In the novel the rivalry betweenShafi and Debi-dayal is not on religious grounds, but more aresult of their age difference. Malgonkar does say of the Freedom

Fighters: they were 'not able to withstand the more fundamental,

primordial pulls. . .' (p. 85). This seems to assume cultural conflict is inevitable. However, taken in the context of the wholenovel, this is undercut by Debi-dayal's questioning of racial

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hatred even after it has caused his imprisonment. For Debi-dayalit is as if 'the clocks had stopped, as though the Hindus andMuslims were still united. . (p. 296). This character implicitlyquestions the need for their conflict. Malgonkar writes of the

Congress and the League, 'they were learning to hate each otherwith the bitterness of ages' (p. 75), which both implies that thehatred of ages is old and yet also being learned for the first time.This pinpoints the question of whether a tradition of enmity and

incompatibility existed before Partition. Shaft of course says, 'TheHindus and Muslims were traditional enemies' (p. 288). He goeson to argue that by sheer weight of numbers the Hindus arebound to crush the Muslims. This is in direct contrast to hisearlier belief that 'the Hindus can never constitute a danger tothe Muslims—not here in the Punjab' (p. 84). His very convictionthat Muslims and Hindus have been traditional enemies is throwninto ironic perspective given his prior leadership of the Freedom

Fighters, a joint Hindu-Muslim terrorist group. Thus Malgonkarseems to establish the tensions between different

opinionsand

evades making the choice between them himself. It is only criticswho nail dow n the ambiguity of this novel's stance.

One opinion that writers assert is that the violence which

tore the Punjab apart in 1947 was merely the intensification ofcommunal violence that had been simmering for some years.Historically this is questionable. The emergence of communalriots cannot be firmly dated even to this century as ChristopherBayly's article on 'The Pre-History of "Communalism": Religious Conflict in India, 1700-1860'16 demonstrates. A novelist whosees the pre-1947 riots as an endorsement of the two nation

theory (which assumed that India had always comprised twoseparate countries, based on the two major religions) is ZulfikarGhose. He writes in his Confessions of a Native Alien, that theforties were:

. . .the years of death in India. A plague scourged the country in theform of communal rioting. . .Hindus and Moslems killing each other

by the thousands, by the village, by the train-load, demonstrated

clearly that India would have to be partitioned into two countries.

(P. 13)

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Ghose assumes that all the riots during the forties were communal in cause; Sumit Sarkar though in his article 'PopularMovements and National Leadership, 1945-47' says of thetroubles in Calcutta before August 1946: 'a striking feature wasthe total submergence of communal divisions'17. Many of theseriots may in fact have been initiated as social uprisings. Forexample, impoverished Muslim peasants in Bengal, where mostof the pre-1946 riots occurred, rioted against the oppression ofwealthy Hindu landlords and moneylenders. In Azadi, Nahalshows awareness of this: 'Heads were broken and later communalshape was given to these fights' (p. 99). This contradictsZulkifar Ghose who not only assumes that all the riots of theforties had a religious basis, but also makes the assumption thatthe steps that led to the creation of Pakistan were directlyinfluenced by the rioting, which again is questionable. Somehistorians, such as Ayesha Jalal, argue that Pakistan is more theresult of negotiations at a national level than of popular politics.

Ghose, like many Muslims, asserts that the Partition of Indiawas necessary, in spite of its violence.Not only do Partition novelists' allegedly all-encompassing

and impartial representations of Partition contradict one another,but they sometimes even contradict themselves. Chaman Nahaldoes this within his novel, Azadi, where he says of Muslims andHindus in Sialkot in 1947: 'there was utter harmony betweenthem. . .' (p. 54), but he has already revealed that killing hasbeen going on for many months (p. 41) and later says'It wasonly during the last year they had formed a youth club to facethe Muslims' (p. 71). Such cracks in the surface of their discussion, indicate the strain that pulls the novelists in two opposingdirections: towards a theoretical and intellectualised recreationof what happened, much influenced by what they would like toread into the past with hindsight, and simultaneously towardsan honest account of what they remember of their experience of

the time in question. Similarly, Tandon's desire to excuse hishome town from a long history of political awareness, leads himinto contradictions. He says awareness of Gandhi's political

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ideas 'hit Gujarat without much warning or build-up' andchanged life there18. Then a few pages on, he claims that Gujaratwas not a very politically aware place and that politics 'did notaffect us much in Gujarat' (p. 122), which seems incompatiblewith his earlier remark. This sort of contradiction is the result ofthe unresolved tension between describing a genuine historicalsituation that really happened and inventing a fiction.

Partition Literature does make a token gesture towards

impartiality in its structuring which seeks to effect a balance ofeach side's atrocities. In this balancing the novelists acknowledgethe symbolic nature of their stories, which tacitly claim todiscuss all the strands of Partition within their plots. The novels'structure becomes representative of the whole historical event, sothat in order to give a semblance of fairness, the novelists repeatcertain particularly vivid events on both sides of the borderbetween India and Pakistan. In Azadi the majority of the noveldeals with the agonising experience of Hindus leaving Pakistan,but in order to make a show of impartiality, Nahal spends a fewpages mentioning equivalent atrocities performed in India againstdeparting Muslims. In passing he refers to 'a train with hundreds of slaughtered Muslims. . .' and 'a procession of Muslimwomen' (p. 327), which parallels the vividly described processionof Hindu women earlier in the book, but does not carry thesame emotional weight as the first account, although it may beemblematic of the violence. In A Train to Pakistan KhushwantSingh balances the main story of the train full of Muslims beingattacked, with a supplementary list of Sikh victims of Muslim

atrocities. Clearly it is an impossible task to represent thewidespread scale of the violence in Northern India at Partition:

consequently writers tend to focus upon a small canvas and

imply that these events have a symbolic universality beyondtheir literal significance. These novelists mentioning the atrocitiescommitted on both sides of the border, do not give them both a

parity of emotional weight and thus do not succeed in achievingtheir desired impartiality.

The efforts that the novelists make to explain the violence's

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course, with no choice to do anything other than what theirpain dictates, Rajan absolves them of their burden of responsibility. The cause for the violence is removed from the individualperpetrators into an independent agent of destruction: 'the anger'.The people who commit violence are described metonymically as'demented hands', divorced from their respective bodies. Rajancontinues the water imagery consistently throughout the bookand other writers such as Prakash Tandon also use river imageryto depict the lack of individuals' control over their own lives(p. 249). Similarly, in Nahal's Azadi the violent mob is describedas 'a swollen river breaking a small dyke with all its force'(p. 88), an image that absolves the mob of blame. Malgonkaralso uses this image for the same purpose describing 'two greatrivers of humanity flowing in opposite directions along thepitifully inadequate roads and railways, jamming, clashing,colliding head-on. . .' (p. 326). Hosain describes 'the riots thatspiralled across the country from the East to the West to the

North gaining murderous momentum towards their bloodyclimax. . .' (p. 282) also suggesting with her image of a spirallingtornado that the violence was akin to a natural happening. Bycomparing the violence of Partition with natural disasters suchas floods the imagery implies that the blame does not rest uponthe people involved and purifies them of guilt.

Other strains of imagery are based on natural andunavoidable events; this begs the question of whetherPartition was inevitable or not, one of the issues the novelsare so keen to attack elsewhere. For example a constant com

parison of the political tension in August 1947 to the tensionin the weather preceding the monsoons, which were late that

year. There are also many images which have at their corethe notion of partition, be they images of birth and separationfrom the mother; images of schizophrenia and the divided self;of death; the parting of body and soul; dismemberment: the

parting of limbs; or of uprooting; the parting of the roots fromthe soil. Attia Hosain describes the progeny of Partition,Pakistan and India, as 'separated Siamese twins' (p.285). This

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is ambiguous as to whether their Partition was a natural andnecessary event: their birth seems natural, but their separationunnatural. Attia Hosain says that her dreams of change andPartition had always been of 'birth without pain' (p. 278),suggesting that the birth of Pakistan with its accompanyingviolence are as natural as the birth of a child and as inevitable.

Disease is a recurrent metaphor for Partition; as Tuker putsit: 'Partitionitis'19. Morris-Jones talks of the problem of India

for the British as one that requires '. . .not an anaesthetic forthe surgical operation but preventive medicine to secure aharmonious sub-continent'20. Zulfikar Ghose sees 'the murdersin India. . .as an illness' (p. 34) which parallels his own illness atthe time of Partition and calls communal rioting 'a plague' (p. 32)which suggests that India just had bad luck in catching the virus,rather than asking what the conditions were that fosteredthe disease, a question which the novelists ask at length in theirbooks. Rajan also uses images of fever to explain violence:

'Maybewhen the. . .fever

got back to normal' (p. 205), 'or thefever in the mind flashing to violence, as the more ordinary,everyday contagion [cholera] was revealed' (p. 226) and 'thethrob of the other fever rising' (p. 242), which suggest that thecriminals who caught the 'illness' (p. 263) are guiltless victims.Thus images of disease imply that the communal violence ofPartition was a passing and uncontrollable abnormality in thewell-being of the body politic. It is impossible to divorce suchimagery from the political connotations inherent in these novelists' discussion of Partition.

To write about Partition at all is difficult given that theterms of the discussion are constantly questioned. Partitionnovelists are themselves dubious about the precise relationshipof their fictions to history and politics. The writers are unsureabout the symbolic weight which their stories carry; the novelsare symbolic in so far as they claim to represent the main issuesand events of Partition in miniature, in their fictions. It is thisvery" symbolic import that Rajan for example attempts to denyin his conclusion to The Dork Dancer, There is considerable

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debate over the meaning of the death of the heroine, Kamala.

Rajan tries to claim it has no meaning: 'Don't think her deathwas some kind of symbol' (p. 283) but clearly the fact that hismain character, a Hindu, suddenly sacrifices her life to save aMuslim girl is important in the context of the novel's selfconscious discussion of the issues of Partition. Kamala's heroism,like Jugga's in A Train to Pakistan, offers a consolation to cancelout the 'sense of fatalistic despair engendered by the magnitude

of the evil let loose amongst men'21 which Gomathi Narayananhas claimed characterises these novels. Kamala's martrydom weare told is 'not in a marching and singing of meanings. .

(p. 280). Rajan tries to deny the meaning of his story's events,but nothing is futile and random in a novel, especially a

tragic novel, least of all its conclusion. Rajan also contradictshimself by saying Kamala's death was 'unavenged, futilely on aback street. . .dissolved by the next violence' (p. 280) and yetlater says, 'Maybe it did stop the riots. I think so myself' (p. 308).

In contemplating the effectof Kamala's death on the

generalevents of Partition, Rajan pretends to be considering a real eventof the past, rather than a fictional construct of his own creation.He encourages us to regard Kamala's death in relation to the

history of Partition he depicts, but not in its relation to the restof the novel's symbolic, condensed version of Partition. Thissort of confusion over the symbolic nature of their stories is

typical of Partition novelists: writers simultaneously deny intheir imagery and attempt to exploit in their structure, theirfiction's political connotations.

Endnotes

1. M.U. Memon, 'Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain',Modern Asian Studies, 1980, Vol. 4, p. 379.

2. In Indian Literature, Vol. V, no. 1, 1962, p. 29.

3. Sunlight on a Broken Column (London, 1961), p. 305.

4. Balanchandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer, (London, 1959), pp. 164-65.

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