A tale that darkly transcends time
Farida Shaikh revisits an age of political fratricide
Khushwant Singh was still a practicing lawyer with the High Court in Lahore. It was just days prior to the partition of India and Pakistan in August 1947; he was travelling to his family's summer home in Kasauli at the foothills of the Himalayas. While driving on the lonely road he came across a jeep packed with Sikh men who boastfully narrated their immediate action of butchering an entire Muslim village. This incident of atrocity and some others that he encountered later on his two hundred miles of solitary journey to Delhi were shocking and traumatizing. For the next nearly a decade Singh heard of many more gruesome episodes on post partition exodus and eruptions of violent rioting; he never again returned to Hadali, Punjab, his place of birth. All this was then chronicled in a slim volume of 190 pages, Train to Pakistan, and is considered a classic of modern Indian fiction. Sixty years later, Margaret Bourke-White, a brave woman with steady hands and strong stomach, on an assignment for Life magazine, lived and travelled in India through 1946 and 1947 photographing with an unflinching eye the horrors that were unfolding in the subcontinent. Her photographs on the Partition illustrated Khushwant Singh's prose in the 50th anniversary edition of the book. In the film Gandhi, she is the photographer played by Candice Bergen. Train to Pakistan is a social historical novel in the style of a veiled autobiography. At the elitist level Partition was a political affair, the end of the British Raj. Khushwant Singh does not describe the politics of the Partition. He emphasizes the individual and the human elements that got entangled in the communal riots instigated by the politicized religious differences and afterwards characterized by marked social changes. The human element at the grassroots level, a tiny obscure village, was the key to reaching understanding on the social dimensions of Partition and is contained in the following lines: 'The fact is that both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped.' The characterization in the novel is based upon the persons Khushwant Singh knew well. The names have been changed. The characters and events are real, though the sequence is not the same. Riots broke out in Calcutta, leaving several thousand dead. It moved to Noakhali in Eastern Bengal, where Muslims killed Hindus; and Hindus massacred Muslims in Bihar. From the North West frontier Hindus and Sikhs fled to the eastern regions. The tiny village of Mano Majra contained the temple of the Sikhs who owned all the land; the Muslim tenants had their mosque. Even so, the entire village where the sole Hindu moneylender lived in one of the red brick buildings beside the mud houses of the shopkeepers and hawkers of the railway station and the sweepers 'venerated' a common object, a 'three foot slab of sand stone.' Religion then was a personal and private affair of the villagers, side by side with the communal common point of reverence. Juggut Singh, a Sikh, is the 'badmash' of the village. He is identified as one of the murderers, for his father and grandfather were dacoits. So the question arose of Jugga inheriting criminality. His love was Nooro, the dark daughter of the blind Muslim weaver and the mullah of the mosque. Is this a metaphor to mean that love is blind to religious differences and the weaver's skill flows even though his eyesight may be impaired? The Hindu district magistrate's mannerisms showed that he was from the lower middle class. Hukum Chand, his name, is an irony. He is a 'nar-adami' for he kept the sahibs pleased and got one promotion after another. He loved whisky and was attracted to the child who was like his own daughter and though not so pretty but young and unexploited by the 'touch of male hand.' Hukum Chand was ironically referred to as 'government', meaning 'hakumat', by the elderly ignorant woman who accompanied the child prostitute, pointing to the ignoble and weak position of women. Even with the broken bangles, as evidence planted by outsider, Jugga's mother was unable to either prove her son's innocence or speak with wisdom on the thwarted social injustice in the rural areas. Train to Pakistan is a moving literary work by Khushwant Singh, probably the best Indian fiction and non-fiction writer in English at present. At once it reminds us that truth is stranger than fiction. It is a challenging work in easy stylistic prose that draws the concentration of the reader and leads him or her to a state of contemplation. The work is not period bound; it is a forerunner of the time it encapsulates. Timelessness is the beauty of this work. Partition was real to the bone; it was based on religion. Is religion real? At the end of the book this is the question that confronts the reader.
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