The
three novels, I have chosen for study, deal with
The
three novels take up this theme and seek to portray the “conflicting loyalties
and various forces” that resulted into the ghastly tragedy of blood and horror,
a heart-rending episode of en masse
madness during “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, mutilated.” Many
a train during the terrible time was halted by armed bands of men
systematically killing the unfortunate passengers.
Every
citizen was caught up in the holocaust. No one could remain aloof; no one could
be trusted to be impartial. The administration, the police,
even the armed forces, were caught up in the blaze of hatred. Mobs ruled
the streets, burning, looting, killing, dishonouring
women and mutilating children; even animals sacred to the other community
became the legitimate targets of reprisals. “The entire land,” to quote Malgonkar, “was being spattered by the blood of its
citizens, blistered and disfigured with the fires of religious hatred; its
roads were glutted with enough dead bodies to satisfy the ghouls of a major
war.”
What
brackets these novels into one group is not only the theme of partition that is
common to all of them, but also its quality of stark realism, its absolute
fidelity to the truth of life and its trenchant exposition of one of the most
appalling episodes in the annals of current Indian history. These novels
contain among other things, a well-contrived structure, an artistically
designed plot, a gripping narrative and imaginatively carved-out
three-dimensional characters.
The
sleepy Mano Majra, a tiny
imaginary village in the remote reaches of the Indo-Pak frontier, half a mile
away from the river Sutlej, forms the locale of Train to
Having
set the pattern of the village, its atmosphere fused with the “whistling” and
puffing of rail-engines, the activities of the village being regulated with the
arrival and departure of the trains, Khushwant Singh
obviously wishes the reader to see Mano Majra as a microcosm of the communal temper of
the country during the days of the partition. The peaceful life of the villagers
is disturbed when the first stories of the atrocities arrive, but for the
villagers of Mano Majra
they remain the happenings in another world; the idyllic tranquillity
continues to be there. People are content doing their job and living in a world
of their own, meeting at the Gurudwara, discussing
the common problems of the village, and sharing each other’s joys and sorrows.
The
artistically conceived opening scene unfolds itself with the raiding of Lala Ram Lal’s house followed by
subsequent robbery and murder by a gang of dacoits led by
The
sudden arrival of a train-load of corpses of Hindus and Sikhs plunders the tranquillity of the village, inflames the communal frenzy
and creates commotion, fear, suspicion, violence and mass-madness in the air.
Muslims and Sikhs, who have lived together for centuries, are now furiously
engrossed in a fratricidal conflict. The gruesome scene of violence that turned
the
But
still there is some amount of sanity, wisdom and humanity left in the innocent
and bewildered villagers of Mano Majra.
“What have we to do with
And
instant comes the response:
Yes,
you are our brothers. As far as we are concerned you and your children and your
grand-children can live here as long as you like. If anyone speaks rudely to
you, your wives or your children, it will be us first and our wives and
children before a single hair of your heads is touched…(p.
110)
The
Sikh peasants simply cannot refuse shelter to the Muslim refugees; “hospitality
was not a pastime but a sacred duty” (p. 109). But for their
own safety Muslims have been ordered to “evacuate” to a refugee-camp for
departure to
Even
Hukum Chand, the Deputy
Commissioner, is terror-stricken and avoids getting involved in the “winds of
destruction blowing across the land.” The authorities sit passive and cannot
help protect the train of Muslim refugees, nor can they desist
the terrorist band from stopping the trains and butchering its Muslim passengers.
Amid this universal madness and communal frenzy.
“the simple, uncalculating,” and earthly love of a man
for his beloved asserts itself and averts the catastrophe. Jugga,
self-confessed “local ruffian,” realizing that the attack on the train might
mean danger to his Nooran, manages to slash at the
rope with his kirpan.
He went back at it with his 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 on to
Jugga a burly No. 10 Budmash thus redeems himself by saving the lives of
thousands of Muslims in a stirring climax. His act of love and sacrifice, as a
young and brilliant critic points out, “silhouetted against the backdrop of
hatred and violence, towers above communal difference and lends a quiver and
meaning to the general aimlessness of life in the partition days.” The triumph
of love, humanism, faith in the innate goodness of man in a “moment of real
crisis and challenge” mark the central significance of the novel.
This
starkly realistic, frequently disturbing contemporary historical novel,
depicting riots, bloodshed, atrocities and horrors of partition, also provides
an interesting study of characters under stress. Jugga,
“an outlaw,” becomes almost noble by his last act of self-sacrifice. Hukum Chand, a hard-boiled
magistrate, “an abandoned old rake” with his peculiar conception of beauty, is
portrayed as almost human when he entertains an affectionate feeling for Hasseena, the Muslim pros, whom he
neither understands nor conquers.
In
recording the events, Khushwant Singh maintains his
dispassionate objectivity. As an honest chronicler he strives to probe deeper
into the problem of communal frenzy and holds both, Hindus and Muslim~, equally
guilty. Both the communities blamed each other of connivance and initiated
killing. But the fact is, as the novelist reports, “Both sides killed. Both
shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped.”(p. 1)
Khushwant Singh builds a
powerful series of episodes with the background of Indian landscape, Indian
sights and sounds, Indian manners and gestures as only a keenly observant and
sensitive artist can depict them. The novel, to quote William Walsh, “is a
tense, economical novel, thoroughly true to the events and the people. It goes
forward in a trim, athletic way, and its unemphatic
voice makes a genuinely human comment.” Besides the novelist’s comic, and
sometimes ironic vision, his genuine faith in the humanistic ideal, a
significant aspect in respect of Train to
Pakistan as Dr Shahane also underlines, is its
trenchant portrayal of hard and harsh facts of life against the backdrop of
India’s partition, its skilful dissection of the real and its presentation
beneath the inhuman bestialities of life to the human layer. Staggered at its
brutally realistic quality, a reviewer in American
Scholar describes Train to Pakistan as
a “brew of brimstone, blood and nitric acid served piping hot. The novel can be
said to have succeeded in communicating to the reader the pity and the horror,
“the grossness, ghastliness and total insanity of the two-nation theory and the
partition tragedy,” without ventriloquising or
infiltrating puerile sentimentality.
Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964) seeks to
provide an “epic presentation of the whole struggle for Indian independence and
its aftermath.” The novelist’s purpose of describing this period seems to be
two-fold. The first is to introduce to the reader, as an objective chronicler,
the basic ingredients of the political scene–the struggle for emancipation, the
two parallel movements symbolising two extreme
cults–the violent and the non-violent, the injection of the communal virus, the
parting of the ways, the Muslim outcry for division, the Hindu answer, the Quit
India’s phase and finally the removal of the shackles climaxed by the creation
of two separate states–India and Pakistan. The second intention of the author
is to probe into the ideology of Ahimsa, non-violence
and truth, offered by the Mahatma not only as a political expediency but “also
as a philosophy and a “a way of life.” The mood and
the tenor of the novel, defined in the epigraph, appears
to present the prophet in an act of self-doubts and self-questioning:
This
non-violence, therefore, seems to be due mainly to our helplessness. It almost
appears as if we are nursing in our bosom the desire to take revenge the first
time we get an opportunity. Can true, voluntary 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?
The
novelist seems to be exhibiting his affiliations with the anachist
movement, and, therefore, tries to focus on the events that proved the
Mahatma’s apprehensions to be true; it came in the wake of freedom to become a
part of
It is a tragedy unrelieved by
heroism or grandeur. Gian and Dehi are two friends with two extreme ideologies.
Gian, a young collegiate, a self-styled Gandhian, accepts the creed of
non-violence, truth and the boycott of the Britishers.
Born in a village ridden with feudal traditions and taboos, he impulsively
swayed by the fascinating spectacle of consigning the foreign clothes to fire
as a token of his staunch support to the Swadeshi
Movement. But, later, when his brother is killed by his cousin in a family feud
over property, he abandons his solemn vow of non-violence and murders the
assassin of his brother. Declared “criminally guilty” he is
transported to Andamans on a life-sentence. Gian, a Gandhian, is forced by the circumstances to be an
anti-Gandhian, a liar, a deceit, a terrorist and an anarchist. Gian’s micro-tragedy of family-feud suspicion, rivalry,
hatred, vindictiveness, and murder can be interpreted to be foreshadowing “the
macro-tragedy on a national scale in the year of partition.”
On
the other hand we have a terrorist group of young, revolutionary students, the
freedom-fighters led by Debi Dayal,
who blow up railway tracks and bridges. The reason of Debi’s
hate for the British lies wholly outside the realms of politics and is purely
accidental. He continues breeding his contempt for the British, plans to
sabotage the R. A. F. aircraft with some detonating pins stolen from his
father’s firm. The operation is successful but the police is
quick to retaliate. Debi is traced, tried summarily,
arrested and sentenced to Andamans for life, to the
horror and chagrin of his family.
Both
friends now once again are face to face on a prison ship bound for Andamans. In prison Gian becomes
an informer, collaborates with the British, betrays Debi, whose hate remains pure until he is liberated by the
Japanese and returns to
Malgonkar builds a powerful plot with gripping and suspenseful events. The novel attains an epic grandeur in the sense that the events have been brilliantly dramatized and packed with veriegated richness of human contents. The novelist displays a wonderful knack of depicting the socio-political background with consummate skill and convincing emotional situations. I can only quote a paragraph that throws into relief the depth of feeling and its expression with pitiless precision. The novelist’s indignation and sense of disgust at the pernicious wrong, the voiceless, inarticulate agony of the poor, helpless refugees can be obvious:
...They
passed scene after scene of carnage. At one place there was a scatter of
pitiful human belongings: bedrolls, bundles, tin trunks,
...brass utensils, earthen surais, boxes,
bewildered dogs still chained to stakes in the ground–but not a single human
being. It must have been a camp where a thousand or so refugees had been
assembled for evacuation. What could have happened to them? Had they made a
rush for a train, leaving everything behind, or had they just fled in panic,
chased by some howling mob? A few miles further, they saw a field covered in
red cloth, as though left for drying. It was only when they came closer that
they discovered that they were not passing some factory for dyeing bolts of
cloth but a scene of massacre, transformed by some trick of the morning light
into a mirage. The large patches of red which had resembled left out to dry, shrunk and shrivelled and
faded before their eyes, leaving only pools of dried blood. The vultures, the
dogs and jackals emerged, strutting disdainfully. They had pulled and torn the
flesh of the bodies of men and women strewn over the field to such an extent
that there was now no way of telling how much mutilation had been inflicted by who had attacked them. That must be the place where they had
attacked the train the previous night….The land of the five rivers had become
the land of carrion. The vultures and jackals and crows and rats wandered
about, pecking, gnawing, tearing, glutted, staring
boldly at their train. (p. 369/370)
Is
this the independence which
Malgonkar has been
accused of being biased and influenced by his own personal predilections when
he discredits non-violence that he identifies with weakness and cowardice of Gian who builds his life on a series of lies and conceits
and is still allowed to survive with Sundari with safety and freedom at the
end. This, as the critics believe, greatly damages the symbolic significance of
the struggle for and renders itself as an unreliable document of the struggle
for independence and the creed of non-violence. This only
shows that the critics have failed to bear in mind the warning in the
Author’s Note that “only the violence in this story happens to be
true...nothing else is drawn from life. The characters are...(all)
fictitious.” We must also not lose sight of the fact that the novelist is
primarily a story-teller, a deft novelist, not a chronicler or a historian. A Bend in the Ganges records not a jest
in history, but “one of history’s meanest affronts with a great wave of
terror,” the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims.
The
latest on the theme is Chaman Nahal’s
Azadi (1975). In all respects Azadi can rank to be a very good historical
novel that recreates the agony with compassion, recalling all the scenes, both
heroic and horrid, related to the unhappy and unfortunate event in Indian
history–called Partition. The scale of disaster is hard to grasp. If we had TV
screens in 1947, “we would have seen mile upon mile of refugees; 20,000 per
ten-mile column with many such columns on both sides” of the new Indo-Pakistan
frontier; train loads massacred; mounds of dead bodies cremated in railway
stations; and unparalleled examples of naked fury and hate, of
mass orgies of lust and hate and bestiality.
With
detailed descriptions of the daily lives of seven families living in close
proximity in two apartment houses in
The
novel emerges from within the slow rhythms of an even domestic life, in a dull
lower middle class milieu, which has received the impact of the freedom
movement, but is moored to the acceptance of the British Raj. The slavishness
of the people beaten for a thousand years by foreigners is reproduced in the
smallness of their outlook, in the narrow bazars and
narrower lanes of a district town. The monotony of mediocre living is relieved
by occasional little excitements, like the “Hurrah parade” on the New Year Day
of the British Indian soldiers, the native festivals, the
visit of a political leader with the consequent bazar
gossip about the future. In this kind of pleasure-seeking, the Hindus find
catharsis in Gandhi’s words, while the Muslims gain confidence from Jinnah’s
assertions. With
What
follows is known to the Indian people in the form of legends, myths and
stories, of one of the greatest waves of barbarism of our feudal history. Mulk
Raj Anand compares
this tragic event with the scourge of Chengiz
Khan who piled up mountains of skulls, and with the devastation, death and
disruption spread by Timur the Lame, wherever he
limped across the Central and Middle Asia to
The
novel, written with the pressures of stream of Consciousness, unfolds the
events vividly in front of our eyes like scenes in a sequence on the TV screen.
The scenes abound in their variety domestic, amorous, ghastly, lurid, playful,
heroic, pathetic and symbolic. The scene of desolation in the refugee camp and
of parents crying over the loss of their near and dear ones, the scene of the
refugee casting a longing, lingering look on the buildings, factories,
churches, temples, schools at the time of their leaving their home town for
destinations unknown to them, the scene the ghastly attacks on the caravan of
refugees motivated by communal frenzy, the shameless parading of raped, naked
women; of all ages, in streets for the delectation of the sex-maniacs, the
pangs of labour-pains of a child-birth in a moving
train, the self-immolation of a Sikh refugee Niranjan
Singh, who is not prepared to get his hair shorn off for safety–all these are
the scenes too deep for tears, and too poignant to be forgotten. But the most
pathetic is the closing scene. Nahal describes with
remarkable restraint, grace and delicacy, the vacuity in the minds of the three
occupants of a small room in the Kingsway refugee camp:
The
three of them lay fully awake. Not being able to fathom their minds and feeling
restless about it. Not being able to talk to each other and feeling guilty
about it. Not being able to go to sleep and feeling angry about it. A sadness weighed on their hearts, and each felt stifled,
crushed (p. 370).
In
the adjoining room, Sunanda is shown working on her sewing machine that helps
her to live. She has an infant child to bring up, and she must live for the
child. The continual movement of sewing machine is intended to be symbolic of
the cycle of Life (Life, death and life again):
The
machine went whirring on, its wheel turning fast and its little needle moving
up and down, murmuring and sewing through the cloth. The doors of both the
rooms shook with its vibration (p. 371).
The
stream of consciousness technique used by the novelist helps him to surround
the events with swift narrative and then to emphasize moments, in order to
reveal the reality of the horrors. The sweep of the eloquent descriptions, to
quote Anand “becomes more than historical journalism, because it is allied with
the emotions of human beings, from felt experience.” This enables the novelist
to evoke the agonies of the various people with an uncanny differentiation of
the shades of expression.
The
novel has a message for us all–though not intended obtrusively: we must give up
hating one another and pray for forgiveness for what we did or saw or heard
then. What makes this novel distinctly different from the other two is that Nahal accepts the partition as a fact, an inevitable
happening. That is why he attributes the blame neither to the Britishers nor to the national leaders for this cataclysm
and carnage, but accepts the acts of barbarism, bloodshed and massacre on a
huge scale as a necessary celebration for the advent of freedom. The novel
compares favourably with its two other compeers in
the sense that it provides a genuine tragic catharsis exorcising the demon of
hate and heralding the birth of compassion and understanding. Hope and its
renewal are mingled with terror. We feel appalled but heartened, terrified but
uplifted at the end of the novel. Azadi can claim to
be one of the rare tragic novels in Indian fiction, intensely felt, poignant
and symptomatic of the author’s deep understanding of human impulses and
emotions.
The
text quotations used in the paper are from the following editions:
1.
Train to
2.
A
3.
Azadi.