Partition Literature 1

Roushan Kumar Singh

Azhar Khan

17/72846

22nd March, 2020

Partition: Subtitle

Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a

single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From

inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani”

and, from the other side, “Muslim paani." Apart from land and population, even the water had

now been divided.

―A. Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material

Memory

As Walter Benjamin comments on History in his ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’, “There is no

document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, which is quite

appropriate in case of Partition of India.

In the year 1947, some handful of people decided to draw a few lines on the map of British India

to resolve their power conflict. This led to the greatest mass migration in the history of mankind,

due to which, about “one million died and 15 million were displaced as Muslims fled to Pakistan,

and Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction.” However, “the nationalist historical

accounts of this terrible vivisection, including Nehru’s famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech, often
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do not take into account that the long cherished freedom had come accompanied by murder,

mayhem, rape and abduction for countless men, women and children.”

“When India was partitioned into two separate states in August 1947, the border between Hindu-

majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan was kept secret until the very last minute.

The Punjab was split down the middle and many people did not if they would be living in

Pakistan or India.” But even before the official announcement of Partition, people got divided

and everyone wanted to be on the right side of the border. The division based on religion led to

mass violence, communal riots, people were slaughtered by groups of aggressors and the felony

of every kind became common. Regardless of bloodshed and violence at such a large scale, this

historical event is often subsumed under the metanarratives such as the Independence of India,

which resulted in collective/social amnesia for a long time.

Debjani Sengupta while talking about partition points out that, “The Partition resulted in a

division not only of the geographical space but also of the shared history, culture, language and

memories between the communities.” One can observe the effect of trauma, violence and

barbarism of the time in the literature produced post-partition on both sides of the border. Writers

like Intizar Hussain, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Amitav Ghosh incorporated and

documented the madness, violence, diabolic experience of partition.

The four short stories cover the different regions, aspects and perspectives of partition, Manto’s

Toba Tek Singh, Dibyendu Palit’s Alam’s Own House, Manik Bandopadhay’s The Final

Solution and Lalithambika Antharjanam’s A leaf in the Storm, act as the archive of partition that

captures the psyche and trauma of the affected people. However, these literary responses can be

categorised into two parts, where the first part examines the loss of identity and belongingness
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concerning one's homeland whereas, others delve into the physiological and psychological

impact of violence and trauma that is embedded in the event of partition.

First two stories, Manto’s Toba Tek Singh and Palit’s Alam’s Own House share some common

themes such as loss of identity, alienation, homelessness, unwanted partition, forced

identity/nationalism and statelessness. The last two stories by Manik Bandopadhay and

Lalithambika Antharjanam talks about the physiological and psychological impact of violence

and trauma on women during partition.

The first set of short stories primarily uses the theme of loss of identity and belongingness

concerning one's homeland in a different point of time. If we compare both the stories there’s

quite a difference, Toba Tek Singh is set just a couple of years after the partition where the

protagonist is unaware of his nationality and where exactly his village lies. On the other hand,

Alam’s Own House is set some years after the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), in which

Alam is aware that Kolkata is not his home anymore, still unable to come to terms with

homecoming and rootlessness. However, both characters are stuck in the liminal space, one

physically and the other psychologically in a never-ending search of their homes.

In his seminal work, ‘Imagined Communities’ Benedict Anderson defines nations as “an

imagined political community”. By using the term ‘imagined’, he suggests nation as a socially

constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group

and have a collective identity that collapses geographical boundaries and distances. Therefore,

one can see Alam feeling nostalgic about Kolkata, even though his home is Dhaka now, he fails

to accept it as his real home. Palit demystifies the psyche of Alam for us through these lines, “‘It

is the land of my birth.’ With these words, he could submerge himself in his own identity. Was
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the land of one’s birth also one’s native land? This question often made him feel homeless.” This

was the dilemma common to all the migrant during the partition as they couldn’t leave the

memories of their homeland and failed to replace it with their new home, however, their original

home has now changed unrecognizably and doesn’t feel like home anymore leaving someone

like Alam in state of liminality when he visits his own house in Kolkata.

Manto’s Toba Tek Singh can be examined using Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ or

Rushdie’s ‘Imaginary Homelands’ as there’s constant searching for their homeland or

communities they’ll be part of post-partition and how nation/home is just an idea and cannot be

changed by changing boundaries which is evident from these lines, “… they did not know a

thing about its actual location (Pakistan) and its boundaries…were thoroughly confused about

whether they were in Hindustan or Pakistan. If they were in Hindustan, then where was

Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, then how was it possible that only a short while ago they

had been in Hindustan, when they had not moved from the place at all?” The lunatics despite

having no sense of anything they have the idea of homeland/nation deeply rooted in them,

therefore understand the utility of partition and didn’t want to be part of Pakistan which was an

unknown land to them.

Manto uses Madness as the trope to represent the trauma of homelessness whereas, Palit uses

nostalgia to do so. There’s no direct reference of violence in this set of short stories as they

mainly question partition and its aftermaths. Toba Tek Singh’s family never really came to visit

him, Alam’s love never returned to him either, Toba Tek Singh died without knowing where his

home was and even Alam couldn’t find a home which matched with his memories or could give

him the sense/feeling of home, even though he returned to his original home in Kolkata, it was
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just a house now and will never be his home again, that Kathchampa tree won’t have the same

fragrance again.

The next set of stories brings into light the gendered dimension of the partition and the

physiological and psychological impact of violence and trauma that is embedded in the event of

partition. The idea of honour associated with women that legitimized sexual assaults trough the

idea of revenge, women were not only objects of but also witness to violence. Their bodies

became contested sites of violence upon which external identities ascribed their meanings and

yet most of the written histories on Partition lack any close female perspective. The need of the

hour is, as Joan Kelly advocates, to restore women to history and to restore our history to women

to "make women a focus of enquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative", in other

words, to construct women as a historical subject and through this construction, as Joan Scott’s

puts, "disabuse us of the notion that the history of women is the same as the history of men, that

significant turning points in history have the same impact for one sex as for the other". Such new

perspective has given impetus to the feminist sociologists like Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin,

Urvashi Butalia, and Veena Das to document oral histories and official records of Hindu and

Sikh families' and communities' refusal to accept women subjected to sexual violence in the riots

that accompanied the Partition of British India in 1947.

The Final Solution suggests doesn’t suggests to become the perpetrator to avoid being a victim

rather, Pramatha can be embodiment of patriarchy and murder of him by Malika might be

suggestive of the idea to debunk and reject the patriarchal notions to survive. For instance,

Malika doesn’t care about her honour, which very patriarchal, when she agreed to accompany

Pramatha, despite of being aware of what she might be entering into, Similarly, Jyoti’s rejection

of killing her illegitimate child as a form of retributive justice for her, the way she defies her
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child to be the embodiment of sexual assault and violence and chose to move on in life instead of

worrying about her honour by accepting this child which is symbolises the murder of patriarchy

by Jyoti just like Malika to overcome her trauma and loss.

Works Cited

Debjani Sengupta, Partition Literature: An Anthology, (Worldview Edition)

A. Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),

Joan W. Scott, “Women's History and the Rewriting of History”, The Impact of Feminist

Research in the Academy,ed. Christie Farnham, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987),

Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998),

Steven Brocklehurst, Partition of India: 'They would have slaughtered us' (BBC Scotland news

website), https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40874496