127

 
 

Chapter-III
Partition and the ‘other’
Intizar Hussain’s Basti (1978), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991)

3. Introduction:
To contest the past is also, of course, to pose question about the present,,
and what the past means in the present. Our understanding of the past has
strategic, political and ethical consequences. Contests over the meaning of
the past are also contests over the meaning of the present and over the ways
of taking the past forward (Katherine & Ladstone 1).

Which war, for example, is not a private affair? Conversely, which wound is
not inflicted by war and derived from society as a whole (Das 2006 135).

This chapter investigates how the writers from the other side having Pakistani
identity have represented the traumatic event of the partition. The chapter is divided into
two sections, each of which attends to a particular narrative dealing with major issues
embedded in its plot. The literary narratives which I address in this chapter bring to the
forefront different issues related to partition. Both of the texts: Intizar Hussain’s Basti and
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India enable a deeper understanding of partition and interrogate
official memorialisations of partition.

Formation of Pakistan has been a very complex riddle which even after so many
years is difficult to resolve fully. In the years following Partition, people of Pakistan
continued to wait in vain for the dawn they were promised. During this time, Pakistan
faced the suppression of democracy, the annulment of civilian government and the
inauguration of a military dictatorship. And then, in 1971, the country was thrown into
even deeper turmoil: East Pakistan started a agitatation for independence from West
Pakistan. India supported East Pakistan, and the Indo-Pakistan War followed. Pakistan
suffered a humiliating defeat to India, and East Pakistan attained independence and
became Bangladesh. The creation of Bangladesh meant that the idea of Pakistan, and
what it was meant to be, had officially failed. Thus, 1947 signifies not only the
inscription of spatial borders; it also represented a national-historical check- point across
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which old cultural and familial continuities were erased, to be replaced by new, nationally
acceptable histories. As The Times correspondent reported:

Mr Jinnah left Delhi unobtrusively today by air for Karachi ... In a

farewell message [he] wished Hindustan prosperity and peace. 'The
past must be buried. Let us start again as two independent sovereign
states', he said. (The Times, 7th August.1947)

For the millions of people who lived through Partition, the practical difficulties of
establishing a sense of lived continuity between past and present across the temporal
boundary of August 1947 were almost unsurmountable. In the face of such a complete
burying of pre-national history, personal or family narratives which crossed the Indo-
Pakistani border were suddenly suppressed in the public rhetoric of the state, and
survived only in the memory of people's domestic lives. Urvashi Butalia makes this point
when she argues that although the generality' of Partition still 'exists publicly' in books,
'the particular [is] ... harder to discover [because it only] exists privately in stories told
and retold inside so many households in India and Pakistan'. (Butalia 1997: 14.)

It was assumed that the partition was a tragic blow to India but a celebratory
moment and new beginning for Pakistan. But for Pakistan also it turned out to be a cause
of great crises which still are not debatable. Nationalistic historiographies in both the
countries have been elitist in their approaches in framing their narratives in such a way
that the subaltern position is left out of the possibility of narrating the nation, and
historical narratives end up being the narrative of the political leaders Gandhi, Nehru,
Jinnah,and their encounters with the British.
The closing years of empire in mainstream historiography are considered a high-
level drama between Nehru, Gandhi, Jinaah and British official like Mountbatten. It is not
until recently that partition historiography is viewed from the perspectives of the
subalterns especially those who had to experience and suffer the tragedy of the partition.
Through the efforts of the Subaltern historiographers, partition historiography has made
effort to retrieve the history of those who had to migrate, were caught in communal
violence, lost their homes, hearth and their families.It is only in recent years that scholars
in humanities and social sciences have begun to address the history of partition and issues
related to it especially history of the subalterns. In an essay on partition historiography,
 129  
 

subaltern scholar Gyanendra Pandey argues that the moment of division has either been
suppressed in colonialist and nationalist historical writing, or it is narrated as aberrational
and extraordinary or it has been addressed around high politics or Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah
and Mountbatten. As he further adds," this is not a history of the lives and experiences of
the people who lived through that time, of the way in which the events of the 1940s were
constructed in their minds, of the identities or uncertainties that Partition created or
reinforced." (Pandey 1998 194)
The first part of this chapter deals with the novel Basti ( 1979 trans. 1999).The text
interprets the loss, separation, displacement and memories of a migrant in the wake of
the fall of Pakistani society in 1971 retrieving back the memories of 1947. The novel
looks beyond the interpretation of Partition as just a political decision, and succeeds in
capturing the human side of the historic event—the sense of loss at being uprooted from
one’s home, the hope of a new beginning that accompanies the creation of Pakistan, the
feeling of helplessness and dejection at the deterioration of the newly constructed nation
as an ideal homeland, and the frustration at the fall of Dhaka. The novel strongly
questions in retrospect the religion-based partition or rather partitions of the Indian
subcontinent and yokes the thread of fall of city: fall of man through various different
ages.
In a recent interview Intizar Hussain asserts:

History works like a municipality bulldozer that is on an anti-

encroachment drive,” he drew an interesting parallel. “It does not
differentiate between the legal kiosks erected with permission and
those which are illegal ones. They destroy and carry away all of
them (Hussain 2014).

The other segment of the chapter investigates the representation of the partition in
Sidhwa’s semi-autobiographical novel Cracking India. Sidhwa represents the painful side
of the Partition through a young Parsi girl child Lenny’s experience before, during, and
after the Partition. The novel recounts the story of partition from a gendered and
minoritarion perspective and significantly from the Pakistani side. Sidhwa represents
Lenny’s everyday experience of the Partition by recording the stories of the marginalized
people, the increasing conflicts among friends, the change of people, and the brutal
violence in the wake of Partition. The novel provides an alternative history which
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emerges from the life, actions and simple conversations of the ordinary men and women
leading their lives in the vicinity of Lahore and Pir-Pindo.Through Sidhwa’s narrative,
we are able to perceive the Partition in a way that differs greatly from that represented in
nationalist historiography. By virtue of Cracking India, we are able to re-read and re-
think the history of the Partition.
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I
Intizar Husain: Basti: (1978)

3. 1. Introduction:

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to

experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being
and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential
sadness can never be surmounted. (Said 137)

The novel Basti broadly deals with the retrieval of past through the rememberence
of a community’s pluralistic culture prior to Partition. The text offers deep insight into the
psychological and emotional aspects of the partition event and its’ impact on human lives
through the mental journey of its protagonist Jakir migrated to Pakistan from India in
1947. Unlike early partition novels he devotes little space to the Muhajir or Non Muhajir
identities or their clashes or communal violence. Instead he focusses on the migration of
Indian Muslims to Pakistan, which he imbues with a wider significance in the context of
the History of Islam. For him the migration to a new country unlocked the memory of a
recurring pattern of migration, the hijrat.
The lens of memory in the novel serves to focus our attention on how local
communities of people experienced trauma of partition of 1947; how they reorganized
and reconstructed themselves and how the other Partition in1971 once again disillusioned
them and compelled them to hark back at their past to search for the relevancy of such
divisions as well as their roots,their origin.
Recently while talking to Tahmina Queshi he recalls that his novel was written in the
backdrop of events that were unfolding in the form of political turmoil in former East
Pakistan during the early 1970s. He had felt at the time that the 1947-like situation was
taking place again:

Then 1971 came and the tales of bloodshed and atrocities we used to
hear at the time of the partition began circulating again. It was as if
1947 revisited us three decades later.... But in 1947 we had been told
that Muslims of the subcontinent were a single nation. But in 1971 it
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was the same nation fighting amongst itself. The problem still
remains... (Qureshi 2014).

The secession of Pakistan in 1971 that carved out Bangladesh from the East
Pakistan further proved that religion alone was not sufficient for uniting Muslims as
nation, and that difference in language can also be the cause of division.

3.1.2. Narrative Structure:

Basti by Intizar Husain, originally published in Urdu in 1979, is one of the
powerful novels about Partition and its aftermath. It is only after its English translation by
Frances Pritchett published by Oxford University Press, Delhi in 2007, it acquired wider
acclaim.
The title Basti, that means an inhabited place, can be used for a village as well as
for a city. In the novel the word Basti denotes cities of the present, of memory and of
myth. The story is set in a number of places real and imaginary: Lahore and Delhi,
Rupnagar, Vyaspur and Shyamnagar. The novel is based on the effects of Bangladesh
war and the fall of the city of Dacca in Lahore. The narrative present is set in Lahore
before and after the Bangladesh war in1971, but flashbacks add the main character’s
memories of his childhood in a small town Roopnagar and Vyasnagar in pre-Partition
India, and comprise the history of Pakistan from its formulation to the present. Through
mental journeys of Jakir into worlds of history, dastan, and myth, the author shows us
parallels with cities from the Jerusalem of Nehemiah to the Delhi of 1857, and from the
Dwarka of Krishna to the Kufa of Imam Husain. The fallen cities, filled with signs of
doom and destruction, are made more desolate by their contrast with- the idyllic, pleasant
world of his childhood in the "beautiful city Rupnagar. The harmonious world of the
beautiful city becomes the nihilistic world of the city of doom because of man's growing
greed, his hypocrisy, and his failure to speak out or protest.
The novel has references to the rebellion of 1857, the creation of Pakistan in 1947,
the wars between India and Pakistan in 1965 and finally the division of East Pakistan and
West Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1971. with in detail.
The plot of the novel moves from the particular to the universal; from history to
myth, from memory to nightmare and from Utopia to Apocalypse. Centering on the fall
of Dacca and its effect on Zakir, it begins with the life history of Zakir, who grew up in a
 133  
 

village in northern India and migrated to Pakistan at the time of Partition. It uses fantasy,
myth and religious history to record the biography of a particular indidual and at larger
level it deals with the historical fall of Dacca to represent the more general theme of the
fall of man, and ends with a comparison of the fall of man's city to the fall of man.
Son of the Maulana Abba Jan of Rupnagar, Zakir is the chief protagonist and as his
name indicates, that is: one who remembers, chronicles the events of his life. The
Maulana is deeply religious, a Shiite, who strongly opposes all the new changes. Khvajah
who has two sons Salamat and Karamat is Abba Jan’s close friend. Bi Amma is Zakir’s
paternal grand mother. Ammi Jan’s sister Khalah Jan has two daughters Tahirah and
Sabirah. Zakir has five close friends, Afzal, Surender, Ajmal, Irfan and Salamat.
The story is narrated from the point of view of Zakir, a professor of history in West
Pakistan, just before the 1971 war. In the quarter of a century since he came to Pakistan,
Zakir has forgotten his past. Now he tries to remember it, both in order to search for his
self-identity through his personal history, and to seek the cause of the decline of a city, a
cultural tradition, and of humanity itself, as "the days pass and the purity of the first day
wanes with the revolution of days. (Basti 83)
The novel begins with Jakir’s memories of his early childhood in Rupnagar, a
village in Uttar Pradesh. It is at first an idyllic, mythic time of wonder, "when the world
was new and the sky fresh and the earth not yet soiled" ( Basti 9), a description, which is
later juxtaposed to his first day in Pakistan as well. When he is old enough to read,
however, this sense of wonder is dimmed by fear as he learns the story of Habil and Qabil
(Abel and Cain). He asks his grandmother how a man could kill his own brother. She
answers that his blood became white; that he forgot the ties of blood. This same phrase is
used later to explain the change Zakir perceives in Pakistan after Partition. When Jakir
came in Pakistan , at first every home was open to receive the refugees, but then people
became greedy, the room in their hearts became less, and the spacious buildings became
cramped.
Both the untarnished world of childhood and the new nation of Pakistan are filled
with brotherhood, and are polluted by greed. Man's growing inhumanity and loss of
brotherly love becomes one of the two dominant themes of the book. The second theme,
the approach of Doomsday, is introduced immediately after Zakir hears his grandmother's
explanation of Habil's hope and harmony, but both fall from grace when they forget the
bondage of blood and murder by his brother Qabil. He rises and goes to the room where
his father is talking with Hakim Bande Ali and Musib Husain. His father is relating the
 134  
 

signs of the coming of Doomsday: ·When those who recite the Word will become silent
and the thongs of shoes will speak•••When the rulers will become tyrants and the people
will eat dust (Basti 13).
In Rupnagar, Zakir is grown up in a pluralistic culture; His life is product of both
Hindu and Muslim religious history, He lives through a plague, sees the introduction of
electricity in the village, and mourns the death of his grandmother. He experiences a
gradual growing love for his cousin Sabrah, who is both a playmate and a childhood
sweetheart. When he leaves behind his childhood and the age of myth in Rupnagar and
moves to Vyaspur, he enters the age of rubber-tired tongas, motor cars and trains. From
Vyaspur he goes on to a college in Meerut. When he returns to Rupnagar on holiday from
Meerut, he finds it has lost the sense of mystery and wonder it had in his childhood. That
feeling is still present in his relationship with Sabirah, but the relationship is broken when
riots force Zakir to move to Pakistan at the time of partition. When he begins to
remember the basti of Rupnagar, Sabirah is present in every wave of memory. Sabirah
becomes a symbol of that feeling of love and harmony which permeated his childhood in
the beautiful village, but which is conspicuously absent from the modern city of war and
riot. Throughout the novel he considers trying to re- establish his ties with Sabrah but he
vacillates and communicates with her indirectly through his friend Surendra instead. At
the end of the novel he still clings to the tenuous hope that he may yet write to Sabirah
and escape a fall into despair.
In subject and technique, Basti is divided into three parts. The long first section is
based on history as it is recorded in Zakir's jungle of memories. It oscillates between
Zakir's present in the days just before the 1971 war, and his memory of the past--from his
childhood in Rupnagar through Partition and the era of Ayub Khan. Both the events Zakir
witnesses in the narrative and the events he recalls through his memories are presented in
chronological order. By the end of the fourth chapter the flashbacks have completed the
biography of Zakir, and the narration is wholly in the present. The short second section
presents the twelve days of the 1971 war in diary form. Realistic depictions of events in
Zakir's present now alternate with surrealistic representations of scenes from history and
myth. The narration frequently shifts from the Lahore of the 1971 war to parables from
the Mahabharata and Shah Narnah, and to historical sequences from the war of 1857.
Through the use of myth and fables Husain allegorically represents the story of East
Pakisatn and West Pakistan. In Zakir's first mental journey into the realm of the dastans,
he sees two cities, one desolate, the other full of people. The first city has become
 135  
 

deserted because of two brothers who demand more than their right. The brothers are
shown using their knowledge they have attained as a legacy from their father to curse
each other to become an elephant and a turtle which will fight each other in a lake until
the lake becomes a marsland, and then dries, and its dust rises over the earth. The second
city, though apparantly prosperous and flourishing, is no better off than the first, for its
king, the Zahhak of the Shah Namah, demands that the skulls of the wise be fed to the
serpents which grow out of his shoulders. The desolate city, like the story of Habil and
Qabil, shows the result of the loss of brotherly love. The inhabited city, with its allusion
to censorship and political suppression, fulfills the signs of the coming of Doomsday
when the wise will be silent and the populace eat dust. The actual fall of Dacca is
symbolically represented. Those days in his diary of the war which according to their
dates should describe the final days of Dacca are set instead· in the Delhi of 1857. The
Lahore of the 1971 war is compared with the Delhi of 1857, but the technique used now
is surrealism, as Zakir oscillates between past and present. A mysterious fakir is shown
warning the imminent fall of the Red Fort. Jakir laments the disunity of the Muslims and
their lack of fighting heroes like the Bakht Khan of 1857. The parables in this second
section indicates causes for the fall of Dacca, the historical sequences implicitly compare
the fall of the Mughal Empire with the disintegration of united Pakistan.
The third section is set in an indeterminate time after the fall of Dacca. Zakir's
mother waits anxiously for news of her sister Batul, and Khwaja Sahib tries to find news
of his son Karamat who, like Batul, was lost in Dacca. Stunned by the result of the war,
Zakir searches for an explanation of the fall in a series of mental journeys to other fallen
cities in history, myth and fantasy. These images of apocalypse are interspersed with
scenes in his home, in the tea-house Shiraz which symbolizes the Pak Tea House in
Lahore, and in the streets of Lahore (called Shamnagar in the novel).
The final section of Basti explores the similarities between past, present and
mythical instances of destruction, censorship and oppression. Lahore after the fall of
Dacca is compared to Ghalib's description of Delhi after the war of l857; to Nehemiah's
account of Jerusalem, its gates burned by fire; to the burning tents of Karbala; to the fall
of Dwarka and the death of Krishna; and to those cities which have been taken by water
or wind or fire, and those which will be taken by the blast of the Angel on the Day of
Judgement.
With increasing frequency the coming of Doomsday is presaged by images of the
speaking of those who should not speak and the silence of those who should speak. The
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fall of cities, through its association with the signs of the coming of Doomsday, is
equated with the fall of man. The fall of man is seen in man's inhumanity to man, and in
brothers who ask for more than their share, from the time of Habil and Qabil to the
present.

In this interpretation of the events of his age, Intizar Husain has traversed from the
ideal kingdom to the time of fallen cities. The days of Utopia when man was in harmony
with himself, with others and with nature are lost forever. They have been destroyed by
the age of the machine, by wars, and by man’s greed. Innumerable cities of doom have
fallen in Intizar Husain's work from 1948 to the present: Kufa, the Jerusalem of
Nehemiah, Dwarka, and the Delhi of 1857 and 1947. Dacca has been captured by its
brother and Lahore is engulfed in violence and riots. There is a pattern of repetitive
pattern of such days when hypocrisy prevails.

The novel which starts with the childhood days of Jakir in pre-partition of Indian
subcontinent in 1947 ends with the second major geographical division of Pakistan in
1971 thus interrogates the partition process itself as well as represents a critique of the
partition of 1947. The novel centres round the theme: that the fall of the city is the result
of fall of man.

3.1.3. Migration: A Failed Hijrat:

This stain- covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn,

This is not that dawn of which there was epectation,
This is not that dawn with longing for which
The friends set out,(convinced) that somewhere there
Would be met with, in the desert of the sky,
the final destination of the stars,
Somewhere there would be the shore of the
Sluggish Wave of night,
Somewhere would go and halt the boat of pain” (Faiz qtd in Zaman1).

When I came here the lanes were clean and the houses spotless.
Now the lanes are filthy and the houses soiled (Basti 81).
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India experienced one of world’s largest population displacements in 1947 at the

time of partition of British India. The magnitude and repercussions of calamity were
neither anticipated by the policy makers and administrators of the time nor could they
pre-empt it through their will. Near about ten million people faced dilemma of
displacement and one million were massacred. It was characterized by a slow-moving,
selective and voluntary process of migration from different parts of India. Migration
inevitably involves breaking away from the culture into which one is born and deeply
rooted and in which one's sense of belonging in society was assured and re-placing one in
a new culture. Therefore, migration was not only the crossing of geographical boundaries
but also the transfer of memories, culture and age-old traditions. Historiography on
partition has not much focused on the cultural and psychological implications of the
migration. However, novel and fiction writing has contributed in exploring the human
dimension of partition. Basti is unique novel in its concerns in the sense that it does not
deal with, like other novels, with the causes of the partition or the extremity of violence it
unleashed but depicts the mental anguish of a migrant who feel disillusionment at the
further segmentation of Pakistan.
At initial stage Intizar Hussain saw the migration of Muslims from India to
Pakistan in a larger historical and cultural context of Islam as the Hijrat of Prophet
Mohammad from Mecca to Madina. However, his views changed later on after post
partition socio-political conditions in Pakistan. Hussain’s own views on Partition and
migration are significant to understand his writings and the issues he deals with. Hussain
says:

In the history of the Muslim peoples, the hijrat holds the position of
an experience which repeats itself time and again.With its
associations of long enduring pain and sorrow.... It becomes a
creative experience....And if one accepts such a conception of
hijrat,it can be seen as not merely an external event, but as a sort of
spiritual state....The meaning of Pakistan at the time was hijrat from
one age to another ( Hussain qtd in Memon 1983).

In an interview given in July 1974, Intizar Husain had this to say about the
experience of migration that was the direct outcome of the Partition of' India in 1947:
 138  
 

A decade ago when I was talking about the experience of migration

and the article's1 wrote concerning it, I was in a state of great hope
and optimism. It was then my feeling that in the process of the
Partition we had suddenly, almost by accident, regained a lost, great
experience-namely, the experience of migration, hijrat, which has a
place all its own in the history of the Muslims --and that it will give
us a lot. But today, after our political ups and downs, I find myself
in a different mood. Now I feel that sometimes a great experience
comes to be lost to it nation; often nations forget their history. I do
not mean that a nation does, or, has to keep its history alive in its
memory in every period. There also comes a time when a nation
completely forgets its past. So, that experience, I mean the
experience of migration, is unfortunately lost to us and on us. And
the great expectation that we had of making something out of it at a
creative level and of exploiting it in developing a new consciousness
and sensibility that bright expectation has now faded and gone”
(Hussain qtd in Memon 377).

The journey is basic motif in Intizar Husain's stories. He has used changing
methods of transportation to symbolize the passing eras through a comparison of the
bullockcart and train or the horse-drawn ikka and the motor rickshaw. Even the structure
of his fiction reflects the theme of the journey through its use of a itinerant narrator or
protagonist who witnesses, overhears, recollects, or undergoes real or legendary incidents
which relate to and illustrate the main theme of the story. The most prominent aspect of
the journey in Hussain’s stories during the fifties was hijrat. Although hijrat had a
melancholy and tragic aspect in the loss of what was left behind, its outcome was
expected to be creative and positive. The parallels which Hussain draws between hijrat
and the birth of Pakistan provide a kind of consolation to tolerate the agony of
displacement. But as we see in his confession in the interview in the case of Pakistan,
migration is a failed Hijrat. It is Intizar Husain's conclusion that the totally sudden
interruption of Muslim life that came in the wake of the Partition of India, and, the
ensuing blood bath had, at least, the redeeming value of having provided the Indian
Muslims with a sense of continuity about a fundamental and recurrent historical
experience hijrat and that, therefore, on creative level, just as on any other level, it was
 139  
 

expected to have enriched Muslims but unfortunately, it failed to do so.

Migration is often a very disruptive experience that creates a sense of insecurity,

resulting from uprooting and marginality. In Representations of the Intellectual, Said
treats exile a both an actual and a metaphorical condition. He conceives of the exile as
someone who exists “ in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting
nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involements and half -detachments,
nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another”
(Said 49).

Said’s words resonate in the novel Basti: Exile is characterised by “ restlessness,

movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some
earlier or perhaps more stable condition of being home or situation” (Said 53)

Bhalla has proposed that we with fictional work on the Partition bring attention to
how the migrating’ characters’ principally come to the realisation that they constitute ‘
exiles and aliens, that a prevailing sensation is the failure to ‘ retrieve their lives again
and remake their homes’ and that the Partition stands for the end of their lives again and
remake their homes’ and that the partition stands for the end of their life-history, not the
beginning of new entanglements in 'human -time’ or a pilgrimage towards the divine.
(Bhalla 2007: 9)

The agony of separation from the land of one's childhood period is powerfully
evoked in the novel Basti. Husain dramatizes the psychological implication of the loss of
one's homeland and the resultant sense of estrangement and exile. The chief protagonist
Zakir’s mind is suggestively dislocated at times. Inside Zakir times and places get topsy-
turvy. Sometimes, he feels, that he has absolutely no idea where he is and in what place.

Jakir ‘s first displacement begins when he along with his Abba Jan and other
family members shift to Vyaspur after his old mother Bi Amma dies. There are rallies
and processions on the roads. There are sounds of gun shots. In Vyaspur from the terrace
of their house one could see the burning ghat. When the country is partitioned Zakir faces
second migration and shifts to Lahore along with his parents. Henceforth, Lahore
becomes Zakir’s scene of action. Nearly all events take place elsewhere; Zakir, along
with many of the city’s other residents, understands what is happening mainly through
varied fragmented pieces of information he receives in cafés, on the streets and from
 140  
 

family members. His days are intervened by dreams, memories and anxieties.
After their migration people were not able to adjust in the new land. Zakir, his
mother, and his friend Afzal, wonder why the Landscape and seasons of the country to
which they have migrated fail to capture their moral and creative imagination even
though the trees, birds and rain are similar to that they have left behind. In the new land,
nature no longer seems to be so richly woven into the very texture of their being as to
produce in them the same 'bliss of Nirvana''' as it once had in Rupnagar, the basti that was
once their home. At 'home' in Rupnagar, every object in nature had radiated with meaning
and was available to them without any self-conscious attempt to search for it. Zakir is
aware that it is not easy to find the same meaning and purpose of life in Pakistan where
everything seems strange and unfamiliar. After migrating to the newly formed Pakistan,
Zakir wonders why the landscape and seasons of the new country fails to capture his
imagination as it did back in Roopnagar. Something seemed to have snapped within him
so that even if the birds, trees, or the rain were similar, he could not relate to his
surroundings. Zakir finds himself trying to locate the neem tree, which he could
effortlessly recognise in Rupnagar. On asking his friend Afzal if any neem tree can be
found in Pakistan, he is brought to stand before a Persian lilac:
'Afzal,' I [Zakir] asked casually, 'aren't there any neem trees
here?'
Why not? Come on, I'll show you.'
He took me around the park. Then he brought me beneath a tree
and stopped me: 'Here's your neem tree.'
I looked at it closely. 'Yar, this is a Persian lilac.'
He was embarrassed. 'Well, it doesn't matter, there's
nothing wrong with the Persian lilac ...
There's a neem tree here, I'll have to search for it.'
But we never had to search for neem trees! In the afternoons when the desert
wind blew, and in the rainy July days, their greenness always proclaimed
their presence (Basti 96-7).

There are some references in Basti to the difficulties faced by refugees on their
way across the border in 1947, whether towards West or East Pakistan. The personal
tales of the immigrants who survived the hijrat to Pakistan were full of unsurmounatable
miseries:
 141  
 

The refugees told whole long epics about those whom they had left
behind...They told about those whom they had left behind....They
told about those who had set out with them...left on unknown roads,
unshrouded and unburied...Their hearts overflowed, and their eyes
filled with tears ( Basti 69).

There are many instances where whole families migrated and one person, usually
an old man, stayed behind. They didn’t stay for the sake of property or land but for their
ancestral graves. In Vyaspur, Hakimji stayed back in the land of his ancestors refusing to
migrate to Pakistan. He questions, "How could my grave have such a shade in Pakistan"
(Basti139).
Zakir's father, who goes to Pakistan, finds himself continually worrying about his
death and burial. For him the burial ground and the shroud, (brought from Holy Karbala)
left behind in Rupnagar, is a loss that can never be retrieved. His faith and identity in
Rupnagar is well established through his reminiences of his past life and his craving for
the ancestral grave. He had even made all arrangements for his burial there, a shroud and
a place for the grave. He is worried that in Pakistan all arrangements will have to be
made as they neither have a place nor any property.
Afzal's grandmother constantly is persuaded to leave for her land of birth on the
pretext of floods as she refused to go otherwise. But every few days she insisted on being
taken back, "The floods must surely have gone down so take me back" (Basti 203). The
hope of returning is a source of strength that sustains her in the new land. But when Afzal
tries to explain the impossIbility of ever returning by saying that even if "the flood has
gone down over there, it's risen on this side" (Basti 233), When she hears, her hope is
broken and she immediately dies. .
Migration of Hindus and Sikh families from Shamnagar is also recorded by
showcasing their empty deserted houses. The depiction of these houses narrates the
tales of those people who migrated from this place:
In Shamnagar, there were so many empty houses. So many houses
lying open...It seemed that the owners had suddenly stood up,
shaken the dust from their feet, and walked out. There were also
houses with big heavy locks on them, and all the ground- floor
windows carefully closed. It seemed that the owners had locked up
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their houses and gone on a long journey, with the thought of

coming back (Basti 70).

A white haired man sits alone at a table in the Shiraz and comes to ask them news
of the turmoils in the country. His explanation of the whiteness of his hair is symbolic of
the change that has accompanied his migration to Pakistan. He relates,

When I reached Pakistan and washed myself and looked in the mirror,
my hair had turned entirely white. That was my first day in Pakistan. I
left my house with black hair and my family, when I reached Pakistan
my hair was white and I was alone (Basti 82).

The greying of hair becomes the symbol of the loss of home and family during
migration: once lost, are irretrievable.
In Basti at initial stage the protagonist Jakir welcomes the act of Migration. Though
there are no direct acts of celebrations, it is implied when he compares the first day in
Pakistan with that of his experience in Rupnagar, the place of his birth, his home: “..... my
first day in this land, should always shine in my memory......When Pakistan was still all
new, when the sky of Pakistan was fresh like the sky of Rupnagar, and the earth was not
yet soiled” (Basti 69).
But soon this freshness and feeling was darkened by the agonized memory of Jakir
when in the darkness of night he remembers his homeland left behind:

As he lay in the large, well-lit room, he poignantly remembered the

shabby room he had left behind. The sleep that had come into his
eyes vanished......The image of his room was fixed in his brain. Then
he covered his face with the sheet and wept (Basti 68).

And at later stage, ( ....) and for the room in which i spread out my
bedding I felt no affection at all. I found myself constantly
remembering the room I’d left behind (Basti 73).

The hijrat, which for Muslims had a religious sanctity, becomes a different type of
journey. The journey now is of those who have lost their way and are on the wrong path.
 143  
 

The hijrat turns into a journey of a decline from a remembered utopia to an imminent
doom; from the creative goal of hijrat to the aimless, blind and self-deceptive wandering
of the present; from the people deeply rooted in spaces and tradition to homeless
refugees; from the friendly people sharing each others’ tradition to those who are afraid
of speaking or who have nothing to say; and from the harmony and community of the
village of his childhood to the anomie, the disenchantment and the horror of the modern
city torn by war and civil turmoils.

Jakir remembers those initial days with hope and aspiration when “There was
lots of space in the houses. There was even more space in the houses” (70) and
recalls those days as “Those were good days, good and sincere.” (Basti 71) However
those untarnished days got changed:

...., how the goodness and sincerity gradually died out from those
days, how the days came to be filled with misfortune and the nights
with ill omen.How before our eyes the houses of Shamnagar went
from being spacious to being narrow, and the space in people’s
hearts kept dimishing (Basti 71).

The partition had created a spiritual and social vacuum in the lives of the
dislocated personages. After migrating to a new place, Zakir is unable to accommodate
himself morally, physically, or imaginatively to the needs of new political and religious
identity. He like other migrants does not feel attachment with the new place or people. He
has failed to develop any connection in Pakistan even after a long period of his stay.. The
whole atmosphere around him is filled with a sense of bewilderment. Having left
Rupnagar, he knows he can never return to it and remains in a permanent state of exile.
Due to political upheavals Jakir and his friends are in the state of disillusionment
and find it difficult to commit to a particular cause. All the friends Jakir, Afzal, Irfan,
Salamat and Ajmal meet at the Shiraz, a tea-house. They are regular visitors in the Shiraz
calling themselves mice. The waiter Abdul treats them as his masters. All the turmoil,
tumult and turbulence of the war are seen in this background. People’s lives in all the
places, Lahore, Delhi and even Dhaka are presented and the turbulence is vividly
portrayed.
 144  
 

The Shiraz is the centre where Jakir and his friends meet and talk. The discussions
of the friends reveal war scenes as they see, understand and suffer. They talk about
processions, slogans and destruction. They all are perplexed young persons. Even they
interrogate the formation of Pakistan:

For a long time they sat in silence, lost in their own thoughts.Then
he looked at Irfan. He kept looking, as though he wanted to say
something, but hesitated.
Irfan
Irfan looked at him, but he was silent.
What is it?
‘Yar!’ He paused, then said somewhat hesitantly, ‘Yar’ was it good
that Pakistan was created?’
--------------
I know one thing, ‘Irfan said at last, ‘ In the hands of the wrong
people, even right becomes wrong (Basti 100).

The state of liberalism and rejection of state decisions is noticiable in some of the
decisions of these characters. Salamat instead of settling in Pakistan or Bagladesh prefers
to migrate to another country. There are references of other characters also migrating to
different countries other than the decided by the state.
At the turbulence front Lahore comes under the spell of a new two-word slogan
painted on all vehicles: ‘Crush India’. The friends in the Shiraz argue, shout, and blare.
Salamat yells against Afzal:

Reactionaries! Imperialist stooges! Boot-lickers of the capitalists! Your

day of reckoning has come.
Your day of reckoning has come.’ …‘Y these revolutionaries will ruin
us. And how much that mouse talks!’
‘This is the time for people like him to speak,’ Irfan said.‘When
shoelaces speak, and (sic) those who can speak fall silent.
He (Zakir) was startled. Nowadays this kind of thing was happening to
him. Some forgotten saying of Abba Jan’s, some remark of Bi
Amma’s, would suddenly come into his mind and at once slide away
 145  
 

again – the way a snake would raise its head from the grass, then
vanish again in an instant (Basti 97).

When the manager asks Zakir if there would be a war he only says that he does
not know. He walks and walks even when there is turbulence in the city.

No noise, no voice, no sound of footsteps, no nothing, only the sound of

gnawing coming from all sides, as though many mice were gnawing
something… walking along one lane, he found the lane ahead closed… a
cat standing up on her hind legs opened the door (of the mansion), looked
at him intently, and closed the door. The light changed from green to red.
He began to cross at the crosswalk, and then hesitated. The waiting cars,
scooter-cabs and motor bikes suddenly rushed past him as though a dam
in a river had burst (Basti 103).

Outside there is noise and lights have to be switched off. The novel captures the
days of the turmoil and the disillusionment it brings with it. This is represented through
Jakir and the conversation among his friends.
Zakir’s wartime diary captures the horrors of the war suffered by the people along
with Zakir’s mental journey through his dreams, visions, and his remembrances of the
epics, history, folktales. The roads, the vehicles, the railway platforms, the Shiraz all
portray shock and pain. Zakir wonders where people are going. He has his own thoughts
of the Jataka tales and Buddha’s subtle teachings. Zakir feels thus:

The primary point of writing this diary is that during the long
wartime nights it will help me discipline my distracted mind …I see
another advantage of it as well I’ll be writing my wartime
autobiography. .. I ought to preserve the record of my lies and my
cowardice (Basti 125).

News of happenings flow on:

Amritsar has been taken, the airport at Agra has been totally
destroyed… the Imperial has been erased like a redundant letter from
the city’s slate. The buildings, the places that hold our sorrows in
 146  
 

trust are reduced to nothingness in a moment by one single bomb …

Rupnagar and this city has merged together inside me, and became
one town (Basti 127).

Zakir remembers his father telling his mother once:

Zakir’s mother,’ Abba Jan said gravely, “Death is everywhere. Where

can a man go to flee from it? It is a saying of the Prophet that those
who run from death, run toward death instead’ (Basti 128).

The novel represents conflict, flight, occasional terror, but little of the worst
extremities of partition violence as shown in other novels. The commotion, that war of
Independence for Bangladesh has created, are reported indirectly:

The discussion was first ideological, then personal, then insulting,

then abusive, and then it came to blows. Passerby stood bewildered,
stared at the combatants with fright, then asked each other, "What's
happening? What's going to happen? In everyone's eyes a single
terror, as if something was indeed about to happen.Then they went
their several ways, and forgot that anything had happened at all. As
though nothing had happened, as though nothing would happen (Basti
).

Jakir broods:
The war threw the life of the city into confusion. Inside me, times
and places are topsy-turvy. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea
where I am, in what place ( Basti 130).

By reading Basti it becomes clear that declarations of the state at the time of
partition that “Mussalmans are a nation...and they must have their homeland, their
territory and their state” (Jinnah 1940 Lahore) proved irrelevant in 1971. As well as the
contradictory statement of Jinnah in his presidential speech in which he assured all
citizens of equal rights couldn’t save Pakistan from further fragmentation:
 147  
 

You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your
mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan," Jinnah
declared. "You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has
nothing to do with the business of the state. (Jinnah 1947 presidential
address)

Contradictory statements by a great proponent of Pakistan on one side expose the

futility of the creation of a new nation by the state authority Jinnah who was the
proponent of the separate nation; on another side reflect the perplexity of even statesmen
over the decision of formulation of a separate state for Muslims. Hussain by citing the
clashes of 1971 interrogates the very act of division of 1947 on the basis of religion
which was proven to be a wrong decision after the further partition of Pakistan.
Migration to the other land couldn’t fulfil the dreams of those persons who were
expecting a good life from the new nation. Partition was not only the geographical
shifting; it was a transfer of ideas, culture, and histories. The new location became a site
for internal as well as external conflict between the old and new spaces. The novel Basti
by foregrounding the sufferings and disillusionment of people like Jakir, his Abba, his
friends in the wake of partition of Pakistan in 1971 interrogate the very idea of the
formation of Pakistan and declares it as a failed narrative.

3.1.4. Memory, Nostalgia and loss: Quest for Identity; Quest for home:

Memories surged along like waves, and I swam among them (Basti 73).

When he could see nothing ahead of him, he set off backwards. Again
the same long journey through the thicket of memories ( Basti 29).

The more the turmoil increases outside, the more I sink into myself.
Memories of so many times come to me. Ancient and long-ago stories,
lost and scattered thoughts. Memories one after another, entangled in
each other, like a forest to walk through. My memories are my forest.
So where does the forest begin? No, where do I begin? (…) He wanted
to arrive at the moment when his consciousness had first opened its
 148  
 

eyes. But he couldn’t grasp the moment. When he put his memory,
dense crowds of memories drifted along its train ( Basti 6 ).

Aforementioned quotes make it clear that the novel Basti is deeply grounded in
memories and redolent with nostalgia. It is unique in its use of the tool of memory.
Hussain has skilfully intermixed subjective memory with collective memory, and further
mixed it with centuries-old historical events and with larger, non-linear cultural
mythology.The national-communal conflict of 1971 serves as a trigger for the
recollection of memories dislocated by Partition. The central protagonist, Zakir,
develops an obsessive preoccupation with his past, recalled against the backdrop of
Lahore during the war for Bangladeshi independence in 1971. The novel revolves
around the life of Zakir feeling alienated and nostalgic about his village lost during the
partition. Alok Bhalla opines that,” Nostalgic remembrance is for him a form of
retrieving knowledge about those modes of living from the past which could be used for
the redemption of ‘future-time’ ” (Bhalla 22).
Being disturbed and disillusioned Jakir juxtaposes his present and past and tries to
understand his self; in search of his roots he mediates between a tolerant and inclusive
past and exclusive Muslim nationalist identity based on religious affiliation alone. To
untangle the web of his tangled existence he traverses through his local spatial reality to
the realms of his religious cultural identity.
Though the novel seems to cover a span of only a few months in the life of Jakir, in
effect it brings into itself, in flashbacks, the cultural backdrop of centuries of Muslim
history. The main historical events begin from 1857 and move on to 1947, and then to
1965 and finally to the 1971 division of Pakistan. Written in 1979, 32 years after the
actual experience of Partition, the novel records the movement into time and even beyond
time. The political disturbances are the backdrop for the tribulations of the characters in
the novel. Being a migrant Hussain, it seems, understands the dilemma of a migrant. It
was not only physical crossing over only it was the transgression of memories also. In
Basti he even goes beyond the memory of a few individuals and digs into the vastness of
racial memory. Basti is viewed as masterpiece in nostalgia and realism on the tragic
experiences of migration and new national identity.
In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym says:
 149  
 

Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of

a new understanding of time and space that makes the division into
“local” and “universal” possible. Second, nostalgia appears to be a
longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time—
the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a
broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of
time, the time of history and progress.The nostalgic desires to turn
history into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like
space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues
the human condition (Boym, 2007).

In the pretext of Boym’s views on nostalgia, Jakir’s nostalgia can be viewed as an

attempt at creating cultural continuity and incorporating the cultural memory of the past
into the present. Hussain’s other writings also manifest nostalgia in which there is a
yearning for a creative continuity with the history. This approach towards history
interrogates and even challenges the popular imaginations of nationalism.
The novel Basti focuses on the partition as memory, through the reflections of the
protagonist Zakir, a historian by profession who seeks to come to terms with this memory
in the context of the happenings in 1971 in Pakistan leading up to the formation of
Bangladesh. He is in a perplexed disillusioned state brooding over his own existential
reality.

I’m sitting in a cave. Outside stands the black night, with its jaws
opened wide. Siren, whistles, the sound of dogs barking— but human
voices absent. (…)I’m encircled by fear. Deep in the forest, far from
my cave. Times and places are scrambled inside me. Where am I going?
In What time? Every direction confused, every place disordered ( Basti
132).

Jakir’s disillusioned state is projected through the tropes of walking and journeys
across worlds: mental and physical. At one point of time Jakir feels so disillusioned and
overburdened that he loses his sense of present identity and he feels as if he is not
walking someone else is walking .He tries hard to establish his self identity in present but
he fails. He wonders: “its strange thing, I am walking along somewhere else?” Nothing is
 150  
 

truly external to Zakir. When his mother tries to prevent him from going out because of
the shooting, fires, and insecurity outside, Zakir reflects, “that’s just fine, let anything
happen outside,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing is happening outside. Everything is happening
inside me. Everything that has already happened” (Basti132-33).When he is unable to
understand the reality of his existence, he tries to comprehend and resolve through the
prism of history which led him to long reveries across historical and mythological time.
He is a professor of History therefore he attempts to review through the linear,
progressive lens. He broods:

Other people’s history can be read comfortably,… But my own

history? I’m on the run from my own history, and catching my
breath in the present. Escapist. But the merciless present pushes us
back again toward our history ( Basti 65).

However, here also he is constantly intervened by the repetitive patterns of a

decline/fall from grace and innocence.
The pain and trauma of displacement forced the people like Jakir to go in their past
idyllic world where they had a life of a shared community filled with shared joys and
sorrows. Jakir traversing through the forest of his memories spots Rupnagar “where his
consciousness first opened its eyes” (Basti ) and the place from which he has been
separated. Zakir constantly remembers and juxtaposes Roopnagar of pre-partition India
and present place of Lahore. He is for the most part "drenched in memories, self-
absorbed, detached from the outside world" (Basti 57). For him, Rupnagar defined
'home', where everything was cherished as an integral part of his life. Rupnagar is
depicted as almost a utopian place; a place of beauty; a place where people lived with
compassion harmony and understanding. Roopnagar becomes synonymous of the
experiences of ordinary life in pre-partition India. It is described as a fresh, new and an
unsoiled place:

When the world was still all new, when the sky was fresh and the
earth not yet soiled, when the trees breathed through the centuries
and ages spoke in the voices of' birds ... everything was so new, and
yet looked so old ... The peacocks' calls seemed to come not from the
forest of Rupnagar, but from Brindaban ( ... ) (Basti 3).
 151  
 

There was a natural and spontanious bonding between people, places, and things. In
Rupnagar different faiths existed together. Zakir grew up listening to both Hinduand
Muslim fables, myths and stories. The stories narrated by Abba Jan and Bhagatji were
from different sources, but they never challenged each other. The territory of Roopnagar
was more significant for them. It was as if two rivers flowing smoothly together never
disturbing the flow of the other.These details suggest that before partition, there was a
strong sense of community and social inhibition.
The people have no religious enmity between them as we see in Roopnagar and later
on in Surender’s concern and affection for all his friends who are Muslims. Zakir’s early
childhood is spent in harmony with all in Rupnagar. Hindu Bhagat-ji’s tales of Hindu
epics, the events and heroes in them has influenced him. His father a devout Shiite recites
verses from the Quran and his friends respect and adore him. Even the Bible stories like
the Cain- Abel story and the killing in it has an influence upon Zakir. When he asks his
grandmother Bi Amma why Cain murdered Abel, he is told that it is a curse on his blood-
it is thinner than water. When his friends ask Abba Jan questions, his replies convince
them. Bhagat-ji recalls what ‘whens’ and ‘whens’ are illumined in Abba Jan’s
imagination. Here is one example:

Maulana, when will Doomsday come?

‘When the mosquito dies, and the cow is free of fear.’

.... .... ...

When will those who can speak fall silent, and when will shoelaces

speak?’ ‘When the rulers grow cruel, the people lick the dust (Basti

4-5).

Words and dialogues like this having faith in different cultures have shaped
Zakir’s personality. Abba Jan dislikes all innovations and new inventions. Electricity is
one of them. When he did not go to the mosque one day Rupnagar gets connected to
electricity.

Zakir remembers many moments of his life in Roopnagar. Rupnagar with it dust
laden roads, trees, birds and simple men and women is his idea of happiness. He never
 152  
 

forgets this idyllic place. One day when he touched Vasanthi’s bare arm and she said
‘Go away, you Muslim brat’.

He remembers the incident when his aunt Khalah Jan comes from Gwalior with
her two daughters Tahirah and Sabirah. Sabirah is affectionately called Sabbo. Zakir
gets the second shock from Sabirah.

Come. Let us play groom and bride.

Bridegroom and bride?’ She was taken aback.
Yes, as though I’m the bridegroom and you’re the bride.

Someone will see. She was nervous.

Just then thunder rumbled in the clouds, scaring them both, and at
once the rain came down so hard that before they got from the open
roof to the staircase they were both drenched. (Basti 21)

People live happily in Rupnagar. Janmashtami is celebrated there. Laila - Majnun

are remembered with equal ardour. Zakir tells Sabirah that Ramchandarji’s leaf plates
after he finishes eating his food are tasted by the King of Crows. He says to her that he
can even swear that in God’ name. When Vasanthi goes to tell Bi Amma on Zakir she
says: ‘Why are you born in our house? You should’ve been born in some Hindu’s house!
Your father is always invoking the names of God and the Prophet – he doesn’t realize
that his son has taken to Hindu stories!’( Basti 25)

Abba Jan and his family move on to Vyaspur after his old mother (Bi Amma) dies.
There are rallies on the roads and turmoil. There are sounds of gun shots. In Vyaspur
from the terrace of their house one could see the burning ghat. In the new location Zakir
makes friends with Phullo whose strange superstitions he believes. Abba Jan tells him
that the train coming there (Vysapur) from Moradabad goes to Delhi. Zakir makes friends
with Surender. They study under the single mango tree in the school. Surender shows him
the girl Rhimjhim from a distance. Once she says “Well, if it is not a Muslim brat!’ Zakir
is satisfied that he is taught something by Surender. Zakir tells his friend about Sabirah’s
lips. The two friends see turmoil through the train first.

All the things that formed an essential part of growing up and living in a particular
place are lost to Zakir. Hence there is endless longing for it. Not only Jakir but all his
 153  
 

friends are also remniscient of their past. Afzal says the "bliss of nirvana can be found
only in the shade of the banyan" (Basti 97), and that the neem is an effeminate tree.
Stretching under the shade of the banyan tree, Zakir realises that he "was remembering
lost trees. Lost trees, lost birds, lost faces" (Basti 97).There was a sense of ownership and
belonging with the surroundings and the people of his past home. For his mother too, the
voice of the koel "awakened sleeping memories” (Basti98) that brought tears in her
eyes.The chirping and twittering of birds acts as a reminder of all that has been left
behind.
People live happily in Rupnagar. Janmashtami is celebrated there. Laila - Majnun
are remembered with equal interest. Zakir tells Sabirah that Ramchandarji’s leaf plates
after he finishes eating his food are tasted by the King of Crows. He says to her that he
can even swear that in God’ name. When Vasanthi goes to tell Bi Amma about Zakir she
says: ‘Why are you born in our house? You should’ve been born in some Hindu’s house!
Your father is always invoking the names of God and the Prophet – he doesn’t realize
that his son has taken to Hindu stories!’(Basti 25)

Zakir’s early childhood is spent in harmony with all in Rupnagar. Hindu Bhagat-ji’s
tales of Hindu epics, the events and heroes in them influenced him. His father was a
devout Shiite who recites verses from the Quran and his friends revere and adore him.
Even the Bible stories like the Cain- Abel story and the killing in it influence Zakir.
When he asks his grandmother Bi Amma why Cain murdered Abel, he is told that it is a
curse on his blood- it is thinner than water. When his friends ask Abba Jan questions, his
replies convince them. Bhagatji recalls what ‘whens’ and ‘whens’ are illumined in Abba
Jan’s imagination. Here is one example:

Maulana, when will Doomsday come?

When the mosquito dies, and the cow is free of fear.
…. …. …
When will those who can speak fall silent, and when will shoe
laces speak? When the rulers grow cruel, the people lick the
dust(Basti 4-5).
 154  
 

Among such cultural interactions Jakir grows which have their lasting impressions
on his mind. Abba Jan dislikes all new changes. Electricity is one of them. When
Rupnagar gets connected to electricity, he did not go to the mosque one day.
It is not surprising that neither Bhagatji nor Abba Jan ever suggested to the child
Jakir that he is a Muslim and he should be away from Hindu religion or he should not
believe in other religion. No one in Rupnagar have religious biases. Only once did Zakir's
grandmother, exasperated by his urge to explain every daily occurrence with a parable he
had heard from Bhagatji, scolds him for listening to Hindu myths and stories: 'Son! Why
were you born into our house! Your father is always invoking the names of God and the
Prophet-he doesn't realize that his son has taken to Hindu stories!' (Basti 31). But, since Bi
Amma 'scolded everybody' (Basti 31), Zakir does not think he either has to pay any
special attention to her complaint or feel offended. Indeed, Zakir's first moral lesson,
learnt through the example of the friendship between Bhagatji and his grandfather, is that
in an ethical community the claims of the 'good' are always higher than any assertion of
solidarity with one's own exclusionary group.
And so, like any other child growing up in Rupnagar, Zakir's childhood was spent
in the pluralistic culture and his personal growth was formed by myths, dastans, moral
parables, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Koran and the Jatakas, the love songs
of Laila and Majnu, the ras-lila, and the festivals welcoming the monsoon rains. Each of
them was very much an essential part of his personality.
It is quite natural that Rupnagar continues to be for Zakir a model of a creative and
enlightened society against which he judges his present life full of disillusionment and
decay. Like his father, but with greater anxiety, he holds on to the memories of his home
in Rupnagar as a 'trust' (Basti 231)-a trust which he sorrowfully acknowledges he can no
longer, and ever again, fulfil. Later, the notion that one has a responsibility towards the
place where one lives, that it is a 'trust' which one must not betray, occurs to Afzal
suddenly in one of his drunken moments, only to vanish when he is in senses again (Basti
126). His parents, however, continue to think that the only moral trust they have left is to
nurture memories of the cities they had once called 'home': 'They had left their cities, but
they carried their cities with them, as a trust, on their shoulders. That's how it usually is.
Even when cities are left behind, they don't stay behind. They seize you even more. When
the earth slips out from under your feet, that's when it really surrounds you (Basti 128).
Rupnagar is, and always has been, an imaginative space of tolerance. As its’ name
suggests, it is not only a place of beauty but is also a basti which has the capacity to
 155  
 

shelter each of its religious communities at the same time. That is why the Hindus and the
Muslims who live here have equal right over Rupnagar: neither less nor more. They have
a natural right over Rupnagar. Later, in moments of extreme despair in Pakistan, Zakir
remembers that every bit of moment he has shared with other people in Rupnagar; every
change of season they shared with songs or every story they were told.
In Rupnagar, Abba Jan tells Zakir, 'not a single word ever fell below the standard of
civilized speech'-not even during political rallies (Basti 23). Indeed, whenever Zakir is
disappointed and is in adejected mood by the present world of strikes, slogans, and riots
in Lahore, he feels nostalgic for peaceful life in Rupnagar. Zakir's Rupnagar is a refuge
for Jakir away from the uncertainties of life.
Though through his mental journey which Zakir recourses through Quranic, Shµ‘ite,
Biblical, Hindu and Buddhist tradition and folklore, he wants to understand his present
existence in which he is entagled in the world of destruction and disintegration around
him, however, the focus of his memories is very much the ideal city of Rupnagar.
Rupnagar is a symbolic representation of all those cities which were full of innocence and
therefore were beautiful; Rupnagar is a symbol of that lost world which he inhibited.
Even after many years of separation Jakir is unable to detach himself from Roopnagar.
His deep rooted concern for the place of his birth is quite clear when he prays for the
welfare of the city:“In my mind is a prayer for Rupnagar and its people as well,for I can
no longer imagine Rupnagar apart from this city. Rupnagar and this city have merged
together inside me,and become one town” (Basti 127) Rupnagar with its dust laden
roads, trees, birds and simple men and women is his idea of happiness. He never forgets
this idyllic place.
However, even Rupnagar was not immune to changes. Jakir remembers various
changes, which occurred in Rupnagar and shaped the social existence of Rupnagar. One
day, electric poles arrived in the village. Slowly they became part of its landscape. After a
long time, they were settled along the roadside and eventually people became used to
their presence. Sometime later, the poles were connected with electric wires. Birds began
to perch on them and monkeys swing from them. Then one day, a monkey sitting on the
electric pole was stringed to death. Lanterns were replaced by electric lights, torches by
light bulbs. With the coming of electricity, the rustic world of Rupnagar was transformed.
Its lanes lost some of their romance; its mosques some of their mystery.
Abba Jan refused to go to the mosque to say his prayers ever again. And, then, in a
moment of inattention perhaps, or panic, he forgot the prophetic warning against
 156  
 

abandoning one's home when the times are bad, and he decided to leave Rupnagar. If
only he had remembered the following story he used to tell his children:

A traveller, passing through a forest, saw that a sandalwood tree

was on fire. The birds that had been sitting on the branches had
already flown away, but a wild goose still clung to a branch. The
traveller asked, 'Oh, wild goose! Don't you see that the sandalwood
tree is on fire? Why don't you flyaway? Don't you value your life?'
The wild goose replied, 'Oh traveller! I've been very happy in the
shade of this sandalwood tree. Is it right for me to run off and leave
it in its time of trouble?’…'Do you know who it was?'-The Buddha
told this story, then looked around at the monks, and said, 'Oh
monks! Do you know who that wild goose was? I myself was the
wild goose. (Basti 158-9)

Before becoming part of a greater migration first Jakir migrates within the
country, a short-term migration. He with his family Abba Jan moved from Rupnagar to
Vyaspur, a city, as the name suggests, reminiscent of the fratricidal wars for power in the
Mahabharata, and closer in time to Kaliyug than Rupnagar was. That was the first
migration, and as he later saw it, the commencement of his permanent exile from home
reminding the words of Adha Gaon: Once you leave your home what does it matter you
live in Calcutta or Karbala?
Like many others Abba Jan too had firm believer in the dictum “ Those who run
from death, run toward nothing else but death” (Basti 9) had to leave his home forgetting
that Rupnagar was the historical product of a long civilizational process, and that
Bhagatji and he were its rightful inheritors. He moved first to Vyaspur, and then to
Shyamnagar, the city of twilight- shadows, in Pakistan. But once he reached Pakistan, he
realized that he has opted self exile. He recalls grievously again and again: “ 'Zakir's
mother,' Abba Jan said gravely, 'Death is everywhere. Where can a man go to flee from
it? It is a saying of the Prophets that those who run from death, run towards death
instead.' (Basti 168)
Zakir records how Abba Jan, unable to make a secure home for himself and his
family in the new city, is forced to accept that his migration to Pakistan was not a hijrat;
that it was not part of some necessary rite of passage towards a place of sacred longings.
 157  
 

Abba Jan is forced to concede that there was no religious, social, or historical reason for
him to have undertaken the journey. After all, his Karbala was back in Rupnagar, his
mosque was still there, and the site of his grave was there too. He could have completed
his pilgrimage on earth, his real hijrat, in Rupnagar.
When Zakir's father had left Rupnagar and migrated to Pakistan, he had carried
with him only a few things which were precious to his sense of selfhood so as to remind
him that life back there, in the neighbourhood of Bhagatji, had been lived as close to the
boundaries of the sacred as is possible for human beings. On his deathbed, he tells Zakir
that in Pakistan he has 'no property, no money' (Basti 231), but what he does possess, he
wants to pass on to him as his inheritance. First, he gives Zakir a 'few ancient pages' from
a book of prayers by Hazrat Sajjad, the son or nephew of Imam Hussain. The book had
reminded him every morning of how even the best of men had been betrayed by the
Umayyids and had taught him to lament for all those who suffer the same fate:

What is there left now that's good to talk about? Don't you see what's
happening in Pakistan?' As he spoke, he picked up a book stained
with mould. He opened it ... and said, 'It's a collection of Hazrat
Sajjad's prayers. Keep it carefully.' He stopped and thought for a
moment, then said, 'A questioner asked, "Oh best of those who offer
prayer I In what state did the morning find you?" He replied, "I
swear by the Proyider, the morning found me tormented by the
Umayyids.''' As he spoke, Abba Jan grew sad, and said, 'Son, from
then to now, that morning has continued.' He fell silent, and then
said, 'And it will continue until the Appearance (Basti 230).

In addition to the few old pages of the prayer-book, Abba Jan leaves Zakir a tablet
made of 'the healing earth of Najaf ' (Basti 231) where Imam. Hussain is buried, and some
prayer beads 'made of clay from Karbala' (Basti 231). For Abba Jan, these objects, though
of little value now, are important because they are the last emblems he has of a Shia
world-view. His faith has taught him that after Karbala, loss and betrayal is the fate of all
good human beings in 'profane time', and that people must travese their passage through
it. As a Shia in Rupnagar, he had not got chance 'honoured the claim of lamentation'
(Basti 230) as strictly as more saintly believers had because he had not been called upon
to do so.
 158  
 

In Pakistan, however, he had honoured the claim of nothing else because, in

addition to the elegies for Imam Hussain, he had also wept over the ruin of his
civilizational home in Rupnagar, a place which had its own Karbala beside the Kala
Mandir and its own burial ground for the Imam's followers surrounded by Ravanban. In
Rupnagar, his Shia identity had its established place within the unfolding history of the
other religious traditions in the Indian subcontinent.
Paradoxically, his new home in the neighbourhood of Shyamnagar a basti, as the
name implies, of darkening shadows- shyam, meaning both evening and black, has
neither a sanctified place for worship and a consecrated ground for burial. And he feels
betrayed by his fellow Muslims realizing that Shyamnagar is not the dreamland he had
been promised. It is, instead, a place, where 'the days are filled with misfortune and the
nights with ill-omen' (Basti 92), and the earth seems more 'soiled and dirty' (Basti 89).
He understands the moral consequence of forcing men from their homes, for it is
written in the Koran, - as the novel reminds us again and again: 'You murdered, and then
you were murdered. You exiled, then you were exiled' (Basti 207). As a religious man he
is of firm faith, that no bastis can be founded on a ground which has not been sanctified
by rites and consecrated, and that 'homes are finally derived from the primary experience
of the sacred'. Indeed, no graveyard, too, can be a final abode of the body if it has not
been sanctified by the presence of one's ancestors. When Ammi and Abba remember
Rupnagar they lost in the memories: they remembered their storeroom and the things they
preserved there. For Ammi time doesn’t matter but the keys of their ancestral home are
valuable:

Oh! What does time have to do with it—time always goes on

passing, but if the key to the storeroom’s been lost, it’s a disaster!
All our old family heirlooms are shut up ther. All the things from my
dowry are there. All the things from my dowry are in there. And
when Zakir, may God preserve him, was born, your father, to
celebrate the birth of a grandson, sent sweets around to all the
relatives on silver plates. Twelve of those plates are stored there too.
And, yes, that shroud you sent for from Holy Karbala is in the same
trunk with your father’s prayer carpet from Medina the Radiant , and
the tablet of healing earth from Karbala, and your mother’s chest
and Quaranstand (Basti 114).
 159  
 

Ammi grievly remorses not to have a final look at Rupnagar:

I did whatever I could. When we left for Vyaspur, I gathered

all our family heirlooms carefully in the storeroom and locked it
up…. I wanted to have a final look around Rupnagar, and pick up
anything that we should take with us,(…) Oh, if only I could have
unlocked the storeroom just once, and at least aired things out in
the sun! So much time has passed, I am afraid the wretched
termites will have been at them; there were so many termites in that
house ( Basti 114)

Abba Jan remembers about the valuables in their storeroom in Rupnagar, his father-
in-law and his prayer carpet brought from Madina and the tablet of healing earth from
Karbala.
He is much worried about the graves of his ancestors: “God alone knows what
condition all those graves are in” (Basti 114).
Hearing about all this Zakir remembers Surender’s praise and adoration for the
power of the grave for Muslims which gives tremendous importance for shrouds:”What
great power the grave has in Muslims’ culture” (Basti 115). Ammi is more worried about
death rather than life: “Oh!, this is just the anxiety that eats at my heart, how will our
deaths be! Ammi said worriedly. Our lives have passed somehow or other, but for death a
hundred arrangement have to made( Basti 115)
The older generation remained rooted and attached to their homeland. Jakir's
parents crossed the boundaries but their minds have remained with their family heirlooms
lying locked in the storeroom of their home in Roopnagar. They hope to go there and
wish to get these heirlooms before termites get to them. Jakir reflects: Is time a termite, or
is a termite time? (Basti 46)

Zakir sympathises with Hakimji when he learns that he had refused to leave
Vyaspur because he could not carry his ancestors with him even though his entire family
had migrated to Lahore.

There was no problem about property: people could go to Pakistan and enter a
claim, and by entering false claims they could even get a larger property in return for a
 160  
 

smaller one. But still many a people remained stick to their lands. For no one can enter a
claim for a grave. In Vyaspur Hakimji even though his whole family went off to Pakistan,
he stayed in the same place, and continued to take sick people's pulses. When reason is
asked, he says:

Hakimji, you didn't go to Pakistan?

No, young man.
And the reason?
Young man! You ask the reason? Have you seen our
graveyard?'
No.
Just go sometimes and take a look. Each tree is leafier
than the next. How could my grave have such shade in
Pakistan? (Basti, 139)

Abba Jan too understands, as he is dying, that the home he had hoped for at the end
of his hijrat to Lahore was ironically the home he had left behind in Rupnagar. As if in a
visionary trance in his final moments, he tells Zakir that, apart from prayers and a handful
of sanctified earth, the most important thing he has with him, and which he has kept
carefully so as not to let it rust, is the bunch of keys to his house in Rupnagar:

Son, these are the keys of a house to which we no longer have any
right. And when did we ever have any right? The world, as Hazrat
Ali has said, is a guest- house. We and our desires are guests in it.
Guests have no rights. Whatever the earth deigns to bestow on us
guests, it's a favour, and the earth has shown us great kindness
indeed. These keys are a trust. Guard this trust, and remember the
kindness shown by the earth we left, and this will be your greatest
act of dutiful behaviour.' As he spoke, suddenly his breath choked ...
Slowly, with the greatest difficulty, he said, 'Hazrat Ali has come'
(Basti 231-2).

Abba Jan and Bhagatji may have imagined that Zakir would grow up to become the
mythographer of Rupnagar. But Zakir lives in different times. He is both a memorialiser of
 161  
 

myths as well as a historian. As he watches the slow decline of Abba Jan, he begins to
understand that in the times he has inherited, myths cannot escape the corruption of
history, and that even they, however fine their original intent, can begin to rust and corrode
the soul. He acknowledges, even more desperately, that when myths become corrupt, men
begin to use the name of god, not to defend the good, but to invent new ways of slaughter.
Many years after the partition, Zakir, who is still tormented by the past painful
memories, begins to recognize that even though Rupnagar was the city of beautiful forms,
it was immune to change or the possibility of moral fault. This is somewhat the strategy to
reconcile with the present because what is done is done; Partition cannot be undone. What
remains is to memorize and reconcile.
 162  
 

III
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991)

3.2. Introduction:

Historians are often guided by their own and their nation’s

prejudices. Fiction-writers can paint a fuller canvas and often
intuitively arrive at the larger truth. Now, I am Parsi, not
Hindu, Muslim or Sikh and I wrote from a Parsi child’s
perspective, because I felt it could bring some sort of fairness
on the issue of Partition which still raises strong involving
religious communities (Sidhwa qtd in Brushi 143).

This chapter sets out to examine Cracking India (1991) which is one of the most
authentic and the finest responses made to the horrors of the division of India by a
Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa who is regarded as a pioneer of Pakistani writing in
English.

The novel acquires a considerable importance as it foregrounds the marginal voice

of a Parsi girl child who rewrites the history of partition challenging the partly monolithic
accounts of Hindu and Muslim communities. According to Ambreen Hai, Sidhwa’s text,
‘situates itself on various borders (generic, discursive, ethnic, political), while it also
examines and celebrates- often by enactment- the inhabitation of such borders’.( Hai 46)
This is an accurate assessment of the way the novel makes a gendered, bodily
intervention into ‘Indian masculinist master narratives’ of Partition”( Hai 388- 89).
Cracking India reveals how the rise of nationalism hitherto unknown to the Indian
imagination aggravated separatism and hatred, hostility and revenge among Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs who were living in peace and harmony for centuries as people of one
territory despite their religious and cultural differences. In the wake of the partition of the
country, thousands of people were massacred or mutilated and women were abducted,
raped, or pushed into the profession of prostitution. Unfortunately, such inhuman acts
were not only enacted upon adults; children were also exposed to the same violent world.
Children who are usually protected from public violence were directly exposed to the
 163  
 

horrible acts of violence committed on their loved ones who were vulnerable because of
their marginal positions in the society. The children who survived and were lucky enough
to escape the partition alive were left with the memories that forever changed the course
of their lives both mentally and psychologically.
Located in Lahore in Pakistan, the novel represents partition history from the
perspectives of women, children, the working class, the lower castes and ethnic
minorities, against the nationally sanctioned narrations of partition that exist as official
records of debates, treaties, and details of the national drama enacted at the higher level
stage between leaders of the Muslim League and the Congress.
The novel offers an opportunity to interface the experiences of those who
were the onlookers of the acts of horrendous violence perpetrated by the fanatics upon
innocent weaklings during partition. Apart from the girl child's perspective, Sidhwa's
account is significant in many other ways also: its neutral stance as a Parsi; its’ revisionist
representation of major political leaders, graphic narration of communal violence, its
gendered perspective and its operation of the motif of memory. Amreen Hai’s views are
significant to note:

(...) in its very form and discursive choices, the text confounds the
generic divisions between fiction, history, and autobiography, and
between public and private space. Recalling ‘real’ events
experienced by the author herself in a fictive form…it blurs the
distinction between memory and fictive (re)creation, betweeen
personal and national experience (Hai qtd in Didur 69).

Reserving the accounts of the gendered violence for the specific chapter five which
deals with the victimization of women during partition, I address some of the major
issues of the text Cracking India in the present chapter.

3.2.1. Narrative Structure:

Like Rahi Masoom Reza, Sidhwa is very specific and clear in her authorial
intentions. The novel begins with three distinctive declarations that set the tempo of the
story: first, invocation through Iqbal's lines which signifies voicing the agonies of those
whose voices are not heard, thus setting the tone of the novel; second, Lenny's description
 164  
 

of her compressed life which contracts more with the historical upheavals leading the
child to the loss of her innocence and making her aware of the cracking of the world in
the wake of historical tragedy; and the third, her awakening to female sexuality through
her experiences in her associate worlds.

Before allowing Lenny to start her story the omniscient author writes the epigraph
to the chapter from Iqbal's "Complaint to God," thus establishing the thematic structure.
Iqbal’s poem suggests the breaking of silence of a dejected person who complains to God
of His partiality and reprimands Him, “You are no less fickle than we.” (CI 11) The
epigraph contains several folds of meaning and provides a gist of Sidhwa's intentions of
writing this novel. If we simplify the lines we can comprhend that the persona in the
poem is not happy with his present condition and is not ready to accept the situation in
which he finds himself. He/she is aware of his ability to sing; the ability to express
himself effectively and so he determines to exploit his/her elocutionary skills to represent
those who are suffering but have no one to speak for them. The epigraph reveals the inner
urge of Sidhwa to come in support of the marginalized or subaltern people whose voices
have not been heard. Iqbal’s verse suggests Sidhwa’s intention of the breaking of silence
and providing voice to the suppressed and subalterns like Ayah, Ranna, Hamida or Hari
and many others like them.

Another piece of Iqbal’s poems quoted at the beginning of the last chapter reveals
the inner urge of the writer to have some ‘ mystic wine that give her ‘power to talk’ and
write in such a way ‘which opens mysteries concealed. Sidhwa’s narrative tools may be
taken as ‘mystic wine’ which facilitate and empower Sidhwa to unlayer the suppresed
traumas of these marginalised people ( CI 287 )

The plot of the novel is set in 1946–1948, in Lahore, India. The novel takes place
during the subcontinent’s struggle for independence and its eventual partition into India
and Pakistan. After Partition, Lahore became part of Pakistan. Lenny’s personal growth is
juxtaposited with the upheaval and rising tensions during partition..

Lenny records various incidents of her private and public world with great
objectivity. She describes her Parsee family life with humor and openness; her Hindu
nursemaid, Ayah who is attended by an amusing group of suitors and her visits to a
Muslim village Pir- Pindo. The story of the growth of Lenny and her awakening into
physical world go parallel with her awakening into history of her country.
 165  
 

The main plot centres on Ayah, Lenny’s nanny Shanta. Ayah always accompanies
Lenny wherever she goes. Lenny learns from her surroundings: from Ayah’s dealings
with her multi-religious group, Lenny’s experiences at her home with cousin, her
observations and experiences in her nearby vicinities etc. Away from school life due to
her physical deformity Lenny grows in her environment experiencing bare and harsh
reality of life. Embedded in Lenny’s story are political events, the rise of such important
political figures as Nehru, Gandhi, and Jinnah, and the massacres and horrors of partition.

As the political tensions in the Lahore increases, Lenny observes cracking of her
private world: people in her surroundings, in their relations and in the way of their lives.
Politics enter in their lives. They start talking about politics and religion. Religious
identities emerge making people distinct from others. Lenny notes changes in all. Feeling
of insecurity and fear dawns upon them. Ayah turns from a carefree woman to a woman
who wishes to marry and settle down, her mother from a domestic wife to a mysterious
woman constantly engaged in some work outside, some changed their religion; some
migrated to the other side of the border. Ayah is Hindu but remains in Lahore for she
feels she is safe with her Parsee employers. But her previous friend Ice Candy Man, a
Muslim, in his religious frenzied mood and his craving to attain Ayah along with his
group abducts her. With Ayah’s abduction story reaches to the climax. The spot where
Ayah is humiliated becomes a turning point where her personal life confronts multiple
borders of nation and religion. Her body becomes a territory on which war of religiosity
is fought. She is gang raped, kept by Ice Candy Man and thrown in the profession of
prostitution. Afterwards he marries her and Shanta turns into Mumtaz. Later on she is
rescued by Lenny’s godmother and is sent to Punjab in India. Other than Lenny’s story is
Ranna’s story which gives a graphic details of communal violence inflicted upon the
innocent people in the vicinity of the village Pir Pindo.

Thus, Lenny loses her most beloved ayah, witnesses the loss of many a people in
her surroundings, and watches her mother and grandmother transforming into the roles of
rescuers for the ayah and other recovered women. Ayah is left at the border to cross the
border to reunite with her family. Sidhwa leaves her at the border without concluding the
story of Aayh. This incomplete thread of Ayah’s life is adjoined with the life of Hamida,
recovered Muslim women whose family has rejected her and Lenny’s mother and
grandmother have sheltered her.
 166  
 

The novel is significant in its recordation of the story of a child’s life growing up
during the turbulent period of partition at micro level and that of millions of innocent
people who underwent the traumas of partition at macro level.

3.2.2. Child as narrator in Cracking India:

Bapsi Sidhwa deploys Lenny, a polio-ridden, Parsi girl child as the primary narrator
of the novel who records her experiences with utmost objectivity and innocence. The
story is narrated in the present tense as the events unfold before Lenny's eyes.
The device of the child narrator enables Bapsi Sidhwa treating a historical moment
as horrifying as partition without any partiality and morbidity. Moreover, the use of child
protagonist as the narrating consciousness benefits Sidhwa to insert autobiographical
material such as her general convictions about individuals and their various relationships
in the novel. She also gets artistic freedom because child, by virtue of his age and
innocence, cannot be blamed for unaccountability. Lenny narrates the story of her
changing world with sophistication and wonder and her child narrator status endows her
account with reliability that even the most sophisticated of adult narrators would be hard
to gain. Lenny does not simply report the happenings; she also interrogates various
things, people, motives and emotions in order to comprehend their fullest meanings. The
naiveté of the child permits the author to look at things from unbiased angle and place the
narrative to multiple interpretations.
Commenting on Lenny’s innocence, Robert L. Ross remarks:

Lenny’s naivete, her privileged position and her version of partition,

a quality that order novels about this tempestuous period in Indo-
Pakistani history lack. The momentous events leading to partition
and the after-math are constructed incrementally through the child
narrator’s point of view, as she repeats overhead adult conversation
tells of strange sights, and sometimes even misrepresents or
misinterprets situations.” ( Ross 183 )

Bapsi Sidhwa has explained in an interview with Feroza Jussawalla not only the
benefits but also the limitations of Cracking India's narrative point of view. She confesses
that the story told primarily by the first-person narrator, Lenny Sethi, restricts the
 167  
 

narration because Lenny can report only what she witnesses in Lahore; she can only
report atrocities committed mostly against Hindus and Sikhs by Muslims.To give a more
balanced view of parallel atrocities committed against Muslims, by Hindis and Sikhs
during the Partition, Sidhwa had to insert a third person narrative point of view by a
young Muslim boy, Ranna.
The novel begins with Lenny's declaration of her limited world thus restricting her
narrative within and surrounding the premises of her individual life. It is only at the initial
stage only that Lenny declares her limitations as well as strengths. I appreciate Sidhwa’s
act of equipping Lenny with all sorts of tools which can help her in witnessing as well as
narrating the traumatic atrocities of partition event. Lenny approaches the historical world
as well as the personal world.
I cite certain statements of Lenny which give us a glimpse of her role as a narrator
in the novel.
My world is compressed (... ) My child's mind is blocked by the
gloom emanating from the wire mesh screening the oblong
ventilation slits. I feel such sadness for the dumb creatures I imagine
lurking behind the wall. I know it is dumb because I have listened to
its silence, my ear to the wall (CI 11)
The covetous glances Ayah draws educate me. ( CI 12)
She is a child gifted with the faculty of intuition. I intuit the
meaning and purpose of things. (CI 28)
I learn fast... I learn of human needs, frailties, cruelties and joys.
(CI 29)
I also learn from her (Ayah) the tyranny magnets exercise over
metals. [ CI 29]
I have many teachers. My cousin shows me things.’ (CI 29)
Though my faculties of reason, deduction and logic advance with
the years, my gullibility and reaction to shock remain the same.’[CI
30]
I am about to shake heaven and earth to set things right when an
astonishing tidal wave of relief and frivolity barrels over the world.
( CI 40)
There are certain things I’ll hold and certain things I won’t.’ (CI
43)
 168  
 

I am not privy to information that is rapidly being revealed as my

birth right.’ [CI 47]

Even deformity of her body empowers Lenny: ‘I am too relieved to see my newly released
foot and its valuable deformity (…) I limp away happily.’ [CI 15]

The less attention I appear to demand the more attention I get. And
despitethe provocative agitation of Ayah’s bouncy walk…I am
attraction of the street” (CI 18).

And with many more proclamations Lenny progresses to explore the outside
world through her domestic world. Lenny is a physically challenged child. It is interesting
to note that Lenny rejoices over her disability, and the ways polio restricts as well as
benefits her in her experiences within her family and in her social sphere. However, as
Lenny grows, she does not remain conscious of her deformity. Used as a tool of
empowerment Lenny’s attempt to unnotice her deformity not only destabilizes and over
turn social exclusion and rejection of a physically disabled girl as wife and beloved , but
also symbolizes the way daily routine life goes on in its particular individual ways in the
context of large scale political conflicts during partition. Lenny’s deformed body is given
an agency in the novel. Another quality of children telling truth though it brings havoc in
Ayah’s life and bitterly depicted by Sharbat Khan as “ Children are the Devil…They only
know the truth” (CI 204) characterizes the novel and adds authenticity to its political and
historical perspective.

Along with the well knitted plot structure and device of child narrator
facilitates Sidhwa to record the traumatic event of partition with great ease. However,
nothing occurs all of a sudden in the novel. Sidhwa equips her narrator well in advance to
tolerate the brunts of a greater tragedy of national level by exposing her to the moinor
domestic forms of violence at domestic level. By juxtapositing two worlds: Urban and
rural, Sidhwa very effectively succeds in recording the harrowing tragedy of partition
mainly through Lenny and partly through Ranna. Ranna’s accounts stand as one the most
gruesome accounts of the communal violence perpetrated upon Muslims by Sikh
Community.
 169  
 

Sidhwa very strategically unlayers the private world and public world to
Lenny. Complexity and vagueness of partition is very well juxtaposed with the
complexity of the age of puberty. As children grow towards puberty, they are not able to
comprehend all the changes. This is the citical stage of vagueness for them, but they have
to cross this stage facing drastic changes as well as turmoils: physical, mental, emotional,
psychological, and social and many more. In the same way the days preceding partition,
during partition and the aftermath of partition was beyond the comprehensibilty of
ordinary men and women. They were passing through the critical phase of transition with
tremendous changes in all fields. Lenny at the verge of puberty truly exemplifies the
turbulent phase of the period as well as the pang and bafflement of innocent people at the
time of partition. Thus the device of child narrator in the text Cracking India serves
manifold purposes.

However the child narrator is supported by the adult voice wherever she is entangled in
the matters which are beyond her understanding .The author herself says in an interview about
this special perspective:

Lenny has a shifting perspective, she is a child of seven or eight, yet

her voice is sometimes that of an adolescent or even of an adult, so
all these complex aspects of her character come into play. Of course
choosing a girl-child narrator was crucial. A child is allowed to be
bewildered and not always accurate. Children have not learnt to look
at reality through the lenses of prejudice yet; they have not learnt to
hate people and hate communities; they are taught that as they grow
up. Children are still innocent (Sidhwa qtd in Brushi 145).

Lenny’s dreams are significant because they connect Lenny to the pain of others as
well her body epitomizes the the sufferings of innumerable innocent people.The first
dream that, Lenny feels, "connects me to the pain of others" (21), is the one of the
German soldier who comes to take her away on his motorcycle. But equally premonitory
of the impending horrors and massacres to come are the other nightmares that haunt her
childhood; the recurrent one, about the lion in the zoo that breaks loose and "crashes
through to sink his fangs into my stomach" (CI 24) or the other terrifying one where:
Godmother sits by my bed smiling indulgently while men in uniforms quietly slice off a
 170  
 

child's arm here, a leg there. She strokes my head as they dismember me. I feel no pain.
Only an abysmal sense of loss-and a chilling horror that no one is concerned by what's
happening (CI 22) Lenny's body is symbolic of the body of the country tortured and by
those who take decisions unconcerned about the pain of those who have to cope with
divisions and new boundaries
Moreover, the child’s perspective of partition also foreground the brutal fact how
partition interrupted the natural course of their lives. After such a traumatic event, there
was no way of returning to the life they had once known. Because Partition hindered the
children’s growing years, it forced them into maturity way before their time. Whether
children suffered physically or psychologically, the result was the same: trauma,
misplaced identity, and confusion. A whole generation of children was exhumed in the
stormy fire of partition, their lives and futures were decided for them while they
themselves had no choice. Although children survived partition, they succumbed to
considerable psychological effects and remained haunted of a history they nowhere were
responsible for.
However, At certain points in the novel it becomes clear that Lenny, the child ’s
voice is guided by an adult perspective. On the very first page of the novel we read: "My
child's mind is blocked by the gloom emanating from the wire-mesh screening the oblong
ventilation slits" (CI 1). The specification of the point of view as a child's mind creates
the impression that an adult consciousness stands behind it: it is as though Lenny's adult
mind was trying to visualize and fix what her child's mind witnessed, heard, sensed and
understood. This adult mind reveals itself especially at the ends of chapters and is
sometimes marked by the use of the past tense; so while the present tense renders the
immediacy of the child's experience, the past tense phrases the adult's views and
comments: “It wasn't until some years later-when I realized the full scope and dimension
of massacres-that I apprehended the concealed nature of the ice lurking deep beneath the
hypnotic and dynamic femininity of Gandhi's non-violent exterior." (CI 88) “And today,
forty years later, in films of Gandhi's and Mountbatten's lives, in books by British and
Indian scholars, Jinnah, who for a decade was known as 'Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim
Unity, is caricatured,and portrayed as a monster.” (CI 160)

The time markers such as 'until some years later' and 'today, forty years later,' are
indicators of shifting between present and past time period, an adult memory informing
the narrating child. Lenny’s comment: “but in my memory it is (the fire in Lahore) is
 171  
 

branded over an inordinate length of time: memory demands poetic license” (CI 149)
embodies the presence of an elderly voice which empowers the child narrator and brings
past and present together.

The collage format of the novel (intertwining of multiple points of view): Ranna’s
perspective as a survivor and Lenny’s perspective monitored at certain occasions by the
adult narrator, provides a great flexibility to the author to perspectivise the complex event
of the partition and facilitate her in recording the varied experiences of the marginalized
people.

3.2.3. Title of the novel

Bapsi Sidhwa's novel has the unique advantage of bearing two titles. Published as
The Ice-Candy-Man in the United Kingdom in 1988 and India in 1992 and as Cracking
India in North America in 1991, Cracking India has received wide spread critical acclaim
in the U.K. and was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year” for 1991. In 1999 the
novel received a fresh wave of attention when it was adapted by director Deepa Mehta as
the film Earth. I have selected the title Cracking India due to its historical and political
focus. However, the original title has significant symbolic connotations, which support
the political implications.

The title Ice-Candy Man shifts the focus from the political to human concerns and
establishes a direct connection between history and the writer’s authorial motives of
representing partition as human tragedy. The word Ice-candy man has specific political
connotations. It stands as a metaphor for human shiftiness, cunningness and deception.
Sidhwa seems to suggest that like Ice Candy Man politicians were also playing different
roles for their selfish motives. So Ice Candy Man is symbolic of unstable quality of
politicians. They are also devoid of any warmth; are icy (cold) because they are
indifferent to the human loss they cause by their political decisions. Towards the end of
the novel Ice Candy Man becomes a holy man pretending as a link between people and
God. Ultimately he is seen in role of a pimp and then lastly enacting as a true lover. Ice
Candy Man like politicians uses his oratory skill to impress others. He can be seen as a
symbol of the shifting roles played by politicians during the tragedy of partition.
 172  
 

The title Cracking India symbolically indicates an enactment of violence, the unnatural
separation of a geopolitical entity through external forces. Through Lenny’s naive
questions, Sidhwa interrogates the idea of separating the subcontinent:

There is much disturbing talk. India is to going to be broken.

Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it
where our house is? Or crack it further up on Warris Road?
How will I ever get to Godmother’s then?” (CI 101)

Like an ordinary innocent folk, Lenny is more concerned about her private world
so she is worried about the safety of her home and the house of Godmother, where shae
feels comfortable and secure, becomes more important. This juxtaposition of the personal
with the national exemplifies the anxiety of common innocent people who were more
worried about their homes rather than being interested in any political decisions. The
Cracking India title suggests the dismantling of the private world of innocent people
along with the cracking of the nation.

3.2.4. A gendered perspective of the partition history:

The central focus in Cracking India is the traumatic history of partition from the
perspective of women who became victims of physical violence perpetrated by men
against the women of the other religions. This victimisation of women is shown through
the violation of body polity of women.
The world of Cracking India is the world of women. If they are victims, they are
the actors; if they are losers; they are the fighters. Though the text is polyvolent in its
approach highly committed to political tragedy of partition, its feminist centrality is
clearly perceptible. Unlike male dominant and hero oriented texts which allow women
only within domesticity or periphery, Cracking India foregrounds women’s world that
either colludes with the patriarchal world or challenges the patriarchal repressiveness in
the most emphatic manner. The novel focalizes women’s domestic roles, their individual
characteristics, strengths, their physical exploitations, their survival strategies and their
vulnerablity during communal wars like partition. Unlike other novels in Cracking India
women are not stereotype stock characters, they are given human dimension with all their
frailities and strengths.
 173  
 

In Cracking India Sidhwa employs mainly female characters, while most male
characters have a minor role (with the exception of Ice-candy-man. It is also interesting to
notice that women in general are not only oppressed, but several of these female
characters seem to be rather empowered. Kleist (70), who has written an article about
feminine power versions in this particular novel, identifies four instances of female
authority: Lenny, as descriptive narrator; Ayah, as influential agency over men in pre-
Partition time; Lenny’s mother and aunt, as refugee helpers for abducted women; and
Godmother, as nearly omnipotent with many social connections. Sangeeta Ray (2000) has
noted that ‘‘the novel emphasizes the particular plight of women as they become the
increasing focus of a definitive ethnicity’’ (Ray 133).

Feminist perspectives of Cracking India have been explored in studies like

Madhuparna Mitra’s (2008) article ‘Conceptualising Ayah’s Abduction: Patterns of
Violence Against Women in Sidhwa’s Cracking India’. Focusing on specific female
characters of the novel, like Papoo, Ayah, Lenny and her mother, Mitra highlights the
sexual victimization each of these female figures experience within the novel. She
concludes by explaining how sexual harassment is used as a tactic in the novel. However
Mitra, in addition to pointing out the sexual disempowerment of women in the novel,
illustrates the empowerment of women through the character of Godmother. Mitra’s
feminist exploration is furthered in more recent studies such as Jacquelynn Kleist’s
(2011) article ‘More than Victims: Versions of Feminine Power in Bapsi Sidhwa’s
Cracking India’. Kleist challenges the presentation of women as oppressed victims and
urges for the understanding of female characters in Cracking India as, “women possessed
with distinct forms of power, as they exhibit their individual forms of agency. Cracking
India, like texts by female authors Quratulain Hyder, Amrita Pritam and Jamila Hashmi
break free from hegemony of patriarchal partition narratives to provide a distinct female
counter-narrative” (Kleist 70)
By providing centrality to female characters Lenny and Ayah the novelist permit us
to examine the complexity of this violent partition beyond the grand narratives of
political, religious, and nationalist discourses of partition. In focussing on the experience
of the subaltern, the novel challenges male-dominated nationalist historiography through
Lenny’s growing consciousness regarding India’s partition and through her
transformation from an innocent perspective to a political interventionist and revisionist
perspective.
 174  
 

3.2.5. Parsi perspective:

As a Parsee I can see things objectively. I see all the common people suffering
while politicians on either side have all the fun. (Sidhwa qtd in writer in
residence 1997)

Sidhwa’s canvas of Cracking India is filled with personages from multi

community, but the story is told through the perspective of a parsi girl child. Sidhwa's
novel is unique and the only novel which is written from a Parsi perspective on partition.
While the three major religious groups—Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs—voice their
“despair or anger and profound unhappiness” (Menon and Bhasin 7) in their own
languages, minor groups such as the Parsee remained silent. The novel as a whole shows
that with the coming of partition other religions contracted to symbols only , but the
Parsees, who are descendents of Persian immigrants remained nuetral. Lenny belonging
to the Parsee community enunciates the tensions and stance taken by the Parsees at the
time of partition from a uninvolved position of Parsee located in Lahore. Through Lenny
Sidhwa also informs the readers about the religious rituals and rites of Parsees in the
novel at various occasions
At a Jashan prayer meeting to celebrate the British victory in the World War II,
Prsees assess their situation during the troubled time of Partition and takes some
important decisions. A person proposes that they should join political agitation, march to
jail and enjoy the facilities of free board and lodging ment for class prisoners. Col.
Bharucha, a doctor and president of the Parsee community in Lahore warns against such
steps: “Hindus, Muslims and even the Sikhs are going to jockey for power: and if you
jokers jump into the middle you’ll be mangled into chutney!” ( CI ) When objections are
raised by some members of the Parsi community at a jashan meeting on the eve of
Partition, Colonel Bharucha, the spokesperson of the Zoroastrian community in Lahore,
observes:

I hope no Lahore Parsee will be stupid enough to court trouble. I

strongly advise all of you to stay at the back—and out of trouble ( CI 45).
 175  
 

He argues that it would be very difficult to predict the outcome of Partition. He cautions
them:

There may not be one but two—or even three—new nations. And the
Parsis might find themselves championing the wrong side if they
don't look before they leap (CI 46 ).

One expresses his distrust of the three communities: If we’re stuck with Hindus
they’ll swipe our business from under our noses and sell our grandfathers in the bargain:
if we’r stuck with Muslims they’ll convert us by the sword! And God help us if we’re
stuck with the Sikhs!” ( CI 46 ). The wise Col.Bharucha suggests: “Let whoever wishes
rule! Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian! We will abide by the rules of their land.We will
cast our lot with whoever rules Lahore.” (CI 48)

He resolves that the Parsis of Lahore should be in favour of the ruling party. He
believes that there is no need for the Parsi community to leave Lahore. He tells them: Let
whoever wishes to rule! Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian! We will abide by the rules of
their land. (CI 48)
The proclamations of Colonel Bharucha at the community dinner reflect the stance
of the minorities in the Zoroastrian community in the pre-Partition context. He aptly
predicts that Hindus, Muslims and even the Sikhs would jockey for power. He cautions
the Parsis of Lahore not to jump into the middle. After a reasonable they conclude: As
long as we conduct our lives quitly, as long as we present no threat to anybody, we will
prosper right here,” (CI 49)

Through this conversation Sidhwa exposes the mental confusion and

apprehensions of Parsees on the eve of partition and Independence.They remained in
areas of India and Pakistan, trying to preserve their identity by not involving themselves
in political matters. Parsee community’s strategy to remain nuetral was for them an
appropriate step for survival during that turbulant period.

3.2.6. Pakistani Perspective:

In Cracking India Sidha deals with the theme of partition as a Pakistani citizen. The
perspective of Sidhwa is quite evidently Pakistani. According to her, Partition was a
 176  
 

'mistake', a tragedy which could have been averted. However, in the novel, she argues
how Partition favoured India over Pakistan:

The Hindus are being favoured over the Muslims by the remnants of the
Raj. Now that its objective to divide India is achieved, the British favour
Nehru over Jinnah. Nehru is Kashmiri, they grant him Kashmir. Spurning
logic, defying rationale, ignoring the con sequence of bequeathing a
Muslim state to the Hindus. (. . .) They grant Nehru Gurdaspur and
Pathankot without which Kashmir cannot be secured (CI 100).

Thus Sidhwa rejects the British and pro-Hindu Indian versions of history. She
subverts the popular myth about Partition which was nursed and cherished by people on
either side of the border in the subcontinent.

As a Pakistani writer she contests the prejudiced representations of Mohammad Ali

Jinnah by Indian historians as well as by others which hold Jinnah resposible for the
partiiton. To counter this popular demonized figure of Jinnah, she represents Gandhi
,Nehru, Lord Mountbatten, Subhash Chandra Bose in a slightly comic or unfavourable
vein. During a debate in Queen’s Park Masseur comments on Gandhi: “He is a politician
Yaar,… it’s his business to suit his tongue to the moment” (CI 100 ) Gandhi figures
satirically in the novel as apolitician who entered in the politics through his continuous
dieting programmes, a man who is obsessed with bowel movements and enemas. He is a
represented as a wily politician who bears the responsibility for the Partition violence,
hiding as he did the “ice lurking deep beneath the hypnotic and dynamic feminity.

Lenny's response to Gandhi is naive. He, a mythical figure, for her at least, emerges
as a multi-dimensional reality. His presence is overwhelming:

My brain, heart and stomach melt. The pure shaft of humour,

compassion, tolerance and understanding he directs at me fuses me
to everything that is feminine, funny, gentle, loving. He is a man
who loves women. And lame children. And the untouchable
sweeper— so he will love the untouchable sweeper's constipated
girl-child best. I know just where to look for such a child. He touches
my face, and in a burst of shyness, I lower my eyes. This is the first
time I have lowered my eyes before a man (CI 96)
 177  
 

Lenny truly comprehends the concealed nature of "ice" lurking deep beneath the
hypnotic and 'dynamic' femininity of Gandhi's 'non-violent exterior' only after the
communal frenzy starts. Sidhwa's description of Gandhi is a mixture of awe and
irreverence.
Jawaharlal Nehru is also caricatured in an unfavourable manner: “ But that Nehru,
he’s a sly one… He’s got Mountbatten eating out of his one hand and the English’s wife
out of his other what-not…He is the one to watch (CI 141).
Jawaharlal is represented as the shrewdest politician:

Jinnah or no Jinnah! Sikh or no Sikh! Right law, wrong law, Nehru

will walk off with the lion’s share… And what’s more, come out of
it smelling like the Queen- of- the-! Ice- candy-man speaks with an
assurance that is prophetic (CI 141)

Sidhwa’s praise of Jinnah, on the other hand, is typical of a Pakistani, a national

duty to defend him. When her mother tells her that Jinnah's wife, a Parsi, died heart
broken, Lenny avers:

But didn't Jinnah too die of a broken heart? And today, forty
five years later, in the films of Gandhi's and Mountbatten's
lives, in books by British and Indian scholars, Jinnah who for
a decade was known as 'Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity',
is caricatured, and portrayed as a monster (CI 171)

Sidhwa’s account is revisionist in its depiction of Jinnah and she clearly manifests
her grief at the biased work of the British and Indian scholars. To support her estimate of
Jinnah Sidhwa cites lines from Sarojini Naidu's tribute to Jinnah:

the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve masks, for those who
know him, a naive and eager humanity, an intuition quick and ten
der as a woman's, a humour gay and wishing as a child's pre
eminently rational and practical, discreet and dispassionate in his
estimate and acceptance of life, the obvious sanity and serenity of his
 178  
 

worldly wisdom effectually disguise a shy and splendid ideal ism

which is of the very essence of the man (CI 171).

As being Pakistani she caricatures Jinnah above other politicians, but as a novelist
represents the Partition horrors unbiasedly.

3.2.7. Cracking India: Fragmented Selves:

We Indians and Pakistanis alike are always emotionally

involved in our politics…. I should add that politics in
the subcontinent touches each person’s life. …I don’t
like too much politics in a novel. I am more interested in
human relationship in a work of fiction.
(Sidhwa qtd in Bhalla 224-227)

Sidhwa’s Cracking India provides a graphic and detailed account of the Partition
event, its horrors and consequences and therby assists us to access the inner recesses of
indivdual experiences of ordinary men and women, thus, shifting the attention from the
elite leaders and the celebration of Independence to the accounts of marginalised people
and the especifically the recesses of the women’s worlds. The everyday lives and
experiences of working class people in this novel not only challenge the institutionalized
accounts of partition, but also demonstrate the ways in which daily lives were
transformed into critical sites for providing alternative history. The novel focuses on the
daily routine life of marginalized people, their experiences, frailities, resistances and
agencies in the inner recesses of their private worlds and the ways they negotiate and
question the Imperial, religious and nationalist discourses in colonial and post-colonial
India.

Through the narration of the young girl Lenny, Cracking India represents the
particular experience of individuals rather than generalized accounts. Cracking India
represents directly the naked dance of brutality inflicted upon innocent people during
partition through the eyes of children.

By juxtaposing two different spatial locations; one urban (Lahore) and the other
rural (Pir Pindo), Sidhwa represents an unprejudiced and unbiased recordation of the
 179  
 

everyday lives and shows how a national event created rupture in otherwise peaceful life
of these people. Lenny’s home and its surroundings, Godmother’s home, Queen Park,
Roof of Ice Candy Man’s home from where Lenny records some of the horrors of
communal violence and the vicinity of Pir Pindo are the main spots where main events of
the novel take place. These micr- narratives provide us the glimpse of the macro-level
happenings.
The events occuring in Lahore are mediated through Lenny the Parsi narrator but to
offer a counter account of Pir- Pindo another child Ranna is introduced creating a
separate section entitled “Ranna’s Story,” the child appears as a survivor enduring
horrendous atrocities and the novel represents his experiences of the cruelities of Sikhs
(Akalies) upon Muslim community. His memory as a survivor offers another form of
historiography in contrast to that of the elites and non- actors.

Certain meetings and scenes at specific places such as Lenny’s home, Queen’s Park,
Faletti’s hotel, Pir-Pindo are very thoughtfully devised by the writer to showcase the
dismantling lives of marginalized people in the wake of partition. The meetings of Ayah
and her friends, meetings at Pir Pindo between village people of different communities,
even chidren’s group meeting together and discussing private and public issues resonate
the high level drama going on at national level.

To understand the representation of partition and its impact on the lives of the
marginalized people at macro-level I approach the text Cracking India through two local
spatial positions: Lahore and Pir-Pindo .

Lahore: From ‘Paris of the East’ to a monopolized space:

How long does Lahore burn? Weeks? Months?

…………
Despite all the ruptured dreams, broken lives, buried gold,
bricked-in rupees, secreted jewelry, lingering hopes… the fire
could not have burned for months and months…
But in my memory it is branded over an inordinate length of
time: memory demands poetic license (CI 149).

The story of the novel Cracking India is set in the city Lahore before, during and
 180  
 

after Partition .This spatial location allows us to observe the events that happened right in
the center of the country, therefore, the disturbances and violence that the partition caused
are directly presented to us.

In pre-partition time Lahore was a hub of different cultural hues. Sidhwa provides
a vivid description of Lahore in the introduction of her book The city of sin and spleadour
and adorns it as the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings,
the courtesan of Mughal emperors’, the ‘Paris of the East’, Lahore is more than the
grandeur of Mughal forts and gardens, mosques and mausoleums; the jewel colours of
everlasting spring. It is also the city of poets, the city of love, longing, sin and splendour.
Sidhwa asserts:

To belong to Lahore is to be steeped in its romance, to inhale with each

breath an intensity of feeling that demands expressions (Sidhwa xii)

For me, growing up in Lahore as a child, this metropolis with its

chequered history and historical sites was compressed into tiny
pockets of familiarity: they provided me with many of my
characters. Godmother, Slavesister, Mother, Father (…)and the host
of other wallas in Ice Candy Man, The Crow Eaters and American
Brat. (Sidhwa xvi)

Lahore city, which was a place of fascination to all religions, faced the worst of
violence and carnage that took place in 1947. It became the most disputed centre because
all three parties, Hindu Muslim and Sikhs, were laying their claim to it. Lahore
experienced experienced horrific violence in the year 1947. And when everything subsided
Lahore emerged out a place of burka-clad women, devoid of all Hindu and Sikh families to
the other side.

There is a constant juxtaposition between domestic and national in the narrative.

While depicting characters under going unexpected changes and communal conflicts,
Sidhwa also offers a representation of the official versions of the Partition thus critiquing
the way how these official version suppress the real accounts of marginalized people.
 181  
 

Sidhwa’s narrative focuses less on the elite leaders and celebration but more on the
people and their struggle. There is a gap between the politics of the elites and that of
ordinary men’s politics. The Sharbat Khan and Ayah’s conversation exposes this gap:

Sharbat Khan cautions Ayah: These are bad times—Allah knows

what’s in store. There is big trouble in Calcutta and Delhi: Hindu
Muslim trouble. The Congresswallahs are after Jinnah’s blood…

What’s it is to us if Jinaah, Nehru and Patel fight? They are not

fighting our fight, says Ayah lightly.

That may be true,” says Sharbat Khan thoughtfully, but they are
stirring up a trouble for us all ( CI 84)

In official historigraphy it is the leaders or elite who are given the prime
importance but in literary narratives, it is the ordinery people who remain in the centre, it
is their history which is focused at, while poltical leaders find little space as it becomes
apparent from the following accounts:

Mother chatters about friends and supplies political tidbits filtered

through their conciousness: Colonial Bharucha says that Jinnah
said…And Nehru said that…And oh, how I laughed when Mehrabai(
that’s the mirthsome Mrs. Bankwala) said this about Patel… and that
about. (CI 87)

The reports of violence of the partition reported by the government are much
different from the violence actually confronted by people in real life situations. Like other
literary naaratives Cracking India also does not give much space to the nationalist
leaders. People can only hear their voices or commands through the radio. However, they
usually find the situation described by the elite leaders or the government to be very
different from what people really perceive in life. For example, when Lenny and the
others gather and listen to the radio, “The Congress and Muslim League announce
spokesmen, the announcer says, warn the peasant not to heed mischievous rumors. Even
Master Tara Singh, the leader of the Akali Sikhs, tells the peasants---especially the
Muslims—to remain where they are. No one will disturb them” (CI 117).
 182  
 

Same Master Tara Singh is seen delievering inflammatory speeches later on. Lenny says
she sees him clearly:

Holding a long sword in each hand, the curved steel reflecting

the sun’s glare as he clashes the sword above his head, the Sikh
soldier-saint shouts: “ We will see how the Muslim swine get
Pakistan! We will fight to the last man!.... Raj karega Khalsa,
aki rahi na koi! ( CI 143)

The Sikh punctuate his shrieks with roars: “ Pakistan

Murdabad! Death to Pakistan! Sat Siri Akaal! Boley se nihaal!
(CI 143)

Another example of official history is given when there is trouble in the city; at that
moment,“The radio announces through the crackling: ‘There have been reports of trouble
in Gurdaspur. The situation is reported to be under control’” (CI 158). After hearing
this, the gardener immediately comments: “Which means there is uncontrollable
butchering going on in Gurdaspur” (CI 158). This announcement uncovers the cracks in
the official history. In these examples, Sidhwa ironically discloses how the elite—the
nationalists as well as the colonialists—respond to the violence of the Partition.

Birth of nation

Formation of Pakistan is represented through a casual game of cards played by

British officials and through the imaginative process of birth of a child. And at this
moment of nation’s birth the domestic space of ordinary men and women cracks. Sidhwa
represents the process of Partition as game in the hands of British during the last phase of
their rule— “ Playing British gods under the ceiling fans of the Faletti’s hotel—behind
Queen Victoria’s gardened skirt---the Radcliff Commission deals out Indian cities like a
pack of cards. Lahore is dealt to Pakistan. Pathankot to India” (CI 150). Lenny wonders
over this quick decision. Birth of the nation is announced and Lenny realizes, “ I m
Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that A new nation is born. (CI 150). Lenny visualizes it as
a physical or material nature of border.

Lenny’s vision of British Gods is juxtaposed with slavesister’s perception of

partition as the birth of a new baby:
 183  
 

… don’t forget, we have to celebrate the new arrival yet!

Godmother and I look at her blankly. “ Somebody has a baby I don’t

know of? Asks Godmother suspiciously

Have you forgotten already? Says Slavesister with reproof. “ We’ve

all produced a baby… We’ve given birth to a new nation. Pakistan!
(CI 151)

World of Subalterns:

The novel primarily deals with the lives of marginalized people who belong to the
lower strata of the society. In pre-partition era when religion is not the identity marker,
many of the characters are named after their professions, such as “Masseur” or “the
Government House gardener” or Ice Candy Man, nanny etc. The way of naming indicates
that the protagonists in the novel are the ordinary men and women; the working class who
suffered during Partition instead of the elite leaders like Gandhi or Nehru. Furthermore,
Lenny’s world moves around these subaltern people which enables her to witness and
narrativize everyday experiences and changes which occur in the lives of these people.
Being an observant, intuitive kid she is able to visualize, grasp as well as understand the
increasingly changing perceptions of people with the coming of the division. She very
well narrates the changing relationship between friends, the outbreak of violence, the
abduction of her Hindu ayah, and the impact of partition on the people she is in contact
with. The novel Cracking India very well documents the cracking away of the world of
Lenny and her related vicinity in the wake of partition.

The novel begins with the pre-partitioned Lahore where Lenny and Ayah lead
tension free life in a multicultural space of Lahore. Characters from different religious
backgrounds are shown meeting everyday, gossiping, making overtures. In pre-partition
Lahore all religious communities are shown living peacefully having good relations.
Their identities are based on their social connections rather than religious affiliations. The
pluralistic culture is represented primarily through Ayah’s group; the gathering in the
Queen’s park where people of different caste, creed, come everyday, sit, chat and
secondly through Lenny’s home where people of all religions dwell peacefully.

Pre-partition Lahore is shown a multicultural space full of amity, understanding and

 184  
 

cooperation. The best example is cited by Ice Candy Man who despite of being Muslim
helps his friend Sher Singh, the Zoo attendant, to get his house vacated from the Muslim
tenants and proudly acclaims: “I’m first a friend to my friends…And an enemy to their
enemies… And then a Musssalman! God and the politicians have enough servers. So, I
serve my friends” (CI 131).

Sidhwa does not specifically project clear cut division between pre- partition and
post-partition time; a very smooth gradual slippage is perceptible to transgress from pre-
partition to post-partition and from colonial to post-colonial period, however, pre-
partition amity and post-partition disturbances are captured through certain incidents and
conversations of common men and women.
Different sets of groups and their meetings in their domestic domains not only
challenge different ideologies of high level discussions and meetings associated with the
partition event, they also foreground the multiple angles through which the event can be
analyzed and revisited. These meetings of the subalterns offer a view of the politics of the
ordinary people which is not exclusionery like the politics of the people. Since the story
is told from a Parsi girl perspective, her position in all the meetings and places become
significant to understand the stance taken by the novelist. It is interesting to note that
Lenny narrates the story from varied positions.

The dinner scene at Lenny’s home is the first scene when we see the representatives
of all the major parties involved at that time. This political discussion intervenes the
domestic motive of inviting at dinner and is symbolic of the intrusion of the political life
into the private life of people. Sidhwa critiques the nationalist ideologies regarding
partition very clearly in the dinner scene. In this scene we see the direct presence of
British Roger. There is a heated debate between Mr. Roger, Mr. Sethi, and over the
contemporary situations. They discuss the current politics that who will rule India and
what will happen if the British leave. The scene is quite significant from three
perspectives: British, Liberal and nationalist. Lenny represents this scene from the
underside of the dinner table. She is not able to visualize but can hear what is discussed
there. This distances her as a witness.

Earlier in pre-partition times, Lenny didn’t mark religious differences. But with
the Partition getting closer with emerging religious identities, the differences of
communities become highlighted and thus visible to Lenny. She begins to pay attentions
 185  
 

upon religious identity markers. The observation of the changed representation of

individuals also brings us a close look at the influence created by the Partition.

Lenny observes: “Imam Din and Yousaf, turning into religious zealots, warn
Mother they will take Friday afternoons off for the Jumha prayers. On Fridays they set
about preparing themselves ostentatiously” (Sidhwa 101).

The representation of Lenny and Ayah and her admirers’ meeting also mediates the
impact of the impending Partition. They change their meeting place with the increasing
disorder in the society. In the final days before the Partition takes place, they have
stopped going to the Queen’s Garden; instead, they go to the Faletti hotel—a switch from
a public place to a more private one. The switch of the meeting place suggests their
awareness of the growing tensions in public spaces.

The argument that was going on at national level is projected through the meeting of the
Ayah and her group:

They are arguing. Everybody appears to be quarreling these days.

Masseur says: “If the Punjab is divided, Lahore is
bound to go to Pakistan. There is Muslim majority
here…”
Lahore will stay in India!” says the Government House
gardener, cutting him short…
There is much Hindu money here…they own most of the
property and business in the city and….
But there are too many Mussulmans! Insists Masseur.
So what? People don’t matter…Money does! (…) (CI 137)
…
All at once the Sikh Zoo attendant shouts,” And what
about us?... The Sikhs hold more farmland in the Punjab
than the Hindus and Muslims put together! (CI 139)

Sidhwa has caricatured Sikhs as the most aggressive of all the communities. The
statements of Butcher like “The British have advised Jinnah to keep clear of you
bastards! ... The Angrez call you a bloody nuisance! .They have tradition of violence;…
 186  
 

(their) portraits of the gurus holding the dripping heads of butchered enemies? (CI 140)
However, the sane voice comes from Masseur:

Shut up Yaar … Its all Buckwas! The holy Koran lies next to the
Granth Sahib in the Golden temple. The shift Guru Nanaik wore
carried inscriptions from the Koran… In fact the Sikh faith came
about to create Hindu Muslim harmony! ... There are no differences
among friends… We will stand by each other. (CI 140)

However marginalized these people were they were well aware of the tricks of the
politicians as well as wanted to be away from the politics:

One off duty sepoy agrees with Masseur and comments: “Of
course, Yaar”,… Who are we to qurrel ? Let the big shots fight it
out (140).
You are right, brother,” …. The politicians will say anything in
times like these to suit their purpose… (CI 140)

Lenny’s position and reaction here are noteworthy. She closes her eyes. “ I can’t bear to
open them: they will open on a suddenly changed world. I try to shut out the voices.” (CI
140) She doesn’t want to hear them so she slips into Ayah lap and hides her face. Though
Lenny is a child still she can sense the venom in the air. May be children are sensitive and
intuitive and are able to smell the dangers. She describes: There is something so
dangerous about the tangible colours the passions around me have assumed that I blink
open my eyes and sit up (CI 141).
Lenny , an insightful child, is able to sense the religious difference:

I become aware of religious differences. It is sudden. One

day everybody is themselves—and the next day they are
Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling
into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing
Ayah—she is also a token. A Hindu. (CI 101)
 187  
 

After the Partition has taken place, and after the violence has begun to burst, Lenny
and Ayah and the admirers stop going to the restaurant. Some of the non-Muslims in the
group have already made their plan to leave Pakistan. The Government House gardener
says: “When our friends confess they want to kill us, we have to go” (167). His words
reveal the fact that the promised brotherhood or friendship can no longer be retained and
people start to lay their hands on those whom they used to call “brothers.”

“Mehtas have gone! the Malothras have gone! the Guptas have gone!... and there
are any Hindu families left on Warris Road,” and Mr. Singh is “to leave Lahore forever”
“Things have become topsy-turvy” (CI 155-157).

….

Rosy-Peter have gone. The Government House gardner has gone.. (CI 169)

The whole cultural and social picture of Lahore is changed beyond recognition:

(…) wave upon scruffy wave of Muslim refugees flood Lahore--- and
the Punjab west of Lahore. Within three months seven million
Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs are uprooted in the largest
and most terrible exchange of population known to history. The
Punjab has been divided by the icy card-sharks dealing out the land
village by village, city by city, wheeling and dealing and doling out
favors (CI 169).

Lahore is suddenly emptied of yet another hoary dimension: there

are no Brahmins with caste marks—or Hindus in dhoties with
bodhies. Only hordes of muslim refugees. (CI 187)

Queen’s Garden is the significant location which provides us the glimpse of the
pre-partition and post-partition Lahore. It is the central space where the changes become
more apparant. This is the place where Lenny, Ayah, and Ayah’s group meet regularly.
In the representation of the park, Lenny unconsciously sees in her surroundings the “
Sikh women, a Muslim family, and a “group of smooth-skinned Brahmins ” (CI
105).After partition Queen’s garden has lost its colour, vigour and charm. Lenny says
says she cannot believe her eyes:
 188  
 

Queen has gone! …Bereft of her presence, the structure looks unwomaned.

The garden scene has depressingly altered. Muslim families who

added color when scattered among the Hindus and Sikhs, now
monopolize the garden, depriving it of colour.Even the children,
covered in brocades and satins, cannot alleviate the austerity of the
black burkas and whit chuddars that shroud the women. It is
astonishing. The absence of the brown skin that showed through the
fine veils of Hindus and Sikh women, and beneath the dhoties and
shorts of the men, has changed the complexion of the queenless
garden. There are fewer women. More men. ( CI 249)

This passage is enough to tell the story of a lost world Lahore was palpitating in pre-
partition era. Now in post-partition scenario it has lost its vigour and charm.

What Lenny says about Ayah is rightly applicable to Lahore: Where have the radiance
and the animation gone? Can the soul be extracted from its living body? (CI 272)

Lenny’s accounts of violence:

Body polity has a significant place in the novel Cracking India. The violence
of the Partition is represented through various bodies of subalterns: Masseur’s body,
Ayah’s body, Hari’s body, innumerable butchered bodies of Muslims in Pir Pindo,
Ranna’s body and so on. We find accounts of victimization of male and female bodies
during partition through which violence is actualized by the perpetrators and the message
of victory is transmitted through the mutilating, amputating or capturing the body polity
of the other religions. Lenny records the scenes of violence in Lahore and a short
deviation from Lenny’s perspective is Ranna’s most horrible account of Pir-Pindo.

Through the injured, mutilated, scarred and murdered bodies , the unnarratable
accounts of pain and suffering of the victims are reciprocated. The body becomes a
territory on which wars of religion, nation are erected.

Pandey writes: the Partition is “a moment of rupture and genocidal violence,

marking the termination of one regime and the inauguration of the two new ones”
(Remembering 1)
 189  
 

In Communal violence of partition community feeling became prominent. It is quite

perceptible when Ice-candy-man reports a train which have arrived with mutilated bodies:
“He is breathless, reeking of sweat and dust, and his frantic eyes rake the group” (159).
He narrates the terror of violence which this non-animate train conveys and transmits:

A train from Gurdaspur has just come in, he announces, panting.

Everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. Tere are no
young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of
women’s breasts! ( CI 159)

Lenny’s position as a narrator and commentor is significant here. She reports:

What I’ve heard is unbearable….I shake my head to focus my

distracted attention on Ice-candy-man. He appears to have grown
shades darker, and his face is all dried up and shrveled-looking. I can
see that beneath his shock he is grieving (CI 159).

Ice-candy who claimed, “I’m first a friend to my friends…And an enemy to their

enemies… And then a Musssalman!” (CI 131) is in the process of becoming religious
zealot.

In the representation of the Partition, the body is object which primarily receives
the suffering. It is the location from which the narrative of the violence begins. For
instance, when Lenny and Himat Ali find the gunny-sack of Masseur’s body on the road,
the depiction of the body starts:

The sack slowly topples over and Masseur spills out. […] He
was lying on one side, the upper part of his velvet body bare, a
brown and white checked lungi knotted on his hips, and his feet
in the sack. I never knew Masseur was so fair inside, creamy,
and his arms smooth and distended with muscles and his
forearms lined with pale brown hair. A wide wedge of flesh
was neatly hacked to further trim his slender waist, and his
spine, in a velvet trough, dipped into his lungi. (CI 185)
 190  
 

Masseur’s body is the starting point of communal violence in the narrative. Even
though Masseur is dead, his body communicates his pain; “they look at him as if he is not
a person. He isn’t. He has been reduced to a body. A thing” (CI 186).

In another scene in which body is used as the sight of violence is in Chapter 16 of

the novel, where in the demonstration of the Sikh mobs, a child is poked by and hung on
a spear:

A naked child, twitching on a spear struck between her shoulders, is

waved like a flag: her screamless mouth agape, she is staring straight
up at me. A crimson fury blinds me. I want to dive into the bestial
creature clawing entrails, plucking eyes, tearing limbs, gouging hearts,
smashing brains: but the creature has too many stony sightless eyes,
deaf ears, mindless brains and tons of entwined entrails” (CI 144)

The flag here becomes the symbol of the power of the winning group as well as it
demonstrate the helplessness of innocent. Female body here displayed manifests the
power of the Sikhs and their victory over Muslims. This scene is immediately
counterposed with Muslim’s atrocities. Lenny narrates:

My eyes focus on an emaciated Banya wearing a white

Gandhi cap. The man is knocked down. His lips are drawn
away from rotting, paan -stained teeth in a scream. The men
[the Muslim mobs] move back and in the small clearing I see
his legs sticking out of his dhoti right up to the groin—each
thin, br own leg tied to a jeep. […] There is the roar of a
hundred throats: ‘Allah-o-Akbar!’ and beneath it the growl of
reviving motors. (CI 145)

When a child witnesses such type of brutal acts of violence, it certainly has its
psychological implications. After seeing these scences, Lenny re-enacts the same
violence on her doll: she pulls the legs of a doll apart:

I select a large lifelike doll with a china face and blinking blue eyes…. I
hold one leg out to Adi. “ Here,” I say, “pull it”

Why? Asks Adi looking confused.

 191  
 

Pull, damn it! I scream, so close to hysteria that Adi blanches and
hastily grabs the proferred leg… Adi and I pull the doll’s legs,
stretching it in a fierce tug of war, until making a wrenching sound it
suddenly splits. (CI 148)

She is frightened by the result, crying, and her brother is confused and irritated by
Lenny’s “pointless brutality” (CI 148).

The violence which is represented through Ayah’s body is the extreme point of
communal violence inflicted upon bodies during partition: “(…)her mouth slack and
piteously gaping, her disheveled hair flying into her kidnappers’ faces, staring at us as if
she wanted to leave behind her wide-open and terrified eyes” ( CI 195)

Not only female bodies but male bodies were also victimized in the name of
religion. Through Hari’s forceful conversion Sidhwa gives accounts of these brutal acts
of violence. This account not only exposes the barbarity of perpetrators but also
foreground the helplessness of those people who instead of leaving their homelands
preferred conversion. Like other novels Sidhwa’s text also interrogates the superficiality
and fluidity of the religious markers of identity.

When the Muslim mob comes to Lenny’s house to find out and catch if there is any
Hindu or Sikh, they question the gardener Himat Ali, who, before the Partition and his
conversion into Muslim, is known as “Hari.” They ask him to recite the Koran and
expose his circumcised penis to the crowd so as to prove that he is already “a proper
Muslim” (Sidhwa 192). After the guarantee by the barber who himself has circumcised
the gardener and the gardener’s reciting the Koran with a Hindu intonation, the mobs let
the gardener go.

Pir-Pindo: From a shared community to a devastated land:

Like Ranna, Pir Pindo is brutally altered (CI 206).

Sidhwa very beautifully posits juxtaposition between village life and that of city.
She adopts story within story technique to give separate space to Ranna’s story so as it
cannot be forgotten or merged in the annals of other accounts.
 192  
 

Imam Din, the cook in Lenny’s family, goes to his village Pir –Pindo to inform his
family and villagers about the communal tensions in the city and the possible violence
that may later on enter in the rural areas. The villagers also evaluate the role of British at
this juncture:

(…) there is trouble in the cities… the English Sarkar can’t seem to do
anything about it”(…) I don’t think because they can’t… I think it is
because the Sarkar doesn’t want to!” ( CI 64)

When villagers listen to the talks of Imam Din, they very carelessly but confidently
express their faith upon eachother. Following conversation provides a glimpse of the pre-
partition society in which people of all religions were living torgether peacefully and had
concern for each other:

“all that is in the cities, (…) It won’t affect our lives” (CI 64). When Imam Din
tells them that this is a serious matter and they should take it seriously because “‘(…) sly
killings, rioting and baton charges by the police’ are going on in the city and Hidu-
Muslim trouble is spreading” [CI 64], the other villagers, who are either Sikh or Muslim,
erupt in protest. A Sikh proclaims: “Brother, […] our village come from the same racial
stock. Muslim or Sikh, we are basically Jats. We are brothers. How can we fight each
other?” [CI 64]. Another villager speaks: “If needs be, we’ll protect our Muslim brothers
with our lives!” (CI 65).

Chaudhary promises,’ I am prepared to take an oath on the Holy Koran that every
man in this village guard his Sikh brothers with no regard for his own life!’ (CI 65)
However, when Lenny visits Pir Pindo for the second time on the festive occasion of
Baishakhi things are changed. The change is quite perceptible, the faith and optimism of
people are replaced by suspecion, fear, anxiety and gloom. Baishakhi is an occasion of
celebration. The whole atmosphere is shrouded with peculier silence. Her friend
Ranna's"smile becomes strained and his laughter strident" (CI 106); voices are solemn
and lowered;"Dost Mohammad's thigh twitch[es] against" (CI 107)The unusual and
threatening presence of a group of armed Akalis makes the villagers of Dera Tek Singh to
escort their Muslim friends to their village "before it gets dark" (CI 108). Lenny’s
position is of central position here because She sits “between Dost Mohammad and
Jagjeet Singh” while “Ranna sidled into his father’s lap” (CI 63)
 193  
 

However, when the "madness" (CI 107) of the city, as Jagjeet Singh calls it, spread
to the rural areas and its effects soon are visible in Lenny's world. Shortly after Baisakhi
some refugees from Pir Pindo take shelter in Lenny’s home. In chpter 19 we have
refugees account which offers a version of those people who were put in an dielemic
condition whether to go or not who left and who remained rooted only to face atrocities
later on. When in Lahore they hear about the attacks Imam Din broods over the situation:

Where can they go ? There are millions of them. Even supposing

Dost Mohammad and his family leave Pir Pindo, which they can’t …
how can they abandon their ancestors’ graves, every inch of land
they own, their other kin? How will they ever hold up their heads
again? Suppose every single person in Pir Pindo can hold his own
someplace else-even then millions of Mussulmans will be left in East
Punjab! Where will they go? (CI 117)

The words of the rustics of Pir –Pindo foreground their belief in the space of their
birth:

Those Mussulmans who want to go to Pakistan had better get into the
truck, a soldier shouted through a megaphone. He was short and
stocky like most of his race, and his small Tibetan features appeared
frieghteningly alien to the villagers,

We will leave at dawn.

What? The puzzled villagers asked. “ Is pakistan already there?

Who knows” said the Gurkha. “ I’m telling what I’m told to say.
……
Do you expect us to walk away with our hands and feet? What use
will they serve us without our lands? Can you evacuate our lands?”
he asks cunningly. …..And what about our harvest? They asked.
And the crop we have just sown?
And our cattle? Who will evacuate them? (CI 118)

It is really very pathetic to go through these pages of history when innocent people
 194  
 

were left helpless. This agony is never echoed in the official accounts:

Do you expect us to leave everything we’ve valued and loved since

childhood?The seasons, the angle and color of the sun rising and setting
over our fields are beatiful to us, the shape of our rooms and barns is
familier and dear. You can’t expect us to leave
just like that? (CI 119)
Lenny’s statement best exemplifies the emergence of religiosity at surface during partition:

My perception of people has changed. I still see through

to their hearts and minds, but their exteriors superimpose
a new set of distracting impression (CI 103).

This vague uneasiness in the behaviour of people is felt not only by Lenny but also by others,

including Ranna. Through Ranna and Lenny Sidhwa foreground the impact of partition in the

domestic locales of ordinary people which even a child like, Ranna can sense: by the presence

of strangers, their unexpected faces harsh and cold. A Sikh youth whom Ranna has met a few

times, and who has always been kind, pretends not to notice Ranna. Other men, who would

normally smile at Ranna, slide their eyes past. (CI 115)

Ranna’s account of communal violence: survivor’s history:

No one noticed Ranna as he wandered in the burning city. No one cared.

There were too many ugly and abandoned children like him scavenging
in the looted houses and the rubble of burnt-out buidings. ( CI 218 )

Ranna’s story is the most thrilling, shocking and heartrending account of the
violence I have ever read. When Lenny sees him for the second time, Ranna is already
the survivor of the assault that takes place in his village by the Sikhs. She can hardly
recognize Ranna, for he does not look like the one Lenny used to know before the
 195  
 

Partition. Lenny narrates her first sight of Ranna after his survival: “so painfully thin […]
His limbs are black and brittle; the circular protrusion of his windpipe and ribs so skeletal
that I can see the passage of air in his throat and lungs ” (CI 205-06). Ranna’s abnormally
skinny body discloses his story of the struggle for life during the bloodbath in his village.
Instead of running away, Ranna’s kin and other villagers decide to stay the village only.
“We cannot leave,” they said,(…) what face will we show our forefathers on the day of
judgement if we abandon their graves? Allah will protect us!”(CI 207). Moreover, it was
beyond their imagination that the Sikhs with whom they had been living since ages will
assault them. Dost Mohammad tells the villagers: “they are killing all Muslims. Setting
fires, looting, parading the Muslim women naked through the streets-raping and
mutilating them in the center of villages and in the mosques” (CI 209)

In the Sikhs’ attack, Ranna witnesses the horrible bloodbath:

Dost Mohammad stepped out and walked three paces. There was a
sunlit sweep of curved steel. His head was shorn clear off his neck.
Turning once in the air, eyes wide open, it tumbled in the dust. his
hands jerked up slashing the air above the bleeding stump of his neck.
Ranna saw his uncles beheaded. His older brothers, his cousins. He
felt a blow cleave the back of his head and warm flow of blood. Ranna
fell just inside the door on a tangled pile of the pile of bodies. The
room in which they hide themselves becomes a “pool of blood” due to
the “bodies blocking the entrance” (CI 213).

Ranna’s family and villagers are forced to suffer the horrible torture and death
and devastation. Ranna says that he thinks, amidst violence, he sees his sister “run stark
naked […] her long hair disheveled, her boyish body bruised, her lips cut” (CI 213). In
contrast, the bodies of the Sikhs are described in vitality at the beginning of the violence:
“tall men with streaming hair and thick biceps and thighs, waving full-sized sword and
sten-guns” (CI 211). Ranna’s innocent family, relatives and villagers are exhumed in the
process of nation-formation. After surviving the violence, Ranna appears as the
storyteller. He comes to Lenny’s house and tells his experience of the Partition.

Although surviving, Ranna receives a wound from a blow on his head by the Sikhs.
Like the gardener’s circumcised body, Ranna’s wound records his history of the partition
and becomes a grim reminder of his traumatic past. When Lenny notices Ranna’s scar,
 196  
 

she says: “I see the improbable wound on the back of his shaved head. It is a grisly scar
like a brutally gouaged and premature bald spot” (CI 206). Ranna’s body is symbolic of
the wounded and bruised nation which survives after partition.

The violence has left Ranna’s body with the scars signifying the damage partition
has permanently wrought upon him. Lenny describes: “He is covered with welts; as if his
body has been chopped up, and then welded” (Sidhwa 206). Scar on Ranna’s body is
reminder of the trauma he has undergone during partition. After this trauma his entire
being, his subjectivity is changed. Lenny describes the wound like the “shape of a four-
day-old crescent moon” (Sidhwa 206). The symbol of crescent moon used by Sidhwa
here has a double implication: one implying the beginning of Ranna’s new life and the
other implying Ranna’s new identity as a Pakistani.

Like Lenny Ranna also ceases to be an innocent child when he confronts hedious
violent attack on his village Pir-Pindo, killing of his own family, rape of his sisters and
uprooting of people from their ancestral land. When Lenny meets him later and hears the
story of his survival she tries to understand his trauma and his survival:

It surprises me how easily Ranna has accepted his loss;

and adjusted to his new environment. So…one gets used
to anything…If one must. (CI 223)

3. Conclusion:

There is a gap between the historians’ history of the Partition and that of th
survivors. According to Pandey, this is a gap between “history and memory” (Pandey
Remembering 6). There are two faces of the history of the Partition; they represent “the
perceptions of different classes […] [:] a ‘ruling’ (privileged) class celebrating
Independence, and, a ‘refugee’ class unable to do so” (Pandey Remembering 125).

By foregrounding the history of the suppressed voices, Husain's and Sidhwa's

works interrogate and reject state imposed declaration against the burial of the past. Both
of the novelists have employed different modes of knowledge to draw out the “micro
history” embedded within the historical event and depict the unrecorded and fragmented
local folk experiences. Basti is nostalgic in remebering idyllic past whereas Sidhwa
yearns for neither a spiritual nor a familial homeland and her allegiance is to the
 197  
 

community or the place of settlement. Both Sidhwa's and Hussain's texts problematize
and interrogate the issues of identity and home based on exclusive parameters. Putting up
a defence for these local versions of history, Gyanendra Pandey says that even the so
called insignificant details such as a weaver's diary, pamphlets of an unknown freedom
fighter, folk poems that sing the heroic deeds of a local hero are of central importance to
creative writers because in them they find a creative insight into the smithy of life, which
will have eluded the official recording of events. As he says, these details contest the
documented versions of history and give us an altogether a different version of reality for
we know that we can nowhere get a clear picture of an absolute reality. [Pandey, 1991,
559-72]
Pakistan was formulated to provide a solution of a Homeland to the Muslims who
had minority status in India. However, despite the Majority status they didn’t get the
protection and promised Homeland as per the claims. Basti’s narrative structure contains
various page breaks, shifts in present and past which designate the disruption partition
created in the lives of people. People though separated geographically couldn’t separate
themselves from the memories of their homes, relationships and shared history.
The novel Basti looks beyond the interpretation of Partition as just a political
decision, and succeeds in capturing the human side of the historical event: the sense of
loss at being uprooted from one’s homeland, the hope of a new beginning that
accompanies the creation of Pakistan, the feeling of helplessness at the progressive
deterioration of the newly created nation as an ideal homeland, and the frustration at the
fall of Dhaka.
Basti makes a rather strong statement by questioning in retrospect the religion-
based partition of the Indian subcontinent of 1947 in the wake of another partition in
1971 on the basis of language. In an interview with Memon Hussain comments:

----whatever novel I began was affected by the immediate socio-

political situation of the country---the past that I was trying to forget
sprang to life again within me (…) the reasons, the history, behind
the bloodshed was inevitable’ (…) So now the question arose in my
mind: we imagined that Hindus and Muslims were two nations---but
what we were considering to be one nation, is that also two
nations?....Are Bengalis a community separate from us? Are they not
Muslims, or are they not Pakistanis? If the bloodshed now happening
 198  
 

is on the same scale as happened in 1947, what does this mean?”

(Hussain qtd in Memon 2005)

The novel Cracking India retrieves partition history against the nationally
sanctioned narrations of Partition that exist as official records of political debates, fought
between leaders of the Muslim League and the Congress and privileges the experience of
marginalized ones : women, children, the working class, the lower castes and ethnic
minorities. Thus, Sidhwa’s alternative history attempts to break the hegemonic, state-
based accounts of Partition by destablizing state-based discourses.

Sidhwa’s narrative challenges and interrogate official history by retrieving the

experiences of people specially women.The text records accounts of loss, misery, horror
of the time by showing how a political event brings havoc in the domestic lives of
ordinary men and women and plays a detrimental role in determining their identity in
terms of religion and nationality. Through her marginalized narrator Lenny and through
the experiences of Ranna, Ayah, Hari and various other marginalized characters, Sidhwa
gives voice to hitherto silenced and hidden aspects of partition event and in so doing tells
other versions of the traumatic event.

Thus, Sidhwa’s account of partition in Cracking India intervenes the version of

nationalist historiography—the one belonging to the elite class. Writing about the
freedom moment of India, Sidhwa represents the Partition in a way that focuses less on
the elite leaders and celebration but more on the people and their struggle. Through a
child’s eyes and her innocent expression, Sidhwa portrays the horrible side of the
Partition that nationalist historiography has tried to conceal. In the novel, Sidhwa
reconstructs the history of the Partition and its violence, representing how people receive
a nd survive the violence. Sidhwa says in the interview: “I was just attempting to write
the story of what religious hatred and violence can do to people and how close evil is to
the nature of man” (Sidhwa qtd in Rajan). She retrieves people’s voice and allows them
to relate their experience of the Partition.

Rather than forgetting the painful memories of the Partition, Sidhwa chooses to
represent these events so as to memorialize them. For the survivors in the Partition, the
memory and trauma produced by the violence will not be buried together with the dead.
 199  
 

In Cracking India, Sidhwa adopts a stance of the people—the subaltern—to re-tell the
history of the Partition and includes them into her story.

************
 200  
 

Works Cited:
Asaduddin M. Intizar Husain and His World The reconciled selves of the exalted
Pakistani writer. 1 June 2013. Web.
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/intizar-husain-and-his-world.

Bhalla, Alok. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a lost home. New Delhi: OUP,2007. Print.

Boyam, Svetlana. “Nostaligia and its contents.” Web. 10th June 2013.
http://www.iasc-culture.org/eNews/2007_10/9.2CBoym.pdf.

Bruschi, Isabella. Partition in Fiction: Gendered Perspective. New Delhi: Atlantic. 2010.
Print.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz . Subh-e-aazaadii. Web. http://www.urdupoetry.com/faiz08.html.

Hai, Ambreen. “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism in BapsiSidhwa's

Cracking India.” Modern Fiction Studies. Volume 46 Issue 2 (2000): 379-426. Project
Muse. 10th June, 20011. http://muse.jhn.edu.

Hussain Intizar. Interview by Arshad Sahin. Questions on our identity still need answers.
February 8, 2014. The Express Tribune. Web. http://tribune.com.pk/story/669019/
questions-on-our-identity-still-need-answers-intizar-hussain/

Hussain Intizar interview with Asif Farrukhi.Talking about Basti: Intizar Husain in
conversation with Asif Farrukhi, Lahore, 2005. Web.
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00litlinks/basti/txt_intizar_asif_2005.pdf.

Hussain interview with Queshi Tehmina. “The Year was 1971, but it felt like
1947,says Intizar Hussain.” Saturday, February 8, 2014. The News, Karachi.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-4-231111-The-year-was-1971-but-it-felt like-
1947-says-Intizar-Hussain.
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone “Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory
“ qtd in Kate Douglas . Contesting Childhoods:Autobiography, Trauma and Memory.
New Brunswick NJ,USA: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p- 19.
 201  
 

Memon, Muhammad Umar. Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain. Modern Asian
Studies 14,3 1980:377-410. JSTOR. 2nd March, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/312138

-------The Writings of Intizar Husain. Special issue, Journal of South Asian Literature 18, 2
1983.

------Reclamation of Memory, Fall, and the Death of the Creative Self: Three Moments in
the Fiction of Intizar Husain International Journal of Middle East Studies , Vol. 13,
No. 1 (Feb., 1981), pp. 73-91. JSTOR. 10th March, 2013.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/163288.

Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition:Violence, Nationalism and History in India.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.

Robert L. Ross, “Cracking India: A Feminist View of Partition.” The novel of Bapsi
Sidhwa, p.183.

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays. New
Delhi: Penguin India, 2001. Print.

…. Representations of the Intellectuals. New York: Vintage Books.1994.Web. P-47-

83. http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_10178.pdf.

Sidhwa, Bapsi. Interview by David Montenegro. Points of Departure - International

Writers on Writing and Politics, 1989. OUP, 2004. Print.
Sidhwa, Bapsi. “Introduction, City Beloved” City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on
Lahore. India: Penguin Books , 2005. Web. P-xi-xvii

Sidhwa, Bapsi. Cracking India. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1991.

Sidhwa, Bapsi.(Ed.) City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore. India: Penguin
Books , 2005 -
 202  
 

--- Interview with FerozaJussawalla.Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World.

By FerozaJussawalla and ReedwayDasenbrock. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1992.
198-221

---Interview with David Montenegro.Points of Departure: International Writers on

Writing and Politics. By David Montenegro. Michigan: U of Michigan Press, 1991.
26-51.

---Interview by Chelva Kanaganayakam. The Toronto South Asian Review 2.1 (Summer
1992): 30-56. Print.

Sidhwa, Bapsi.“Writer-in-Residence Bapsi Sidhwa Takes Laughter Seriously.” (28

Mar.1997) The College Street Journal. 2 Apr. Web.1997.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/970328/sidhwa.html

Zaman Niaz.A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh. Bangladesh: The United Press Limited. 1999.Print.

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