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Partition’s Little Red Book: Revisiting Krishan

Chander’s ‘Infamous’ Partition Stories, 70
Years On
By Raza Naeem
The fire of civil war is raging in India and Pakistan, its flames threaten to burn
https://cafedissensus.com/tag/pakistan/page/3/ 26/02/24, 7 37 AM
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humans, houses and libraries along with our life, freedom, culture and civilization to
ashes. Today after many months these flames have lessened but have not gone cold
yet. There are several embers beneath the ash which can be inflamed with just a
blow. Those who would fan these flames are also present.
But there is no scarcity too of firefighters. The healthy and progressive elements of
India and Pakistan are trying to stop this civil war and it can be said with certainty
that they are the ones who will be victorious. Because time, history and the future
are with them. The demands of life are strengthening them. The revolutionary forces
are supporting them; and the best traditions of humanity are behind them.
The words above were not written in the current, scarcely comforting times of
demagogic populism and right-wing fundamentalism in the two largest states of the
Indian subcontinent, but amid the chaos and confusion of the partition of India,
seventy-one years ago, when the prominent Progressive poet Ali Sardar Jafri and
many of his comrades on both sides of the partitioned divide were thinking not only
about the implications of the calamity that had just taken place; but also how best to
combat it.
Sardar Jafri was writing these words as a preface to a searing collection of partition
stories by his Progressive comrade Krishan Chander (1914-1977), titled Hum Wehshi
Hen (We Are Savages) which came out in 1948, just under a year since the horrific
events of 1947 had taken place. As Sardar Jafri had also noted in the
aforementioned preface, Chander was among a handful of writers who refused to be
silenced by sheer violence and brutality of the partition; there were other notable
interventions by Upendar Nath Ashk, Ismat Chughtai, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Kaifi
Azmi, Yusuf Zafar and Fikr Taunsvi. However, there was yet another notable or
notorious literary intervention curiously omitted by Jafri in his preface within
partition literature in the same year that Hum Wehshi Hen came out; the equally
biting sketches Siyah Hashiay (Black Margins) by none other than Saadat Hasan
Manto. Whether Jafri omitted Manto’s intervention because he was unaware of it, or
whether he had already begun to distance himself from Manto, owing to the latter’s
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perceived ‘un-Progressiveness’ is a moot point.
Be that as it may, the year 1948 thus saw two notable literary interventions on the
partition of India, from Krishan Chander and Manto. Both these interventions
received excoriating accolades from either side of the ideological divide. Manto’s
intervention was criticized by Jafri, the doyen of Progressive writers at that time.
Muhammad Hasan Askari, a noted Pakistani literary critic, not only wrote the preface
to Siyah Hashiay, he also made a veiled attempt to attack Chander’s contribution in
the same preface, in the following words:
If in the beginning (of the short story), if five Hindus had been killed, then by the
end of the story the calculation of five Muslims should balance it. Equally divide
the blame on both sides of the scale.
Likewise, Chander’s intervention was supported by his Progressive comrades like

Chughtai and Abbas, but roundly criticized by Askari and other critics like Mumtaz
Shirin and Anwar Sadeed. It is Chander’s volume which concerns me here, for two
reasons: Firstly, since it is surprisingly not very well-known among the voluminous
oeuvre of Krishan Chander; I have written elsewhere that though Chander wrote
almost five thousand short-stories, by far the largest number among his peers, most
of his critics, editors and translators have seldom bothered to read his work beyond
1947, quietly distancing themselves from what they perceived to be his ‘romantic’ or
socialist realist style.
The second reason I am interested in Chander’s aforementioned volume is that it is

too often dismissed by even discerning literary critics. Observe a recent assessment
by noted critic Asif Farrukhi, who in a piece on Ismat Chughtai, dismisses the
aforementioned volume by Chander in a mere two lines: “Krishan Chander, wrote
profusely, taking up Partition as his theme, but these stories contributed to a decline
in his reputation.” He doesn’t go on to elaborate why these stories contributed to a
decline in the writer’s reputation. Neither have the seven stories in Hum Wehshi Hain
been widely translated into English (unlike Siyah Hashiay and other fictional work on
partition by other well-known writers) for the world to arrive at a more judicious
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judgement as to the artistic worth of the collection; and for us to convincingly bury
one of the better-known creative endeavours on the partition under such a sweeping
‘critical’ statement.
While sticking to the topic of critical opinions, the Pakistani critic and short-story
writer Mobin Mirza differs with Askari on the evaluation of Siyah Hashiay. In his
recent book on Manto, he says that Askari has overrated the pieces that, in fact, are
of purely journalistic in nature and lack any creative touch. So, in the light of this
recent evaluation of Manto, shouldn’t we be seeing Chander’s intervention in a
different light as well? For nothing less than a re-evaluation of Hum Wehshi Hen is
the objective of the piece which follows.
As noted above, Hum Wehshi Hain consists of seven stories depicting some
memorable characters drawn from a wide strata of society in colonial India on the
verge of freedom from British rule: there are middle-class, nominally religious
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, motivated by plain hysteria and revenge when ordered
to do so by opportunistic leaders; Maratha goons parading about in colonial
Bombay, for whom ’peace’ during the frenzy of partition means little more than a
good opportunity to do business; peanut-sellers; nationalist prostitutes appealing to
the better instincts of Hindu and Muslim leaders; racist Anglo-Indian administrative
toadies in the twilight of their careers who out-English the English into believing that
the sun would never set on the British Empire in the face of facts to the contrary;
wine-drinking maulanas; martyrs to the cause in Jallianwala Bagh; Muhajireen and
‘Sharnarthis’; veteran Ghadarites and Congressmen taking part in the looting; a
young girl reading up on socialist praxis and philosophy.
So what is controversial about these stories? What makes them so damnable in the
eyes of a few critics from both sides of the border?
They try to understand the brutal tragedy which happened in the wake of the
partition of 1947, from the observations and points of view of various characters
across class, gender and ideology in colonial India. Five of them are ‘conventional’
stories of 1947 and the other two, namely “A Courtesan’s Letter” and “Peshawar
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Express” beautifully use creative license to tell the tale of partition from relatively
unconventional angles: a courtesan normally given to providing the pleasures of the
flesh; and a locomotive, that monstrosity of steel, regarded as one of the
indispensable but inanimate symbols of colonial and postcolonial modernity. In
short, both the courtesan and the locomotive are unromantic, unsuspecting,
unsuspected, even unsavory phenomena, shunned by polite bourgeois society.
Now to the stories themselves.
The first story “Blinded” is a satire on Muslim prejudices about Hindus on the eve of
partition and is set in a predominantly Muslim mohalla where two Hindu households
stand out conspicuously. The narrator, himself a victim of such prejudice, is in love
with a young woman from one of the Hindu households. Amid the frenzy of partition,
the narrator is shown to be part of a group of Muslim ruffians who ransack the two
Hindu homes in their locality. While the wanton arson and murder is still going on,
they come upon an infant lying peacefully in his cot; murderous instincts take the
place of pity, but the child is saved when the narrator remembers his own child at
home. However, in a masterful twist of irony, upon reaching his own home with the
loot, he finds his whole family slaughtered by Hindu goons, including his own child.
Blinded perhaps by linguistic and class prejudice (as well as the larger communal
prejudice) and the loss of his beloved Pushpa in the riots, the narrator resolves to
seek revenge for his slain family. Thus a miniscule moment of humanity and pity for
the other is enveloped by a murderous communal passion where the group dictates
to the individual.
The second story ‘Lal Bagh’ (Red Garden) takes its name from the iconic landmark
of colonial Bombay. Krishan Chander masterfully depicts the story’s main character
Kamlakar, the criminal gangster dada. In Chander’s words, “It is easier to become
the governor general of India and Pakistan, but to become the dada of Lal Bagh is
not easy.” The partition riots come as a huge opportunity for his opium, charas and
cocaine racket. Though profit and capital do not distinguish between Hindu and
Muslim, here Kamlakar encourages his henchmen to keep the order by killing
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Muslims, while also keen to protect the interests of poor Hindus. We are shown a
scene where one of Kamlakar’s henchmen takes his boss to show him the
murderous pickings of the day and Kamlakar filches a bottle of oil still clenched in
the fist of a murdered youth, giving it to his deputy saying, “Well done, take this
bottle of oil, it will help some poor Hindu.” Then from Kamlakar and his heinous
patronage networks the focus shifts to the poor victims, all of them Muslims, one of
them being poor Sheedu, a peanut seller from Bareilly who had sworn to remain in
Lal Bagh expecting no retribution from his ‘brother Hindus’ but who eventually pays
the price because “he was the only one (Muslim) left and I (the murderer) needed
the fifty rupees.” Among the victims is also a working-class Kashmiri couple.
Kamlakar may have forgotten, but here Krishan Chander reminds us of the real
power behind such mannequins as the former:
These accursed Hindu and Muslim politicians, these feudal landlords. With
whose blood and destruction are these deceitful capitalists building the
foundations of their governments?
The third story in the collection, “A Courtesan’s Letter Addressed to Pandit

Jawaharlal Nehru and Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah” is, in my opinion, the most striking
story in the volume, rather than the more frequently anthologized and discussed
“Peshawar Express”. One attraction is created by the very simple title of the story,
the second being the assumption of unequal power inherent when a ‘courtesan’
dares to address the two eminent nationalist leaders of divided India, the two
leaders of the huge Indian subcontinent, partly responsible for the bloodbath and
tragedy which followed in its wake. However any inequality of power soon
disappears when the pleasantries addressed to both the politicians soon give way to
anguish and raw anger. This is how she addresses the two at the outset,
I hope that before this occasion you would never have received a letter from a
courtesan. I also hope that you would never even have set your eyes on me and
other women of my type. I also know that my writing a letter is forbidden to
yourselves and that too, such an open letter.
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The reader can be forgiven while reading this preamble for believing that a story
fictionalizing a prostitute’s travails in a collection on partition would perhaps limit
itself to just that, but Chander masterfully tailors the courtesan’s plea to the plight of
two girls – Hindu and Muslim – from Rawalpindi and Jalandhar respectively whose
fate will be dependent on the actions of Jinnah and Nehru. The writer’s fictional
treatment of courtesans becomes all the more remarkable given that while the
subject of prostitution and courtesanship has been treated in Urdu fiction since the
days when Mirza Ruswa penned his famous Umrao Jan Ada, through Qazi Abdul
Ghaffar’s Laila ke Khutoot and made into an art form by Manto’s various stories;
Chander here departs from this mainstream by depicting his heroine as someone
with political agency. The story is also a parable about the contemporary plight of
women in both Pakistan and India. This un-named courtesan is easily the most
powerful female character in the collection under review. I am tempted to cite a
redeeming lyrical passage from the story, the final paragraph from the courtesan’s
address to Jinnah and Nehru:
I have said quite a lot being swept away by the river of emotion, perhaps I should
not have said all this. Maybe this is akin to debasing you. Perhaps no one has yet
told or narrated you more disagreeable things than these. Perhaps you cannot
do all of this, not even a little bit, despite that we are free, in India and Pakistan.
Perhaps it is even a courtesan’s right to at least ask her leaders what will
become of Bela and Batool now?
Bela and Batool are two girls, two nations, two civilizations, two temples and
mosques. Nowadays they live at a prostitute’s in Faris Road; She conducts her
business in a corner off the Chinese barber. Bela and Batool dislike this
business. I have bought them. If I want, I can make them work for me, but I am
thinking, I will not do what Rawalpindi and Jalandhar did to them. So far I have
kept them apart from the world of Faris Road. But still when my clients begin
washing up in the back room, Bela and Batool’s looks tell me something,
something which I cannot bear. I can’t even convey their message to you
properly, why don’t you yourselves read it? Pandit Ji I want that you adopt Batool
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as your daughter. Jinnah sahib I want that you think of Bela as your daughter.
Just for once keep them in your home away from the grasp of Faris Road and
listen to the dirges of thousands of those souls which are booming from
Noakhali to Rawalpindi and from Bharatpur to Bombay. Can’t it be heard in
Government House alone, will you listen to this voice?
Yours sincerely,
A courtesan of Faris Road
The fourth story titled “Jackson” shows the plight of an arrogant Anglo-Indian
Deputy Superintendent of Police, the eponymous Jackson who is just four days
away from the end of his ‘empire’ due to the partition of colonial India and his
investment in it. The way Chander has displayed the eventual crumbling away of the
world of Anglo-Indian authority, hubris and its privileges is both subtle and
understated. Jackson had already made plans to retire comfortably to England after
the end of his ‘mandate’, divorce his Anglo-Indian wife and live like an English lord by
marrying a ‘real’ English countess. His daughters were ‘reserved for England’ and
shared his antipathy for their Anglo-Indian blood and fellow Indians. DSP Jackson
also duly makes his contribution to colonial India by playing the politics of divide and
rule, by arming the leaders of both the Hindu and Muslim communities. To the Hindu
mahashe, he says:
We are old friends. We will definitely help you and in all honesty, the Hindus have
the right over Lahore. Lahore was built by Hindus. Its gardens, houses, colleges,
cinemas, its entire hustle bustle is owed to Hindus. Only they should reside here.
Fight like men, Mahasheji. We will help you.
And to the whisky-drinking maulana he says:
I don’t want to live in India, but in Pakistan. I have no love for the Hindu baniyaas.
And then Islamic teachings resemble our Christian religion so much. Christians
can unite with Muslims but we have no love lost with the Hindus.
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The real master-stroke in the story arrives unbeknownst to Jackson within his own
house when his favourite daughter Rosie writes him a letter disowning whatever she
had been led to believe about the purity of the Anglo-Indian world and deciding to
elope with her Anglo-Indian boyfriend Anand. The come-uppance is too much for
Jackson, who consequently commits suicide.
The story is also a prescient and valuable comment on the psychology and mentality
of the Anglo-Indian, often seen as a fifth columnist who partly paved the way for
British imperial consolidation in the Indian subcontinent.
The fifth and sixth stories in the collection “Amritsar: Pre-Independence” and
“Amritsar: Post-Independence” depict the political and social situation in an
insurgent city situated in the heart of Punjab, after one of the worst tragedies of
colonial India, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919; and what happened in the
same city in 1947.
The fifth story is actually the shortest in the collection and serves to challenge what
is taught as official history in Pakistan, about the united, peaceful struggle and
sacrifice of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs against the might of the British Empire in
colonial India. There are moving accounts of Siddiq and Om Prakash, two friends
who risked their lives for each other at the height of the massacre. However, the real
heroes of the story are the valiant women of Amritsar: Begum, Zainab, Paro and
Sham Kaur who took on the senseless clause of the infamous Rowlatt Act (enforced
in the wake of the 1919 massacre) that everyone will have to salute the Union Jack
and crawl on their knees to pass from one street to another. All four paid with their
lives while resisting and becoming martyrs. This is a valuable social history of the
Amritsar massacre, surprisingly lesser-known than other better-known fiction on the
subject from other masters of Urdu fiction like Manto, Ghulam Abbas, Abdullah
Hussein and Khawaja Ahmad Abbas.
The story about post-independence Amritsar is a direct polar counterpoint to the

heart-warming stories of sacrifice across the communal, class and gender divides in
the previous story; in that communal passions were unleashed in all their fury in
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1947 just under 30 years after the same city had shown itself to be above such
prejudice. Horrifying accounts where a thirsty child aboard a train to Pakistan cannot
have access to water because he is a Muslim; where a child disowns his own dead
mother while taking away her blanket for fear of being robbed even of this last item
still worth something. Even books were not spared and carted off by an unfortunate
late-coming looter to be used as fuel for the night’s supper!
Those two stories on two of the seminal events of the history of united India taken
together offer a chastening lesson in history which is usually not found in our history
books. For example, in the private school where I teach, prescribing both these
stories in the ‘O’ Levels curriculum proved eye-opening for my students, a welcome
counterfoil to official history.
The last story in the collection, “Peshawar Express”, is not only the most notorious
but also one of the most frequently anthologized stories about the partition. The
story is told from the point of view of a train, an inanimate object which was
travelling from Peshawar in what became Pakistan to Bombay in what became India.
On its long journey, the express train – otherwise a symbol of modernity in most
Progressive literature – narrates scenes of recurring bloodbaths of Hindus, Muslims
and Sikh refugees fleeing the violence. The technique Krishan Chander has used in
this story has been much criticized, and has been referred to above. The writer has
shown the number of Muslim casualties to be exactly the same as the number of
Hindu or Sikh casualties. This technique has mostly been lamented by right-wing
critics on both sides of the divide; and by new critics writing many years after 1947.
Of course critics are welcome to dislike any work of art or literature they wish, but to
make a claim that one story contributed to damaging the reputation of the writer
concerned and then use it as a bully pulpit to consign the entire volume to the
dustbin does not behove them. Especially when Krishan Chander has written why he
chose his fictional vigilantes to ‘balance’ the casualties in this way: “So that the
balance of population should be maintained between India and Pakistan”. I have not
seen any so-called critic of Krishan Chander responding directly to this not-so-
innocent line in the story. So I suspect that the criticism is directed more against the
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Progressive, socialist philosophy espoused by Chander rather than the way he has
depicted the atrocities of partition.
Throughout the story, Chander displays his anguish at the barbarity which could
result in mass killings and rapes across nationality, gender and confession. Hailing
from a family in Wazirabad in Punjab and raised and educated in his beloved Lahore,
this son of Punjab can hardly contain his anger when Taxila, Sirkap and Wazirabad,
ancient centres of peace, learning, arts and crafts (cutlery in the case of Wazirabad)
are re-christened with blood in the heat of 1947. He lets the Peshawar Express
express his own feelings:
A thousand curses on these leaders, on their next seven generations, who

destroyed this beautiful Punjab, this unique, pretty Punjab into pieces and
eclipsed its pure soul and filled its strong body with the pus of hatred, today
Punjab had died. Its songs had become muted, dead. Its melodies, dead. Its
language, dead. Its fearless, courageous, innocent heart, dead. And without any
feelings or eyes and ears, I witnessed the death of Punjab.
For me, the most affecting incident in the story comes towards the end of the story
where a beautiful and intelligent young woman, having endured the murder of her
parents and younger siblings by a murderous mob, asks the ruffians to consider
marrying and thus sparing her life. She was brutally murdered, and with her the
lessons of the book she was carrying with her, The Theory and Practice of Socialism
by John Strachey, a productive life snuffed out prematurely.
On the 71st anniversary of partition, reading Krishan Chander’s stories anew, one
gets the feeling that the women were affected more adversely than the men in what
has also variously been described as a ‘holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ in the horrific
events of 1947; but it is also the women who are the saving grace of a humanity
which will be born anew, however dark and hopeless the situation. The heroines are
there in most of the stories, rebelling against their plight and almost complimenting
the brutalities of their men like Kamlakar and Jackson: the un-named courtesan as
much as the two girls she wants to save from her own profession and the hate of the
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Other; the Anglo-Indian Rosie who breaks away from the artificial world created for
her by her authoritarian father; the four doughty daughters of Amritsar drowned in
the blood of martyrdom; even the unfortunate socialist activist who bore the
assassin’s knife with scholarly grace.
I will end with the redeeming words of Krishan Chander, once again, who writes, as if
to refute the guilty charge of humans as savages in the dock:
We are humans. We are the standard-bearers of creation in this whole universe,

and nobody can kill creation. Nobody can rape or dishonor it. Because we are
creation and you are destruction, you are savages, you are beasts, you will die;
but we will not. Because humans never die. They are not beasts, they are the
soul of kindness, the outcome of divinity, the pride of the universe.
Note: All the translations from the Urdu are by the writer.
Bio:
Raza Naeem is a Pakistani social scientist, book critic, and an award-winning
translator and dramatic reader based in Lahore. He is currently the President of
the Progressive Writers Association in Lahore. His most recent publication is an
introduction to the reissued edition (HarperCollins India, 2016) of Abdullah Hussein’s
classic partition novel, The Weary Generations. He can be reached at:
razanaeem@hotmail.com
***
For more stories, read Café Dissensus Everyday, the blog of Café
Dissensus Magazine.
December 28, 2018  Leave a Reply
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Beyond Partition
By Nishat Haider
Partition is the “originary trauma” in Indian national memory, and scholars like Suvir
Kaul, Kavita Daiya, Jisha Menon, and Priya Kumar have “excavated its lasting impact
on the postcolonial life of the nation-state and explored in particular how the
violence of Partition left its mark on Indian literary and cultural production” (Misri 8).
Written from a position informed by a critique of trauma theory’s model of
subjectivity, and its relations with theories of referentiality and representation,
history and testimony, this paper foregrounds Nandita Das’s Firaaq (2008) to
explicate that the legacy of the partition communal violence is more dangerous than
violence itself. Framing the subject of post-riot trauma faced in a cross-section of
society in Gujarat, the film (which presents six stories running parallel), spanning a
day, one month after the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, revolves around a set of
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characters, a Muslim musician/singer and his faithful servant, a Hindu wife and her
Muslim husband, a poor Muslim couple, a Gujarati Hindu family, an orphaned Muslim
kid and a set of Muslim friends who are hell bent on taking revenge against the
atrocities they have faced. However, it must be conceded at the outset that I will
avoid analyzing all the stories in the film, but will choose only those scenes that
unravel the memorialization of a child’s (Mohsin) loss in the post-Godhra carnage.
The paper aims to map out child(ren)’s trauma as a structuring yet elusive subject of
representation by exploring the relationship between the experiences of terror and
helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which the young survivors
remember, and the representation that seek not only to comprehend connections
between trauma and memory in the shifting terrain of history making and its
reception, but also to work through the trauma. Though there is a lot of research on
men and women’s response to Partition trauma and its reverberation in the post-
Independence communal conflagrations and violence, what so far has been left out
of the debate is the issue of the appropriateness of children’s traumatic memories
as viable narratives that attempt to access and to represent a painful past that is by
definition inaccessible.
The history(ies) and memories of Partition live on in post-colonial times to such a

degree that “we should truly prefer the phrase ‘partitioned times’ to the more
common ‘post-colonial times’” (Samaddar 21). The collective memory of Partition
within the subcontinent has, during the past century and more, been refracted
through communal and state ideologies. The vast majority of general population is of
Hindu religion, and the traumatic partition of India in 1947, which was accompanied
by a large scale rioting and genocide amongst Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, had a
long term effect on the relationship between religious and national identity. The
analytical studies on the repercussion of violence and its implication for the
making/marking of identity, collective and individual (Das and Nandy 1986;
Durkheim 1965 [1912]; Girard 1977; and Scarry 1985) has led to a greater
understanding of the critical and traumatic effect of post-Partition riots and
pogroms in the structuring of memory and negotiating/delineating group or
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individual subjectivities. Memory is “based on traces from the past.” Our present is
“haunted” by the past and that past is “modeled, invented, reinvented, and
reconstructed by the present” (Assmann 9). Historical memories of partition trauma
and its aftermath to a large extent are constituted by and through “institutionalized
sites of memory” like literature and cinema. A film that unforgettably captured the
memories and sensibilities of the anguish and tribulations of Muslim families, which
chose to stay on in India after the Partition, was MS Sathyu’s debut film, Garm Hawa
(1973). Another movie that creates the same lasting impression on the collective
conscience is Firaaq, which means both separation – the estrangement between
communities – and quest, a search, for hope and the meeting again of hearts.
Film as cultural memory is a locus of history, a mode of remembering, a mnemonic

practice with a ‘mnemohistorical logic’ which focuses on the following questions:
“who is telling the story, how is it being told, and with what underlying intentions?”
(Assman 117). Though the film Firaaq has a multi-voiced narrative, but at the centre
of this narrative is a little boy named Mohsin seen moving through the streets, trying
to find his missing father. He emerges as the youngest witness to the city set on fire.
His memories are filled with trauma, of which he cannot break free. The fear of
death haunts him. He has lost his family in the post-Godhra riots. He was a witness
to his family being butchered and has escaped from the camp where he had been
sheltered, in search of his father. In yet another story in the movie, there is a
battered middle class Hindu housewife, Aarti (performed by Deepti Naval) who
refuses to help a Muslim woman who had come to her doorstep, desperately
seeking refuge. Further, Das indicates her (Aarti) husband’s role in the riots subtly
by showing him as being part of the upmarket mob that raided shops and
establishments, which belonged to Muslims. Even one month after the riots, this
housewife is suffering from the guilt of not helping a victim. She tries to make
amends by sheltering the young Muslim orphan boy, Mohsin, and tries to help him.
She gives him a Hindu name, Mohan, to conceal his identity in order to protect him
from the rioteers.
In Firaaq, both Aarti and Mohsin have suffered abuse at the hands of ruthless
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heteronormative nationalism, at home and without. Aarti overhears a chat between
her husband and his brother, which shows his involvement in a Muslim woman’s
gang rape and murder. Aarti herself is ill-treated and battered by her husband.
Battered and isolated, she starts empathizing with Mohsin. This compassionate
relationship must be understood as “a politics based on concrete heartfelt
understanding of what it means to be Other” (Rich 400). In a poignant scene,
Mohsin describes the slaughter: the women, he said, were stripped naked and then
burnt alive and thrown in mass graves. The men, he innocently adds, were not
stripped naked. Aarti listens to the orphaned child Mohsin:
Mohsin: There were many. They were all shouting. They burnt my mother and
brother too. They even killed my younger sister, aunt and uncle.
Aarti: Did you see all this?
Mohsin: Yes, some even brought swords. They killed aunt after stripping her. But
they didn’t disrobe the men.
Aarti: And where were you?
Mohsin: I was hiding in the dustbin.
Aarti: Then?
Mohsin: Then Uncle Yusuf took me to the survivors’ camp. But I want to go to Abbu
[father]. (Firaaq)
Mohsin’s acknowledgement of his trauma in a household whose members were

openly responsible for such victimization is ironic and significant. In one of the film’s
most disturbing moments, the little boy in search of his father smacks an ant dead
with sudden force. While killing the ant, he says with unexpected fervor, “Maar diya
sale ko [I’ve killed the bastard].” He has borne witness to vast and tiny cruelties.
Now, he is a premonition of a new generation. The final scene of the film, which
shows the young Mohsin running on the streets to locate his father, presumably
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dead, is quite agonizing. In doing this, the movie neither offers a notion of closure
nor resolves the traumas. On the one hand, it does offer hope that with the next
generation lays the opportunity to bury the past and forge a new future ahead filled
with better understanding, and the appreciation that such violence should never
occur again. On the other hand, it also seeks to remind us of how within an
impressionable young mind wandering inside a relief camp, taking in the sights of
the aftermath of atrocities committed, the seeds of revenge could have been
innately planted for further atrocities to be committed, sometime in the future. It’s
extremely difficult, but not impossible, to break the stranglehold that violence
begets more violence.
Traumatic memories are not “encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a
verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story” (Herman 156-
57). In making Firaaq, the challenge for Das was “to find a way of making this
fundamental truth accessible to the mind and emotions of the [viewer]” (Langer xxi).
Firaaq offers modes of representation adequate to such events. Since the movie
detours from the usual linear story-telling format, the viewer operates within the
‘trauma process,’ struggling to bridge the gap between event and representation
(Alexander 11). By framing the film from multiple viewpoints, Das not only asks the
adult viewers to reconsider the manner, in which they grasp, process and assimilate
information, but also to consequently relearn in an unconventional way. A section of
the film is framed from the vantage point of the child-actor Mohsin. The apparent
directness and frankness of the child’s focalization, and the haptic images enable
Nandita Das to frame the cinematic experience of postcolonial trauma in terms of
innocence lost. Whilst the act of witnessing violence changes the child, the act of
watching it changes the viewer. Das calls upon the viewer to inhabit the narrator as
child, and to embark on an analogous psychological journey of discovery and
maturity, which absorbs and sublimates the ‘remnants’ of the ‘originary’ trauma or
‘traces’ of trauma that defies depiction. Firaaq frames Mohsin, the child, to inflect
the act of representation of trauma with an ostensible naiveté, inoffensiveness,
innocence, and a certain degree of dispassionateness. The film enunciates the
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traumatic depiction of communal riots reminiscent of partition violence from a
child’s perspective that transparently looks back, eliding all the representational
difficulty that necessitated the action in the first instance. The character of the child
thus becomes a means of establishing a literary realism that would otherwise be
untenable. Das frames the innocence of child’s perspective as a deferral of the full
presence of trauma, that is, the partial depictions as testimonies offer a ruse for full
representations. In other words, the innocuous, innocent quality of childhood is
ample rationalization for the film’s absences, elisions, deferrals, and descriptive
gaps.
The frame of childhood in Firaaq enables Das not only to re-witness the realm of the
unofficial/non-mainstream historical memories and narrate the violent loss that
might otherwise challenge representation, but also to explore, albeit innocuously,
the ways in which family, religion and society intersect with postcolonial identities.
The film Firaaq, as a site of reminiscences of the violent past, is a historical
document that constructs filmic expression and discourse that restores individual
and collective memories without privileging the official, mainstream version of the
events. Remembering, witnessing and telling the truth about violence, injury and
deeply rooted psychological traumas are prerequisites both for the restoration of the
social order and for the healing of individual victims. The film ultimately provides a
vehicle for the eventual incorporation, by an audience, of the narrative of survival
and therefore “acts to mitigate traumatized isolation and create empathy with the
sufferings of others in the present” (Radstone 192). The viewer is positioned as a
witness interpreting how he construes what occurred, that is, his own trauma or
cultural memory of that event. This involves the viewers in the production of the
meaning of the experiences of the child-actor and alters the loss of experience into
an experience of loss. Through the testimonies of Mohsin, the audiences not only
become witness of what simply happened during post-Godhra in Gujarat, but also
grasp some of the entanglements of Partition history and its reverberations in the
present, such that what we understand or experience provides us a rationalization of
why and how communal violence like those in Gujarat (2002) happen; thereby
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performing a socio-cultural evaluation, which is already a form of recovery. Firaaq
endeavours not only to bear witness and testify, but also to negotiate the fissures
between memory and history, and remembrance and representation.
Works Cited
Alexander, J.C., ed. “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and
Collective Identity. Berkley, California: U of California P, 2004. 1-30.
Assmann, Jan Moses the Egyptian: The memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997.
—. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010.
Das, Veena and Ashis Nandy. “Violence, Victimhood and the Language of Silence.”
Ed. Veena Das. The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record. New Delhi:
Sage Publications, 1986.
Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of The Religious Life. New York: Free P,
1965 [1912].
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1977.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. 1992. Afterword by Herman. New
York: Basic, 1997.
Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1991.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial

India. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
Radstone, Susannah, ed. “Special Debate: Trauma and Screen Studies.” Screen 42
.2 (2001): 188-216.
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Rich, Adrienne. “If Not With Others, How?” Feminism and Community. Ed. Penny E.
Weiss and Marilyn Friedman. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1995. 399-406.
Samaddar, Ranabir. “The Last Hurrah That Continues.” Divided Countries, Separated
Cities.The Modern Legacy of Partition. Ed. Deschaumes Ghislaine Glasson and Rada
Ivekovic. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2003.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1985.
Bio:
Dr. Nishat Haider is Professor of English and Director, Institute of Women’s Studies,
at the University of Lucknow. She is the author of Contemporary Indian Women’s
Poetry (2010). Recipient of Meenakshi Mukherji Prize (2016), C. D. Narasimhaiah
Award (2010) and Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award (2011), she has presented papers
at numerous academic conferences and her essays have been included in a variety
of international journals and books. She has conducted numerous workshops on
gender budgeting and gender sensitization. She has lectured extensively on
subjects at the cusp of cinema, culture and gender studies. Her research interests
include Postcolonial Studies, Popular Culture, Cinema and Gender Studies.
***
Dissensus Magazine.
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Partitioned Selves
By Rosy Sinha
Partition of India may be an event that is (temporally speaking) beyond us. As a

cultural trauma, it continues to dominate our social, political, ideological
imaginations. The trauma hasn’t mitigated. Instead the trauma through counter
transference of memories continues to affect millions. Defined as the Holocaust of
the Indian subcontinent, Partition entailed loss of home and mass scale
displacement of millions. A tragedy that found representation in literature as well as
visual culture. In this article I will focus on the film Mammo by Shyam Benegal
besides touching works of some other artists to explore how one of the most
enduring legacies of Partition has been the loss of ‘identity’ for millions who were
rendered homeless. These ‘refugees’ in India and ‘mujahirs’ in Pakistan are in most
instances engaged in a futile search of a, ‘nutan badi,’ as represented by Ritwik
Ghatak in his iconic film Subarnarekha.
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The idea of lost home configures in several works addressing Partition whether it is
Benegal’s film Mammo, or the art works of artists like Sardari Lal Parasher, Nilima
Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Zarina Hashmi, etc. I will focus on the works of two
contemporary artists: one from India and one from Pakistan to assert the continuing
impact of Partition. Nalini Malani was born in Karachi in undivided India in 1946.
When the subcontinent was divided, her family chose to move to India. In her works
one finds a resonance of Partition’s horrific legacy. In one of her works titled City in
Pain/City in Escape, she has painted images which are suggestive of riot, carnage,
fallen naked figures and pain. These are a sombre reminder of how religion
configures as a recurrent principle of contention between Hindu and Muslim
communities since 1947.
Nalini Malani City in Pain/City in Escape, 1989.
In a video installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), Malani makes use of
video screens. These screens display archival footage of Partition compelling the
audience to go back in time and experience the trauma of millions dispossessed in
the wake of Partition – bedding, tin trunks refugees used to carry their goods during
forced migrations, images of deportations and childbirth. Heightening the impact is
the voice over which reads out excerpts from Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” pointing out
the puerility of Partition. Through this pastiche Malini offers an abrasive and
powerful critique of Partition. What is even more significant is that it asserts the fact
that Partition’s horrific memories are still holding us hostage.
In another video installation, “Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain

(2005)”, Malini returns to the theme of Partition and the recurrent instances of
intercommunity violence. While the demolition of Babri Masjid was the catalyst for
Remembering Toba Tek Singh, it is the horror of Godhra riots which compel Malini to
return to this narrative. The image of the motherland is juxtaposed with the
contradictory narrative of interethnic cleansings. Displayed on the five large screens
are images of Partition followed by anti-Muslim attacks in Gujarat in 2002. “A
burning mouth recalls the terrible deeds of the Gujrat incidents while the voice of a
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woman and a man are heard in succession, recalling the reactions of women
abducted during the Partition and that of Indian parliamentarians who dismissed
them with a ‘Nehru’ tone – ‘the honour of the state is at stake’.”[1]
Zarina Hashmi (b. 1937 India) like Nalini Malani belongs to the ‘hinge generation’.
Like Malani, Hashmi’s understanding of Partition came through the stories of loss,
displacement and trauma that were trans-generationally transmitted. Born in 1937, it
was her family’s decision to migrate to Pakistan in the 1960s that deeply influenced
the ways in which she relates to Partition. Search for a lost ‘home’ is deeply etched
in the works of Hashmi. In almost all her works, the dominant metaphor is home. One
of her work is titled Home is a Foreign Place (1999); it is through this work that
Hashmi explores the connotations of ‘home’. The series is reminiscent of the
childhood home in Aligarh that she had to leave behind and the nostalgia it evokes is
very touching.
Moving from the field of paintings to films, I would refer to a very profound film by
Benegal called Mammo, which like Hashmi’s works is a meditation on the idea of
belonging, roots and home. Mammo focusses on the minority community in post-
Partition India. In doing so it offers a divergent perspective on Partition. The film is a
subtle representation of the dilemma experienced by those Muslims for whom
Pakistan was not what they had envisaged and who wanted to return to the land of
their birth (Mammo). A great human document, Mammo sensitively captures the
trauma of Mehmooda Begum, or fondly called Mammo. Once Partition becomes a
reality her husband’s decision to migrate to Pakistan leaving behind her family in
Panipat becomes Mammo’s destiny. As a woman she is completely marginalized in
this decision-making process. Upon the death of her husband she wants to return to
her sister in India, but it is easier thought than done. If patriarchy impinged upon her
ability to decide for herself when her family migrated to Pakistan, the state impinges
upon her desire to return to the land of birth. Born in undivided, India she was now
by choice a Pakistani; that her heart lay in India was of no consequence for the state.
Now her identity has been redefined – she is a Pakistani national entitled to live in
India for a period of three months extendable by a few weeks.
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By bringing this to the fore, the film captures not the immediate history of violence
but rather the tragic tale of an old woman trying to return to the land of her birth.
Unlike several films made on partition such as Train to Pakistan, Earth 1947, Pinjar
which largely situate the action during Partition or in its immediate aftermath,
Mammo through voyeuristic reference to Garam Hawa, coupled with Mammo’s
reminiscing of the horrific days of Partition in presence of Riyaaz, not only captures
the pathos partition continues to generate even decades later, but more significantly
shows how memories influences the generations born much later. Thus, though
Riyaaz is born in post partition India he still partakes of the Partition experience,
through countertransference of memories.
The film is loaded with subtle nuances all evoking a deep sense of loss and nostalgia
– the reference to the Panipat Haveli where the three sisters had spent their
childhood and which eventually becomes a source of discord between them is
reminiscent of the political differences that materialized into the division of the
nations with a shared legacy of memories of a relatively happier past. In the opening
scene, an adult Riyaaz is rudely awakened by a nightmare in which he sees his
Mammo nani being forced into a train bound for Pakistan. The trauma that Riyaaz
experienced as a child when Mammo was forced to leave India for Pakistan has
stayed with him even years later establishing that partition generated such intense
repercussions that they have ruptured the social fabric beyond repair.
The most significant and ironical scene in the entire film is the last scene when
Mammo after years surprisingly returns. Mammo returns, never to return to Pakistan
for she has declared herself as dead. She chooses to negate her existence by
getting her false death certificate made. As a dead woman she no longer is a
Pakistani desirous of staying with family in India. A radical act of disowning life
allows her to live it her own way – in India.
Thus, as the work of these artists reveal, Partition is not a thing of the past. It
continues to cast its shadow in multiple ways be it in Kashmir or the innumerable
instances of cross border exchange of hostilities. Wars have been fought yet the
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dispute and rift continue. Recently a museum Yaadgaar-e-Taqseem dedicated to
Partition has been set up in Town Hall, Amritsar India. Besides this, several attempts
are being made to recover the people’s story of Partition. If Art Speigelman’s Maus
was an attempt to graphically narrate the horror of Holocaust, then Vishwajyoti
Ghosh’s This Side, That Side is a recent attempt which has made a great impact
upon Partition scholarship.
[1] Kayser, Christine Vial. “Nalini Malini, a global Storyteller.” Studies in Visual Arts
and Communications: an International Journal, Volume 2, No.1, 2005, p.3
Bio:
Dr. Rosy Sinha is Assistant Professor, Department of English, ARSD College,
University of Delhi. Her doctoral thesis is on Naipaul and her area of interest is Indian
Writing in English.
***
Dissensus Magazine.
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South-Asian Partition Studies: An ‘industry’ in
the making?
By Debasri Basu
The sundering of the Indian subcontinent on the basis of religion in 1947 has been a
watershed in the history of South Asia, casting a pervading impact on its populace.
The people of India, Pakistan and latter-day Bangladesh have had to encounter a
gamut of experiences on account of this which have, over the last seven decades,
been expressed through diverse modes. The most immediate responses were
journalistic reportage, followed by fiction, poetry and allied literary depictions as well
as chronicles, which in turn led to the framing of ‘history proper’. In later years, oral
testimonies came up in a big way to supplement written accounts and highlight the
importance of ‘petite’ against the bulk of ‘grand’ narratives.
Having said that, it ought to be borne in mind that the field is a particularly explosive
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one, and has remained so for all these years. That there was a lag between the event
and much of its representation cannot be denied, and has sometimes been ascribed
to an often self-imposed moratorium by sections of the intelligentsia. It could have
been the result of their own sense of repugnance at the gross brutalities that had
transpired, which numbed them into relative silence. The prevalent polemics of that
period could also have contributed to it, since it impeded the evolving of a milieu
conducive to any unencumbered deliberation on the topic. The common argument
was that the wounds were quite raw and parochial dogmas still held sway.
Incidentally, Tapati Chakravarty refers to a ‘literary policy’ directed against the
manifestation of such themes in literature in her essay, “The Paradox of a Fleeting
Presence” (268), where she illustrates the aversion for subjects with contentious
implications. The furore in India over M. S. Sathyu’s 1973 Urdu movie Garm Hava and
the 1988 Doordarshan telecast of Govind Nihalani-directed television series Tamas
[whose plot-line was based on Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi novel of the same title] is also
an index of the communally-charged atmosphere that remained entrenched in the
polity much after the Partition.
It is only in the last couple of decades that the issue has registered a greater degree
of discussion in academic and public spheres. This change is, perhaps, the natural
corollary of the fact that a large segment of the witnesses to the Partition had grown
old, prompting historians and scholars to record their testimonies while it could be
feasible. As far as the survivors themselves were concerned, the passage of almost
half a century had sufficiently lent a ‘distance’ essential for creating a ‘perspective’
to review their past. Some of them still felt the pangs while speaking about those
agonizing days, but others, especially Sikh refugees, came forward to articulate their
observations, regarding it imperative in view of the phases of politico-religious
turmoil in the intervening duration – most notably the anti-Sikh conflagration after
the assassination of India’s Prime Minister, Smt. Indira Gandhi, in 1984. Not
surprisingly, the time was thus ripe for the development of a distinct academic
domain, termed Partition Studies, which started delving deeper into not merely the
causes of the political divide but also its multifarious repercussions.
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This growth found an almost concurrent impetus from the blooming of what has
come to be known as Partition Literature. Unlike history, literature had been swift in
representing the myriad facets of this rift since the late 1940s, possibly owing to the
inherent distinctions in the two genres. The element of fictionality enables literature
to enjoy a degree of latitude which is not available to history. Creative writing in the
form of novels, stories, sketches, poems, plays, inter alia, in the many subcontinental
languages as also English flourished in the immediate aftermath of the vivisection of
India. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh
Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, Mohan Rakesh, Yashpal, Bhisham Sahni, Jyotirmoyee Devi and
Sunil Gangopadhyay, among several others, took up the untold aspects of this
Partition in their signature ways. As it happened, there was a perceptible emphasis
on novels and memoirs, as a result of which short stories, poems and even dramas
remained out of general purview for the most part. It was the 1990s that proved to
be crucial in the eventual expansion of Partition Studies, plausibly since it coincided
with the golden jubilee celebrations of attaining political independence. Partition,
being ‘the other side’ of this freedom, hung heavily on the predictable festivities
associated with the year 1997. The decade had already seen the publishing industry
run into a tizzy, with numerous titles seeing the light of day. These included a
number of anthologies which gathered poetry and prose pieces of varying lengths,
especially short stories, which were translated from a range of vernaculars into
English and intended for a wider readership.
These publications are, however, not without their share of lacunae. If we survey the
body of such works written since the late 1940s, a geographic disparity is bound to
be detected. Most scholastic writings on the subject have been Punjab-centric, to
the almost exclusion of other provinces affected by Radcliffe’s dividing line, viz.
Bengal, Sindh, and Sylhet. This is evident in not only the realm of history but also
literature, especially in some of the anthologies like Stories about the Partition of
India collected by Alok Bhalla in four volumes, When the British Left India: Stories on
the Partitioning of India, 1947 and Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition of
India, both edited by Saros Cowasjee and Kartar Singh Duggal, India Partitioned: The
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Other Face of Freedom in two volumes collated by Mushirul Hasan, and Translating
Partition edited by Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint. Most of the stories and accounts
included in these books were written in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi, and subsequently
translated into English. Bhalla’s original compendium in three volumes had sixty
three stories, forty seven of which were from these languages of northern India.
Orphans of the Storm had one story from Bengal, while the other titles mentioned
above did not have even a single Bengali or Sindhi tale, accentuating a highly
skewed linguistic ratio. The lop-sided nature of such pan-Indian anthologies, as also
paucity of English translations, has led to the formation of a fallacious notion
amongst some people about the supposed lack of Partition writings from these
regions. The upshot of such editorial slights has been the grossly insufficient
coverage that they have received in most circles, which ultimately resulted in the
perception about its apparent absence. S. Settar and Indira Baptista Gupta, the
joint-editors of a two-volume collection of critical essays on the subject titled Pangs
of Partition, reveal this general impression when they state: “An interesting aspect of
Bengali literature is its total indifference to Partition, as virtually no short stories or
novels of significance dealt with it” (11). We find a related query in the words of
social historian Ashis Nandy spoken in this context: “Why have even the garrulous
Bengalis been, for once, silenced?” (xvi). The reasons are not too far to seek,
especially when one takes into account the fact that academic discussions, whether
in national or international spheres, have largely remained confined to the
occurrences in Delhi and Punjab. Partition scholar Urvashi Butalia had astutely
pointed out this bias in the August 1994 issue of the journal Seminar: “A serious gap
is the omission of experiences in Bengal and East Pakistan” (qtd. in Bagchi and
Dasgupta 1:1). The renowned Indo-English poet Keki N. Daruwalla too had echoed
similar sentiments when he emphasised the need of looking anew at hitherto
neglected areas: “…we need to be better informed on partition literature from Bengal
and Sylhet” (200). It was only in the initial years of the twenty-first century that this
anomaly was partially corrected through the publication of some anthologies with a
special focus on Bengal, Sylhet and Sindh – namely Prafulla Roy’s Set at Odds:
Stories of the Partition and Beyond, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and
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Partition in Eastern India in two volumes edited by Jasodhara Bagchi, Subhoranjan
Dasgupta with Subhasri Ghosh, Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter
collated by Bashabi Fraser, Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals
collected by Debjani Sengupta which laudably included a story from the oft-ignored
Tripura, Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam
edited by Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharya and Dipendu Das that focussed on the plight of
refugees on account of both religious and linguistic factors, as well as Rita Kothari’s
The Burden of Refuge and Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition, voicing
the anguish arising out of this division on those affected from Sindh.
The recent years have seen a veritable explosion on account of fresh inputs into this
domain, including not just books and periodicals, but also various arms of audio-
visual media. Documentary movies and feature films themed on the Partition have
been made in India for long. In the world of television, contents which delineate the
different aspects of the vivisection have been visibly popular from the 1980s. Be it
Buniyaad which portrayed the tribulations of a Punjabi Hindu family from Lahore
seeking refuge in India, or later programmes like Tamas, the subject has successfully
managed to draw in the audiences. The trend sustained well into the new millennium
and has found enthusiastic response from viewers and critics alike. Even in Pakistan
and Bangladesh, the issue has been variously dealt with in notable films and
television serials.1 At the same time, it would do well to remember that the projection
of the 1947 Partition in these cultural productions from the two neighbouring nations
could be different from their Indian counterparts, owing to divergent perspectives
from which the split is viewed by their respective masses.
The subcontinent has, thus, in later decades offered an environment favourable to

the bourgeoning of the subject through an assortment of academic and cultural
exhibits. Their profusion, particularly in India, has generated appellations like
‘cottage industry’ to designate Partition Studies as a lucrative discipline. It is
nowadays quite common to come across numerous seminars, conferences and
symposia on this theme, and according to some the topic is fast approaching the
stage of saturation. There are also concerns that the tragedy of a section of the
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populace has being exploited, a matter which inevitably veers towards the ethics of
representation. Moreover, persistent harping – at times in explicit terms – on the
bodily abuse that occurred during those cataclysmic days can border on the
salacious, a prospect that had provoked Alok Rai to characterise such writings as
‘pornography of violence’ in his essay “The Trauma of Independence: Some Aspects
of Progressive Hindi Literature, 1945-47” (365). The criticism inherent in such a
label is not too difficult to sense, necessitating a detailed appraisal of the scenario.
That the topic still reverberates with readers and audience alike is a fact that cannot
be gainsaid and, not surprisingly, this emotive factor has been utilized by
practitioners and their associates from the world of arts and academia with
consummate prowess. Publishing firms have upped the ante to bring out newer titles
under the rubric, possibly trying to cash in on the vogue. The phenomenon is also
noticeable in the commercial domain, and a case in point is the ‘Reunion’
advertisement produced by the multinational company Google in November 2013 to
promote its Search Engine. Although the video clip tugged at the heartstrings of
many across India and Pakistan, it simultaneously prompted speculation about
financial considerations being the motive power behind artistic and similar
endeavours in today’s market-driven economies.
Notwithstanding such critiques, Partition Studies continues to march ahead with its
entourage of political and cultural capital, for despite there existing a sizable array of
works on the subject, it is far from exhaustive. Ashis Nandy in his essay, “The Days
of The Hyaena” (xiv), rues that in fact, it has not been as extensive as those on the
Armenian genocide of the early twentieth century, the Jewish Holocaust before and
during the Second World War, or the much recent Bosnian and Rwandan massacres
in the 1990s. The numerous socio-historical issues and their nuances are yet to be
completely explored even after all these years, and coupled with the vastness of the
area is its intrinsic complexity, a feature which makes it all the more challenging to
engage with the multiple causes of the Partition as well as its far-reaching effects.
Besides, with instances of religious violence showing no signs of abatement in the
subcontinent it is imperative that the lessons from the manoeuvres surrounding the
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Partition and its manifold, less than desirable, consequences are learnt anew. The
long shadow of the Partition continues to haunt people even till this day, especially
the older generation who were either directly or indirectly affected by its
vehemence. On the political front its very mention has the capacity to raise the
hackles of some people, and demands handling with extreme tact. There have been
concerted initiatives by groups from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to organise
cross-border campaigns in order to foster awareness about each other and
encourage amity amongst the ordinary citizens.2
There is also a growing realization about the need to impart these insights to the
current and future generations of the populace, both who reside in the subcontinent
as well as members of the diaspora. Efforts to this end are being taken through
creation of digital repositories like ‘The 1947 Partition Archive’ which garners as
much information as is possible through personal interviews, and makes it available
to netizens on the world-wide-web. Akin to this is the founding of the Partition
Museum in Amritsar’s Town Hall last year on the occasion of the seventieth
anniversary of this fateful event. Inspired by Holocaust museums in several cities of
the world, it is aimed at preserving memorabilia belonging to victims and survivors
as also newspaper clippings and photographs of those turbulent times. As recently
as April this year, Netaji Subhas Open University of West Bengal in India and Khulna
University of Bangladesh signed a Memorandum of Understanding to carry on an
international project titled “Mapping Partition Memory, Amnesia & Literature in
Middle and Southern Bengal: An Indo-Bangladesh Perspective”. Interestingly, in
contemporary Britain too there has been an endeavour lately to increase public
opinion with the objective of incorporating the history of the Indian Partition into
British school curricula.3 All these miscellaneous enterprises testify to the seminal
importance of Partition Studies in the present times and establish its relevance in
the days to come, since it pertains to a topic which still looms large in the backdrop
of South Asian affairs at home and around the world.
Notes
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1. Pakistani movies like Kartar Singh in 1959 (Dir. Saifuddin Saif), Tauba in 1964
(Dir. S. A. Hafiz), Lakhon Mein Eik in 1967 (Dir. Raza Mir), Behen Bhai in 1968 (Dir.
Hasan Tariq), Pehli Nazar in 1977 (Dir. Islam Dar), Khaak aur Khaun in 1979 (Dir.
Masud Pervaiz), Jannat Ke Talaash in 1999 (Dir. Hasan Askari), Khamosh Pani in
2003 (Dir. Sabiha Sumar), and the television serial Dastaan in 2010 (Dir. Haissam
Hussain) have ably taken up the many facets associated with the 1947 Partition.
The 1999 feature film Chitra Nodir Pare [On the Banks of River Chitra] directed
by Tanvir Mokkamel from Bangladesh too revolved around the theme and has
been well-received.
2. Two of them, ‘Aman ki Aasha’ [denoting ‘Hope for peace’] aiming to strengthen
the Indo-Pak peace and ‘Milne Do’ [meaning ‘Let people meet’] working towards
removing stringent restrictions with respect to Indo-Pak visa, have gained
substantial popularity in recent times.
3. According to a report dated 21 July, 2018 in the Bengali daily Bartaman published
from Kolkata in West Bengal, this move has received endorsement from many
residents of England belonging to a subcontinental origin, including the British
Member of Parliament [House of Commons] Virendra Kumar Sharma and British
Broadcasting Corporation presenter Anita Rani (4).
Works Cited
Bagchi, Jashodhara, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds. The Trauma and the Triumph:
Gender and Partition in Eastern India. 2 vols. Kolkata: Stree, 2003; 2009.
Bhalla, Alok, ed. Stories about the Partition of India. 3 vols. 1994. Rpt. New Delhi:
Harper Collins, 1999.
–––. Stories about the Partition of India. Vol. 4. New Delhi: Manohar, 2012.
Bhattacharya, Nirmal Kanti, and Dipendu Das, eds. Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of
Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. New Delhi: Niyogi, 2012.
Chakravarty, Tapati. “The Paradox of a Fleeting Presence: Partition and Bengali

Literature.” Settar and Gupta 2: 261-81.
Page 33 of 43
:
Cowasjee, Saros, and K. S. Duggal, eds. When The British Left India: Stories on the
Partitioning of India, 1947. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1987.
–––. Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition of India. New Delhi: UBS
Publishers, 1995.
Daruwalla, Keki N. “In a High Wind.” Settar and Gupta 2:199-209.
Fraser, Bashabi, ed. Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter. London: Anthem
Press, 2008.
Hasan, Mushirul, ed. India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom. 2 vols. Delhi: Roli
International Books, 1995.
Kothari, Rita. Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition. New Delhi: Penguin,
2009.
– – – . The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. Chennai:

Orient Longman, 2007.
Nandy, Ashis. “The Days of The Hyaena.” [Foreword] Mapmaking: Partition Stories
from Two Bengals. Ed. D. Sengupta. 2003. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011. xi-
xviii.
Rai, Alok. “The Trauma of Independence: Some Aspects of Progressive Hindi

Literature, 1945-47.” Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and Partition. Ed.
Mushirul Hasan, New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2000. 351-70.
Ravikant, and Tarun K.Saint, eds. Translating Partition. New Delhi: Katha, 2001.
Roy, Prafulla. Set at Odds: Stories of the Partition and Beyond. Ed. John W. Hood.
New Delhi: Srishti, 2002.
Settar, S. and Indira B. Gupta, eds. Pangs of Partition. 2 Vols. New Delhi: Manohar,
2002.
Page 34 of 43
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Bio:
Dr. Debasri Basu, Assistant Professor, is currently teaching at the Post-Graduate
Department of English, Maulana Azad College in Kolkata, India. Having researched
on the topic of Partition Literature in the context of the Indian subcontinent, she was
subsequently awarded her doctoral degree by the Department of English, University
of Calcutta. She also professes an avid interest in British Literature of the eighteenth
century, miscellaneous Indian Writings in English, Bengali, Hindi and English
translation, as well as Resistance Literature and Popular Culture.
***
Dissensus Magazine.
Page 35 of 43
:
Crosses and Knots: Subcontinental Partition
Cinema
By Prithviraj Sinha
Love/Hate. Unity/Division. Peace/War: It seems without the onus of practicing these

time-honored binaries, our social lives would be devoid of a central truth. It is
wisdom on our part to know that the imperceptible workings of the human mind
have been instrumental in fanning divisions over centuries and when I adopt or even
so much as enunciate the term ‘subcontinent’, an image of division becomes
instantly recognizable with its other graver cultural synonym. PARTITION – an event
of life-altering magnitude that etched in no singular terms the brutality of mankind.
1947 was the year when we realized that clinging to the weight of one ideal was
foolhardy and skipping from one to the other was the need of the hour. We made our
choices then to hoodwink death sometimes and to cut our own corners, little
knowing that our collective tragedies resonated in our individual churnings. In the
presence of such vitiated tempers, humanity learnt the bitter tyranny of never
managing to abide by a single principle to survive. Who knew that these binaries
would compel us to resort to hate-mongering and its chiseled weapons would
continue to saw the very flesh of democracy (even seventy years down the line) in
various forms. The personal choice inevitably then became a political tool with
serrated edges.
We have better sense to know that when political maneuverings add fuel to the fire,
an ordinary individual, who has suffered some personal dilemmas of his own, resorts
to using simmering hostilities and communal tensions to stoke a divisive order that is
beyond imagination. It resides in ruins of not just facts and memories alone. All the
same as we put together this skeletal idea of Partition, we have to reiterate how the
dialectic of hate has become a commonality, an occupation for partisan workshops
of the modern era. Make no mistake about it as it’s no longer even relegated to a
state or a pan national boundary. That illusion of insular societal complexities of a
Page 36 of 43
:
particular nature has been completely shattered in these Trumpian times. Today, we
are ready to air our own private dirty laundries muddied with delicate ethnic and
communal filigrees to a globalized mirror of refractions. The sharp edges of shame
are left behind in the process of peddling these divisions and without realizing as
much, this personal streak becomes disturbingly political. Be it man or woman, aged
and children, today this is the worldview that sums up our collective humanity
consonant with our general, exclusionary, egotistical make up.
Then what is the part that the victims adopt in return? Those who have been
wronged and splintered by opportunistic agents of division? Which of the binaries
do they adhere to? Exactly which political/personal strain do they lean on? Go probe
into the deep, ye soul / for in the landscape of 2018, what state of responsibility do
we stand by as the past comes crashing disgracefully to the present? This is the
finer-point I make keeping aside the narratives, the touch of pure evil and vestiges of
truth we recognize with the Partition. If we reel in the subsumption of our essentially
divisive times then I believe we have to hark back voluntarily to the same universal
strains that go into constructing manmade Holocausts as these. If this is indeed how
far we have come then we are only apprehending treading further on the path of
more strife and bloodshed even as both words occupy our consciousness by the
diurnal clock. With our modern currency of indiscriminate passions stoking a new
civil era of disengagement with the politics of peace, we prevail as a Partitioned
society, in the face of this overt majoritarian syncretism we rally around. You see,
this churning is really deep-seated and claustrophobically internalized.
***
As my critical framework is built around the narrative of Partition, for me the agency
of art vis-à-vis cinematic image and the written word is the one that has made me
look at Partition as a tragedy as also the trickle effect of complexities affecting
people across these border lines. If you ask me then I will say that a famous painting
by Amrita Shergill, titled Group of Three Girls, comes to my mind. This painting was
modelled on the rural women of Punjab, the very state that oversaw horrors of
Page 37 of 43
:
Partition and history has informed us how members of the fairer sex had to undergo
physical agonies and emotional scars galore. There can be no sanitized appendage
to what they went through but this portrait of three woebegone young women,
huddled together in a stooped down position and their saturnine features along with
Shergill’s use of their dress colors against a damp, sooty backdrop, makes me look
at the unexpressed patches of a prior communal life as it was painted a good twelve
years before the Partition pogrom. Just like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, it relays a
power of suggestion of the coming and the past experience particular to the location
and people involved. The particular then morphs into the universal. Was the wan and
downcast expression on the women’s faces a part of any pre-existing strain hidden
in crannies of anonymity? We’ll never know but I have always felt their faces, rather
the mobility of their countenance even in case of a lack of expressions projected on
the canvas, made an unwritten past merge with the recorded tales.
My experience of Partition was via history books. I was ‘informed’ about this episode
in distant history. I got awakened to it when as a twelve-year-old, I came closer to
inspect the turnaround the event occasioned. I watched Pinjar (2003), which was
based on the novel of the same name by Amrita Pritam, and the fate of Puro hit me
in the gut. As a woman betrothed to be married to a sensitive young man, she is
abducted by Rashid who wants to avenge a past misdeed by her forbears on top of
contentious land disputes. Puro is made to borne the stigma. Rashid may have
ventured on the path of retribution but he does not outrage her modesty. As a
Muslim who is made to be the Other, his anger has hardly settled down but he
realizes the implications of his actions on Puro. What seems more impossible is how
her family disowned her. Her pleas that she is untainted fall on deaf ears as she is
driven away. In her fate resonates the fate of millions of women who were abducted
and raped during the Partition mayhem and were treated as a ‘stigma’ by the
custodians of honor. Puro converts to Islam and the loss she endures is horrific. Her
tale seems to encompass turmoils of gender, religion and land that is eternally at the
center of every conflict zone.
The same echoes are to be found in the Pakistani drama Dastan (2010), based on
Page 38 of 43
:
the novel Bano written by Razia Butt. While the protagonist in Pinjar was a Hindu
woman and in Bano a Muslim, the fate they share is the same. The theme of rupture,
loss of home, sense of alienation has been realized with rare sensitivity. The
essential loss of innocence in the wake of a new nation’s dawn reveals that the
society remains as fractured as it was before lofty ideologies had a field day.
Ultimately, the women of the soil who were hailed as its heroes were torchbearers of
its stunted beginnings and future generations indebted to half-informed truths.
Perhaps, we find the most nostalgic and powerful narratives of the Partition, the
plight of Punjab and its women in Amrita Pritam’s Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu. Amrita
Pritam’s poem in Punjabi speaks of a land fragmented invoking images of iconic poet
Waaris Shah and the Chenab river.
***
Actually, barbed wires can never really snap shared experiences and indeed Pinjar
and Dastaan are replete with memories of a united land. In fact, filmmakers from
both sides have on countless occasions risen above a perceived air of indifference
and collaborated on the similitudes that the two countries share. A case in point
would be Wirsa, a film that speaks about companionship and assimilation amongst
Indians and Pakistanis in a diasporic setting. The music of maestros like Abida
Parveen, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, fusion bands, the popular channel Zindagi are
constant reminders of a common cultural ethos which highlight the sheer
absurdities of sectarian and communal divisions in a post-Partition epoch.
Two recent films, Ramchand Pakistani and Khamosh Paani (both made by Pakistani
filmmakers) subtly explore the legacies of contestation that Partition spawned.
Ramchand Pakistani, directed by Mehreen Jabbar, is set in post-Partition Pakistan
and explores the plight of hundreds of prisoners who are languishing in cross-border
prisons (Kulbhushan Jadhav and Sarbjeet Singh are examples of such victims). In
Ramchand Pakistani, a Hindu father inadvertently follows his seven-year-old son into
India; this makes them Pakistani infiltrators and hence susceptible enough to be put
in jail. The two stay in prison for several years until they are released and go back to
Page 39 of 43
:
their ‘home’, Pakistan. Not every story has a similar turn of events.
More incisive narrative about Partition-spawned complexities is Khamosh Pani,

directed by Sabiha Sumar. It’s a purview of the continuum of the Partition. In it,
Kirron Kher plays a woman who resides in her village Charkhi which after 1947 lies in
Pakistan. A Sikh woman who refuses to accept being killed by her own father to save
her ‘honor’ from Muslims, she leaves home and chooses to stay in Pakistan. She is
no longer Veero but rather Ayesha, a widowed woman who then witnesses the
Islamic fundamentalism that consumes and claims her son who has morphed from a
gentleman to an extremist.
Partition, for me, is a phenomenon that continues to echo in every single instance of
extremism, bigotry and ethnic and sectarian ‘othering’. Lynching, hate crimes
abroad, even a look of distrust and disgust. All of these commingled to generate the
single greatest human purge just years away from the Holocaust. Remembrances go
back to how the Partition was deemed by historians as the ‘Indian Holocaust’. The
fabric of suffering and loss reverberates across distances, eras and personages. Till
today, my mind shudders, imagining the breadth of loss of property, home, hearth
and a way of life that defines this mass exodus.
Generations later today we witness a strong nostalgia and yearning for the days
gone by as represented in the Google Search advertisement where long-lost friends
are united by their respective grandchildren. These experiences assert the past in
the presentness of Partition as well as a desire to overcome the rupture.
The opening of a Partition memorial in Amritsar, safeguarding remnants of people,

attires, even structures of homes and various paraphernalia, clearly demonstrates
that all cannot be forgotten or lost forever. There’s a life that exists outside public
enmities and just small talk. It defines our triumphs, tragedies and life scripts with all
the complexities we carry on our shoulders. For a lifetime and generations beyond.
Reference
Haq, Zia. “Nayar, optimist, defender of civil liberties, dies.” Hindustan Times (New
Page 40 of 43
:
Delhi), 23 Aug, 2018.
Bio:
Prithvijeet Sinha is an M. Phil. (English) student at the Department of English and
Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow and is an avid reader and
writer. Since 2015, he has been publishing his poetry, essays on popular culture,
music and cinema on the worldwide community Wattpad and on his blog, “An Awadh
Boy’s Panorama: Tracing Words on These Filigreed, Discerning Fingertips”. He also
contributes regularly to Reader’s Digest, GNOSIS journal, Café Dissensus Everyday,
and Forward Poetry UK.
***
Dissensus Magazine.
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TAGGED WITH PAKISTAN

Partition’s Little Red Book: Revisiting Krishan

Likewise, Chander’s intervention was supported by his Progressive comrades like

The second reason I am interested in Chander’s aforementioned volume is that it is

Now to the stories themselves.

The third story in the collection, “A Courtesan’s Letter Addressed to Pandit

A courtesan of Faris Road

And to the whisky-drinking maulana he says:

The story about post-independence Amritsar is a direct polar counterpoint to the

A thousand curses on these leaders, on their next seven generations, who

We are humans. We are the standard-bearers of creation in this whole universe,

December 28, 2018  Leave a Reply

The history(ies) and memories of Partition live on in post-colonial times to such a

Film as cultural memory is a locus of history, a mode of remembering, a mnemonic

Aarti: Did you see all this?

Aarti: And where were you?

Mohsin: I was hiding in the dustbin.

Mohsin’s acknowledgement of his trauma in a household whose members were

—. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010.

Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial

December 28, 2018  Leave a Reply

Partition of India may be an event that is (temporally speaking) beyond us. As a

Nalini Malani City in Pain/City in Escape, 1989.

In another video installation, “Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain

December 28, 2018  Leave a Reply

The subcontinent has, thus, in later decades offered an environment favourable to

Chakravarty, Tapati. “The Paradox of a Fleeting Presence: Partition and Bengali

Daruwalla, Keki N. “In a High Wind.” Settar and Gupta 2:199-209.

– – – . The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. Chennai:

Rai, Alok. “The Trauma of Independence: Some Aspects of Progressive Hindi

December 28, 2018  Leave a Reply

Love/Hate. Unity/Division. Peace/War: It seems without the onus of practicing these

More incisive narrative about Partition-spawned complexities is Khamosh Pani,

The opening of a Partition memorial in Amritsar, safeguarding remnants of people,

December 28, 2018  Leave a Reply

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