The shame of it
Tejwant Gill

Reading Partition/Living Partition
Ed. Jasbir Jain. Rawat Publications, Jaipur. Pages 338. Rs 750.

This is a book meticulously edited by Jasbir Jain, eminent teacher of English and scholar of several Indian literatures. She seems to have read every thing about the 1947 Partition by rubbing it against the grain. Little wonder, her awareness of this horrendous event is not just historical in retrospective perspective. In prospect, it is existential as well leading her to focus upon Partition, its corrosive correlative, of which the marring effect gets into all aspects and facets of the social life. Then the image of Partition, lurking in her memory, is not confined to what happened only in the eastern and western parts of the Punjab. The anguish and torment the Mohajirs had to undergo, the Sindhis kept on suffering and the Parsis did not remain immune to, equally call for her attention.

Suffice it to say, her grasp of Partition is not regional and parochial, it is national and social as well. That is why her concern with corrosive Partition as against its horrendous correlative with the first letter capital is manifold and diverse. To her mind it, with the first letter small but all the same at several levels, keeps on spreading its tentacles both in filiation and affiliation. How Partition was lived and read as trauma, as a consequence of which partition, as its multiple but corrosive correlative, is borne in all its minutiae, a bit as drama though, over all this extends Jasbir Jain’s critical gaze. From this problematic, the volume takes birth, going through what looks like suffering the spectral presence of both in simultaneity.

The writings comprising this volume wear ample evidence to this fact. She is convinced that "Partition is one such happening, the shame of which has outlived the loss of life and values." Since literary discourse is the only mode to move beyond this lasting though not eternal shame, she has gathered pieces from multiple sources as resources for forging new ethos. These are extracts from classics such as Krishna Sobti’s Zindginama and descriptive pieces about how classics such as Kamleshwar’s Kitne Pakisan came to be written. Supplementing them are sensitive critical studies. Sudhir Chandra’s unraveling of dichotomy in Intizar Husain’s An Unwritten Epic, Harish Narang’s Weaving Black Borders Manto and the Politics of Partition, Bharucha’s sympathetic study of Bapsi Sidhwa’s fiction, Tripti Jain’s commentary on the film Khamosh Pani and in counterpoint to all these Vijaya Singh’s remarkably original evocation of Train Journeys in Partition Stories are some which are not only revelative but illuminative as well. Besides, these are poignantly written creative pieces like Keki Daruwalla’s In a High Wind, Nida Fazli reminiscence Between the Walls, Jashodra Bagchi’s analysis Porous Boundaries and Divided Selves and Jasbir Jain’s own Writing Trauma and History: The Self in the World which form a kaleidoscope.

How Partition was a catastrophic failure is nowhere more terribly shown than in the stories of Manto, in particular Toba Tek Singh and Khol Do. Harish Narang applies his mind to this side of the stories but not wholly because his main concern is to show Manto politically rational rather than apocalyptically creative. This failure, alluring to the metaphysical extent but irreversible like one-way street, gets evident from Sudhir Chandra’s analysis of Intizar’s piece, more than a story but less than an epic. His analysis taps all fissures and ruptures to show how wisdom misses this unwritten epic. Bharucha is at pains to show how the Parsis, forming a miniscule minority, carved out their survival by bidding goodbye to integrity, not an illusion for the founders and the forefathers.

Here I am tempted to put the case of the Sikhs, again a minority community though not to the extent to which Parsis were, in comparative projection.

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