Permanent scars of the Partition

Stuti Khanna

So much of our daily communication with others and ourselves involves shaping, telling and listening stories. And it is not just the act of conscious story-telling, as a bedtime story would be, but the process of narrativisation that accompanies, sometimes subconsciously, a large part of human communication. When we ask our child to tell us what she did in school that day, we are asking her to tell us a story. Not a piece of fiction, of course — though it may well be that, for all we know — but an account, a narrative, wherein she selects the moments that stand out in her mind from her day in school, and strings them together to form some kind of a tale with a coherent shape and internal logic of its own. 

In this multitude of stories that we wade through every day, whether or not we are 'readers' in the strict sense of the term, what is it that stays with us, that inhabits and impacts and even alters, possibly, our consciousness over a long period of time?  It could be a passing reference, a minor part of the 'main' story, or a visual image, perhaps, that gets lodged in one's mind and refuses to leave it. 

In one of the rare Partition 'stories' that I heard from my grandmother as a child, what continues to haunt me to this day is not so much the fact and scale of the dislocation that affected my people and so many others, the loss of home and property, of members of the extended family. It is an image. Sometime in 1947, somewhere in Lahore, my grandmother, with her infant daughter and some relatives, huddled in a basement room in the middle of the night, while gangs of men from the 'other' community were on a rampage through the locality, breaking into homes, killing and looting whomever and whatever they could. To keep the baby from whimpering and giving away their hideout, my grandmother stuffed her mouth with pieces of cloth until the danger had passed. The sense of unspeakable dread that this comparatively mild image conjures up in me exceeds by far the horror evoked by the reports of corpse-filled trains or the brutal violence people inflicted upon each other at the time. 

In Urvashi Butalia's monumental account of Partition, The Other Side of Silence, one of the testimonies is by a young man who witnesses his sister getting beheaded by their father. It was one of the thousands of honour killings that took place at the time in Hindu and Sikh families, where people killed their own wives and daughters to prevent them from 'falling into the hands' of Muslim men. He recalls:"My sister came and sat in front of my father, and I stood there, right next to him, clutching onto his kurta as children do, I was clinging to him.... but when my father swung the kirpan, perhaps some doubt or fear came into his mind, or perhaps the kirpan got stuck in her dupatta... no one can say.. It was such a frightening fearful scene. Then my sister, with her own hand she removed her plait and pulled it forward... and my father with his own hands moved her dupatta aside and then he swung the kirpan and her head and neck rolled off and fell... there... far away." 

In Khol do, one of Saadat Hasan Manto's most terrifying stories about the Partition, a young girl, abducted and used as a sex slave, successively, by groups of both Muslim and Hindu men, is 'rescued' and brought back home, only for her relieved father to discover to his horror that in her battered, semi-conscious state, her response to any male presence, his own included, is to untie the drawstring of her salwar and part her legs. 

Why do these images continue to resonate in our minds long after we come across them? I have deliberately chosen instances from both fact and fiction — the first is a personal memory, the second a published testimony, and the third a short story — in order to highlight the fact that the emotional impact of these 'stories' originates not (only) in their status as historical truth, but in the power of the word image per se. The sheer wrongness of a baby being refused its basic right to cry, and the terror of a mother forced to do so, become a more powerful comment on the horrific violence of the Partition than any account of mass carnage can be.  The small, dreadful detail remembered by the brother in his nightmarish account, the symbolic, hopeless gesture of resistance offered by his sister's braid and dupatta, sends a shiver down our spines in a way that reports of mass murders or suicides cannot. It forces us to ask the question — what kind of a ghastly, surreal world has the Partition created, in which a baby cannot be allowed to wail when she wants to, a young woman mutely aids in her own ruthless destruction, and another has been so brutalised by the savagery of Hindu men as much as Muslim so as to render the entire basis on which the Partition of the country was being enacted a monstrous farce.

While word images become the inevitable tool that crystallises the meaning and power of the story, what also makes these images memorable — spine-chillingly so — is the fact that these refer to an individual, single case. They bring home the horror of the Partition to us in a way statistics or news reports cannot. The story of six million suffering people does not move us in the way the story of one suffering person does, and it is by means of the story of one that we able to glimpse, briefly, into the terrible abyss that it emerges from. For, as the wise poet has said, "human kind cannot bear very much reality".