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Bhisham Sahni, one of the famous writers on Partition and author
of Tamas, in his interview with Alok Bhalla, emphasises
the harmony in which religious affairs of different communities
could be conducted in an atmosphere of tolerance. He considers
Partition a mistake, the result of a fatal ideology of religious
politics.
Mrinal Pandey
by reviewing the life, literature and politics of the two
countries observed that neither India nor Pakistan has recovered
fully from the deep hurt suffered during Partition. The author
believes that communal riots targeting the minorities, Dalits
and Backward Classes in both the countries are assault on the
basic principles of democracy in India. These riots deny basic
concept of an egalitarian brotherhood and solidarity on which
Pakistan was built.
Urvashi Butalia
has invited the common people, mostly uprooted from their homes,
to record the hitherto unrecorded memories of the joint past in
the book The Other Side of Silence. She has dug out the
unsung human actors, recorded their memories and reproduced
their version verbatim. Manmayee Basu also narrates the
experiences of uprooted women and men weaving moving tapestries
of violence and indignity suffered by them. Both of them try to
explore the history through the memories of the unknown and
anonymous by placing the oral evidence along with the
conventional. Nandi Bhatia also believes that literary works
provide an alternative source of history. He feels that these
marginal experiences are intrinsic part of the Partition saga
not available in official records.
K.S. Duggal
shows how Partition was handled with resilience and sensitivity
by the uprooted Punjabis. A majority of them cherish a natural
desire to revisit their homes. Mushirul Hasan represents the
common thought that Partition was brought about by hot-headed
and cynical politicians who failed to grasp the implications of
division on religious lines.
Anindita
Mukhopadhyay, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Alok Bhalla, Sadat Hasan Manto
and Asaduddin have captured the poignant moments of Partition in
their short stories. In Bengali literature, one finds a paradox
that in one genre only poetry depicts Partition events in
detail, while stories and novels do not. Tapti Chakravarti
endeavours to unravel this paradox with the help of novels.
Naresh Jain
depicts the changing Muslim attitude through Attia Husain’s
novel Sunlight On a Broken Column which presents the
tragedy of Partition with greater objectivity and questions ‘how
can we live together as a nation if the differences between the
communities are continuously preached’?
Jayanti
Chattopadhyay discusses two Bengali plays written in the first
decade after Partition, namely Salil Sen’s Natun Ihudi and
Tulsidas Lahiri’s Banglar Mati. The plays depicted Bhadralok’s
desire to valourise the cultural unity of Bengal and
propagated the rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim unity. She draws
attention to the problems faced by play writers.
Kamlesh Mohan
deals with a story based on Kashmiri Lal Zakir’s novel Karamanwali.
Karamanwali represents the agonising internal journey of
that generation of women whose children were left behind while
they migrated to India or Pakistan. It is based on a real
incident of a mother looking for her son. In the process, she
experiences the gory and dehumanising conditions of a ‘refugee’
camp.
Discussing
Kushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan depicting life
of a small village situated on the border of India, Shikoh
Mohsin Mirza exposes the event that led to the transformation of
a sleepy village on one night of August 1947 into a cauldron of
conflicting loyalties when a train load of massacred men, women
and children arrive in the village.
The book on the
whole weaves a fine tapestry of various strands of Partition. A
major refrain of the book is that in spite of the creation of
two nations, a bond of oneness can be clearly discerned among
the divided. People cherish in their hearts a kind of nostalgia
for the undivided past. The people-to-People interaction may
hopefully lead to better relations between India and Pakistan in
future.
The book is of immense
significance for academicians, researchers, planners,
policy-makers, politicians and bureaucrats, besides students of
sociology, history and political science and for general
readers. It is a storehouse of data for Partition events.
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