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the Partition was the single peace time event that forced one of the largest migrations in human history. The numbers are mind boggling — about 12.5 million terrified people were exiled from their homeland and, as new India and Pakistan came into existence, had to cross a border to their new country and "homes". About a million people died. The stories and films on Partition, whenever they are read and watched, leave behind sadness and regret, and the feeling that hatred and violence can never be the solution to a peoples’ problems.
The accounts should, in effect, leave a lasting effect, a determination in the minds of countries, governments and societies, that history should not repeat itself. However, the truth is there for all to see. We either forget or just don’t seem willing to learn the lesson of violence. Perhaps that’s why books like Mohinder Singh Sarna’s Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition, are so important. They serve to remind us that ferocity and animosity cannot ever be allowed in civilised societies, that they sear and tear away the fabric of the country and families and leave only barrenness behind. The book was written in Punjabi by Mohinder Singh Sarna, and has been translated by his son, writer and diplomat, Navtej Singh Sarna. Although Mohinder has been a prolific writer, novelist and poet, but he admits that his stories on Partition have been his most appreciated ones, perhaps because he "passed through that cataclysm unprotected. I was eyewitness to those massacres, those acts of fanaticism and barbarity." The stories would be based on Sarna’s experiences, but the characters are fictitious. The situations, however, are ones that we have heard of time and again in narrations of Partition.
The stories of savagery and intolerence are, however, interspersed with tales of kindness and gallantry, where humanity takes precedence over hostility. They are all the more effective for the simplicity of narration. The characters are the real strength of the book — the stories being woven around them, sometimes more than the plot. We thus meet Choudhry Khuda Baksh in A village called Laddewala Varaich, who gets killed trying to save the 15-year-old Jagiro from being raped. Then there is the story of the distressed Sikh mother, who is so horrified at her son parading a wretched Muslim woman naked in the streets, that she bares her own breasts before him. In the story Hope we meet an old man, a refugee living in Lady Hardinge hostel who has lost his children to a bloody mob, who fervently awaits the end of the world which would be brought about by Hydrogen bombs. But when his neighbour gives birth to twins and names them after his dead children, he is full of hope again. In A Woman of Integrity, Sayida compels her husband Noora to consign into flames the spinning wheel he had taken from the home of a massacred Sikh family. "Return what is not yours and only then show me your face," she declares to her husband. The stories are both disturbing and compelling. They are not pleasant reading because they speak of disturbed times and displaced people, but they carry a message that we should heed history lest it repeat itself!
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Wails and tears of
mothers, frightened children looking haplessly at the bodies of their
dead fathers, villages ravaged, girls raped, mass massacres, senseless
bloodshed and green fields that turned red with blood — it all
becomes all the more real and tragic when narrated by characters who
are suffering the pain.