Midnight's children look back

Raaja Bhasin

Some years back, when my younger son was at boarding school, they staged a series of plays of extraordinary depth and sensitivity. One of these was Gulzar’s ‘Raavi Paar’. When it ended, many of the young players were in tears, as were some of the audience. A few days later, my son asked about Partition, “We are from Lahore, aren’t we?” There is a photograph of our ancestral house in our less-than-palatial post-Partition dining room. That photograph marks our origins of sorts and one may have occasionally spoken of the tragedy of 1947. Of the time when our families and loved ones were reduced to statistics of dead or lost.

My sons are of the third post-Partition generation who now speak and ask questions. These are who Aanchal Malhotra’s book, ‘In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition’, brings into a primary narrative, where the account also spans the earlier two. For good reason, I’d say. The ones who experienced the tragedy first-hand were taken in to rebuild lives as best as they could. Their children grew up either in silence that cauterised those terrible months, or heard of the trauma in snatches. Very few talked about that time in detail. This, the third generation, has, for want of a better word, the ‘comfort’ of looking at homes, the concepts of home, origins of real and imagined spaces and of ancestors known and unknown, in the relative safety of today. The wrench, the fear is shielded by this ‘comfort’.

A chasm of decades also opens the doors to study and examine with the dispassionate tools of scholarship, the horrific events of Partition. These, like the Holocaust, Pol Pot at work, the almost-casual destruction of native American nations, China’s Cultural Revolution, continue to haunt generations. But only if they are allowed by history to be remembered and not swept under thick, if hole-ridden, political carpets. And only if we are prepared to learn that bridges provide greater security than walls.

Malhotra’s book is an opus. I have met her just once, briefly, some years ago, at a seminar on Partition. She came across as a controlled, reflective and compassionate person. That persona comes through in the book. Even the expected outbursts of emotion have been handled with understanding and carefully chosen words. Malhotra has taken a substantial amount of time and patience to gather, structure and edit the story of many lives.

This is not a book about the broad sweeps of history where we may never know the real motives, the swiftly altering beliefs and the political patterns that went into creating this tragic moment. This is, and yet not, a book about Mountbatten, Jinnah and Nehru. This is not a book about the Empire and its caprices. This is a book about people trapped in that vortex. Of you and me who lost their lives and identities in this maelstrom. Who despite the odds stacked against them, sliced through the debris and let human hope and light shine through.

The book has not been structured into an all-too-easy time chronology, but more into what one may call an experience and memory one. It begins with, well, ‘The Beginning’ and ends with ‘The Quotidian’. Across some 600 pages, we move between one life and another, and yet more. We move from the first life to the next with the words, ‘chalo, chalo’, move on; escape, save yourself.

There is a school of thought that believes that we live and create lives of our own and of others, out of fiction. Oversimplified, this would mean that there is no truth about real motives or beliefs. Partition still has that shroud around it.