Witnessing Partition

Memory, History, Fiction

Tarun K. Saint

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429560002
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

This book interrogates representations – fiction, literary motifs and narratives – of the Partition of India. Delving into the writings of Khushwant Singh, Balachandra Rajan, Attia Hosain, Abdullah Hussein, Rahi Masoom Raza and Anita Desai, among many others, it highlights the modes of 'fictive' testimony that sought to articulate the inarticulate – the experiences of trauma and violence, of loss and longing, and of diaspora and displacement. The author discusses representational techniques and formal innovations in writing across three generations of twentieth-century writers in India and Pakistan, invoking theoretical debates on history, memory, witnessing and trauma.

With a new afterword, the second edition of this volume draws attention to recent developments in Partition studies and sheds new light as regards ongoing debates about an event that still casts a shadow on contemporary South Asian society and culture. A key text, this is essential reading for scholars, researchers and students of literary criticism, South Asian studies, cultural studies and modern history.

1
Negotiating the Effects of Historical Trauma

Novels of the 1940s and 1950s

Short-story writers, such as Manto and Intizar Husain, generated remarkable self-reflexive modes of ‘fictive’ testimony in the immediate aftermath of widespread and multiple forms of violence, as we shall see in Chapter 5. However, not many major novels about the Partition appeared before 1960 in Hindi, Urdu and English.¹ The few novels that depict the experience of the Partition seem preoccupied with obvious manifestations of communal violence or seek to restore the human dimension to the story of independence and division of the subcontinent, at times in overtly didactic ways. Some of these narratives fall back on communal stereotypes and conventional ways of coming to terms with the unprecedented fracturing of intercommunity relations. Such early novels are often marked by sheer bewilderment or a sense of underlying guilt, given their proximity to the event. There is also a seeming inability to find a mode of narrativisation that would enable writing to step out of the shadow of colonial and nationalist frameworks of reference while depicting communal violence.²

The effects of psychological numbing, a consequent sense of frozen time, as well as the constraints imposed by nationalist myth making played their part in these writings as well. As Das argues, the violence in the interior realm as many fled to an alien space led to a new logic of division; the self became radically fugitive and the world radically fragmented.³ During this period, embodied forms of witnessing existed, nonetheless, even as a veritable contract of silence was imposed.⁴ Many survivors had also to contend with an absence at the societal level of a capacity for listening, amounting to a taboo on divulging such experiences. Gandhi’s fasts and espousal of non-violence became the exemplary form of embodied witnessing in collective memory as a way of moving beyond the ‘time of Partition’.⁵ The cessation of violence after his assassination can be attributed to collective recognition of the significance of his ultimate self-sacrifice.⁶

The concept of historical trauma is invoked in my discussion of early fictional reconstructions of historical processes leading up to the Partition. Dominick LaCapra argues that historical trauma is specific, afflicting victims of cataclysmic events, as in the case of the Holocaust.⁷ Furthermore, he points out that there is a differentiated specificity to instances of historical trauma, for not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject-position associated with it. In the representation of historical trauma, the distinction between victims, perpetrators and bystanders as well as collaborators and resisters is crucial. Instances of secondary trauma or perpetrator trauma cannot be equated with that of the victim, even though ambiguous cases belonging to Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’ may exist.⁸ This is because the tendency to collapse all survivors into the category of traumatised victims may lead to distortions of the historical record and an inability to deal with the nuances of trauma’s afterlife. This argument needs to be further qualified with respect to the experience in the Subcontinent during the violence and its aftermath, when many victims became perpetrators, often after shedding their minority status, having moved from one region to another.⁹ Indeed, the trauma afflicting some survivors of the Partition arose out of experiences as both victim and perpetrator. I will argue that novelists writing soon after 1947 were unable to devise an adequate mode of testimony in fictional form, partly as a result of this ambiguity and the pervasiveness of the ‘grey zone’ across South Asia. Indeed, in both India and Pakistan, there was a prolonged societal refusal to recognise the existence of perpetrators at all and a marked inability to initiate processes of reconciliation with the ‘other’, though to different degrees in the two countries.¹⁰ Some of the early novels, instead, seek to generate uplifting messages or optimistic scenarios in the form of redemption narratives, in which suffering is shown to have a higher purpose.¹¹

I will first contrast two narratives of the 1940s, written from the vantage point of the Muslim minority community, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (a novel written in 1948 though published in 1957), that in some respects prefigure the catastrophic loss to come. Ali’s introspective novel is characterised by a degree of critical nostalgia for a way of life perceived to be disintegrating, while Shah Nawaz’s autobiographical and documentary style interweaves personal and political prehistory with 1947. After a brief discussion of Khadija Mastur’s novel Aangan (1952 trans. Inner Courtyard 2000), a social-realist treatment of the post-Partition refugee experience in the Progressive mode, I will counterpoint Train to Pakistan (1956) by Khushwant Singh (perhaps the most popular novel about the Partition) with The Dark Dancer (1958) by Balachandra Rajan, a less well-known novelistic attempt to allegorise the Partition experience from a returned South Indian expatriate’s perspective.

Twilight states of being

After the 1857 rebellion, the ashraf or upper-class Muslims of North India faced a situation of decline in terms of both political power and cultural hegemony. According to the ironic reflections of the Persian and Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, ‘I have none of the hallmarks of a Muslim; why is it that every humiliation the Muslim suffers pains and grieves me so much?’.¹² Ahmed Ali’s novel Twilight in Delhi was written in the late 1930s and published in 1940.¹³ The continuing after-effects of the revolt of 1857 and its bloody aftermath, after which Mughal rule in India was decisively ended and the formerly dominant Muslim aristocracy reduced in stature, are alluded to in this novel set in the second decade of the twentieth century, at the time of the imperial durbar and coronation ceremonies of King George V in 1911.¹⁴ Gyanendra Pandey suggests that Twilight in Delhi laments the fate of the city of Delhi as it comes under the sway of a corrosive, corrupting, commercialised and aggressive colonial culture.¹⁵ Indeed, the novel is a detailed description of the life, world and social practices prevalent in the 1920s amongst ashraf Muslims of old Delhi who had experienced the transition to a colonial system of governance. It also achieves a poignant evocation of a state of internal exile.¹⁶

In the novel, Ahmed Ali captures nuances of interpersonal life in a community that had evolved sophisticated forms of culture and modes of coexistence over a period of centuries. However, the advent of British rule brought about transformations that are recorded in the novel, with specific reference to the 1857 rebellion.¹⁷ The memory of 1857 pervades the present, while collective defeat is symbolised by the plight of the descendants of the king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Mir Nihal, the protagonist, a well-to-do Muslim householder, recalls this event two days before the coronation ceremonies of the English king are to begin. His wife, Begum Nihal, relates how ruthlessly Delhi had been looted by the ‘Farangis’ at the time of the revolt and how the Muslims had been turned out of the city and their possessions and properties taken away.¹⁸ ‘All this, and more had not been forgotten by Mir Nihal and his wife and the others; and they all burned with rage and impotent anger, for they could do nothing’.¹⁹

The necessity of compromises with the new system of governance and political authority becomes part of everyday experience for ashraf Muslims. Memories of heroism during the 1857 revolt are contrasted with the situation of the community in 1911, unable to make similar sacrifices.²⁰ Stray acts of political resistance, such as the throwing of a bomb at the governor – General Lord Hardinge in 1912 – provide scant consolation.²¹ Mir Nihal’s melancholic state of being disallows the possibility of acquiring critical distance or the capacity for judgment as regards the perils of such a retreat from colonial modernity.²² This becomes manifest when Mir Nihal does not permit his son Asghar to study at the Aligarh Muslim University (founded by Syed Ahmad), for he believes that though it is a Muslim institution, it is the evil-doing of the ‘Farangis’ ‘who wish to make Christians and atheists of all’.²³ Asghar makes up his mind to marry Bilqeece, who is from a Mughal family but is regarded as low born because someone in her family married a prostitute or maid-servant. He faces opposition from Mir Nihal, whose conservative values come to the fore (he claims Arab descent, from a family proud of being Saiyyeds, direct descendants of the prophet).²⁴ Mir Nihal eventually agrees to Asghar’s marriage. But Bilqeece’s later death due to neglect after child-birth and a bout of fever and her all too rapidly being replaced in Asghar’s affections by her sister Zohra indicates the decadence that has begun to overtake sections of the ashraf community. Asghar himself does not participate in the agitation against the Rowlatt Bill, and his preoccupation with amorous relationships seems to rule out any engagement with politics. Indeed, the novel refers to Muslims who prosper under the apparent stability of life under British rule.²⁵

Bilqeece becomes a symbol of vulnerabilities in the family and community. Asghar’s neglect after their child, Jehan Ara, is born brings this to the fore.²⁶ She faces the dual burden of being expected to enact the role of the ‘ornament of the home’, as well as remain the vehicle of traditional spiritual values. However, the symbolic role of ornament of the home was largely confined to upper-class women in Muslim society.²⁷ Prescriptions for this role were laid out in nineteenth century works like Nazir Ahmad’s The Bride’s Mirror, which though an Urdu novel, functioned like a conduct book for Muslim wives.²⁸ Bilqeece fails to live up to such expectations; she dies in tragic circumstances at a young age. Ali criticises such rigid assumptions regarding female conduct and double standards with respect to the conduct of men in this society through this figure, complicating the nostalgic picture presented through the protagonist.

In a significant passage, Mir Nihal mourns the death of Indians in the Great War as fodder for German guns and alludes with distaste to profiteering by gravediggers and sellers of mourning shrouds during this time of outbreaks of influenza in the city, which necessitates the building of a new cemetery for the dead. The narrator notes that the Hindus were lucky insofar as they simply went to the sacred Jamuna, cremated the dead and threw away the ashes and unburned bones in the water.²⁹ Muslims, however, were faced with the gruesome menace of shroud thieves. The narrator describes how prayers were said to mitigate the evil.

But God did not exist, perhaps; for, perchance, their feeble voices did not reach the sound proof gates of h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Negotiating the effects of historical trauma: novels of the 1940s and 1950s
• 2 Partition’s afterlife: perspectives from the 1960s and 1970s
• 3 Narrativising the ‘time of Partition’: writings since 1980
• 4 Short stories about the Partition: towards a self-reflexive mode of testimony
• 5 Reinventing testimonial fiction in the wake of the Partition
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index