Literature Review:

Literature and post – partition India

Several books on Partition and Partition novels are available. All these books deal with
various aspects of the event as the responses of creative writers.

What Urvashi Butalia referred to as9 „silence over human dimension of partition‟, was/is
always voiced and addressed by various writers, poets, painters, lyricists: genres of art which
does not deal with „history‟ directly. The trauma left by Partition remains a major concern of
Indian literature after independence. While independence was greeted by several poets with
celebratory odes, quite a few considered it a false dawn: either because they felt, like Nazrul
Islam of Bengal, that the Swaraj did not bring anything for the hungry child or because it was a
divided India. Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati poets all expressed the same feelings. Memories of the
communal holocausts were still fresh in people‟s minds. The deepest anguish was expressed by
the poets of the Punjab and Bengal directly affected by the Partition. From the other side of the
new border Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote,10 „this is not that longed for break of day, Not that clear
down in quest of which our comrades set out.‟ The trauma of Partition also was a major theme
in fiction as in the stories of Krishna Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Amrita Pritam, Saadat
Hasan Manto. K.S.Duggal or Nanak Singh or in novels like Khushwant Singhs „Train to
Pakistan‟, Amitav Ghosh‟s „Shadow Lines‟, Salman rushdie‟s „Midnight’s children. Chaman
Nahals „Azadi‟ and K.A.Abbas‟s „ Inquilab‟ in English, Bhisham Sahni‟s „Tamas‟ and
Yashpal‟s „Jhoota sach‟ in Hindi. A monumental novel like Qurratulain Hyders „Aag ka Dariya‟
in urdu reveals with race intensity and immense sweep the experience of Partition that was „a
murderous attack on the millennial continuum of Indian history and civilization‟.

According to Meenakshi Mukherjee11, while the essential predicament of the nineteenth

century American novelist was that of isolation, the major issues facing the twentieth century
Indian novelists, untill recently years, were involvement and concern: involvement with the
changing national scene, concern for the destiny of the country. The independence movement in
India was not merely a political struggle, it affected all aspects of life of Indians in the 1920‟s
and 30‟s. No Indian writer dealing with that period could avoid reflecting this aspect of society
either directly as theme or indirectly as significant public background to a personal narrative.
 Emotionally charged national experience generally serves as a grand reservoir of literary
material which can assume a significance beyond mere historical reality. Truly, the facts of
history are to be handled and pondered over by scholars and historians, “but those in the thick of
a maelstrom like the one of the Partition, cannot remain entirely passive, especially those gifted
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with such perceptual sensitivity as could capture the tragic event through an artistic media.”
Thus the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, the American Civil War and the
subsequent reorganisation of the country have all provided novelists with rich material for
fiction.

History has always offered a context for fiction, which if appropriately used, can provide
a useful perspective. However, over dependence on history can cramp the novelist‟s vision and
this can be an even greater risk if that historical circumstance is a part of the novelist‟s life. But a
good novelist uses historical material only to the extent it is essential to his fiction. He takes from
history broad ideas and patterns and blends them into his narrative in such a way that they
become a part of his fictional world. To quote Anuradha Marwah Roy, Partition literature “...can
be roughly defined as the creative attempt to make sense of one of the worst pogroms in human
memory.In trying to grapple with the enormity of misery, writers dealing with this period,
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obsessively deployed imageries of rape, violence and destruction.” Thus, history loses its
circumstantiality and becomes a timeless presence in fiction. Some of the most well- known
examples of such writing are A Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, All quiet on the Western
Front, A Farewell to Arms and many more war novels written in the West. Dickens employs the
French Revolution in his A Tale of Two Cities to fictionalise history and make it serve an
archetypal function, not intrude into the narrative as an external agent. Salman Rushdie selects
some broad events from Indian history and fantasises them in his novel Midnight’s Children.

In his introduction to the novel Tamas by Bhisham Sahni

,Govind Nihalani states;

“ A traumatic historical event usually finds

The artistic literary response twice .Tamas
is the reflective response to the Partition
of India-one of the most tragic events
 in the recent history of the Indian
sub-continent.”14
The Partition of the Indian sub-continent was the single most traumatic event experienced
in recent years. The violence that it unleashed was unprecedented, unexpected and barbaric.
Provoked by the hooligan actions of a few, the vengeance that ordinary Hindus, Muslims and
Sikhs wrecked on each other coarsened our social sense,distorted our political judgements and
deranged our understanding of what is meant by moral rightness.

The real sorrow of the Partition was that it brought to an abrupt end a long history of
communal co-existence. No doubt the relation between the Hindus and the Muslims were not
always free from suspicion, distrust or angry rejection by one group of the habits and practices of
the other. Occasionally, the conflicts were harsher and even led to murder and arson, but such
moments of communal frenzy were rare and short- lived. People had accepted co-existence as a
way of life despite minor skirmishes or occasional outbursts of anger and violence which were
suppressed quickly and normalcy was restored in a short time. Such was the mechanism
developed by both the communities to contain tensions and disruptions, if any. And if at all there
were conflicts and disruptions, the rich variety of the life of the two communities was never
seriously threatened- the Hindus never ceased from paying homage at dargahs, the Muslims
continued to participate in Hindu festivals, traders of both the communities carried on with their
usual exchange of goods and services.

Had there indeed been a history of irreconcilable hatred between Hindus and Muslims, it
would have been reflected in the cultural and social practices of the two groups. As Alok Bhalla
puts it the pain of living together would have been extensively recorded in popular kissas or
Tamashas and Songs.15 It does not, however imply that there were no organisations with
communal bias or those which nurtured hatred towards each other or incited communal passions.
But the people who commanded respect were the ones who highlighted dependence of the
Hindus and the Muslims on each other and encouraged mutual support. In fact people like Raja
Ram Mohan Roy, Togare, Nazrul Islam, Gandhi and many more supported the theory of a
unified state with a multiplicity of religious, social or moral ideas. The daily life of the people
(both Hindus and Muslims) was so richly interwoven into a common fabric and there was so
much similarity in their customs and practices,that the Partition came as a rude shock to the
common people, leaving them in state of utter bewilderment.

It is as if Partition and its attendant carnage was so completely without any historical or
social justification that most of the writers could only watch, as the place they had called home
was reduced to rubble, and the memories of their collective rites and traditions, stories and songs,
names of trees and birds were permanently tinged with the acrid smell of the ash, smoke and
blood.

The ghastly tragedies of the Partition has been a major theme with fiction writers in Indio-
Anglian writing. Though the writers may differ in the treatment of their subject matter and in
their choice of gory incidents, they all seem to insist that the division of the Punjab was done
arbitrarily that the Hindus and Muslims could have lived in a united India as they had done for a
century and half under British rule. They assign the blame for the Partition to power- hungry
politicians who inflamed hatred among a simple people to serve their own selfish ends.

The Partition led to wide spread massacre, rape, terror, arson, orgy, rioting, hostility,
distrust, religious enmity, attacks and counter-attacks all of which is the subject matter of the
literature pertaining to the partition. However, there is also another dominant theme running
through this whole literature and that is the restoration of humanism and propagation of
communal harmony between the two communities. As can be expected, communal narrow-
mindedness and religious fanaticism are deplored by most of the writers who vividly portray the
evil consequences of religious intolerance .They show that human values are preserved by
individuals in both the warring communities even in the midst of utter chaos, and that itself is a
ray of hope for man. Having put their faith in human rationality, many of them have no words to
express their disillusionment.

Unable to explain the violence, many of the writers concentrate on painting elaborate
scenes of violence during Partition in the hope of conveying something of their sense of horror,
suggesting that fiction can recreate the event even though history may tend to distort. In doing
so, they consciously avoid taking sides and put the blame equally on both warring factions. The
literature that emerges immediately after independence is strewn with, “The stark images of
abducted women being paraded through the streets, of mutilated bodies of men and women, of
train loads of corpses, of lines of moving humanity trudging through roads strewn with bodies
and baggage left behind, the religious cries now turned into battle cries or calls for
vengeance..”16 Veena Das on the other hand, reminds us that this was a time which produced a
condition of dumbness as language itself was brutalized.17

It is surprising that no novel in English by an Indian about the Partition was written until
1956, when „Train to Pakistan‟ was first published (initially titled Mano Majra). Since then, of
course, there has been a continuous stream of writing about this event. To quote Jasodhara
Bagchi and Subhorajan Dasgupta, “From compensatory nostalgia to limitless despair, from
growing distrust (women were singled out as victims) to resolute, defiance, from diurnal trauma
in railway platform to epic struggles in refugee colonies- all these motifs have been recreated in
the poems, short-story, novels, play extract and screenplay,” 18“Indeed, so far only some „fiction‟
seems to have tried to assimilate the enormity of the experience.”19 Mushirul Hasan opines,
“These creative writers reject, implicitly or explicitly, religion (communal in common parlance)
as the prime explanatory category, invoke symbols of unity rather than disunity, and are wedded
to composite and synergetic pan-Indian values.”20

Although Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao depicted the freedom struggle
and the impact of Gandhi‟s ideas in their novels, they did not deal directly with the holocaust of
the Partition in their writings as did Khushwant Singh or K.A.Abbas or Chaman Nahal.
However, the trauma of Partition has also stirred the creative genius of such novelists as Attia
Hosain, Manohar Malgonkar, Raj Gill, Kartar Singh Duggal, V.N.Arora , Gurcharan Das.

Apart from novels, there are a large number of emotionally charged short stories on
communal incidents revealing the anger and disgust of the innocent people. There are stories
which are full of lamentation and consolation and bring out the pathos of the situation by writers
like K.A. Abbas, Saadat Hasan Manto, Kartar Singh Duggal, Khushwant Singh, Amitav Ghosh,
Salman Rushdie. All describe an unusually vicious time in which the sustaining norms of society
as it had existed in the past are absent. It is as if the Partition had not only shattered the
continuity of the Partition of the nation in which the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Muslims had
defined their individual and communal identities, but it had also ensured that it would never
again be possible for anyone to recreate a community in which moral and political choices which
are valid for all can be made. It is true, of course, that for many migrants, the question of choice
did not arise during Partition.21

Many short stories are concerned with the sorrows of migration, with uprooted people
who find that they have nowhere to go. The Partition, they know has given them to leave behind
a human world and has given them in return only a heartless substitute of a religious community.
Manto‟s story „Toba Tek Singh‟ reveals the writers own state of mind. Fearful of communal
tensions prevailing at that time, and persuaded by his wife and family, Manto left Bombay for
Lahore in January 1948 and always regretted done so.

Among the groups is an old sikh, Bishen Singh, who wants to be neither in India or
Pakistan but in the village -Toba Tek Singh- to which he belongs. And it is through his weird cry
and death that Manto speaks of the pain and grief of the millions who were forced to leave their
homes.

In another of Mantos stories, “A Tale of 1947”, a character Mumtaz speaks with great
passion:

“ Don‟t tell me a hundred thousand Hindus

and the same number of Muslims have
been massacred. The great tragedy is not
that two hundred thousand people have
been killed, but that this enormous loss of
life has been futile.”22
Mumtaz was sailing for Pakistan, a country he knew nothing about. To him religion was not an
infection which afflicted ninety- nine percent of the people. It was a faith which makes a human
being special, distinguishes him from the herd and proves his humanity. It is Manto‟s own
disillusionment that is reflected in most of his stories.

The most harrowing tale about rape is “Open It” by Manto. In it a muslim girl Sakina
who has been abducted and raped so often that when she is hospitalised and the doctor asks the
girl‟s father to open the window her hands involuntarily move to undo her trouser strings. The
father‟s exclamation of joy. “she‟s alive. My daughter is alive”,23 is very ironical.
 Stories about women being physically abused and mutilated are quite painful and
nauseating. Kartar Singh Duggal‟s “kulsum” brings out a moment of horror. In this story an old
sikh rapes a muslim girl (whom he has abducted) for failing to oblige sexually his young guest, a
school master. As the old man emerges from the hut trying his „tehmad‟ we find ourselves as
dumb founded as the girl, Kulsum. The earlier plea to the school master, „Marry me, Marry me
First.... I beg of you. I shall repay you for your kindness.‟24 repeated many times by helpless
girl, add to the pathos of the story.

Among both communities, the Hindu and Muslim, there were those who accepted
conversion to the others faith to save their lives. In Bhisham Sahni‟s “Pali”25, a lost Hindu child
is adopted by a Muslim couple and circumcised and pronounced a Muslim. His name is changed
from Pali to Altaf. Some years later, the boy is discovered by his real parents and taken back to
India where he is rebaptised as a Hindu after the mundan ceremony and again called Pali. This
situation, comic as it may seem is most poignantly moving and touching. One can easily imagine
the utter bewilderment of the boy who had to undergo the formal ceremony of conversion from
Hindu to a Muslim and vice versa only to satisfy the religious ego of the two communities. What
about the feelings of the boy that are injured brutally in this process? Whom will he accept, his
biological parents or his foster parents? Can he be insensitive to the succour provided to him by
the couple because they were Muslims? The language of love transcends all barriers. But the
greatest irony is that all the religious tend to forget the essential message underlying them.
Bhisham Sahani‟s story is an attempt to bring out this tragic irony and ruthless irrationality of
religious bigotry and its horrible consequences. It was a common practice during the Partition to
strip a man naked to determine whether he was Hindu or Muslim. In khushwant Singhs “Train to
Pakistan”, one of the characters who is circumcised muses:

“Where on earth except in India would

a man‟s life depend on whether or not
his foreskin had been removed? I would
be laughable if it were not tragic. ”26
The riots were a natural result of the Partition, and Khushwant Singh with incisive irony,
presents the genesis of one such riot in a story called simply “The Riot”. Tension ran high in the
two communities, but the real culprit of the day was the bitch, Rani. A stone thrown at her by the
Hindu shopkeeper, Ram Jawaya, catches a Muslim grocer, Ramzan. And soon, “what had once
been a busy town was a heap of charred masonry.”27 the threadbare, matter- of- fact account of
the happenings, without comment from the narrator, exposes the hideous face of riots.

Riots may be caused by a family situation but are aggravated in an atmosphere of fear
and suspicion. It is during the riots that man‟s rationality takes complete holiday and his
savagery comes out with full vigour and forced.

Many writers were so disgusted with the harrow and violence of the Partition, that they
blamed both the parties without taking any sides. The most striking example of a neutral account
is Krishan Chander‟s “Peshawar Express” where the author has presented almost a well-
balanced statistics of the butchered men, women and children from both the communities.

Women writers also show a non- partisan point of view. Attia Hosan‟s “After the Storm”
is rich in feeling and shows how children and women struggle to keep alive in the hell let loose
by their menfolk. Bibi, a child small and thin with serious anxious eyes and a smile on her face28,
is led to speak about her past. It is difficult to tell how many years of childhood, life had robbed
her of. Her story is given in snatches and with many digressions, and is a curious blend of fact
and fiction. But one is able to gather from the story that Bibi is an orphan without a soul. Her
mind refuses to fill the gap between the refugee camp and her adoption.

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Krishna Sobti‟s story “Where Is My Mother?” brings out the horrors imprinted in the
little girl‟s mind. Her persistent please and repeated requests to the Baluch- Yunua Khan, “I want
my mother, where is my mother? Bring out the agony, which no promises of any kind can
diminish. Her inconsolable and anguished cry is as poignantly moving as the cry of the lost child
in Mulk Raj Anand‟s story “The Lost Child”.

Some of the Pakistani writers have also written on the theme of the Partition and
effectively brought out the sufferings of Muslim women. Manto, Bapsi Sidhwa, Qudrat Ullah
Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmed, Aziz Ahmad, Ibne Insha and Intizar Husain are some of those who have
expressed their feelings through their stories. Shahad‟s “ Ya Khuda”30(o god), is a powerful tale
of harrowing misery to which Muslim women were subjected during Partition. The title “Ya
Khuda” rings in our minds and symbolises our utter helplessness in the face of such an inhuman
treatment given to women folk by men irrespective of what religion or country they belong to.
To quote Aijaz Ahmad, “In India as in Pakistan, the principal genre that served as a virtual
chronicle of the Partition was the short story.”31

Punjabi writers in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu come to this theme again and again,
perhaps because Punjab suffered the most on account of the Partition novels, short- stories,
poems dealing with the trauma of the division of the country are found in abundance in Punjabi
literature. Amrita Pritam‟s “Pinjar” (translated in English as “The skeleton” by khushwant
Singh) and her poem “Aj Aakhan Waris Shah Noo” “ I invoke warris shah today”) have moved
the people on both sides of the border so deeply that even today when they read the poem they
weep for what they themselves had done to each other, Singh of the sense of shame and disgrace,
„we feel even now.

Besides these stories, there are a large number of stories written by men and women who
were witnesses to this age of genocide. Kamleshwar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Mohan Rakesh,
Yashpal, Kulwant Singh Virk, Maheep Singh, Ismat Chughtai, Vishnu Prabhakar and many
others. Most of the stories are ironic in their tone and realistic in their depiction. They bring out
the inhuman aspect of the Partition, but uphold human goodness.

K.A. Abbas‟s Inquilab32 (1955) is a detailed picture of the Indian political scene over a
period of almost two decades upto the 1930‟s.The novels offers glimpses of Bhagat Singh,
Tilak, the Ali brothers, Gandhiji, Nehru etc. and also of the political developments taking place.
But perhaps because of its objective stance, the novel reads like a newspaper report rather than a
work of fiction.

Attia Hosain is the only women novelist who evokes Partition in a nostalgic mood in her
novel “Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961)”33. Manohar Malgonkar‟s “A Bend in the Ganges”
(1984), 34 is an epic presentation of India‟s struggle for freedom from the late 30‟s upto the down
of Independence in August 1947, thus encompassing the history of a saga depicting the
movement for Independence, the world war and the Partition of India.

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Raj Gill‟s novel, “The Rape”(1974) dramatizes the dehumanization of life and the
collapse of all values. Dalipjit, the protagonist in the novel, is dazed to discover; on his return
home after Partition, that his Muslim girlfriend, Leila. Whom he had rescued and who has been
given shelter by him, has been raped by his own father.
 Chaman Nahal‟s “Azadi” (1975)36 (freedom), written on the epic scale offers a most
comprehensive account of Partition. The actual event and its aftermath . The author recreates in
vivid detail the consequences of the partitioning for a Hindu family and its close associates as
they journey from Sialkot to Delhi. His story represents the story of a whole nation,of millions
who were forced to leave their homes and to whom „azadi‟ brings only unhold misery and an
uncertain future.

H.S. Gill‟s “Ashes and Petals” (1975)37, records another gruesome aspect of Partition-
the killing of one‟s own women folk, in order to save their honour. The novel opens with a
trainload of Hindus and Sikhs on their way to India. When the train is attacked by Muslim
hooligans, Risaldar Santa Singh shoots his fourteen year old grand- daughter, Baljeeto. Her
seven year old brother Ajit, sits through the act as a silent witness.

In Kartar Singh Duggal‟s novels “Twice born Twice Dead‟‟ (1979)38, we are given a
panoramic picture of human suffering. Anita Desai‟s “Clear Light of Day” (1980)39, is another
novel which refers to India‟s independence struggle and the Partition that followed it. However,
this appears only as the background of the events in the life of the Das family.

According to Alamgir Hashmi40, the novel “Clear Light of Day” is also the story of
colonial India‟s growth and maturation into the separate statehoods of India and Pakistan. Anita
Desai has woven together the public and the private, and has given a balanced treatment of the
historical elements in the book to the study of the characters.

“Tamas” (1974)41(darkness), by Bhisham Sahani also portrays the tragic period of the
Partition of the country. He attempts to depict the communal frenzy that gripped the west Punjab
in Pre- Partition days. The novel “Ice- Candy- Man”(1988)42by Bapsi Sidhwa is also a poignant
tale of Partition. The novel is set in Lahore in the 1940‟s in the period when Independence and
Partition were brewing and it culminates in the ultimate horrors of the holocaust, seen through
the eyes of a young Parsi child, Lenny.

“ A Fine Family” (1990)43 by Gurcharan Das is another Partition novel that traces the
fortunes and misfortunes of Lala Dewan chand‟s family from the year 1942 to the Post-
Independence era, right through till the 1970‟s it provides a means of understanding the past in
order to understand the present.
 Salman Rushdies novel “Midnight‟s Children”(1982)44 covers the period of India‟s
Independence to the lifting of the Emergency. The novel begins with the narrator- protagonist
Saleem Sinai, who is the embodiment of a supreme movement of the history. Another similar
character is Mian Abdullah. “ the Humming bird”, an active opponent of Partition whose joyful
ecstasy in work is symbolised by his constant humming and who falls a victim to the knives of
Muslim fanatics.

The „Shadow Lines‟ questions prevailing precepts and ethics, which man inherits blindly.
The value of political zeal and social freedom is no longer stable, permanent and immutable as
Tha‟mma and I la had believed. The apparent stability which is offered by such idea is illusory.
Concepts which have always appeared to be well- defined are seen as shallow, capable of
vanishing at a closer look, leaving man alone and defenseless. Tha‟mma is totally bewildered
and aghast to know that violence and bloodshed had not resulted in a physical boundary between
two countries.

The holocaust of the partition has been a recurring theme in the writing of many other
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writers such as B. Rajan‟s „The Dark Dancer‟, Collins and Lapierre‟s „Freedom at Midnight‟
and these writers have highlighted their own points of view in their own subtle way. From the
survey it becomes clear that the horror and trauma of Partition was undergone by many Indian
novelists in English and its dramatic potential was also captured by many regional novelists like
Yashpal in „Jhoota- Sacha‟ (Hindi) or Qurratullain Haider in „Aag Ka Darya‟ (Urdu). But the
first to use Partition as the central theme was Khushwant Singh in his first novel, „Train to
Pakistan‟. This is by far the best known and the most powerful novel on Partition. Symbolism,
mordant satire and ruthless realism are the hallmarks of this novel which depicts the holocaust
through a simple plot building up to a spine- chilling climax. „Train to Pakistan‟ is not only
the first novel in English dealing with the Partition but also perhaps the most realistically
presented. In the midst of all the horror he presents, however, Khushwant Singh also sees a ray
of hope for mankind.

A Suvir Kaul says, „Partition issues‟ need to be explored because they define not only
our past but in crucial ways, our collective future. And these „Partition issues‟ should not only be
explored in archives. V.P.Menons , Ayesha Jalals or in any other „official‟ and „historical‟
documentation of Partition, but also in the literary corpus of Partition authored by literary figures
or litterateurs. Therefore, the researcher attempts to make a study of four literary figures-
Khushwant Singh, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie and Chaman Nahal- and their writing on
Partition of India (strictly on partition and not their other literary writing)