Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Even though etched in collective consciousness. Partition to recover moments of solidarity and connectedness. Whilc
experiences remained unartlculated and buried in the Krishna Sobti's Zindaginama brings alive an era of perfect
wasteland of memories. It needed several decades for society co-habitation of different communities, Kamleshwar's Hindi
to bring to the conscious levcl what lay submerged in the novel, Laute Hue Musafrr. is an example of communities coming
minds of people for so long. The creation of Partition literature back together after the dispersal caused by the Partition.
led to a revival and. to borrow Foucault's words. a resurgence These are just a couple of examples from amongst many
of hidden suppressed histortes that deslabiHse and challenge fictional narratives which demonstrate a vision of prioritising
the official ones. The nightmarish past had to be exorcised. It communal harmony in the wake of bitter memories of the
had been a time when humanity seemed to have surrendered violence of Partition riots.
to bestiality completely. whether through victlmhood or by There are many stories in Hindi and Urdu that explore
indulgence in an act of vioLence. The archives of memory personal memory as a means of relocating identity. An intense
collected in literature speak abundantly for the subaltern process of remembering actually becomes an act of
expertence which has been overshadowed by official history, re-membering, of healing and putUng together the fragmented
Khushwant Singh's A Train to Pakistan, Bhisham Sahni"s bruised self in order to recover the dignity of human living.
Tamas. Joglnder Paul's SLeepwalkers, Intizar Husain's BasLi Evoking the past through subjective memory and then finding
and many other novels recalled the past as a rupture that ground in the new reaJity became an effective device for the
has been followed by continual reenactments of the same process of reshaping identity. In Lalithambika Anthcujanam's
phenomenon. The project of an engineered ~forgetling." story. "A Le'af in the Storm." the protagonist does not need to
whether conducted by the individual, the society or the state. recall. but in effect she has to rid herself of the memory of the
came under scrutiny with the production of powerful literary brutal rape she suffered durtng Partition; only then would
texts that reveal the different colours of Partition. it the new reality of the baby in her womb get any space In her
questioned both the censoring as well as the denial of psyche. It is the direct physical consciousness of the
movement of the baby in her body that connects her with her
) experience.
The numbness in the psyche of those affected by partition
had been like the lull after a devastating storm or an
new identity, Memories can be like shadows, haunting and
oppressing an IndiVidual till death.
earthquake. It was a sense of beWilderment. a Memory can indeed become a burden. There are many
dumbfoundedness. a stony sllence as also a sense of characters in Partition fiction who feel doomed because they
helplessness. On the other hand, the country had just cannot forget, or they want to cling to their sweet memories
acqUired the long sought after freedom. Hundreds of people of the pre-Partition past. if only to escape from the reality of
had become martyrs in the struggle for independence and the angst generated by the cruel present. In the Urdu story
there were counUess numbers of scil1ess, idealistic freedom by Joglnder Paul. ~Dariyaon Pyaas" ("Thirst of Rivers"). the
fighters. The euphoria of freedom and a deep sense of angUish old woman does not part with the bunch of keys of the haveli
over the Partltlon riots could not really be contained or that she and her family had to abandon when they migrated
experienced Simultaneously. I\n ulter confusion followed the across the border. She actually believes that she will be able
contradictory nature of the circumstances. The multiple uses lo open the locks of her son's new house with those keys.
of memory include the usc of nostalgia. of taking a sentimental She cannot forget and remains stuck to her past.
journey Into the beautiful past. as if to salvage humanity, or It took the sensitivity. keen observation and the
NARRATINQ PAR'TTTlON
CRmQUlHa PAR1TI10N NARRAnv&S
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extraordinary objectivity of a creative writer to witness. identify From subjective. individual memory to collective memory.
and articulate the plurality of the experiences of Partition. and moving on to connect with a non-linear cultural
The writers captured moments of compassion and love from mythology. Partition narratives churned up symbols that
within the scenario of the brutality of degenerate humanity. corresponded with notions and myths sanctioned by the
And If there was a representation of bizarre violence. It was society. The point of reference for the symbols used is then
portrayed In such a manner that It aroused disgust through that of the memory lying in the storehouse of culture. For
the ~aesthetics of the ugly." What is noteworthy Is that a large instance. the Urdu writer Intizar Husain used the notion of
body of good fiction was written In PunJabi. Urdu. Hindi. ~hijrat" to describe migration and exile. In a llterature that
English. Sindhi and BangIa, not with any avowed didacticism dwells so much on cultural rootedness. critical appreciation
or melodrama. but to confront the truth of the felt experience. has to develop SUitable tools and resources for the formulation
This process held up a mirror to the society. a mirror that of a relevant critical theory.
offered a closer look at both. the warts as well as the blossoms "What place do you come from?" This is a question asked
of humanity. of each other after the initial greetings even today when
An aesthetic rendering of the incidents of Partition. be it former refugees - now a very senior generation of people _
that of migration or rape or murder. and an excavation of the meet. both in India and in Pakistan. This highlights the
deeply wounded psyche of the victim as also of the agent of compelling desire to reestablish some contact. If not with
violence. continued to be of deep concern to creative writers. the place. at least wHh someone who may have come from
specialiy to those who experienced the trauma of Partition the same town or city as themselves. The strong sense of
themselves. It was the writer who had the courage to face place In Manto's story, "Toba Tek Singh" gets further
such experiences with acute alertness and explore the accentuated when it is revealed that ~Toba Tek Singh."
working of the human mind at the collective as well as the beSides being the protagonist's name. is also the name of
individual level. Even if the action was not a pre-meditated
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suffer an exodus of this nature, for people who otherwise in creative literature. lJterary criticism needs to interpret
cherished the long entrenched notion of neighbourhood as them in the light of the worldviews upheld in Ule society
family, was in itself totally disconcerting. And to make it worse, which has produced that literature. Only then can it have
it was a journey through a grotesque dance of violence. 'The credibllity.
child who reached safety is dead, It cannot speak. The living The cultivated genocide and organised violence experienced
chUd who could have spoken has been lost on the way"- tWs by the Jews in the West during the Holocaust cannot compare
perception, expressed in Gulzar's story, "Ravi Paar" speaks with the kind of spontaneous violence experienced during
for the quality of silence of those who became pernlanently tbe Partition riots. It would not be right therefore to use the
exiled and suffered a throttling of speech. Their journey into same paradigms for critiquing the literature emerging from
their selves remained forever an "Unwritten Epic" (the title of the two phenomena. The survivors of Partition clearly perceive
a story by Intizar Husain). Their disowned memories are Partition as an end of a certain kind of innocence, thc
sklllfully retrieved by the creative writer and empathetically innocence of a shared culture and the sense of togetherness
given a language. In Jamila HashmJ's story, "Banished," the that had evolved over centuries between Hindus and Muslims.
acute alienation of the woman married to the man who Qurratulain Hyder's River ofFire. a post-Partition nove], traces
abducted her is projected as the story of Sita whose exile is the history of negotiation and the process of mutual
never going to end. assimilation of cultural practices of Hindus and Muslims. It
Even the "rehabUitated" woman could not regain access offers a vision of a gradual developing of composite culture in
to the normalcy of Interpersonal relationship. Official India through a sharing of rHuals. languages as well as
rehabilitation programmes could not de-condition the essential worldviews. The unprecedented violence between
mindsets of people. of both men and women, from shedding the two communities dUring the Partition riots came as a
notions of "honour" related to "purity." "chastity" and so on. shock.
of woman. The abducted "fallen" woman could not be In fact. the suddenness of the rioting was so mJnd-boggUng
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becomes a must for an intimate understancUng of the gender
of politics. The imaginative transcription of history in such Issue In relation to Partition experience. This book is a good
literature creates meta-history or meta-narration, extracted critical and conceptual intervention in charting the
painfully from the courageous dialectic between history and complicated situation of women as victims as well as agents
llterature. The orthodoxy of official history is Impressively for action. It delineates both, how Partition cnppled the lives
demolished through narratives like Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking of hundreds of women, and also how it became an enabling
Indio., Abdullah Hussein's Udt;las Naslein or Manto's story experience for many women who launched a confident
"Mozel," as each of these stories offer a different perspective struggle thereafter to work out a new identity for themselves,
often through a great deal of enterprise. without feeling any
on Partition.
While journalistic writing in the immediate aftermath of need for male support.
Partition thrived on descriptions of savagery and indulged What is also being argued here is the need to apprise one's
I self of the entire range of perceptions and insights already
in what came to be called "pornography of violence," creative
literature sought to work out the aesthetics of presenting derived by critics, social scientists, hlstonans, psychologists
savagery with a human face. The tension of violence In and others for a multi-disciplinary, incUgenous critical theory
\ GuIzar's Urdu story "Khaul (Fear) and the extremely that could consolidate and make possible a fuller study of
I delicate handling of actual violence and Its psychosis by Partition literature.
Sa'adat Hasan Manto in such Urdu stories as "Khol Do" Looking at the ficllon written in all the languages
(Open it) and the vignette "Siyah Hashlye" (Black MarginS) mentioned earlier in this paper, one notices that an
arouse a repugnance for what happened. Here the exhaustive body of Partition narratives bas been generated
presentation of violence in itself acquires a therapeu tic in the five decades follOWing the independence of the country.
value. Urvashi Butalia's book. The Other Side oj Silence, What are the reasons for this almost obsessive focus of so
records the personal stories of many survivors of Partition many writers In the country? Is it the incomprehensibility of
violence, many in the form of confessional chronicles of the catastrophic event as it took place In the writer's own
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prepared to stake his life to get five rupees. in Gyas Ahmed LANGUAGE/CULTURE INTERPACE IN