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A Silent Subjectivity in the Partitioned Subject
Nationalist Narrative in Khushwant Singh‟s „Train to Pakistan‟
Hassan Bin Zubair, Abrar Hussain Qureshi, Noor Afroze Khuwaja
Abstract This paper explores the historical events of 1947 independence and partitioned the colony into two nations which have also become the part of literature. Khushwant Singh‟s Train to Pakistan (1956) is the earliest novel in English written by an Indian about partition. It covers only the disorderly days of partition. After the announcement of partition, the trains were filled with Hindu and Sikh refugees, even the roofs were full of fleeing refugees. This novel describes the problems, pain and anxiety of that particular time of partition. Sikhs and Hindus on one side and Muslims on the other start a communal war, massacring train loads of people trying to decimate entire communities. A brief overview of Khushwant Singh‟s novel and a theorization invoking Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben—of the subject of a post-colonial and post- partition state. It also puts forward a more detailed analysis of Train to Pakistan vis-à- vis its historically contingent narrative as an articulation of a silence. To expatiate on this, I rely heavily on the works of Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, and Benedict Anderson. A silent subjectivity is presented in the partitioned subject along with the national narrative.
Keywords: Violence of Partition, Ghost Trains, National Divide, Sub-Continent, Silence, Pakistan and India.
Introduction Almost all South Asian writers consciously or unconsciously touch upon the issue of the dreadful violence of 1947 when the subcontinent of India was cut into two parts Pakistan and India. The emergence of the two nations gave birth to two contending and contesting Diasporas. The partition of place, ferocity and displacement that ensued has been a topic of discussion and debate among scholars and writers ever since, leading to the production of a vast body of literature. Some scholars, writers, and theorists concentrate on the causes of violence, others concern themselves with the trauma and loss associated with the division of India, and still others focus on the reconstructive work undertaken by the dispossessed and the displaced. Consequently, over the last sixty years we find a shifting focus among authors who write of the history of Partition and related literature. While the creative writers of the Partition have written about the unprecedented violence and the
subsequent trauma of displacement and dislocation, they have also depicted the ability of the victims/survivors of the cataclysmic violence to relocate themselves by reconstructing their individual and collective lives. Khushwant Singh is one of the best social critics, political commentator, historian, novelist and known for his clear-cut secularism and outstanding wit. Sometimes regarded as a ―cultured humanist,‖ Singh was proud of his British education, his command of the English language and his knowledge of English culture. During an interview with Mahfil , Singh remarks: ―I think I‘m among the exceptions because I‘m really English, although I‘m a Sikh. I‘ve spent so many years in England‖. ( Mahfil Interview, 1968). Train to Pakistan is a novella (about 180 pages) covering about four months‘ time, from June to September 1947, and containing less than a dozen characters. Divided into four parts-- Kalyug, Dacoity, Karma and Mano Majra; the novel has a conventional structure that follows a linear sequence of time, and focuses mainly on the events before during and immediately after the Partition. Singh explores what happens in microcosmic world of Mano Majra, which seems to represent the vast subcontinent, through a skillful creation of atmosphere, employment of irony and symbolism, and gradual increase of suspense in the plot much resembling that of a traditional realist novel. Singh himself says: “The beliefs that I had cherished all my life were shattered. I had believed in the innate goodness of the common man. But the division of India had been accompanied by the most savage massacres known in the history of the country…I had believed that we Indians were peace loving and non- violent, that we were more concerned with matters of the spirit, while the rest of the world was involved in the pursuit of material things. After the experience of the autumn of 1947, I could no longer subscribe to this view. I became… an angry middle-aged man, who wanted to shout his disenchantment with the world… I decided to try my hand at writing.”(Dhawan 12-13)
Singh in Train to Pakistan represents the holocaust of 1947 graphically. When the novel opens, as news of murders and rapes and arson becomes more common, one morning, a ―ghost train‖ loaded with corpses of Hindus and Sikhs arrives from Pakistan, disturbing the lives of the villagers as well as those of the incompetent and manipulative police officers and administrators. This event along with the murder of a Hindu merchant in the village creates intense suspicion, enmity, and violence. Sikhs and Hindus on one side and Muslims on the other start a communal war, massacring train loads of people trying to decimate entire communities. The novel ends with the heroic sacrifice of a young Sikh who gives his life in an effort to save his Muslim beloved.
History and Fiction Several novelists interrogated the hard-core realities of Indian politics, Communal violence, refugee's plight along with human anguish and sufferings. Novelists like Krishan Chander, Rajender Singh Bedi, Qurratulain Hyder, Yesh Pal, Rahi Masoom
need to write the history of Partition from the victim‘s point of view and to focus on the trauma and loss suffered by millions, instead of recounting the story of the march of progress and modernity as official historiographers do. He recognizes the role of cultural politics as crucially important for the rewriting of Partition history which finds no space in the nationalist histories (Indian, Pakistani, British). The official histories, Pandey says, not only remain indifferent to the popular construction of Partition as the division of linguistic communities, villages, houses and families, but also ignore the meaning of Partition for those who lived through it, and the trauma it produced. For Pandey, textbook histories merely concern themselves with the shadow of Partition. He emphasizes the inclusion of ―little histories,‖ long neglected by the academic history so as to have a better insight into Partition. The novels analyzed in this study can furnish good source materials for Pandey‘s revisionist history. Pandey is well aware that in their representation of violence, some writers use the ―prose of otherness‖ to demonize the people from the other community but he seems to overlook the politics involved in the narration of the victims themselves who consciously or unconsciously valorize their own community, people or nation while disparaging the other. For Ranajit Guha, the colonial state was a paradox--dominance without hegemony. In its nationalist version, too, the colonial state exhibited coercion rather than persuasion, as Indian politics was structurally divided into two domains--the elite and subaltern--and the Indian bourgeoisie was unable to integrate the life and alternative hegemony. Although Guha rightly describes the dictatorial nature of British rule and historiography, this is not the entire truth. Guha overlooks the role played during the British Raj by communal violence, indoctrination, and false discourses of knowledge termed Orientalism by Edward Said. A member of the subaltern studies group of scholars like Pandey, Guha maintains that Indian historiography suffered, because like the British who did not represent the voice of the Indian masses, the Indian nationalist elites marginalized the masses and did not allow their voice to be heard. I consider that the fictional works in this project provide access to the kinds of ―little histories‖ called for by subaltern historiography. These theories undoubtedly provide a strong basis for reading many of the Partition novels productively. However, I think, another fruitful approach could be to consider R. Radhakrishnan‘s theory of the more open kinds of identities of diasporas‘ characters. His theory takes us beyond binary of colonized and colonizer and addresses a wider range of characters that come from diverse social locations. His theory that Diasporas have created rich possibilities for understanding different histories and backgrounds will help us analyze, understand, and interpret the actions and motives of characters under study (especially, Ghosh‘s characters who have many roots and many pasts), leading towards the consideration of their cosmopolitan qualities.
Research Objectives To highlight the issues related to the partition, described in the selected text. To present the real picture of the incidents happened during partition. To project and highlight the emotions and feelings of Nationalism on both sides of the borders.
Research Questions
- How Khushwant Singh presents the real historical events of 1947 partition in his novel Train to Pakistan?
- How subjectivity and nationalism is projected in Khushwant Singh‘s Train to Pakistan?
Theoretical Framework This project is structured so to reiterate the way nationalism informs subjectivity and to assert that, like Latino studies‘ border subject, the partitioned subject ought to be theorized and studied within the framework of the Lacanian barred or split subject. It offers a history of the 1947 Partition of India, a brief overview of Khushwant Singh‘s novel, and a theorization—invoking Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben—of the subject of a post-colonial and post-partition state. It also puts forward a more detailed analysis of Train to Pakistan vis-à-vis its historically contingent narrative as an articulation of a silence. To expatiate on this, I rely heavily on the works of Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, and Benedict Anderson. Lastly, it presents the culminating argument on the need to acknowledge (if only because an authentic articulation is impossible) the silence of the partitioned subject; the premise of my argument here not only utilizes the works of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, but also attempts to marry the theories of Gayatri Spivak and Antonio Viego among others.
Analysis and Discussion Khushwant Singh was born in Hadali (now in Pakistan) in 1915. After his education in Lahore, Delhi and London, he started practicing law in Lahore. His career was cut short due to the partition. He along with his family left all the belongings and properties in Lahore itself and migrated to India. Nine years after the holocaust, in 1956 he published Train to Pakistan. N. Radhakrishnan notes the view of Singh in his article ―Partition‖: ―I think it ( Train to Pakistan ) is a documentary of the partition of India, an extremely tragic event which hurt me very much. I had no animosity against either Muslims or the Pakistanis but I felt that I should do something to express that point of view.‖ (Radhakrishnan, 1984) Train to Pakistan was the first novel written on the theme of partition by an Indian in English. It received high acclaim and appreciation from every quarter. It is set in an archetypal Indian village called Mano Majra. The novel has a fine merge of characters – officials, ordinary people, a political worker, some rationalist and goons. Juggut Singh, the protagonist of the novel is a blend of a hero and a villain. The names created by Singh are suggestive and have got allegorical significance. ‗Imam‘ means religious, ‗Meet‘ means affectionate, ‗Iqbal‘ means fortune, ‗Hukum‘ means order, ‗Nooran‘ means luster and ‗Haseena‘ means beautiful. It is a common fact that most of the partition writings deals with interreligious love relationship. Singh‘s Train to Pakistan too paints a love affair between a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl. Juggut Singh was a Sikh who was profoundly in love with a Muslim girl called Nooran. It resulted in
“God is merciful. We have escaped it so far. The convoys of dead Sikhs have been coming through at Amritsar. Not one person living! The Sikhs retaliated by attacking a Muslim refugee train and sending it across the border with over a thousand corpses. They wrote on the engine, Gift to Pakistan.” (TTP 20-21)
Then the sub-inspector narrated another incident that took place in the markets of Sheikhupura and Gujranwala and how Pakistan police joined hands with the Muslim Mob in killing Hindu and Sikh refugees. Some women killed themselves and their children by jumping into wells. Many of the wells in that area were filled with corpses. The dead bodies were removed from the train and were carried on crude bamboo stretchers to a leveled ground. The bodies were thrown one above the other. A police officer came to Mano Majra and ordered the people in Khushwant Singh‘s Train to Pakistan : ―Everyone get all the wood there is in his house and all the kerosene oil he can spare‖ (TTP 125). With the wood and kerosene collected from Mano Majra, a mass cremation was done near the station. Khushwant Singh‘s Train to Pakistan describes the manner in which those corpses were burned: ―Red tongues of flame leaped into the black sky. A soft breeze began to blow towards the village. It brought the smell of burning kerosene, then the wood. And then – a faint acrid smell of searing flesh‖ (TTP 127).Even Hukum Chand, deputy Commissioner of the district was bewildered and frightened. There were more than a thousand dead bodies in the train and on its roof. Mano Majra alone did not experience this revulsion but all the places on the border line witnessed this type of nightmarish event. Alexander says: “The beliefs that Singh had cherished all his life were shattered. He had believed in innate goodness of the common man. But the division of India had been accompanied by the most savage massacres known in the history of the country.... He had believed that Indians were peace-loving and non-violent.... After the experience of the autumn of 1947, he could no longer subscribe to these views.”(Alexander, 2002)
The onset of forty to fifty Sikh refugees from Pakistan created a tensed atmosphere. Though Muslims of Mano Majra offered them food, there was a panic that they might start killing Muslims of Mano Majra in vengeance to the pains that they underwent in the hands of Muslims in Pakistan. The guiltless people of Mano Majra did not think that they had to pay a heavy penalty for the freedom that they never yearned for. Even the officials and police had their own hands in supporting such people of their own religion. Train to Pakistan documents, sometimes symbolically, the gory violence unleashed in the village of Mano Majra and its neighborhood. With almost equal numbers of Sikhs and Muslims, Mano Majra, has only about seventy families including that of the Hindu Ram Lal (TTP 2). At first, the villagers, who have been living together for centuries, and who have only simple wants and desires, are not even aware of what is
happening outside their village. They follow their religion and tradition and carry on with their daily chores. The Sikh priest waits until the Muslim prayers are over. ―Then he too gets up, draws a bucket of water from the well in the temple courtyard, pours it over himself, and intones his prayer in monotonous singsong to the sound of splashing water‖ (TTP 4). Of this multi-religious society where people show mutual respect for each other and their deities, Singh writes: “But there isone object that all Mano Majrans even Lala Ram Lal-- venerate. This is a three foot slab of sandstone that stands upright under a keekertree beside the pond. It is the local deity, thedeoto which all the villagers--Hindu, Sikh, Muslims or pseudo-Christian--repair secretly whenever they are in special need of blessing.” (TTP 2)
The novel employs the train as the central symbol of Mano Majran life and activities. Mano Majrans regulate their lives according to the schedule of the trains as they cross the bridge nearby. They wake up, go to work, return from work, and go to bed in time with the arrival or departure of trains at their station. ―By the time the night goods train comes in, Mano Majra goes to sleep with the echoes of the prayers of the mullah and the Sikh priest in the air‖ (TTP 4-5). The train thus signifies the rhythm of life, as well as the emerging splintering, displacement, and movement of a community. Intimations of tragedy come to the routine life of Mano Majrans in the form of a disruption of the train schedule. Thus, when the ―ghost train‖ laden with fifteen hundred dead bodies arrives, ―The village was stilled in a deathly silence. No one asked anyone else what the odor was. They all knew. They had known it all the time. The answer was implicit in the fact that the train had come from Pakistan‖ (TTP 84). People have heard about the bloody acts on the frontiers and sense the impending catastrophe in the village: ―People barricaded their doors and many stayed up all night talking in whispers. Everyone felt his neighbor‘s hand against him, and thought of finding friends and allies‖ (TTP 117). The bond of brotherhood that knit together the village Sikhs and Muslims for centuries gives way to distrust and hostility. The sight of the dead bodies of their Sikh and Hindu brethren, the stories of Sikh refugees in their village, who have fled Pakistan to avoid persecution by Muslims, and rapidly spreading rumors in the village about Muslim cruelty fan the fire of communal hatred in the local Sikhs, leading them to acts of violence against their former Muslim friends. Partition violence thus separates the Muslim population from the Sikhs and Hindus. ―Having decided to send the Muslims to Pakistan to maintain order in the village, the local administration makes preparations first to place them temporarily in a refugee camp nearby. With the administration offering to provide security to the Muslims‖ (TTP 134-136).They are gradually forced to leave to avoid bloodshed in the village. The split is completed by the village administration, which cuts the villagers into two halves for the evacuation of the Muslims. Singh writes: ―The head constable‘s visit had divided Mano Majra into two halves as neatly as a knife cuts through a pat of butter‖ (TTP 120). The Sikhs in the village later take steps so that
Train to Pakistan describes his great sacrifice in the following way: ―He went at it with the knife, and then with his teeth. The engine was almost on him. There was a volley of shots. The man shivered and collapsed. The rope snapped in the center as he fell. The train went over him, and went on to Pakistan‖ (263). The budmash became the unknown savior not only to his beloved Nooran and his unborn child but also hundreds of Muslims who travelled by the train. If not Juggut Singh, all would have been killed. Throughout the novel are found, incidents relating to murder, killing, mass burials and trains filled with human corpse. Singh uses the trains as well as the Sutlej as the symbols of horror and carriers of human corpse. Earlier the trains that passed through Mano Majra brought life. The people knew their timings only through the passing trains. But now, the trains that passed through Mano Majra had a ghastly look. They were loaded with human corpses. Similarly, the Sutlej was the largest river in the Punjab. Its water irrigated vast vicinity. But during the time of partition it flooded with blood and corpses of human beings and cattle. Thus, both the trains and the Sutlej became agents and messengers of death.
Conclusion Khushwant Singh‘s Train to Pakistan does not aim to give a mere picture of partition horrors but it is concerned with humanity. He wants people to realize the mistakes of partition and not to replicate such a mistake again. In the preface to Train to Pakistan , Singh writes, ―The only conclusion that we can draw from the experience of the partition in 1947 is that such things must never happen again. And the only way to prevent their recurrence is to promote closer integration of people of different races, religions and castes living in the subcontinent‖ (TTP 155). He is objective in his approach and does not blindly charge any sect. He has given a dramatic closing to the novel. The partition had varied facets in it – political, religious, economic, social, physical, psychological and emotional. The partition came in the company of joy and sorrow. The freedom of India and the birth of a new nation called Pakistan brought joy and celebration; but the economical, physical, religious, psychological and emotional agonies experienced by ten million people were the saddest occurrences in human history. There were between five hundred thousand to one million deaths during the massive population switch over. The 27th October 1947 issue of Time magazine in its cover page carried a self- hurting goddess Kali with the caption ―India: Liberty and Death‖. A freedom won through non-violence had sadistic partition killing even the victor of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi. The chief component of the partition was the geographical separation of the Indian sub-continent into the Domain of Pakistan (Pakistan) and the Union of India (India). The Bengal Province was divided into East Bengal and West Bengal and was given to Pakistan and India respectively. After the partition, all the princely states were incorporated either with Pakistan or with India. Khushwant Singh has presented the events of partition of the Indian sub-continent witnessed many enforced evacuations. The people did not desire to go to an unknown place leaving their relatives, friends and
things. At the same time, there was great peril for the Muslims to remain in India and for the Sikhs and the Hindus in Pakistan. Ten million people, who migrated to unfamiliar places, had deep bangs in their hearts. Many women were kidnapped by outsiders; and those women were molested and possessed by many men. Some were forcefully converted, married and made to bear children for strangers. There was crucifixion at every moment of their lives and that agony remained with them till they died.
References Alexander, S. (2002). ―Personal Concerns Go Public in Train to Pakistan.‖ Ed. Indira Bhatt. The Fictional World of Khushwant Singh. New Delhi: Creative Books. Chakravorty, D. K. (1987). ―The Theme of the Partition of India in Indian Novels in English.‖ The Indian Novel in English: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Ravi Nandan and R. K. Sinha Sinha. Ranchi: Ankit Publishers. Collins, L.& Dominique L. (1975). Freedom at Midnight. London: Collins. Dhawan, R.K. (2001) ―Khushwant Singh: The Man and the Writer.‖ Khushwant Singh: The Man and the Writer. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige. Foucault, M. (1991). "We" Other Victorians"". In The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault's Thought , by Michel Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin Books. “Mahfil” Interviews Khushwant Singh, July 19, 1968 .‖ Mahfil 5.1-2 (1968-1969): 27-42. Web. Aug. 27, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40874210. Parikh, Bharati A. (2002). ―Train to Pakistan: Humanity at Stake.‖ Ed. Indira Bhatt. The Fictional World of Khushwant Singh. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2002.Print. Radhakrishnan, N. (1984). ―Partition‖, Indo-Anglican Fiction. Madras: Emerald Publishers. Tank, N. D. (2013). ―The Trauma of Partition in Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh and the Foreign Aggression and Its Impact on Indian Politics in Shadow from Ladakh by Bhabani Bhattacharya.‖ <http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/2301/7/07_chapter% 202.pdf>.
Primary Sources Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Grove, 1981. Print.(All the page references in parentheses are to this edition only, ―TTP‖ is used in place of using “Train to Pakistan” within the paper.)
