descended on the village...
‘Train to Pakistan’, 1956 by Khushwant Singh

Partition, the largest peace-time migration in history, which involved an estimated 14 million people and saw another million killed, has been something of a meta-narrative for the subcontinent. Its grievous injuries, never fully forgotten, have endured in the collective memory despite the emergence of three post-Partition generations. Cynical politicians have periodically gained great dividends from it, not just in terms of the occasional episodes of riots and carnage, or indeed in the carefully constructed hostility between India and Pakistan, but in the suspicions and bad faith between Hindus and Muslims that continue to mark ordinary, everyday life, 60 years on.

Those grainy, black-and-white images of trauma, horror and pain from a lost era could have served as a ‘never-again’ lesson, rather than remaining a perennial source of animosity. Only one group of men and women, whom we somewhat erroneously term our “founding fathers”, having been witness to that turbulence at first hand, drew the right conclusions. The Constitution they drafted, in many ways, testifies to this. Several, including Gandhi and Nehru of course, spoke eloquently on the issue, but let me cite S. Radhakrishnan’s speech on the floor of the Constituent Assembly on August 14-15, 1947, before the clock struck 12: “Were we not victims, ready victims, so to say, of the separatist tendencies foisted on us? Should we not now correct our national faults of characters, our domestic despotism, our intolerance which has assumed the different forms of obscurantism... Now that India is divided, it is our duty not to indulge in words of anger. They lead us nowhere...”

Some among the crowds realised this in their own distinct ways. On August 15, 1947, the late journalist, Nikhil Chakravarty, was able to capture as a cub reporter an eloquent scene in the slums of a Calcutta still reeling from the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in its history: “The first spontaneous initiative came from the Muslim bustees and was immediately responded to by Hindu bustees. It was Calcutta’s poor, especially Muslims, who opened the floodgates... Muslim boys clambered up at Chowringhee and shouted, ‘Hindu-Muslim ek

ho’...” This found immediate echo in the Hindu bustees. “Then all of a sudden in the very storm centres of the most gruesome rioting of the past year, Muslims and Hindus ran across the frontiers and hugged each other in wild joy.”

That visionary gleam took awhile to dispel. The fifties were relatively peaceful, but by the sixties communal riots were once again very much a part of the Indian political scene. The decade began with the Jabalpur riots of 1961, triggered reportedly by a Hindu girl eloping with a Muslim boy, and ended with a major conflagration in Ahmedabad, in 1969, which bore all the familiar characteristics of the major riots that followed — including the political assertion of the RSS/Jan Sangh. The Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy Commission appointed to inquire into them made the now familiar recommendation that the Gujarat police needed to be reorganised in order to be less biased, a theme that figured hugely in the Srikrishna Commission report two decades later. Sociologist Paul Brass has argued that this “production of Hindu-Muslim communal violence”, often occurring in waves, was linked to the political construction of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ identities in post-Independence India.

But Partition did more than coalesce communal identities. Its fearsome repercussions branded the lives of the women of the subcontinent. Inherently vulnerable, they were attacked in innumerable and horrific ways — outlined graphically in work done by feminists like Ritu Menon, Kamala Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, Shahnaz Rouse, Gargi Chakravartty and many others — because they came to define the identities of the warring groups and represent community honour. As Menon and Bhasin put it, the women “became their respective countries”. This legacy carried on, well into the post-Independence years. In Pakistan, Rouze points out, ‘Muslim’ dress came to be defined as the shalwar kameez, with the sari being denounced as ‘Hindu’. Clearly, if communal attitudes today drew sustenance from memories of Partition so too did dispositions towards women.

Which brings us to the question whether the subcontinent can ever, will ever, decisively transcend Partition’s negative legacies. Some years ago I put this very question to artists and writers of the Partition generation. Their responses gave no great cause for optimism. The late Manohar Shyam Joshi, whose Buniyaad flickered brilliantly and briefly on our television screens, believed that one of great problems was that “we are a nation devoted to forgetting than remembering”. He added that this may have something to do with the Hindu timeframe based on yugantars: “We either exist in the present reality or in infinity. In our shhradhs, we remember our ancestors only up to three generations.” He believed that this was probably one reason why we don’t have a great novel of the Partition, “not even a great partisan novel — a Hindu Mahasabha version of those events in fiction.”

Theatre doyen, Habib Tanvir, who forced his immediate family to remain in India when the larger family left for Pakistan because “I was convinced that the place you belong to is your place”, believed that it is important that creative people must work towards undoing Partition’s inheritance of hate. One of his powerful plays, Jisne Lahore Nahin Dekhiya, was based on a story by Asghar Wajahat that drew from real life. When a Hindu woman who chose to live in Pakistan died after 30 years, a local maulvi maintained that her body should be cremated. The cremation caused riots. “If that play conveyed the message of the senselessness of riots and that communalism is not the preserve of any one community, I believe I have succeeded.”

Ram Kumar, the noted painter, who had even attempted a novel on the theme, Ghar Bane, Ghar Toote, argued that the baleful effects of Partition can only be exorcised through art — “yet the interregnum has yet to produce a great work of art or fiction, say of the quality of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” But Kumar also recognised that in today’s subcontinent, “a third-rate politician has more power to influence people than a first-rate artist”.

Each of these comments underlines the deficiencies of a post-Independence society that power politics shaped in its own image. Partition brought freedom in one way, but fettered minds in innumerable other ways. The question is, can we remember it in order to forget it?