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?