Apr 21, 2001 02:59 PM
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In 1947, Northern India was abruptly and arbitrarily carved up by its departing British rulers to create the new Muslim state of Pakistan. The result was chaos—a massive crisscrossing exodus of Hindus fleeing south and Muslims north, of homes and friendships broken forever, of atrocity avenging atrocity.
Partition is India’s legacy of shame, a wound that never heals, an event so scarring that it will never truly be expurgated until every Hindu and Muslim who lived through it is no longer alive.
It is part of our legacy, but the younger generation doesn’t remember it, the older generation isn’t reconciled to it.
For years, partition has been a semi-taboo subject here. The religious tensions that drove it are too easily revived, the memories too painful, the relationship between India and Pakistan too fragile.
Although hundreds of academic tomes and polemical treatises have explored the effects of Partition, most popular writers and artists have either shied away from the topic or cloaked it in safe, autobiographical or fictional treatment.
“Train to Pakistan,” a short but searing 1956 novel by Khushwant Singh, was the single major literary work on Partition for a full quarter-century.
Khushwant Singh, India’s well known Journalist is a critic of life, sex, scotch & scholarship. His Novel “Train to Pakistan” is rated as one of the Indian classics. I read it quite a few years back and vividly remember the high-points of the novel, I read it again recently when Pamela Rooks film based on this novel was filmed in London. This novel is undoubtedly a bold move for its time. Set in 1947, it depicts the aftermath the trauma and massacres that accompanied partition.
The story set in a small village in Punjab, centres around a notorious outlaw named Jagga who is a Sikh and is in love with a Muslim girl, Nimmo. Bad for both of them, when murderous suspicion falls upon Jagga, and the already mounting tension grows between Sikhs and Muslims.
AND, the partition occurs , Nimmo is forced to leave to Pakistan on a train full of dead Sikhs which stirs up a battlefield. Jagga lays down his life trying to rescue her and redeems himself by saving many lives. That is in brief the plot of the Novel on which the movie is based.
However, the best of the story lies in acts of honor, brotherhood shown by individual characters; both Muslims and Sikhs and Hindus who show courage in adversity, by coming to help of their old neighbors, even in testing times.
Most remarkably, Singh holds himself above the ethnic and religious fray, reflecting his equal abhorrence of the Muslim atrocities and the Sikh response, “For each Hindu or Sikh they kill, kill two Mussulmans.”
Singh, dramatically foreshadows the violence which has continued in this area to the present day. He makes us feel the sadness and the permanent loss to all the participants on all sides of this tragic conflict.
The Calcutta born film director, Pamela Rooks finds herself on a home wicket having a Hindu father and a sikh mother. Combining slick humor and powerful drama, Rooks skillfully chronicles the most climatic period in Indian history. Perhaps, this film which humanizes the horrors inflicted by India’s two major religious groups on each other ,can help Indian audiences come two terms with Partition and even rise above it.
Be it the novel or the film , Remember ,it all happened.
IT MUST NOT HAPPEN AGAIN !!!.Let there be peace in our sub-continent .
Well, about Kushwant Singh, many relate to him, sadly though, to women,jokes and sex !!, they don’t know that he wrote commentary on the Baghavad Gita ; Shriram: a biography; Japjee, Hymns of Guru Nanak etc., His more recent novel ‘Delhi’ is hailed as a landmark in Indian English.
