Khushwant Singh’s book tells the story of Mano Majra, a border village, in the days of partition. The story traces multiple moral journeys of various characters- Iqbal, Jugga and the village itself- and how the spate of communalism puts a dent in one’s foundational values and turns people into monsters. To stand against your own to save the innocent is the bravest act, but who will do it? The keepers of the religion? The communist preacher? Or the dacoit?
Singh also draws our attention to the notions of good and evil, and how these categories, often invented by law and recast by the one who enforces these, are far from immutable. In the end, it’s your conscience and your actions that determine your place in the spectrum of goodness.
Train to Pakistan shows the subaltern experience of partition- of how a village removed from the node of power and the elite understanding of freedom witnesses and reacts to the violent rending of the social fabric. It highlights the contestation between village loyalty and communal loyalty, and how the latter tries to dominate the former.
Khushwant dedicated this book to his daughter. The concluding scene in the story, which is centered around the safety of a woman and her folks, made me wonder if it was a reimagination of the past to undo the horrors perpetrated on women. It may be a fictional reinvention of the evil men into the saviour man. Not that such men did not exist in reality, but partition, in my view, also was the violation of women by men en masse.
While we are sensitive to the human cost of Holocaust, our memory of partition and the horror it unleashed on women and children gets eclipsed by the Jinnah-Congress debate, or is shrewdly distorted by employing it as the retributive rationale to perpetrate communalism.
There’s a need to visualize and relive the trauma of partition. This will make us more sensitive to the Manipur horror and save us from the shameless whataboutery.
One can begin with Urvashi Butalia’s ‘The Other Side of Silence‘ and Suvir Kaul’s ‘The Partitions of Memory‘ in this regard.
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