On the Bridge of Words

 
“Memory, Ancestry, Legend in Sakoon Singh’s
“In the Land of Lovers” (Rupa; 2020)

The two sisters discuss the debut novel of Sakoon Singh. This novel, In the Land of Lovers which is about Punjab embodies a historical sweep mediated through the perspective of a young woman artist, Nanaki who works as Professor of Textile Design at Chandigarh. The beginning of the novel, a bildungsroman, highlights the details of her childhood and a difficult teenage love. An important part of the narrative is a flashback of the grandmother’s firsthand experience of Partition. Further it is her struggle against bureaucracy to get recognition for an artist languishing in anonymity. Nanaki’s empathy to these causes is an important element in the narrative, whether projected historically or towards issues of pressing concerns today.

Important events in the book are highlighted with the narrative devise of salacious dialogue between ‘mirasis’- the age-old rustic tramps who discuss issues through witty repartee. This work further gleans from Punjabi folklore, Gurbani, folk lore, traditional puzzles and songs.

Taseer Gujral: (TG) Partition is a chapter we have all lived vicariously through our elders- our grandparents, the last generation who experienced it directly is diminishing now. In a way, we are greatly aware of this imminent loss of the oral narrative and there is a desire to archive it. It is also about how fundamentally that central incident defined who they were, and the choices of their subsequent generations. Partition is also the closest we’ve felt to tangibly understanding the family’s dislocation from land, a milieu, human connections –and despite these reverberations in the personal space, there was a silence around this cataclysmic event for the longest time. But of late there is a proverbial opening of the flood gates and one sees all manner of literature/performances/efforts to depict this event: from fiction to non-fiction to archiving interviews of survivors who are now the fading generation to setting up of museums of Partition. Where exactly, on this continuum, do you situate your book?

Sakoon Singh (SS): First off- Even though it is a book that foregrounds Partition in a significant way, it is not only about Partition, as you know. To take your last question first: for me, there are reasons I choose to talk about Partition. One is the issue of one’s own identity, of which it is an important constituent. I think, the first book is tied more strongly to one’s personal experiences as an act of self-validation than perhaps the subsequent ones. So that could be one reason for foregrounding Partition as a defining experience of the grandparents and that of Nanaki’s psyche. It is a generational trauma that cannot be stowed away. It periodically leaks through the nooks and crannies, like it did for us. And transported us to a mythical lost land. So, whether you like it or not, it did become a part of one’s psychic landscape. Nanaki, to be a well-rounded character had to deal with this central experience in her own way, even though it is not first hand for her.

Secondly, Partition writing has, of late, begun to evoke a tiresome reaction. A trite reviewer had the impudence to remark recently that books by the dozen are based on Partition these days.  Sometimes that is the problem. We go by the superficial indicators. We want to know all there is to know by the look of things and come up with a tag. What is too little or too much literature on a subject? Like for instance, if you look at Europe and see what WWII and treatment of Jews and Hitler’s oppression has meant to them, historically as well as at the level of discourse. The war changed Europe like nothing else. It upended their whole existence. And they wrote about it in all manners possible, in all genres possible, and they continue to write. The Book Thief came out in as late as 2005, the film in 2013, I am sure many more continue to come as we speak. So, they are still processing the trauma at a cultural level, at the level of collective consciousness, and deriving not just catharsis but also, in the process, defining who they want to be in future. What values they want to accept and what they want to reject. There is a whole dialogic process going on with literature and society. Thus, I find this criticism unfounded and shallow. Probably it goes on to show that we look at Partition as no more than a theme, whilst it was a defining event, one that continues to have ripples. It explains the choices people made and what their families endured and what path they got onto. Having said that, Partition is one strand in the book, Nanaki traverses a whole trajectory till the 2000s.

About your prior observation, yes, one has always heard of the Partition: from the parents in an inferred way, a backdrop that constantly affected them, a reason they had to share resources with less fortunate relatives who had to endure real damages in the course, from grandparents in a more visceral way:  Remember Nanaji used to be misty-eyed at the mention of Partition: his story of walking to the railway station on the fateful day he left his ancestral village behind, - in a way it was severing a connection that was fundamental to their identity. So, when the land was lost: they transferred that fidelity to their immediate people, their relatives who were repositories of the same stories: and once that land slipped from beneath their feet, they held on to the umbilical cord of stories and accounts to steer them through difficult times. In some ways the novel tries to capture that. And I reiterate that the novel is more than a Partition narrative.

TG: I have been thinking of the ways in which individuals cope with suffering and the myriad ways literature everywhere tries to address these difficult questions. Telling these stories can be a cathartic experience. For instance, the ways in which literature delineates the tremendous suffering in the whole experience of dislocation in Partition. It fills the vacuum that History creates in its silence around these contentious events. Afterall, two million people dead and upto 20 million dislocated was no mean upheaval. However, not to underplay the brutality of it all, but also how suffering actually expands the consciousness and gives you a connect with a larger humanity. Remember, our Nanaji did not shy away from helping his own and even people outside the clan in whatever way he could. Which also raised him to the stature of a leader of sorts in the eyes of many. This spirit, this jazba, can also be found in Nanaki.  As is mentioned in the blurb, she is a ‘fiercely sensitive’ woman - which in essence is the gift of an experience like Partition and how it makes us value freedom all the more and also makes us the custodians of freedom for others. By some alchemy, it transforms the loss into something more dense and also fortifies us with courage to stand up for our rights, and also those of the others.
How much of your story is grounded in a real space?

SS: Remember, the portrait of mamma’s grandmother in our grandparents’ house? We always saw it first thing entering the sunny veranda of the house: the lady with a white dupatta and a benign smile? Perhaps she looked calm only in retrospect or only in the frozen frame of a painting. It was also our limited imagination as children that we saw her in that way. We had never met her but mamma had stories about her. She came across an interesting character and since we only got to know of her second hand, she was a bit of a legend. They talked about her courage in family conversations and the fact that she walked back alone after her husband was murdered in the mayhem. But Mamma often said that as a young girl she remembered “dadiji used to cry a lot.”

TG: Oh yes, and the sound of the hovering airplanes during the China war used to unleash a strange restlessness in her. I particularly remember this detail.

SS: Perhaps that punctured her image of benign stoicism reflected in the painting. She had encouraged her family to leave for the other side when the mayhem started while she waited for her husband to get back from an errand. She wanted to come back with him. However, he was killed in broad daylight and therefore she had to walk back to the other side on her own. Into an alien existence. Sometimes I think of the sheer psychological impact this dislocation and in-your-face violence had on people’s psyche that upended their whole existence as they knew it; and mind you, their existence was materially very limited. One could spend an entire lifetime without venturing out of one’s village, so the loss was very palpable, in a way it is difficult to understand today when we are bombarded by foreign images and exposed to myriad lifestyles, so we might live our own lives but we are not so alien to other ways. But that was not the case with that generation. The only thing that could save you was imagination. But then that could also destroy you. The character of Maanji came from that space. Now many people will be tempted to say “oh ok, so she is your great grandmother” but fiction is a mix of imagination and experience blended in a way that is hard to explain- That which one can loosely call “literary imagination.”

TG: I feel, many of us share memories of incidents narrated by their elders, like Maanji ....so they have become a part of our collective consciousness - another thread that connects many readers with the accounts of Partition or 1984, for that matter, and this kind of narration that is heavy with a sense of loss. Though it wasn’t bleak for some reason. I also love how you’ve interspersed the whole narrative with dense details like Beeji paying so much attention to a normal activity like the finesse of serving tea that raises it to a level of a ceremony or a meditation, since it induces a sense of comfort or a great deal of calm. (we love our meetings over tea in our mamma’s front lawn overlooking her vegetable garden).

SS: Ah! Life’s little joys. Give it to me any day! And that Tea is “imaginary voyage” as Douzel would have it. Particularly love that description.

TG: Yes, of course! And our best stories come out at this time and our reservations melt. I think we share more openly in those hours. Another detail I remember from the novel is the making of chikdi roti, and child Nanaki sitting on the kitchen counter, partaking it. The recipe is a family special, and we’ve spent many days devouring this on the kitchen counter while mamma made it for us. The kitchen, too, becomes a repository of stories and a zone of comfort.

How did the non-linear structure of the novel shape up in your mind?

SS: Ah yes, the chikdi roti and the train of association it unleashes! Somewhere these touches of a parent or certain repeated experiences of childhood have the power to be the balm or ground us in times of upheaval. Memories are also not always pleasant and like people do it for real events, they tend to remember that which affirms and reassures than what destroys. Sometimes nostalgia is as much of a narrative as a story but it has its uses. Especially with regard to preservation of self.  Also, all meaning and value we assign to happenings is via recollection and memory.

TG: So idle nostalgia is not as passive as it is made out to be. Haha. Quite a lens it can be!

SS: Ha, no! It is memory, imagination, focus and a real intention.

As for the structure: the mechanics of memory, recollection, is the collective font that gave the structure to the novel: of a circular flitting between past and present: that is also emanating from the practice of storytelling in intimate family spaces: which involves telling the same story multiple times, forgetting some details, purging the painful and the shameful, emphasising bravado, self glorification, exaggerating the virtues of the lost world (nostalgia has its own mechanics). The character of Maanji though is strong when the tragedy befalls but eventually suffers a psychic breakdown, her unfulfilled  need to go back to her village which she had believed in all earnestness as a world that she would somehow go back to (as a lot of elders continued to believe then).

TG: Another memory that the novel builds on is the memory of the separatist violence in the Punjab of the 1980s. The remnants of that memory are those of stark, silent evenings. That is the space of Patiala that Himmat inhabits as a troubled teenager. Also, importantly his friend Sherry, whose family’s Hindu identity in Punjab is another lens to understand the violence. I remember our neighbourhood in Mohali used to be plunged in an eerie silence after sunset. It was an unwritten rule to not venture out after evenings. It was so awful.

SS: Yes, quite.

TG: I too remember, a lot of silence that came down like a pall after the 1984 violence, as if there was great shock because of a breach of trust...we didn’t usually talk much about this, there was a loss of articulation for a long time, it seemed). How did you use personal conversations and first person narrative to bring to fore these intimate accounts?

SS: The extreme insularity of that life, the Punjab of the pre-liberalisation era was fossilised in many ways. Our world view was limited, that is what also made it more intense, I guess. I have shown the dark shadows of those evenings through Himmat’s tale, mostly through a broken teenage psyche. That coupled with his troubled personal life: the loss of mother, the father’s cruel apathy creates a mnemonic landscape, a place he revisits over several conversations with his lover Nanaki. By and by the memory of the bleak times is shared through conversations with Nanaki, as with the reader.

The trope of conversation, leading to first person narrative of the voice leads an immediacy to the narrative and that happens with other characters also: with Karmo, with Nanaki’s grandparents, who use the expanse of long winter nights to share their experience of Partition with Nanaki, and more fundamentally the stories and puzzles of the summer night time told at bedtime on the terrace of the village homes. Storytelling and sharing anecdotes do become an important preoccupation of families that tend to forge and strengthen ties over this exchange. Also, stories are where we engrain an identity. Remember what Amitav Ghosh says in this regard: “Stories are all there is to live in.”

With the increasing clout of social media and internet, we are letting in an array of voices over and above our intimate family stories and that is displacing the superlative influence the intimate spaces had on our psyche. Now one can choose or reject influences more easily. If the stamp of family becomes eroded, it has both good and bad in it. For those who want to turn away from certain unpleasant givens, it is easier because we are released from the cage, but at the same time the unconditional support one could turn to is weakened. The consciousness with which people are “making memories”, “Doing family time”, “no gadget time” is a resistance to the threat they see. However, the penetration of internet is a reality one cannot really run from, and every generation responds to the exigencies of the brave new world in its own way. There was a time television was seen as devilish, microphones and refrigerators were seen as vampires of some sort that could squeeze out your powers.

TG: And still we also see how at times, the internet and the social media platforms too impel us to dig out our memories and stories, since it is afterall a platform to primarily share – whether pictures, family recipes or social concerns. except that there is an added element of glorification here, whether subtle or in-the-face.

SS: Yes, also the kind of all encompassing influence internet has had on our lives, has altered reality in hitherto unimaginable ways. To that extent we are indeed in the midst of a revolution.

TG: Another character I find fascinating is Joginder Singh. A veteran soldier, a master embroider, who has picked the art of embroidery from his mother. So apart from the mother-son relationship, there is the bond of the teacher-taught in that relationship as it unfolds. It’s a commentary on women’s passions, leisure, community but also more importantly, our relationship with folk art. Because I feel it is important that Nanaki, a college Professor understands the folk aesthetic and so does Joginder’s unlettered mother. So, there is a sense of balance and harmony in folk arts that speaks to all levels in society. You don’t need fancy art schools to teach you to understand the value of folk art. And like they say, the proof is in the pudding, the value of folk art is in its very longevity, that has lasted century after century. Which points to the existence of a collective wisdom that recognises and endorses it. How did you shape up these connections?

SS: Nanaki rises above her art school education to recognise art when she encounters it in unlikely places. Like Twain who said famously that he did not allow his schooling to interfere with his education. She actually cues into that reservoir of collective wisdom, like Prof Pushpinder Syal joked the other day, that to show Nanaki’s connection with old world influences you knocked off an entire generation! Haha. There could be some truth to that. Authors can be self-serving that way!

TG: Talking about this, I remember a meme about a writer who threatens someone not to mess with her or she would make them a character in her book and kill them. Haha.

SS: Gosh, yes. Writers can be dangerous if they are vengeful. Haha.

TG:  And also there is a whole tradition there that critiques education when it flows from a position of power and how political a tool it becomes. Then she somehow gathers the courage to take on the system and that includes her influential Professor.

SS: Yes, that episode brings to the fore a lot of politics in academia that we are exposed to.

TG: Coming to how the interplay of memory and narrative works in the novel, let me say, that memory is the thread that holds the different stories together. Each of the characters are endowed with a voice their own. That is one of the prominent narrative devices in the book. What was the idea behind this?

SS: The use of first person recounting of back stories from those of Karmo to Himmat, gives an immediacy to memory, a feel similar to the impact of listening to somebody talk of their life/sharing their memories. The impact it has is that of entering their worlds on the bridge of words. The first person also allows the penetration of detail in the narrative that is only possible when things are being recounted first hand. Rest, importantly, the recounting of each familial experience is unique and yet connected to a larger archetype of loss, uprooting, so that every little family story of Partition is connected to a larger communal experience, in that it is cathartic because the silence that hitherto existed around the experience is now being increasingly verbalised through literature, thus providing a kind of mass identification. It is a hugely cathartic experience to be able to share these wounds. In this case, it is the grandmother telling the family story to Nanaki on many a winter night tucked in the razai, on many a ghazal-saturated evening, listening to her grandfather with glazed eyes and a drink in hand.

TG: Wanted to talk to you about your use of the Mirasi dialogue. To me, they are an extension of folk wisdom. The element of folk is a thread that runs through the whole story and provides a coherence to its aesthetic as well as its robust humour. Also, the courage to verbalise an act of injustice.

SS: The mirasis as a community use humour to comment on and create a dialogue around the most mundane and important events that touch people’s lives. Also, it is a folk voice or what is called the common voice/vox populi that I was trying to juxtapose with the narrative. Somewhere, every narrative suffers from a bias and therefore in a way, by trying to get in a voice of the people was trying to alleviate that, or maybe deflect for my own balance. Not to mention the unexpectedly ironic as well as witty touch the mirasis bring with their banter. Somewhat like the two tramps of Beckett even though his landscape is rather bleak. Ours is no less torn by violence but what distinguishes the mirasis is a distinctive joie de vivre, not black humour.

TG: Finally I want to indulge in some gossip. Haha. What actually draws Nankito Himmat? Is it a common cause of taking cudgels against a corrupt system, or his vulnerability, even as a man in a certain social set up? Something else?

SS: So many people are cross with me. And this annoyance has been unilateral. (haha) Many readers said they want to know more about Nanaki and Himmat’s romance. I guess this romance untied a mooring somewhere. Himmat is not your typical Punjabi young man, in fact he is as far from the stereotype as can get. For all the machismo we pride ourselves on, he is a bit melancholic and broody. But he has a spirit of adventure and that is what saves him. I mean it literally saves him from the gloominess of his circumstances. His ability, as a child, to delight in the blue sky and the stone spires of his school building when he has no place to go is, I think, a very powerful quality. It is his ability to become a trustworthy ally with Nanaki in her struggle. I think that is an opportunity for intimacy of the minds. Somewhere between all this, love happens. Now if you ask me to explain why, I wouldn’t know but I think I created the right circumstances and something of their spirits that speaks to each other. Beyond that, even the characters overtake the writer sometime, they go on auto pilot and I think it’s perfectly alright. It gets exciting sometimes when things get out of hand.