Difference or Stereotype?: Exploring Selected Sindhi Partition Texts in a Comparative Mode

The Partition literature has been explored in terms of its realistic documentation and engagement with the trauma of its time of displacement and exile. Several writers and poets have explored the experience of Partition from diverse perspectives, especially from the way political decisions affect human lives. Ravikant and Tarun K Saint explore certain Partition texts and reflect upon certain recurring tropes that seem to have guided the aesthetics of Partition writing – the train and the form of madness being only two of them. The constant references to the way names of locations are changed problematise the identity of that space, as if the gesture is an attempt to dememorise. The train, again, becomes an important metaphor signifying movement and displacement and because of its “inbetweenness”, relates to the trope of madness, and thus, both become pointers towards a critique of binaries.

Ravikant and Saint also point out the way certain Partition texts critique middle class responses to Partition in terms of statistical records, and their references to cases of rapes and abductions as a pornographic exercise. However, there are also writers who treat Partition as just another dramatic element ornamenting the stories, and therefore, do not offer a complex understanding of the event, thereby remaining banal. Against this background, this paper attempts to look at a few stories by Thakur Chawla, a contemporary Indian-Sindhi writer and stories by Sa’adat Hasan Manto, a renowned Pakistani Urdu writer, in the context of their engagement with Partition as a hugely personal/political experience and individual responses to it. The attempt here is to understand if the concept of Partition, nationality and nationalism are problematised in the process of documentation of Partition, and how such a questioning affects the characters’ perception of the event.

Chawla is a self-styled writer of “very short” Sindhi stories, who has been writing since he migrated from Pakistan to settle down in Bombay/Mumbai. Many of his stories have been published in various Sindhi magazines and translated into Hindi. A brief survey of his stories should help us in putting his works in perspective. Chawla seems to adopt a very matter-of-fact tone in his stories, where he discusses Partition as an important event. The trope of suffering is put forth in a way that seems to be too idealistic or romantic, with a touch of exaggeration to it. However, this kind of representation does not seem to be a different way of exploring Partition from different perspectives. What follows is a brief discussion of three stories written by him – “The Last Train from Pakistan”, “The Pistol” and “A White Sheet.”

The story entitled “The Last Train from Pakistan” is about an old man who narrates the story of his life in Pakistan – he did not board the last train to India because he wanted to be around his beloved. The old man works with his beloved’s husband for a few years, and then, when the beloved passes away, he comes to India to his wife and friends. What Chawla shares with other writers and poets of his times is that he seldom refers to Pakistan as homeland, and it is largely Sindh that becomes the motherland. In this specific story, the old man says, “The small Sindh was left behind and we moved towards the country land” which again escapes reference to India as the “hostland”. A striking aspect of the story is the way in which the old man’s love story becomes a self-proclaimed allegory of the Partition, as a blunt, straightforward articulation of grief that does not come across as an explored/experienced event. The attachment to the beloved, which is in any case not explored, is in no way related to the attachment to the land. The situation is more like a hurried chronology of events.

“The Last Train from Pakistan”, thus, revolves around an old man, known as a reclusive person by the narrator. The old man narrates the story of his life, especially with reference to Pakistan. He begins:

We had to shut down one business. We had to sell our godowns meant to store red chillies for peanuts. We took with us whatever little luggage was necessary. Whatever remained was given away to Sindhi Muslims…. Many Hindus from our areas were becoming homeless (Chawla 2006: 13-14).

It will be noticed that several narrators in Chawla’s stories begin with a reiteration of the horrible situation during Pakistan. This reiteration does not scrutinise the event of Partition at the political level at all. It does not discuss the suffering at the level of the community, and the community merely remains a partial reference to highlight the personal problem. The old man continues:

A Muslim woman called Allah Dini used to live in my village. We played together in childhood, grew up together but we could not marry each other. My brothers forced me to marry a woman of their choice and they also got Allah Dini married to a Muslim employee working with us. Yet Allah Dini and I used to meet each other every day and consider ourselves to be each other’s support. We had never imagined that Partition could happen. We never knew what we wanted from each other; we only wanted to be close to each other. When Allah Dini came to know that I would be leaving for Hindustan along with my father, he began to break down. She cried so much that her eyes went red and were swollen. She stopped crying only when I assured her that I would not be going to Hindustan and would continue to stay there itself. And that is what I did. My family members left the village and settled down in Lucknow, but I stayed back for Allah Dini and her companionship (Chawla 2006: 14-15).

Later, the old man is grateful because he gets to eat food cooked by Allah Dini. He continues to stay in Pakistan for thirty years. Allah Dini dies of asthma. The passage translated and quoted above reveals how the old man’s notions of nation, Partition and love/beloved are not anchored or in any way related to the self. The way he renders his experience is very terse, and the terseness does not even seem to be a conscious choice of style. It does not examine the relationship between love for the nation (if any), and for Allah Dini, and merely juxtaposes the two against the backdrop of Partition. The attempt seems to look at the sacrifice made for the beloved, but the intensity of that effort is again left unexplored because there are no references to the gravity of the loss (of family). The decision seems to be one that is easily made and does not involve larger questions of existential dilemma or human suffering.

“The Pistol” begins again with repetition of facts: India got her independence in 1947. The Partition caused a lot of suffering to Sindhis who had to sell their property, land and jewellery and come to Hindustan.

Partition thus remains only a device to indicate the setting of the story even in “The Pistol”. It remains descriptive and is not made to relate to the main conflict of the story. Chawla’s figure of the beloved again enters the narration when the narrator takes the illegally bought pistol to show it to her, or rather to impress her. The story begins with the acquisition of the pistol and ends with how the narrator manages to get rid of it. The Partition remains in the story only at a descriptive level, and the characters do not engage with it to problematise it in any way.

In “A White Sheet”, the narrator receives a letter at the beginning of the story, and the sender is again, the former beloved, a figure similar to the one in “The Last Train from Pakistan” – a perfect symbol of platonic love, untouched by this larger-than-life, serious lover, the narrator. The translation of the first few lines is as follows:

Dear … I have been searching for you since many years. We used to live in the same lane in Karachi. We were of the same age and we got to know each other through my uncle’s daughter. We used to meet each other because of something or the other. I used to like Sindhi novels and you used to get them for me. I remember, you used to ride a white bicycle and … I used to return from the balcony to catch a glimpse of you. In the evening when I used to return from my uncle’s house, you used to wait for me on the road, holding another novel. I suddenly felt I had begun to love you and that is how I wrote my first love letter to you by putting it in a novel. And the exchange of our letters began. I used to feel scared sometimes but I couldn’t help it. Suddenly, the nation was partitioned and I quit my job at Hardevi school….When the mohajirs attacked your building and you got hurt by their knife, you were badly injured. The military was called and I too came rushing towards you and remained with you till we reached the civil hospital” (Chawla 2006).

The Partition is again a sudden event, disturbing the love affair of the protagonists of stories written in isolated, private contexts, where nobody seems to have any clue regarding the possibility of Partition. There are no conjectures about the position of Sindh and is not in any way related to people’s reaction as a whole. The Partition as an event jumps out of the blue, causes a few instances of discomfort (like the sacrifice of family, and so on), especially when the beloved does not get to marry her lover/narrator. In this story, again, the narrator helps in his beloved’s marriage – the beloved has no name – and the girl’s father is impressed by this “good” gesture on the part of the lover. The girl also says: “I am writing so much so that you remember something” (Chawla 2006: 69). She meets him again, suddenly at the Deolali camp after lapse of time. A few years later, she again suddenly discovers that her lover is the editor of a well-known magazine. She writes to him and he rushes to meet her. What is also amusing is the way she concludes the letter: “If it is you really, then send a reply to the address given below. If you are somebody else with the same name, then tear this letter off” (Chawla 2006: 70).

The narrator begins to imagine what she now looks like after so many years – if she wears a white sari, or whether she has stopped wearing a bindi, or if she still smiles, or if she does smile, then what her face looks like. The narrator continues with a lot of fanfare: “Yes she was the girl. After Partition, I had come very close to her. It was like playing hide-and-seek with her. We used to meet and get separated” (Chawla 2006: 90).

Considering the suddenness of the role time plays in these stories, the hide-and-seek analogy seems to be somewhat apt. The beloved calls him again to inform him about her presence in Mumbai. The narrator says:

She was in her night dress and yet she came down to meet me. She held my hands and said, ‘We used to live in the same lane in Karachi. We used to meet each other daily and play a lot of pranks. Do you remember the local goon once saw you with me and caught hold of your neck?’ (Chawla 2006)

Three years pass by again. And when the narrator meets her for the last time, he finds her children addressing him as their maternal uncle! Which is again, quite sudden. She discloses that her father wanted her to remain chaste, like “a white sheet” and she is grateful to this “brother” that she remains so.

Chawla, thus, does not question the idea of Partition. His characters do not explore the ambivalences of their positions as conditioned by Partition. The loss of the loved one remains a personal condition, with no bearing on the political situation.

Manto, on the other hand, is well-known for the way he scathingly critiques the certainty of the decisions as perceived by the political leaders. He tends to problematise madness, and thereby challenges the idea of any form of methodising/systematising functions of politics and bureaucracy. Most of his stories offer graphic details of Partition violence, in the vicious circle of action and reaction, which is again magnified to question of the idea of possession and belongingness. His story “The Dog of Tetwal” is an exploration of the idea of how the conflict over possession leads to war, and thereby, ridicules the notion of ownership. The story is set in a field of war wherein the Indian and Pakistani armies are waiting to attack each other, and also waiting to be attacked. A stray dog enters the Indian camp, is fed and claimed as Indian and named “Chapad Jhunjhun”. When the same dog happens to return/visit the Pakistani camp, it is named “Sapad Sunsun” and declared Pakistani. The dog is let free, and while it is about to enter the Indian camp, a war breaks out. The dog is killed by two bullets, one from each side, and it is declared that it died a dog’s death. The story is a moving account of the absurdity of the idea of possession which lays its hands on creatures like dogs, and violates their right to live. The dog dies in no man’s land and a dog’s death, very suggestive of the violence.

“Pandit Manto’s First Letter to Pandit Nehru” is another story, problematising the grand narratives of origin and identity. It speculates on the origins of surnames – ‘Nehru’ comes from ‘river’ and ‘Manto’ from ‘a weighing stone of one and a half ser’ – and how they refer to the possibility of a bond) which he attempts to establish between himself and Nehru). Manto and Nehru are both Kashmiris, and yet, to stretch the meanings of the surnames, both can nowhere be connected. Manto critiques the idea of how since ‘Nehru’ refers to ‘river’, Nehru dares to dam the rivers flowing into Pakistan. His complaint in the letter is stated in seemingly innocent irony and unusual metaphors of bread-slicing and the Partition: “You are toasting it from that side and we, from this. But the flames in our braziers are coming from outside” (Saint 2001: 90). This act of damming, which if not stopped by Nehru, would lead to violence – he would catch Nehru by the throat and would not let go. The letter becomes a thought-provoking insight into the sites of possession and violence.

“Toba Tek Singh” does not need introduction. It brings out the localised truths of the individual experiences, wherein people do not even understand the location of Pakistan – it is a place in India “where they make cutthroat razors” or it is a new place created by Jinnah. The confusion happens because the lunatics seem to have moved in national space without any movement in physical space. The lunatics suppose themselves to be political leaders like Jinnah and Master Tara Singh. However, they labelled as dangerous and kept in separate cells. One of the lunatics was earlier a lawyer, and his beloved has been forced to move to India, leaving him sad. At the time of exchange, he does not want to go to her in Amritsar because his practice would not flourish there. This marks an interesting difference between Chawla and Manto – the beloved in Manto is not a transcendental ideal; she is a concrete person, problematically potential of adding to financial hardships. “Toba Tek Singh” is more specifically written in the third person, but the devices stand out to be full of irony, bringing out the ridiculousness of the Partition. The good flight of imagination helps uncover the uncertainty about the way places are not rooted in concrete space and how both India and Pakistan might vanish altogether.

A discussion of Manto here is not to impose value judgments of aesthetics of writing on a lesser-known writer. The intention here is to point out how some strategies of dealing with an experience do not go beyond clichés, while some offer a consistent problematic reading. While Chawla seems to be writing Partition over and over again on similar lines, Manto offers different strategies of reading it. The aim here is to understand the complexities of dealing with specific kinds of intensity and how they could be explored from the points of nationalism and nationality. The romanticism and sentimentalism that characterises Chawla’s writings point towards the lack of conflict, and worse, a denial of it, offering no perspective on the aggressiveness and vulnerability of the situation.

Lack of conflict is not peculiar to Chawla’s stories alone. “The Fire Continues” by Hari Himthani is another account of violence during Partition. The story is about a family living in Quetta and its “sudden” encounter with violence. The story is interesting because of the way it presents memory. The narrator says that recalling the situation of those days is equivalent to watching a scene from a film, and goes on to describe the horrifying times and events. The narration is defined by several extreme expressions: “Dark clouds of terror”, “the fanatic Muslims who belonged to Quetta”, “the odour of fundamentalism choked us”, “man-eaters ran all over the city”, “cannibal dogs and wolves”, “the fruits resembled the heads cut off from the bodies”, “rivers of blood”, “the illiterate, ignorant Pathans had turned into wild animals” and several other related images that could be understood as what Ravikant and Saint call “the pornography of violence”. “Topanmal” and “6 January 1948” and many other stories by Himthani are anti-Muslim, written along the lines of the rhetoric of hatred, description of the riots, or rather the victimisation of Sindhi families in Pakistan. The stories, as anthologised in Virhango, rarely deal with major thematic concerns outlined by several literary critics on Partition. According to Ravikant and Saint, the other kind of Partition writing is a site where:

…the heroes and villains, so familiar in the dominant discourse dealing with High Politics, are reproduced [in such stories] ad nauseam. This tendency to attribute blame to your leaders or a community is often an attempt to achieve a cessation of guilt. Such escapist writing may be deemed to be the worst by-product of the collective imagination’s attempt to negotiate the Partition trauma. Even the efficacy of this writing as propaganda is open to question, though, since it often remains caught up in predictable and banal rhetoric. A banal literature can never enable a genuine coming to terms with the past. Indeed, evil itself may be reduced to something too easily assimilated and conveniently distanced. The early writing, with their outpouring of descriptions of blood and gore, bear this out (Ravikant and Saint 2001: xxv-xxvi).

To reiterate the point made earlier, many stories written on the lines of examples discussed by Sindhi writers above, do not tend to reflect more upon the complexities of Partition as a historical, political and personal event. As mentioned earlier, the main thrust of the stories remains how unjust the situation was, but there are no larger questions of agency, the political issues and the human condition and dilemma involved. However, such a statement is not a criticism of all Sindhi short stories. Stories like “The Claim” by Narain Bharti prove the contrary. However, the central themes of many stories remain loss of home, land and the beloved. Having said that, it is also necessary to analyse a few more short stories to scrutinise Sindh as a site of belongingness. What follows is a brief discussion of a few stories from Desert Blooms, an anthology of Sindhi poems and short stories translated into English. The common concern of these stories is a discussion of Sindh, and therefore, the past through some moment in the present.

“Salt of the Earth” by Krishin Khatwani, for instance, is a story about the narrator recalling an incident from the past. The narrator is a magistrate who feels the convict to be innocent and relates him to his servant in Sindh who had to face the angst of the narrator’s father for stealing one rupee, which actually the narrator had stolen. The description of the flashback is particularly interesting:

It was a village in Sindh, full of dust. All the houses were made of clay bricks. The roads were of plain dry earth. That is where I lived and was schooled in childhood…. After school we would loaf about in the streets or trespass into private mango groves and pluck unripe mangoes, sharp to the taste but enjoyable nevertheless (Krishin 1972: 102).

A few lines later, the narrator goes on:

The memory of the village calls up several images and scenes vividly before me. Incident after incident re-enacts itself before the mind’s eye, each one a story even as each case I conduct is a story. The village of hot winds during the day and cool moonlight at night now appears as a corner in paradise. The waters of life flowed past through it leisurely. All its inhabitants lived like one family (Krishin 1972: 103).

The past is also the site revisited remembering somebody. “The Baloch” by Ram Panjwani is about a Pathan, Mohammed Hassan, who is an overseer for the narrator’s family. The narration recalls his bravery and honesty. He had killed somebody in his youth and saw somebody else being sentenced to death for the crime. Later in life, Hassan faces a situation wherein he is convicted for a crime he has not committed. Other stories like “The Scarf”, too refer to a person in the past, in pre-Partitioned Sindh. “Gokul’s Ma” and “Paparwali” by Sundri Utamchandani refer to people that the characters had known previously in Sindh now living in adverse conditions. The contrast is particularly striking because the remembered-encountered people are women and now seem to be having a difficult time in terms of survival.

While the stories dealing with Partition seem to be taking a very simplistic stand over the entire event, the stories that deal with Sindh as memory and as past do seem to have a much enhanced perspective on the idea of location. The stories in the latter category seem to adopt a fine engagement with what is left behind and nicely interweave imagination with memory. These stories seem to be like snapshots in recreating Sindh without any of the postmodernist techniques (like fragmentation) that characterise writings by other diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie. However, they are commendable as acts in recreation. Rushdie says:

…I’m not gifted with total recall, and it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities. There is an obvious parallel here with archaeology. The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstructed, are exciting to discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects. (Rushdie 1991: 11-12)

The gore and violence discussed in the Partition stories could be seen as an exercise in memory and imagination. However, they do not offer an agenda of revisiting something beyond the identification of blame. But that does not authorise any kind of indictment of these stories as trivial, since “Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups” (Rushdie 1991: 15). The model of “minor” literature invoked earlier precisely seeks to state that the difference in writing in a “minor” language has to be understood not as a worthless attempt that need not be acknowledged as “good” literature, but as a tradition that attempts to write itself on its own terms.

Bibliography

Chawla, Thakur Contemporary Stories Allied Publishers: Mumbai, 2006
Khatwani, Krishin “Salt of the Earth” in Desert Blooms Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, New Delhi, 1972
Manto, Sa’adat Hasan “Pandit Manto’s First Letter to Pandit Nehru” in Translating Partition Katha: New Delhi, 2001
Manto, Sa’adat Hasan “The Dog of Tetwal” in Translating Partition Katha: New Delhi, 2001
Manto, Sa’adat Hasan “Toba Tek Singh” in Translating Partition Katha: New Delhi, 2001
Rushdie, Salman “Imaginary Homelands” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 Granta Books: London, 1991
Saint, Tarun K and Ravikant, “Introduction” in Translating Partition Katha: New Delhi, 2001