Tryst with our dark selves

Fiery Urdu poet Josh Malihabadi migrated to Pakistan a decade after Partition, much against his friend Jawaharlal Nehru’s counsel. Afraid that Urdu had no future in an independent India dominated by Hindi, Josh was lured by the promise of greater respect for Urdu and him in Pakistan. His homeland dream soon soured, and he spent his last years in utter frustration and disillusionment. His ideas did not exactly endear him to the ruling elite. Among Punjabi Muslims, who dominated politics and culture in that country, he was a lesser being — a mohajir, as those who migrated from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were called. Sometime during his last years, the story goes, Josh, so proud of his delicate Lakhnawi Urdu, was found struggling to learn Punjabi. When someone asked him about it, he retorted, “ Suna hai dozakh main Punjabi hi boli jaati hai (I have heard they speak only Punjabi in hell).”

Elite history often elides the history that is lived by people. The history that people tell each other, or memory reconstructs, always trumps the history that grows out of archives. The history of Partition is not merely what Nehru, Jinnah and the British did, or didn’t do. It is chiefly what we — as religious, gendered and ethnic subjects — did to one another. Our tryst with destiny, which our textbooks so proudly tell us of, was also the time when we had a tryst with our dark selves.

Partition as a historical event suppresses Partition as a personal memory. As a historical narrative, it exceptionalises the violence by assigning it to a lapse in sanity. The violence becomes an aberration or a part of the other. Thus it saves our own selves from scrutiny. I remember how a friend was shocked to read the accounts of violence against Muslims in Punjab in Gyanendra Pandey’s book on Partition. It was something he had never come across in textbooks. Violence, as far as he knew, had happened mostly in Pakistan.

While the elite history perpetuates our naïveté by muting the individual voices, the oral or subaltern history brings us face to face with our dark selves by parsing those silences. The oral history can tell us, for instance, that the victims of Partition were actually women and children and not Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.

Urvashi Butalia had exposed such silences around Partition in her now famous book The Other Side of Silence . Her latest book, Partition: The Long Shadow , a collection of essays by scholars, is an addition to a growing discipline that can be called Partition studies. It was originally conceived as a set of lectures to mark the 60th anniversary of Partition, but was later expanded to take in new works as well.

As the title suggests, the book explores the long-term consequences of Partition. It also brings to the discipline “hitherto unaddressed areas” such as Ladakh and the Northeast. It attempts to take Partition beyond a historical moment and situate it amid our diverse cultural and political processes.

The essays explore new narrative forms such as graphic stories, reveal how Partition came to the borderless community of the Banni pastoralists, and reconstruct memories and events to gain new insights. An interesting essay tells the little-known history of the communists of Kashmir and their key role in the shaping of Sheikh Abdullah’s campaign against princely rule. Prajna Paramita Parasher recovers memories of her father, the famous artist SL Parasher, as she looks at the sketches of the displaced he made when he was in charge of the refugee camp in Ambala.

Today, Partition seems too distant to the new generation. The names of Delhi localities such as Derawal Nagar, Kohat Enclave and Gujranwala Town, all evoking locations in Pakistan, hardly speak to them the way they did to their parents. How many would point out Partition as a significant event, let alone understand it? Few can even speak the language, such as Seraiki, that their elders did. Yet, Partition is as real as it was half a century ago, for the assumptions that led to it are still alive. The memory of Partition will be relevant to us as long as the politics of Partition infests our times.

(Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist)

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