‘The other’ grim reaper

It was with a lot of trepidation I leafed through subsequent short stories after reading the first few in Mohinder Singh Sarna’s gripping account of the horrors of Partition in his book Savage Harvest (Rupa).

The tales have been translated from Punjabi by his son Navtej Sarna, who acknowledges that translating the writer — known for “the richness of his language and the nuances of his idiom” — was not easy.

If Sarna’s stories have so effectively captured the pain and pathos, bitterness and brutality, as well as humanity and extraordinary courage of people on both sides of the border who put their lives on the line to save “the other” — Hindus or Muslims — it is because he himself was caught bang in the middle of the mayhem and was an eyewitness to many massacres. As he puts it, “The blows of barbarism fell more on my soul than on my body. I saw the blood spurting from the jugular vein of humanity.” It so badly shook his faith in mankind that for some time both prose and poetry meant nothing… “I did not want to do anything, write anything, be anything,” he says in the intro to the book.

But then, writing was a lifeline for this veteran who, his son tells us, won awards (including the Sahitya Academy) without moving a finger. As a “whirlwind of riots, rape, pillage and killing” swept the subcontinent, Sarna was holed up with his father and younger brother in their Rawalpindi home. Prisoners in their own home, they watched the unfurling of the Pakistan flag on government buildings. Extraordinary luck got him a seat on a charter plane and he left for India, taking only the Guru Granth Sahib with him.

Most of the stories are set against the backdrop of villages in and around Rawalpindi, the region with a Sikh and Hindu population of around 80 per cent when Partition happened. But there are also some stories told from Delhi and villages on the Indian side of the border.

One of the most powerful stories of this collection is the title story, ‘Savage Harvest’, where the village ironsmith Dina is compelled by his bloodthirsty son Bashir and his marauding gang to continuously hammer out axes to butcher all the non-Muslims in the village. An old Brahmin woman, caught in the throes of a seven-day fever, has no clue about the bloodshed and suddenly comes to their house searching for her goat. Dina talks his wife out of offering her shelter, knowing well the danger from Bashir, who has dragged away the woman’s screaming granddaughter Preeto.

The vivid descriptive skills of the author, and the powerful imagery he uses to paint a stark picture before your eyes, come to the fore in this story. As he works at the furnace, Dina’s body seemed to be on “fire with the combined heat from the sun and the furnace. The fire had dissolved into his blood and was now roasting the marrow of his bones.” As he wipes off the sweat running down his face, “thick drops fell on the fire. There was a little hiss and for a split second, a piece of coal found some relief.” But the couple can’t save the old woman; the story ends with Dina watching in horror a “thatch of white hair rippling in the wind”.

In another story, Choudhry Khuda Baksh tries to save the young Jagiro and her mother. In the midst of death, destruction and blood-curdling cries for revenge, his mind wanders. Next month would be sawan , when the cotton would start flowering, and in the following month groups of young girls would be picking it, singing while doing so. “But this year the month of sawan had been a strange one. It had frightened life into silence. And now, in bhadon , someone had gone and murdered all the songs with axes,” muses Choudhry. As Choudhry fails to save Jagiro from the clutches of the marauders, and gets axed while doing so, the immensely thirsty man sees a salwar hanging from a tree. Suddenly, many salwars dot the horizon to remind the dying man how his own children had destroyed him, “trampled on his old bones and rubbed his white beard into the dust”.

The powerful stories paint for readers a deeply disturbing picture of the mindless killing and raping that took place during the tumultuous division of the country. Sarna tells stories of similar carnage on the Indian side. Jathedar Mukand Singh has seen the slaughter of 18 members of his family during the tempest of violence that had spread through the Sikh villages of Rawalpindi division in March 1947. Sikhs were particularly targeted because they had rejected Jinnah’s outstretched hand of friendship and shattered his dream of seeing Pakistan stretch “across the Ravi” and reaching the banks of the Jumna. They had saved half of the Punjab for India and “in one of his speeches, Jinnah had blamed the Sikhs for crippling his Pakistan”.

With his hatred for Muslims and grief sinking deep “into the desert of his soul”, after crossing the border Singh forms a “jatha” of 15-20 vagabonds, waylays refugees fleeing India, promises to put them in trains and kills them… till Ramzan, a middle-aged man, displays a shocking mindset which releases Singh from this tight knot of hatred.

This collection of Partition stories, written in a racy style and brought alive by full-bodied characters and surprising twists in the plot, paints a grim portrait of how Punjab was gruesomely rocked by the division.

The celebrated Punjabi poet Mohan Singh, who regularly published young Sarna’s stories, once remarked that he was obviously influenced by Russian writers as his characters had the stamp of Russian peasants. “I have not read Russian writers,” Sarna told him, “but now I surely will.”

COMMENT NOW