A N eerie calm descended on the Indian subcontinent in 1947. A million voices, of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, were silenced forever. Hatred was the pulse of the times. Never mind Mahatma Gandhi, Noakhali was a reality. Lahore and Ludhiana were torn asunder.
As trains arrived in Delhi or Lahore, all that the bystanders could do was to count the casualties. The living, devastated and brutalised, were all but dead. Blood and grief ran through the streets of Delhi and Rawalpindi.
So profound was the grief, so overwhelming the silent sorrow of the humanity on either side of the border, that the Imperial cinema hall in Delhi, which revelled in playing the best of Hollywood and Muslim social dramas until Independence, closed that chapter of its professional engagement. Surrounded by refugees from the new state of Pakistan and being a daily witness to trainloads of blood-soaked bodies in the immediate aftermath of Partition, the Imperial cinema hall decided to speak the language of the refugees. In came Hindu mythological movies and Punjabi dramas. Cinema could at least pretend to heal.
Slowly, the community recovered its voice. But it took a long time. Long enough for the illustrious poet Gulzar to turn moist-eyed when he reached his birthplace, Dina, now in Pakistan, almost 60 years after he left the place as a child. Much like former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral and the noted journalist Kuldip Nayar. They had all suffered or heard tales of untold suffering related in hushed whispers on long winter nights at homes. The sorrow of Partition and the stories of displacement and dispossession were like family secrets. Each was hidden from the public eye, yet each was similar to the other.
The noted journalist Kavita Puri stumbled upon one such story. It was a story her father had kept to himself for 70 years. Then, one day in 2016, it tumbled out. The result? Partition Voices , an evocative book that leaves you breathless with its human predicament and gives voice to stories long held prisoner to silence.
It is a different path that Kavita Puri charts. Not for her the stories of horror from the refugee camps in Delhi. Instead, she digs up the stories from England, where many Indians and Pakistanis went in search of a new home, of bread and butter. She writes: “My father broke his silence after nearly seventy years to speak about what happened to him during the partition of British India. Seventy years. A lifetime. He never returned to the place of his birth, the place he was forced to leave, the place he always hoped to see again. Ravi Dutt Puri was born in 1935 in Lahore, Punjab, in British Colonial India. When he finally told me about the things he had witnessed as a twelve-year-old boy, I understood why he had kept his silence.”
Why indeed? Simply because the loss and suffering were unimaginable. Nearly a million people were killed. Nearly 10 million were displaced. Among them were pregnant women, innocent children, the aged and the ailing. The human cost was staggering. Yet statistics failed to convey the profundity of the tragedy, the enormity of the challenge ahead.
For instance, take the story of Mohammed Hussain Sultan and his daughter Khurshid, and how their family stood divided at the time of Partition. Kavita Puri writes poignantly: “…Mohammed Hussain Sultan turned up at his now teenage daughter’s school in Delhi. He told Khurshid to leave with him immediately. He had already warned his child that if he were ever to appear and ask her to come out of class, she must do as he says. NO questions. Mohammed was a Muslim civil servant working in the Imperial Secretariat. Days earlier, he had been tipped off by some Dalits, untouchables, who he had been giving charitable assistance to, that there were to be riots in the area he lived in. ‘Leave quickly,’ they told him. He arranged to send his family to Karachi; only Khurshid would stay with him, as she was about to sit for her school exams. His wife and eldest daughter, dressed in saris to look like Hindu women, made their way to Delhi station, bound for a new country. Khurshid’s mother was carrying a newborn, and in her purse, she kept the photograph of her husband, and Khurshid with her younger brother, Yusuf, who had died years earlier, and was buried in India. She took it as a reminder of the son she was leaving behind in India’s earth.”
Or take the story of Denys and Mohammed Sarwar, a rare bond between a British officer and his batman. Sarwar was a responsible man, cheerful, gentle. And Denys, who had learnt to speak Urdu, trained, ate and lived alongside Indian cadets. Kavita Puri writes that at the time of Partition, Sarwar and Denys transcended their nationalities: “When Denys and Mohammed parted, they both knew it was for the last time. ‘I don’t remember discussing it at all, but I’m sure we all knew in our heart of hearts that we wouldn’t see each other again,’ says Denys. ‘I couldn’t put my hand on my heart saying, I remember being in tears or near to it saying goodbye, but I’m sure I was. Everything seemed to be happening so quickly at that stage. India was part of the British Empire. Then it suddenly became independent and everything sort of happened bang bang bang on top of the other. And I think there was probably very little time for emotion.’”
If there was little time for emotion for a British man, there was none for an Indian; the costs of Partition were exponentially higher.
Kavita Puri’s is not the only voice on Partition 72 years after India and Pakistan kept their trysts with destiny. There are the equally engaging, and disturbing, voices of Aftab Husain, the eminent multilingual poet and writer from Pakistan, and Sarita Jenamani, the Cuttack-born multilingual poet. They have selected, edited and contributed poems on Partition in Silence Between the Notes: An Anthology of Partition Poetry . The poems have been described by the noted author Mohammed Hanif as “songs of separation, voices of despair and the cruel music that still rings through the present subcontinent”.
Poetry to portray terror
Human misery does not make for instant poetry. It lends itself more readily to prose, short stories, even long-form journalism. But distance in time allows for the poetic metre to find its own soul. If sad songs and music be the abiding memory of Partition, then Aftab Husain and Sarita Jenamani give us abiding melancholy. They write in the introduction: “After the Second World War German cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno had famously pronounced, ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ He meant, perhaps, that any attempt to capture life in concentration camps in poetry, simply denigrates the horror faced by those who lived and [those who were] murdered by Nazis. However, many survivors, their descendants and the writers who saw that horrendous crime, have used poetry to portray the terror and dread of the Holocaust into words. Very often, as we know, poetry serves as the ideal medium to describe the emotional and personal experiences and to express ideas that perhaps could not be adequately rendered through other forms of literary expression. Poetry, in this case, acts as a powerful medium in which these writers could express the inexpressible.”
Expressing the inexpressible here are poets from both sides of the geographical divide. They include luminaries such as Akhtar ul Iman, Ahmad Riaz, Agha Shahid Ali, Adil Jussawala, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Nida Fazli, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Balraj Komal, Sahir Ludhianvi, Mohan Rana, Fahmida Riaz and Shankha Ghosh, besides the editors themselves.
Aftab Husain, incidentally, comes up with a piece of poetry that expresses the widely held belief of Indians and Pakistanis: they become one when they leave the subcontinent. In “Reunion in a Third Country”, he talks of Barcelona, where he met Balbir Singh. “We had three languages at our disposal to communicate/But, we found ourselves speaking Punjabi—our mother tongue”. Without shouting from the rooftop, Husain is able to point to language as the bond of commonality. Religion divides, language unites.
Sarita Jenamani takes recourse to melancholy in her poem “70 years later”. She writes: “August does not let us forget those maimed and mangled bodies uprooted and cleaved from life by a vertiginous fury/ August is a month of monsoon and monsoon brings a maze of hope.”
Particularly unsettling is the writing of Fazli, whose own kith and kin migrated to Pakistan even as he held steadfast to India at the time of Partition. Here he writes, somewhat laconically: “On changing house, on getting into new grooves/many things break, many things get lost.”
Leaving one more forlorn is Komal’s “The Lonely Girl”: “I’ve no one in the world today, My mamma, papa, older sis,/ My sweet, innocent little bro,/ The proud rays of my chastity,/ The small hut in whose lovely shade, I heard the tuneful lullaby,/ Whilst picking flowers, singing songs, And smiling all the while, Now all has gone, I’m left forlorn/ And nothing stays with me.”
The best work in the book, predictably, comes from the pen of Fahmida Riaz whose oft-read “You turned out just like us” has an unusual echo at this time in India. The poet, who was uprooted from her land at one time, writes: “You turned out just like us/ where had you been hiding all this while, brother?/ That stupidity, that idiocy/ The century that we whiled away/ knocked at your doors at last/ Congratulations brother!/ The ghost of religion is dancing/ You will establish Hindu Raj/ You will muddle all the things up/ You will devastate your garden/ You too will sit and think it over/ All is set I am sure/ You too will pass fatwas:/ Who is Hindu, and who not/ Life here too will be hard to live/ You too will taste the dust.”
“Silence Between the Notes” tells you one thing loud and clear: the passage of years clears the way to a poet’s expression of a tragedy most profound. Distance in time only hides emotions, it does not diminish them.
As for Kavita Puri’s book, she treads the path unknown, uncharted. Nobody has ever brought out the stories of South Asians now settled in the United Kingdom. Merely because their present is calm and composed does not mean their past was without trials and tragedy. Kudos to Kavita Puri for documenting Partition’s lasting legacy in Britain, an irony in itself. It is a unique book, one that lives with you long after the stories end. Clearly, when it comes to Partition, there are no ends, only fresh beginnings.
As for those displaced and dispossessed in 1947, there is consolation: all of us are immigrants. All that matters is how far back you go in time.
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