Creative Revisiting of Violence

However, it would be injudicious to infer that the partition novels considered in the study are mere stories of the harrowing incidents of violence. Instead, they are, in essence, discerning insights into the complex human nature. What Harish Raizada observes of Khushwant Singh is equally true of all other Indo-English novelists whose fiction has treated the holocaust of partition, Raijada writes that Khushwant Singh turned to fiction “to let out his disenchantment with the long-cherished human values in the wake of inhuman bestial horrors and insane savage killings on both sides during the partition of the sub-continent between India and Pakistan in August 1947....”1 Some of the novelists while exploring the limits of human resilience, pitchfork the journey motif in the realm of the philosophical. The emotional and physical alienation that such a journey entails, makes them confront such questions as the meaning and purpose of life. In the answer to these questions, the partition journey becomes a kind of existential and moral quest. Jugga in Train to Pakistan quest manifests itself through sacrifice leading to a moral regeneration of the society. In Azadi, the partition journey gets internalized in its characters variously. Initially, it leads to an emotional retreat of the individuals in their own inner-selves. In the wake of the breakdown of moral and social consensus, each character constructs his/her own independent inner life, thus losing contact with each other. At this moment, Nahal seems to suggest that in this wasteland, everyone is an island in him. But ultimately Kanshi Ram, Arun and to some extent Sunanda are able to overcome this alienation and in the wake of new dignity imparted to their beings by the independence of the nation, are able to achieve an affirmativeconnectedness with their new environment.

What Raizada seeks to emphasize is the understandingthat partition writers have made serious artistic endeavourto expose human character which is overlaid by all kinds ofsuperficial embellishments. If Khushwant Singh in Train toPakistan unmasks the sordidness and savagery of humanlife, ManoharMalgonkar in A Bend in the Gangesexposes petty selfishness and hypocrisy of man in crisis.So is also the true essence of other novels like ChamanNahal’s Azadi, Raj Gill’s The Rape, H. S. Gill’s TheAshesand Petals, and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on BrokenColumn. Train to Pakistan exclusively deals with the aftermath ofpartition. The story shows the religious and socialdifferences between the Sikhs and the Muslims in aneffective way. It severely criticises the attitude of the Hinduand Muslim political leaders that led to this tragic bloodbath. Nehru’s attitude towards the partition is severelyattacked. The novel displays remarkable impartialitytowards the warring communities. While reflecting on his“compulsion to write”, Khushwant Singh makes a veryrevealing observation that underlines that highly emotional,yet self-conscious constitution of his historicalconsciousness in the context of partition: I had two books in my system which I wanted to get out.One was on the partition; the other on my community. Thepartition theme was born out of a sense of guilt that I haddone nothing to save the lives of innocent people and had behaved like a coward. Writing on the Sikhs was a calculated move.2 As is apparent from the above statement, the creative revisiting of the partition space in Khushwant Singh was motivated by the cathartic need of his disturbed psyche to relive the phenomena heroically. This explains his sympathetic portrayal and an overt identification with Jagga, whose action, as various critics agree, 3symbolise the heroic redemption of human values. Through him the author writes himself in this novel. The sense of guilt, in addition to encapsulating his sense of helplessness at the loss of human innocence and his identification with the human misery, also suggests the purging of the guilt through correct remembrance. All these factors: a sense of identification with human misery that was a part of his lived experience (what he calls my system; the confession of the guilt at his cowardice); and novel or creation as a site to purge that guilt of heroically betray a highly affective nature of his hysterical understanding. When coupled with his implied need for correct remembrance, this historical consciousness makes Train to Pakistan very self conscious cathartic enterprise. The very conception of plot and characters, coupled with the general drift of their narrative tenors, in this novel, carries the impress of this consciousness. Train to Pakistan is a conscious retrieval of the ‘syncretic’ truth of Indian history. Taking Mano Majra as a case-study of India in “microcosm”4 in the aftermath of partition, the writer shows how this syncretism inherent in the rural socio-cultural space was vitiated by the forces that were essentially alien to its basic ethos. He identifies communalism as a malaise responsible for the ultimate breakdown of human values in Mano Majra, but very subtly insinuates its existence to the colonial institutions and system imperatives and not in Mano Majrian history. This way he not only denies the validity of two-nation theory, but is also able to demonstrate communalism as a “false consciousness”5 leading to an insensate but temporary blood-orgy. One of the predominant qualities of Train to Pakistan is its stark realism, its absolute fidelity to the truth of life, its trenchant exposition of one of the most moving, even tragic, events of contemporary Indian history, the partition. It is also marked by its special naturalistic mores. The individual in Khushwant Singh’s fictional world is silhouetted against this vast, panoramic background, the great human catastrophe of the partition of India and the ghastly and inhuman events which followed it. Khushwant Singh’s art is revealed in not merely probing deep into the real but in transposing the actual into symbol and image. This art of realistic portrayal cannot be described merely as an exercise in the bookkeeping of existence; in effect, it is a creative endeavour of transcending the actual,asserting the value and- dignity of the individual, andfinally, of expressing the tragic splendour of a man’ssacrifice for a woman of the ‘other’ religious community.

On the eve of the partition of the Indian subcontinent,millions of people from either side of the dividing boundarywere on the way to seeking refuge and security. Millions ofnon-Muslims from Pakistan longed for a passage to India,a land of hope and peace, whereas millions of Muslimsfrom India sought the road to Pakistan, the land of Islamicfaith and promise. The train implies the movement of vastcommunities torn from their roots and areas of traditionalgrowth to a new ‘Jerusalum.’ It indicates the harrowingprocesses of the change, the awful and ghastly experienceof human beings involved in a historical, impersonal, anddehumanized process. The train suggests the fate ofindividuals, the destinies of the two newly formed nations,consequent upon a political decision, and the miseries,sufferings and privations which issue from it. Therealization is paramount that the modern mechanistic,materialistic age has caused several destruction ofhumanistic values. The age of machines has led to aconstantly increasing degree of dehumanization. Mandivorced from nature and God, feels rootless, andalienated. However, under this all too obvious representation of thetrauma of partition and the resultant spate of violentcarnage is revealed Khushwant Singh’s disenchantmentwith the intrinsic nobility of man. The cultural heritage of awriter like Khushwant Singh had instilled into him anassuring belief in the inherent goodness man, but thereality of the situation proved matters otherwise. Thisbrought about disillusionment and crisis of values in hislife. He himself expressed his distressing inner conflictduring that period of discontentment thus:

The beliefs that I had cherished all my life were shattered. Ihad believed in the innate goodness of the common man.But the division of India had been accompanied by themost savage massacres known in the history of thecountry … I had believed that we Indians were moreconcerned with matters of the spirit, while the rest of theworld was involved in the pursuit of material things. Afterthe experience of the autumn of 1947, I could no longersubscribe to these views…6

It is this painful experience about the truth of humanexistence that is projected on to his novel as his reflectionson human nature in crisis. Raizada aptly notes this factwhen says: “Everything in his life upto this point qualifiedhim for creating just this sort of book.”7 In Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh conceives of the communal discord as a moment of deviance, brutal darkness and sin. For him, it is a manifestation of Kaliuga. The ambience that incorporates this in the narrative is an accumulation of nocturnal activities, ghostly descriptions, animal images and natural calamity. He creates a heady and a relentless mixture of symbolic overtones and naturalistic details to capture the sense of both psychological and moral dislocation inherent in the event. The “ghostly train” (TTP, 94) carrying murdered and mutilated corpses, the “red tongues of flames leaping into black sky... [and] faint acrid smell of searing flesh “of the mass cremation that stills Mano Majra “ in a deathly silence”, (TTP,100) and “aroused an uneasy feelings” (TTP,97) in them, graphically builds up the moment of anomie. But the tone underlying the sub-text of the imagery also belies the author’s sense of outrage and resignation. And this is felt predominantly at the gut level. In a short, it throws him overboard in his balanced analysis of the situation, He is so carried away by the momentum of his own creation, i.e, the atmosphere he seeks to evoke, that it becomes an angry and melodramatic obsession with him. The anger seems to spill over into the next scene where he closes in on the mood of Hukam Chand through the symbolism of “geckos darting across from the wall” trying to get [the moth] fluttering between its little crocodile jaws”(TTP, 103). Consequently, an unconscious slant tends to creep in his dramatization of the horror and its impact on the Mono Majrians. The pain of the whole humanity (the representation of which obviously is avowed motive of Train to Pakistanis, ironically, substituted by that of a particular one, This is apparent in the following authorial observation within the same episode: “No one asked anyone else what the odour was. They all knew, they had known all the time. The answer was implicit in the fact that the train had come from Pakistan.” (TTP,100) This observation obviously associates the evil with the train and the train with Pakistan. It is this train from Pakistan that triggers the later events in the novel. Yet another train, once again from Pakistan, caps the communal divide. One again, the images building up the atmosphere are seeped in anger: There was no doubt in anyone’s mind what the train contained. They were sure that the soldiers would come for oil and wood. They had no more oil to spare and the wood they had left was too damp to burn. But the soldiers did not come. Instead a bulldozer arrived from somewhere. It began dragging its jaw into the ground just outside the station on the Mano Majra side. It went along, eating up the earth, chewing it, casting it aside. It did this for several hours, until there was a rectangular trench almost fifty yards long with mounds of earth on either side. Then itpaused for a break... Then the bulldozer woke up again. Itopened its jaws and ate up the earth it had thrown outbefore and vomited it into the trench till it was level with theground. The place looked like the scar of a healed-upwound. Two soldiers were left to the guard the grave fromthe depredations of jackals and badgers. (TTP, 166-67) Though the conscious in the author seeks to counter theseincidents by a train to Pakistan (which forms the closingepisode of the novel) to show a similar breakdown of thesignificance, yet the difference between the two is obvious.Whereas the former envelops the village in “melancholy”,(TTP, 97) the latter, through the self-sacrifice of Jugga,redeems it. In the first, the silence is “deathly” and evokesprimordial fears, in the second, the silence of Jugga is amanifestation of moral conviction and faith that integrates.Unconsciously, the writer ends up putting upon a Sikh, oneof his own community, as the ultimate beholder ofgoodness. Train to Pakistan, therefore, besides its exposition of thesavagery of human life, its unreal mask of hypocrisy, is anaffirmation of the writer’s world view, his enduring faith inthe values of love, loyalty and humanity that shall outlivethe tyrants, the stalking forces of evil and wickedness. The vital human dimension of the narrative is that theauthor takes a dig at the cult of pseudo- sacrosanctreligious fanatics and efficient administrators who bearthemselves around as carriers of human values, of theinnate goodness of man, when he ironically projectsJugga, the confirmed ruffian, as the bearer of innategoodness. Whereas others sulk in timidity, and the priestscower in timidity and the intellectuals like Iqbal recoil inirrelevant ideologies, it is Jugga, “budmash number ten”(TTP,54) who makes incredible sacrifice to save innocentlives lives threatened by the planned Mano Majramassacre. The scathing irony in the novel lies in thewriter’s elevating a budmash to an esteemed moralstature. Through the creation of Jugga, Khushwant Singh’sintention seems to be to invert the myth of the innategoodness of man into a more real human myth of thesynthesis of good and bad that this life actually isKhushwant himself writes: I thought it was time one exploded this myth of the innategoodness in man. There is innate evil in man. And so I justwrote about it, and I did create one character whom Istuffed with the so called innate goodness of man, and heis the only character which is entirely fiction.8 This fact of the human dimension in the midst of violence does underscore the point that people like Jugga are indeed rare, people who would give themselves to a noble cause selflessly now inhabit the fictional world only. Thus, through the story of Jugga in the backdrop of inhuman violence, Khushwant Singh has unmasked the duplicity, sham and pharisaism of human character. Jugga could do what the Deputy Commissioner or the valiant police authorities or Iqbal with his rational ideologies could never do. Goodness and faith are not the prerogatives of those in power. Even common men of the soil like Jugga are capable of such virtues and acts, provided they have the moral courage. All else is pretence of the moral decrepits, Khushwant Singh seems to suggest. That is why he invests Jugga’s selfless sacrifice with tragic grandeur. Another human aspect treated through the tale of violence in Train to Pakistan is its frank exposition of the pretentious face of those who have enjoyed the public reputation of being good, helpful, religiously pious and humanly reliable. The portraits of such characters are presented in satiric terms. Three such representative characters include Hukam Chand, the high officer in the Govt. administration, Meet Singh, the Sikh priest, and Iqbal Singh, the rationalistic non-communal worker. These three typify hypocrisy, cowardice, and sham in human nature, and therefore they prove to be the adversary of their own race. Hukam Chand, the magistrate and Deputy Commissioner of the district, is a worldly wise man of easy morals. He has risen to great place by his sycophancy. As an officer, and as a naradmi, his immediate problem was to save Muslim lives. However, his interest in saving Muslim lives is not inspired by humanitarian consideration, but by his official compulsion lest his official position should be compromised. The duplicity in his attitude is manifest in his conversation with the sub- inspector of Police: We must maintain law and order. If possible, get the Muslims to go out peacefully…. No, Inspector Sahib, whatever our views–and God alone knows what I would have done to these Pakistanis if I were not a government servant–we must not let there be any killing or destruction of property. Let them get out, but be careful they do not take too much with them. Hindus from Pakistan were stripped of all their belongings before they were allowed to leave. (TTP, 32) This duplicity of character is later reinforced as his pretence when, broken by the spate of violence, he lapses into inactivity and just wants to put on a facade that he has acted responsibly. Meet Singh is one another character who hides his realface from the world. He is a peasant but he has taken toreligion as an escape from work. He espouses peace andlove as true human virtues. When Sikh boys try to inciteMano Majrians against Muslims, he snubs them sayingthat Muslims have been by and large harmless here. Sowhy kill them? But when it comes to taking concrete stepsto avert the imminent danger to Muslims, he recoils intimidity. When Iqbal requests him to do something to stopit, he replies: I have done all I could. My duty is to tell people what isright and what is not. If they insist on doing evil, I ask Godto forgive them. I can only pray: the rest is for the policeand the magistrates. (TTP, 193) Iqbal Singh is yet anothercharacter in the novel who lacks the courage ofconvictions. As a communist he is forthright in his criticismof social evils in the country. But in time of crisis he has noguts to put all his ideology into practice. From the very starthe is too worried about his own safety and health. He istimid and brittle. When communal tension mounts in thevillage, he wishes “they had sent someone else to ManoMajra.” (TTP, 65) Even his moral inadequacy comes underbantering ridicule of the author when he shows him funkingat the time of threatened attack on Mano Majra.

The real intention, therefore, in Train to Pakistan, is toshow a situation where the true face of humanity ispresented. Singh realistically recreates a representativesituation and then examines through characters all kinds ofmoral questions that have far reaching human implications.Therefore, the novel is not merely a mechanical chronicleof the events and the historical forces but also a subtlereminder of a way out of the desperate situation. Thesolution for this problem lies in affirming the flame of love.Jugga, in the novel, stands for this integrating force of loveand personal sacrifice as against the advocates of politicalideology which is divisive whether it is communism,nationalism or socialism. He becomes a symbol of peopleputting the community before the self as against peoplelike Hukum Chand and the political leaders who putthemselves before the community and the nation as theirsaviours. So, through Jugga the novelist is able to preachthe ideology of love above all other ideologies and in himgives the solution for all the problems- solution being loveand self-sacrifice. In this way, the novel turns out to beconcerned with just a little slice of history, the periodbefore the partition but it deals with depth, complexity and compassion, with its portrayals of all important segments of society-- Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, the police, the bureaucracy, the state administration, political leadership etc. and in personification of abstract historical forces, shown in intense, interaction of characters--the characters which are fictional but which are rendered factually by their quality of being representatives of the society of those time. Moreover, the events are not merely chronicle but also analysed in such a manner that the writer’s message of love as a cementing force and absolute solution for all the problem is effectively projected.

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