KASAULI, India — Just days before the official birth of independent
India and Pakistan in August 1947, Khushwant Singh, a lawyer then
practicing in the High Court in Lahore, drove alone across what would
soon become a bloody frontier and arrived here at his family’s summer
cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas. From here, along nearly 200
miles of eerily vacant road, he would drive on to Delhi and, on its
outskirts, encounter a jeep full of armed Sikhs, who would boast of
having slain a village full of Muslims. In the face of such ghastly
swagger, Mr. Singh, also a Sikh, would realize that he would never
return home to Lahore, for what he had just heard was a chilling echo of
what he had heard on the other side of the soon-to-be border, except
that there Sikhs and Hindus were the victims. That solitary drive would
also give shape to “Train to Pakistan,” Mr. Singh’s slim, seminal 1956
novel whose opening paragraphs contain one of its most unsettling lines:
“The fact is, both sides killed.” An estimated one million people were
killed during the partition, and more than 10 million fled their homes:
Hindus and Sikhs pouring into India, Muslims heading in the other
direction, to Pakistan. The novel tells the story of an uneventful
border village that gets swept up in that violent storm. Now, in a new
edition of the novel, Roli Books in New Delhi has paired his story with
66 unflinching black-and-white photographs of the Partition era, some
never before published, by the American photojournalist Margaret
Bourke-White. This new incarnation of “Train to Pakistan,” which Roli
hopes to find international distributors for at the Frankfurt Book Fair
next month, has given the book what its author happily calls “a new
lease on life.” It has also given Mr. Singh, who at 91 has borne witness
to several rounds of carnage in his country, an occasion once again to
warn against forgetfulness.
“The wounds of partition have healed,” he likes to say as often as he
can. “The poison is still in our system.” Bourke-White, known equally
well in India and Pakistan for her portraits of Gandhi at his spinning
wheel and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, sitting
straight-backed in a chair, was among the most effective chroniclers of
those wounds. The photographs reproduced in the book are gut-wrenching,
and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer’s undaunted desire to
stare down horror. There is a street littered with corpses, an audience
of vultures looking down from a roof. There is a dead man in a hand
cart, his open eyes staring through the spokes of the wheel. There is an
old man, only skin and bones, leaning on his pile of bedding, vacantly
staring at the sky. Two years before Bourke-White shot these pictures,
she photographed the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at
Buchenwald. She was the first woman the United States Army accredited as
a war correspondent during World War II. The photographs were displayed
recently at the posh shopping center Khan Market, near Mr. Singh’s home
in Delhi; Khan Market was once known as a “resettlement” hub, where
refugee traders from Pakistan were offered storefronts. The only thing
more astonishing than the images blown up large as life was the number
of shoppers who seemed not to register them, marching on instead to
inspect the latest running shoes or stem crystal. There was at least one
passionate response. Pramod Kapoor, the publisher of Roli, recalled a
sweeper at the market telling him that he felt like tearing up the
pictures. Today there is not a single memorial to the partition in
India, Mr. Kapoor points out, let alone a museum. It is only remembered,
or forgotten, by the people who lived it.
Mr. Singh, whose father constructed much of Delhi, a city reinvented by
the flow of partition refugees, is among the last survivors of the era.
For his generation he is unusual for wanting to speak of that horror,
again and again. He reminds in words what Bourke-White’s photographs
seem to scream on the page. “People should know this thing happened,”
Mr. Singh insists. “It did happen. It can happen again.” India has been
reminded of the bloodshed of partition many times over its 59 years of
independence by further episodes of violence, and Mr. Singh has
chronicled them all. In 1984 there was the massacre of Sikhs, in Delhi
and elsewhere, after the assassination of the prime minister, Indira
Gandhi, by two Sikh bodyguards apparently avenging an attack by the
Indian Army on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine.
In 1992 a mob of Hindu radicals tore down a 400-year-old mosque in the
north Indian town of Ayodhya with its bare hands, sparking Hindu-Muslim
clashes across India. In 2002 a fire consumed 50 Hindu pilgrims on a
train in western Gujarat state — whether it was an accident or arson
remains in dispute — fueling a burst of killings and rapes against
Muslims. Even in recent months homemade bombs have been planted inside
houses of worship, both Hindu and Muslim. The police say they are
designed to spark Hindu-Muslim violence; they have not, or not yet.
“You kill my dog, I kill your cat” is how Mr. Singh described India’s
history of tit-for-tat violence. “It’s a childish and bloody game, and
it can’t go on.” Mr. Singh says he is not a believer, though he has a
weakness for religious music, and his claws are sharpest with those who
inject religion into politics: from Islamist religious radicals in
next-door Pakistan to the Hindu-nationalist leaders of the Bharatiya
Janata Party, who led India’s coalition government until they were
ousted in elections two years ago and continue to serve as the principal
opposition party. (They are not his fans either.) “That’s what bothers
me about India the most, the resurgence of fundamentalism,” he said on a
recent morning in the shade of his porch here in Kasauli. He blames the
carnage on a competition for precious resources. “Any excuse to get rid
of your neighbor who doesn’t share your faith is a good enough excuse,”
he grumbled. Perched on a hill, with a view of snow and cloud, the
house in Kasauli, a former British cantonment town, shows off Mr.
Singh’s affinities. His study contains a framed photograph of Gandhi.
Next to a large statue of the Buddha in the living room is a pile of
empty whiskey bottles.
Mr. Singh’s critics point out an important omission in his record of
outspokenness. In 1975, when Mrs. Gandhi imposed emergency rule, drawing
the country into one of the most repressive periods in its history, Mr.
Singh endorsed the move. He now says he did so because of the chaos
that preceded the emergency, and because he thought it would be
short-lived. It was not. It went on for two years and ultimately
resulted in voters’ ousting Mrs. Gandhi in the next elections. Mr. Singh
is a servant to routine, and he is anything but idle. He says he rises
by 4 every morning, reads and writes after breakfast, rests in the
afternoon and receives visitors in the evening at home in Delhi, at
exactly the same hour (7 p.m.) and for exactly one hour, during which he
drinks two pegs of whiskey. Mr. Singh goes through an average of five
crossword puzzles daily. He writes two newspaper columns a week. He is
at work on a book, a collection of his favorite verses and quotes in the
five languages he knows: English, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi and Urdu. One
of the verses he likes to quote is from an Urdu poem, and it reveals
the old man’s sardonic wit. “The truth is good, but if somebody else
dies for the truth, it is better
As I looked at him I thought of Train to Pakistan and tried to imagine
the murderous frenzy that overtook Punjab following Partition as Sikhs
and Hindus massacred Muslims and Muslims massacred Sikhs and Hindus and a
huge transfer of population took place to and from the Indian and
Pakistani parts of the Punjab as the land of the five rivers got
bloodily divided. I was looking at him and thinking how it would have
been for him to witness that genocide of Punjabis by Punjabis and how
aptly he described it in Train to Pakistan. As if he had sensed my
thoughts he said to me, “Do you know the Sikhs are now rebuilding
mosques destroyed during the violence of Partition? In one village of
the Indian Punjab the local Sikhs have rebuilt a demolished mosque,
handed it over to the Muslims and now Sikhs stand guard outside the
mosque as Muslims pray inside. Do get hold of this week’s Outlook and
read the wonderful article by Chander Suta Dogra.” I got it the same
evening. It turned out that “around 200 mosques across Punjab have been
repaired, rebuilt or built from scratch with the help of Sikhs and
Hindus in the last 10 years… In the months after Partition, some 50,000
mosques across present day Punjab, Haryana and Himachel Pardesh were
destroyed, burnt or converted into temples, gurdwaras, homes, even.
Today, Muslims just comprise 1.5 per cent of Punjab’s population, mostly
migrant labour from UP and Bihar… in addition to small pockets of
Muslims, such as those belonging to Malerkotla, who did not go to
Pakistan in 1947”. The article further informs the reader that the
Malerkotla chapter of the Jamaat-e-Islami (Hind) has also been
rebuilding mosques through the active help and co-operation of local
Hindus and Sikh landlords. I told Khushwant Singh about the large
Gurdwara in Sargodha that is now called the Ambala Muslim High School.
Sargodha was the district headquarters of the district Shahpur of which
Khushab was a tehsil. In 1947 the population of Sargodha city was 36,000
with only 6,000 Muslims and a very large Sikh presence. All Hindus and
Sikhs went to India as post-Partition violence erupted and the city was
taken over by Muslim refugees from the east Punjab city of Ambala. The
large Sikh Gurdwara located in the city centre was converted to a school
for boys. There was an exceedingly deep and sad look on his face as he
thought of the horrors he had witnessed.
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