Book Review of ’Witnessing Partition by Tarun Saint’

(From: Seminar No. 610, June 2010)

(Book review section)

Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction by Tarun Saint. Routledge, Delhi, 2010.

Witnessing Partition is a big book, in that it deals with a very wide range of Partition literature in chapters that are arranged chronologically and attentive to trends in historical scholarship since 1947. Since there were no trials for the incredible violence that occurred, Tarun Saint sees Partition literature perform the work of testimony. For Saint, ‘the attempt to aspire to a form of proxy witnessing may be discerned as an ethical imperative’ in the best writing on the Partition (55): however, it is in characterizing writing as best or mediocre that the book raises important questions on the function of literature, especially the genre that is Partition literature.

Throughout his analyses, Saint seems torn between reading Partition novels and short stories either as documents faithfully reflecting the debates of their time, or as deploying representational techniques that allow the reader a deeper glimpse into some of the anxieties and aspirations that moulded the people of that time. His first chapter on novels of the ’40s and ’50s discusses Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Khadjia Mastur’s Aangan among others.

Ali’s classic novel on the loss of a way of life, although written in 1940, is seen as presaging events to come; Shah Nawaz’s important novel on the high politics of the 1930s and ’40s and the shift among some ashraf families from the Congress to the Muslim League is read as standing in for Pakistani nationalism and Pakistan; Singh’s novel is seen as reflecting stereotypes on the ‘simplicities of peasant existence [which] may be a byproduct of Singh’s desire to assuage collective guilt as regards the later treatment of Muslims in Punjab’ (101), while Mastur’s novel on betrayed nationalism allows for a critique of the ‘predictable triumphalism’ with which Saint believes Shah Nawaz’s novel ends.

Following Freud, Saint argues that these early novels were products of historical trauma and work as ‘raw narratives’ rather than as well thought out statements on what might have caused Partition or have been destroyed by Partition. Saint also discusses lesser and less known novels that are seen as incapable of apprehending the nature of Partition and of being ‘overly influenced by the rhetoric of the times, whether colonial reporting on riots, or the nationalistic rhetoric of blame’ (113).

The following chapter on Partition’s afterlife deals with novels from the 1960s and ’70s. Important novels discussed include Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, Abdullah Hussein’s Udas Naslein, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, Intizar Husain’s Basti, Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha Gaon and Topi Shukla. Saint argues that these writers display less of a resistance to ‘working through the memory of the founding trauma’; instead, they imaginatively reconstruct the pre-history of the Partition, and find ways to reinvent the ‘witness sensibility’ especially in the context of communal and sectarian violence. Further, Saint argues that the ‘failure of nationalist histories to address the ambivalent legacy of the Partition led writers to explore the root causes of the deteriorating communal/sectarian situation in terms of a longer time-span and durational history than earlier writers’ (119). I am troubled by the ease with which Saint can presume to speak of what might move a writer to write. Besides, the resources to write a work of fiction and a work of history are quite different, and might well, in some measure, explain the reticence among historians, nationalist or otherwise, of engaging with Partition immediately after the event.

Writers in the 1960s and ’70s are also lauded for weaving their micro-narratives back into larger narratives of collective loss. The marginalization of upper class Muslims in India and of mohajirs remaking a lost world in Pakistan is artfully explored. Sahni’s Tamas, which began to be written after riots in Bhiwandi in 1970, is discussed as an instance of primary and secondary witnessing. Abdullah Hussein’s masterly novel took five years to write and involved interviews with those who migrated from east to west Punjab. Some of the most painful descriptions in the novel stem from his research. Saint is at his best when he does not consciously strive to align the plot of each novel and short story to ‘fact’. As examples, I would note his discussion of two vignettes in Hussein’s Udas Naslein: the presence of survivor’s guilt in the fish-vendor’s culpability during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the arbitrariness of creating boundary lines as depicted in the land gifted to the patriarch Roshan Ali.

In this chapter Saint faults Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi for not dealing with traumatic violence with empathy and insight. Yet do all novelists need to reflect on violence with equal doses of empathy? This brings us back to the core meaning of literature. Is literature of value only if it is rooted in an ‘ethical imperative’ or can literature that seeks to reveal the workings of prejudiced minds also be regarded as valuable. Is it the message that qualifies fiction as good or mediocre or the quality of the writing itself? After all, Saint’s hero, Saadat Hasan Manto, manages to cast tremendous light onto Partition violence without indulging in saccharine nostalgia or stereotypical empathy.

The next chapter deals with Partition literature produced since 1980. Saint focuses on Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Krishna Baldev Vaid’s Guzara Hua Zamana. Both writers are credited for being in tune with trends in historiography that had shifted focus to ‘little’ histories of people on the margins. However, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers are criticized for their identitarian emphasis. This chapter has a productive discussion of trends in Holocaust literature and the difficulties in using memoirs and witness accounts in fictional writing. Debates among Indian historians on the perils and advantages of using oral history and interview recollections also find place here. Rather than faulting first person witness accounts per se, I think it is more important to train historians to conduct interviews and read and analyze the subsequent transcripts with care.

Saint’s chapter on short stories has the by now customary salute to Manto’s exemplary writings on Partition. Also of interest is his analysis of Mohan Rakesh’s short story, ‘Malbe ka Malik’. Rakesh’s tale about an old Muslim refugee who revisits his home in east Punjab after the Partition, reminds the historian of the wide chasm that continues to exist between the capable novelist/short story writer’s detailing of multiple experiences and the historian’s oftentimes still sterile engagement and investment in the typical Partition displacement story.

In conclusion, Saint’s many analyses of fictive testimonies show that there is no singular authentic Partition experience. Through the prism of literature we find every shibboleth shattering: activists drawn to the Muslim League seem more swayed by the logic of personal and material gain than any real empathy with the predicament of minority Muslims in a Hindu majority India, and in Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, a corrupt and manipulative politician joins the ranks of Gandhian pacifists. Finally, Saint’s close analyses also begs the question of whether and to what extent Partition literature ought to be mined like any other kind of historical source. Given the stylistic innovations deployed by writers like Krishna Baldev Vaid in Guzara Hua Zamana where the protagonist is a young boy, or Shauna Singh Baldwin, where secondary modes of witnessing come into play, I think it is necessary to underline and return to some of the more basic protocols of writing history, especially histories of violence.

Neeti Nair