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The Partition debate - II
By Mushirul Hasan
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As a metaphor, an event and memory, Partition has to be interpreted and explained afresh to remove widely-held misconceptions.
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IN THE histories of imperial rule, the retreat of the British administration was an act of abject surrender to the forces of violence. ``We have lost,'' wrote the British Viceroy, Wavell, ``nearly all power to control events; we are simply running on the momentum of our previous prestige.'' When the dead count was taken, the people paid the price - and that too a heavy one - for the breakdown of the law and order machinery. For the most part, the small boundary force in Punjab stayed in the barracks, while trainloads of refugees were being butchered.
No one knows how many were killed during the Partition violence. No one knows how many were displaced and dispossessed. What we know is that, between 1946 and 1951, nearly nine million Hindus and Sikhs came to India, and about six million Muslims went to Pakistan. Of the said nine million, five million came from what became West Pakistan, and four million from East Pakistan. In only three months, between August and October 1947, Punjab was engulfed in a civil war. Estimates of deaths vary between 200,000 and three million. An anguished Amrita Pritam appealed to Waris Shah ``to speak from the grave'' and turn the page of the book of love.
Public men, social scientists, especially historians, writers, poets, and journalists shared this concern, in equal measure, and represented violence, pain and struggle in such a way as to reflect the present-day language of historical discourse. Implicit in their concern is a sense of moral outrage, an unmistakable revulsion towards violence, the fear of its recurrence, and, at the same time, the hope of its being prevented in free India and Pakistan.
Another noteworthy point is that violence is not celebrated (as was done by the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina) but decried in the narratives I have accessed. Violence is, in fact, not only condemned but is so often attributed - often as a means to disguise the collective guilt of a community - to anti-social elements, unscrupulous politicians, and religious fanatics. It is worth reiterating that the `heroes' in the Partition story are not the rapists, the abductors, the arsonists, the murderers and the perpetrators of violence, but the men and women - living and dead - who provide the healing touch.
Even at the risk of oversimplification, I wish to argue that the general tenor of the literary and political narratives, both in India and Pakistan, is to emphasise that Partition violence sounded the death-knell of those high moral values that were essential components of Hinduism, Islam and the Sikh faith. Naturally, the definition of such values, rooted in diverse traditions, varied. But the consensus, though unstructured, is to invoke diverse religious, intellectual, and humanist traditions to serve the crying need of the hour - restoration of peace and inter-community goodwill. Thus Nanak Singh, the Punjabi writer, invokes Guru Gobind Singh to lend weight to his moralistic plea for communal amity (he had ordained: every one of the humankind is same to me); Amrita Pritam, the Punjabi poet, vividly recalls the dark nights on the train and the images of death and destruction which Haji Waris Shah had seen in Punjab at the end of the 18th century, with the butchery and rape that accompanied Partition. For scores of writers, social activists and publicists, secularism, in the sense of anti-communalism, was a deeply held faith, an integral face of nationalism, a value to be upheld even during the difficult days of August 1947 and thereafter.
Possibly, one can take this as an entry point to vindicate the importance of a liberal and secular polity. At the same time, setting out an agenda for the future historian of Partition is not easy. The literature that has appeared during the last decade or so points to the possibilities of charting new territories, and breaking free from the boundaries defined by Partition historiography. Using fiction to portray the other face of freedom, and introducing poignant and powerful gender narratives has, likewise, triggered lively discussions that go far beyond the limited terrain explored during the last few decades. When artfully undertaken, invoking popular memories too shifts the burden of the argument outside the familiar realm of elite manoeuvres and high politics to local specificities and personal and family traumas.
Realistically speaking, however, gender narratives and personal and collective memories can at best enrich Partition debates and not constitute an alternative discourse to the existing ones. Oral interviews can only go that far; they cannot be a substitute for archival research, especially because they are conducted over space and time by writers who have a agenda of their own. Historians, too, have their agenda, but their script can be read and interpreted differently. The same cannot be said of gender narratives and other accounts, often contrived, of pain and suffering. Although intellectually rewarding, our preoccupation with pain and sorrow that resulted from Partition has limited our understanding of many other crucial areas, including the political and civic fault-lines revealed then - fault-lines of religion, gender, caste and class that still run through our lives.
All said and done, it may not be easy displacing the dominant intellectual discourses. Whether this can or should be done is not the issue at hand. The reality, is that South Asian readers everywhere still earnestly desire to know a lot more about the triangular narrative, with the British, the Congress and the League occupying centre stage, and pay no heed to the historian's plea to eschew preoccupation with national leaders and national parties.
Though sensitised to alternative discourses, most people in the subcontinent discuss not so much the enormity of the tragedy in 1947, but the factors leading to the country's division. They want to know about the intractable stubbornness of one or the other leader, and make sense of the ill-fated talks in Delhi and Shimla. In short, they wish to unfold the great drama being enacted, with the spotlight on their `heroes' and the `villains'. Consequently, they follow the moves and countermoves of the `major' actors performing on the grand Indian stage to satisfy both plain and simple curiosity, or to reinforce ideas inherited from family and friends, and school and college textbooks.
In the aftermath of the September 11 and December 13 attacks, there is talk of Partition's `unfinished agenda'. The pot is kept boiling, as illustrated by the speeches delivered by the RSS stalwarts. Today, the unending turmoil over Kashmir, the worsening Indo-Pakistan relations, and the resurgence of Islamist ideas and trends are conveniently attributed to Partition's unfinished agenda.
For the historians located in South Asia there is no escape route: they have to whet the appetite of their readers. Though it may take a long time for the scars to be healed, it is important to sensitise them to Partition as the defining moment in South Asian history, and, in the words of Intizar Husain, ``the great human event which changed the history of India''. The Lahore-based Urdu writer goes a step further. The agony of India's Partition, he suggests, could be lessened, perhaps, by exploiting the event's potential creativity: ``To salvage whatever of that (pre- Partition) culture, if only by enacting it in literature. To preserve a memory, however fugitive, of that culture before time and history have placed it beyond reach.''
Partition's impact on the individual and the collective psyche of the two nations is too deep-seated to be wished away. As a metaphor, an event and memory, it has to be interpreted and explained afresh in order to remove widely-held misconceptions. As I read the recent outburst of the RSS chief, I know that this is easier said than done. The only hope lies in what Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib wrote long ago: ``My creed is oneness, my belief abandonment of rituals; Let all communities dissolve and constitute a single faith''.
(Concluded)
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