October 27, 2007
Train to Pakistan
One of the most brutal episodes in the planet’s history, in which a million men, women, and children were killed and ten million were displaced from their homes and belongings, is now over half a century old.
Partition, a euphemism for the bloody violence that preceded the birth of India and Pakistan as the British hurriedly handed over power in 1947, is becoming a fading word in the history books. Khushwant Singh, who was over thirty at the time, later wrote Train to Pakistan and got it published in 1956. Reprinted since then, reissued in hardcover, and translated into many languages, the novel is now known as a classic, one of the finest and best-known treatments of the subject.
Khushwant Singh sketches a tiny village, Mano Majra, on the railway line near where it crosses the swelling Sutlej. Set in the backdrop of Partition, he narrates the story of changing loyalties of simple peasants of a village bordering Pakistan when a trainload of dead sikhs stops at the village railway station. Each of the characters drawn make a lucid picture in front of our eyes. The powerful district magistrate cum deputy commissioner Hukum Chand, a piteous pragmatist; the village hooligan Juggut Singh “Jugga”, a giant Sikh always in and out of prison, who has fallen in love with the daughter of the Mullah of the village; an educated visitor to the village who is a worker for the Communist party, with the ambiguous name of Iqbal (He does not reveal his religion)… every character makes an impact of its own.
As the post-Partition exodus across the border erupts into violent rioting, the sikhs and Muslims in Mano Majra continue to live peacefully, their lives regulated by the trains that rattle across the river bridge, untill a train comes to an unscheduled stop, and the villagers discover it is full of dead Sikhs. It creates a terbulance and wave of disbelief amongst the villagers. In the stirring climax, it is left to Jugga, the village ganster, to redeem himself by saving many Muslim lives. The government makes the decision to transport all the Muslim families from Mano Majra to Pakistan. The dumbstruck villagers are overtaken by events.
The most memorable passages in the book, as I found, was in the end when Iqbal decides his stance in the matter. He starts thinking…it reads:
“The point of sacrifice, he thought, is the purpose. For the purpose it is not enough that a thing is intrensically good, it must be known to be good. It is not enough only to know within one’s self that one is in the right, the satisfaction should be posthumous…….
…… If you really believe that things are so rotten that your first duty is to destroy–to wipe the slate clean–then you should not turn green at small acts of destruction. Your duty is to connive with those who make the configuration, not to turn a moral hose-pipe on them –to create such a mighty chaos that all that is rotten like selfishness, intolerance, greed, falsehood is drowned.”
Filed by SunniestGnome at 4:32 pm under Fiction