JHOOTA SACH
BY
YASHPAL
You don’t need a
map to know where Shahlmi, Pari Mahal, Papar Mandi, Machchi Hatta, Kanjar Phalla, Qilla Guggar Singh and Krishan Nagar are situated.
I could hear the
chanting of wailing women in a Siyapa ritual, the waking up calls of
drums and Naats in early Ramzan
Sehri parties, call to arms of Muslims against Hindus and vice versa, and the
sirens of fire brigades and police vans. I am not from Lahore but felt like a
Lahori. I thank Yashpal for that.
A scene: a few days
after the Shahalami fire.
Puri had to give
up the idea of going to Mori Gate. The thought of taking bodyguards to meet a
person like Ghaus Mohamad was not agreeable. Next day around nine in the
morning, he went alone, with the manuscript tucked under his arm. He did not go
by the way of Machchi Hatta and Shahalami, but rather through Vachchovali,
Shesha Moti and Sootar Madi toward Lohari Gate.
Mostly Hindus live in this area, By and large the shops were open but
the bazaars were not crowded. . In the intersection near Sootar Mandi, he saw
Masood, carrying a similar but slightly smaller package like his own.
I have no qualm in
accepting the truth that had I not walked in the Udru Conference in NYC NYU
arranged by Tahira Naqvi I had not known to date about the masterpiece I ended
up reading. My son who learned Urdu on his own in the Urdu semester he took
with Tahira Naqvi wanted to attend the conference and I accompanied him.
This year the theme
was Lahore topophilia. And one of the talks was about the book by his son Anand
who is the translator of the book into English. He aptly chose the name of the
English translation as, This Is Not That Dawn, after the verse by Faiz. Both
the original Hindi and English titles point to the dreams left unrealized after
the Independence. It was more of a Partition than Independence.
Yashpal is a
prolific writer. One of those few political activists, who could be termed terrorist
in today’s jargon. He denotated a bomb in an attempt to kill the Viceroy Lord
Irwin. He was a colleague of Bhagat Singh and served jail time. He was later released
in an amnesty program. Then he became a writer.
I don’t know the
exact length of the original Hindi scrip, but the translation in Urdu is 1117 pages long and 1119 pages in English. It is
a big novel.
First half, termed Watan
and Desh, (Country and Nation) is set in
Lahore. It takes you to 1945. The story is gripping. It revolves around a small
street, a galli, Bhola Pandhe in the walled city, not so far from Shahalami. Its inhabitants are Hindus and
Sikhs. The main characters are young
adults, college going boys and girls including a pair of siblings in that
street Jaidev Puri and his sister Tara, children of a school teacher Master
Ramlubhaya.
The narrative is
strong enough that you don’t need a map to imagine the old city. Lahori friends
will be delighted to see the old city come to life. With characters walking or
riding a bike, tonga , rickshaw or car to Shalhmi, Gawalmandi, Anarkali and to
the suburban Model Town.
It is the closest
narrative to people’s history of the events around partition in South Asia
fiction. Told through the thoughts and dialogues of characters who are all
Lahoris of various persuasions. In the Ghola Pandhe gali, none except one, a
physician has travelled outside Punjab. They look at rest of India as an alien
land. Although living in segregated lives, the lives of Hindus and Muslims
mingle all the time.
Residents of this
street do not thing at all in the beginning of the novel, around 1945 that they
will ever have to leave Lahore. They feel closer to Muslim Lahoris than non-Punjabi
Hindus of faraway India.
That was the time
when there was an agitation against the Unionist Khizar’s government which
eventually falls and Governor Rule is declared in Punjab.
As the weeks go by
and the partition starts to become a reality, the tensions start to rise. Some
of the young residents start becoming militant. It seems that the sectarian
fights were instigated equally by Hindus in Lahore as much as by Muslims.
It was also thought
as a conspiracy theory that the British bureaucrats in India including the Governor
of Punjab were the Conservative Party supporters of Churchill and against the
policies of Attlee and Mountbatten. There was also a rumor that the British may
want to hold on to Punjab even if the rest of India is given independence. (I never heard of this before)
The first scene of
racial tension is very telling when two female activists of Hindu Defense
Committee enter the street and ask a Muslim fruit vendor, an Arain to leave the
street. Then they gather all the ladies of the galli and explain to them the
massacre of Hindus in Calcutta by Muslims and encourage them to support Hindu
street vendors and not Muslims.
One of the
residents is a school teacher whose children are of college going age. His son,
Jay Puri (who I think has several characteristics in common with the author
Yashpal) had been in Multan Jail for being a part of anti war movement. His
sister, Tara is a graduate student urged to do bachelors by her brother Jaidev.
These young siblings have a circle of friends and colleagues, who are mostly
left leaning including some who are communists. They include Hindu, Muslims and
Sikhs. Some of their friends belong to more affluent families. Some have
developed romantic inclinations with members of different faiths.
Life of young
writers was tough in those days too. Jaidev
as a young writer has a really hard time to find a job. After much running
around, he gets a chance to be in a newspaper, only to be fired when he speaks
his mind in an editorial when one of an innocent Kashmiri Hindu boy of his
galli is killed in a sectarian fight. Then it is downhill for him from there. One
option after the other starts to fall off. It is very painfully described the
way he gets increasingly depressed and ultimately had to leave Lahore all the
way to Nanitaal to chase an opportunity, unsuccessfully.
Hindus and Sikhs
from western Punjab had already started to find refuge in eastern Punjab in
early 1946. Many of them stopped in Lahore where the Lahori Hindus helped them
find the way forward. They themselves did not think or realize that they will have
to do that themselves soon.
Close to the time
of partition, almost daily events are mentioned, as they happened in the
political sphere while the personal lives of the characters in the novel were
gradually upended. Tara is married off against her wish, and her brother fails
her. She almost runs away with a Muslim communist friend, who does not have the
heart to stand up to the occasion. Her life takes the most dramatic turn on the
eve of her marriage as Banni Hata, the galli of her marriage is attached by
Muslims . She is left for dead, but she survives, only to face one humiliating
fate after the other, going from one unsafe haven to another. In the meantime, country has been divided and she
is found by the combined search teams of Pakistan and India to secure the
abducted women and is repatriated to India.
In the meantime,
her brother Jaidev Puri is in Nanitaal, where his beloved Kanak has moved some
time back to safe area away from Lahore. She has stood up against all odds to
help him, against the wishes of her wealthy family including her father, a
publisher in Gawalmandi. Now Puri is concerned about the fate of his family and
tries to go back to Lahore to rescue them. Along the way he sees the plight of
Muslims running away from rioting Hindus and Sikhs. He sees it all, the rape,
the pillage the abductions.
Yashpal cuts no
corners in telling the story of partition. The atrocities, by all, is detailed
without prejudice or glossing over. The deceit and the animal nature of humans
in all its nakedness is laid bare. The narrative is compelling that one cannot
skip through it even if one wants to do that.
In the second part, Watan ka mustaqbil ( Future of Homeland) the characters, the former inhabitants of Ghola Pandhe, Gawalmandi and Model Town
pick up their lives in India. What was turned upside down in a matter of few
months, takes years to come to some shape. This part is stretched over almost
ten years from 1947 to 1957 and shows how the resilient Punjabi spirit survives
despite the discrimination and uphill battle the refugees face in their adopted
land. Some are more successful than others but all suffer to some extent: the
exploitation they face in the camps, streets and at the hands of interlopers.
The female
characters are the stronger ones in the novel. Kanak, seems to be the strongest
during the first half or more. Daughter of a wealthy and liberated publisher of
Gawalmandi, she falls in love with a young activist and fights all , including
her father and brother in law, to stand by her man. When eventually a time
comes to confront her man, she does not shy away from that either. As the story
builds up, Tara comes across as the most resilient and strong person against
all the possible odds one could face. Then there are female characters who keep
their love flames alive despite being married elsewhere and those who would
rather die than be ostracized.
It is the master
artistry of the writer that characters are on a moving scale of being liked or
disliked. Some of the very positive characters in the beginning of the book end
up being partly villain or fall off from the most favored list. Others who
seemed to be week, seem to rise up to the occasion.
Muslim characters
are of peripheral nature. Whether it is Asad,
the love interest of Tara, Zubaida who moves to India to be with her
Hindu lover, or Nabhu the rapist, or Hafiz Inayat the spy turned holyman who
saves women but also wants to save their hereafter, or Syed Abdul Samad of
Durrani Gali, Delhi Gate Delhi, all are somewhat week characters and rather
dispensable to the narrative of the story.
Events of daily
live are portrayed in detail and one finds oneself being a part of a scene of a
Hindu Lahori death ritual of Siyapa, a birth of a young Sikh boy and the ritual
of naming him, and the marriage of a Hindu family in the streets of Lahore
while the city has started to burn.
Most of these young
educated Lahoris were hoping against hope to have India united, and even if
there is a partition, to remain in Lahore, even as a minority amongst Muslims in
Pakistan and saw the dream slipping away from their hands.
And as of the
residents of the guli, they were
already upset when two of the rather wealthy neighbors Ghasita Lal and Panna
Laal had locked up their houses and left under the guise of going for a
religious pilgrimage to Vrindavan and Mathura; but when, in the middle of July 1947,
the official notification came for the governmental officials to get themselves
transferred to India or Pakistan based on their religion, people started to
panic. If the government could not assure the safety of government officials of
different faith in a country how they would safeguard the security of common
man.
The following
passage gives a good picture of how a Hindu Lahori thought of life without
Lahore.
In Bhola
Pandhe’s Gali, the only government employees were Babu Govindram,, Dotor Prabhu
Dayal, postel clerk Birumal, and Shaduram who worked at the secretariat. These
men would sit at the chabutra of Babu Govindaram and discuss the situation late
into the evening, Khushal Sing, and Masterji joined them. Babu Govinran wanted
all of them to say in Lahore. Doctor Prabu Dayal was in two minds. He was the
only person in the gali who had visited other parts in India, He would say,
rather sadly, ‘One can live and survive, if necessary, anywhere in the world,
but the truth, is there is no city like Lahore, ( Lahore Lahore hay!).
The mere thought
of being posted to a different place frightened Birumal. After he joined, he
had worked for a few years in the Railway Mail Service, for several months at
the beginning of 1940, his posting was to Cuttack, quite a distance to the
south-east. He would say, “Bhai, that country is totally different. They are
also Hindus, but of a different sort. Their talk sounds like a pebble being
shaken in a brass pot. The only clothes their women wear is around their waist.
Bhai, their food is different, and so are their customs. They let boiled rice
go stale before eating it . --------So what if Muslims of Lahore have turned
into our enemies? At least they’re like us, same language, same dress, their
food too is almost the same. They only difference is that between a temple and
a mosque.’ He said, uttering a curse, “It’s been ten years since I went to any
temple. How long can we remain enemies?’
It is a treat to
read this novel. The Urdu translation has its limitations. It is by Munira
Surati, an Indian and perhaps she is much exposed to many Hindi words that she
may not have thought of them being a bit foreign to Pakistani audience. For
examples the words like andolan, charcha, sundaas and grahak are
mentioned many times. One has to guess the exact meaning of a word in a
particular context.
The English
translation is by the author’s son, Anand. I have skipped through it and seems
very attractive to read. I may end up reading the whole thing, another 1119
pages.
