Jhoota Sach (This Is Not That Dawn): By Yashpal. A Story of Partition and Lahore

JHOOTA SACH

BY

YASHPAL

For the duration of reading the book and for some time after that I was transported to 1940’s in Lahore. The streets of old city with all the cross-roof talks, chatter of the vendors, the scent of flower laden walkways of Lawrence Garden, the hustle bustle of Shahalami and the suburban air of Model Town, all came alive.

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.

 

Mottled Dawn: Fifty Stories on Partition by Manto

I just finished reading " Mottled Dawn", translation of fifty sketches and short stories of Saadat HasanManto by Khalid Hasan, written in 1996 and with a forward by Daniyal Mueenuddin in 2011.



The title is the translation of Faiz's verse Dhaag Dhaag Ujala about the Independence of Pakistan.

While questions of Independence abound and what exactly it mean for Pakistan to be independent is hotly debated, (an ideological religious state vs secular state etc), the trauma of Partition has largely been shelved. People do not talk much about it, partly due to shared guilt or due to apparent disconnect with the present day situation.

For those who are interested in Partition, and there is an increasing demand in certain circles to explore and research it more, not much is out there in objective way. Most of the accounts are jingoistic and clearly partisan, blaming the others for the starting of atrocities or otherwise minimizing and looking the other way. Other accounts are devoid of human stories, being just statistics and bland numbers.  People present at that time who are still alive and can provide oral histories are rapidly vanishing.

In this dearth of real information, strangely, Manto's stories come to the rescue, almost as a collection of people's history. Here you see an honest and impartial depiction of what happened. Manto is able to take the essence of the time, and tell us what was going on in peoples heart and minds. How a relatively normal person gets drawn into the rage of revenge and hatred and commits atrocious crimes. At the same time how brief moments of humanism show up amidst that time of violence and make the person human again.

It starts with 'Toba Tek Singh', his seminal story; how a lunatic refuses to be transferred to India from Pakistan in exchange of residents of lunatic asylums as he wanted to be nowhere else but in his Toba Tek Singh.

In 'Return' (Shalwar), the father is mad with joy to find out his daughter is alive, ignorant or oblivious of the fact that she had been repeated raped and mutilated. In 'Colder than Ice' (thanda gosht), for which he was tried in the courts, he tells how a person felt impotent after realizing he had raped someone who was dead all along. Many more including the 'Assignment', 'Dutiful Daughter', 'Mozail' ( the Jewish girl in Bombay who helps rescue a Sikh girl for his ex boyfriend) 'Dog of Ttitwal' and 'The Last Salute' are a treat to read.

In the 'Last Salute', Indian and Pakistan soldiers who were members of the same regiment before the partition face each other in war in Kashmir, and the dying Ram Singh cannot help but salute the Pakistani Captain as he was his previous officer .

In the 'Tale of 1947', the main character is based on Manto himself. Mumtaz leaves Bombay for Pakistan after he realizes that his own best friend had admitted that he could have killed him in revenge of his uncle's murder in Lahore at the hands of a Muslim.

The sketches are from his book 'Siyah Hashie', composed of short stories, some are only a line or two long. They all tell the story of Partition tersely.

The best way to describe Manto is in the words of Khalid Hasan in his introduction and I reproduce below:

"--- to Manto, what mattered was not what religion people were, what ritual they followed or which gods they worshipped, but where they stood as human beings. If a man killed, it did not matter whether he killed in the name of his gods or for the glory of his country or his way of life. To Manto, he was a killer, In Manto's book, nothing could justify inhumanity, cruelty or the taking of life. In the holocaust of 1947 he finds no heroes except those whose humanity occasionally and at the most unexpected times caught up with them as they pillaged, raped and killed those who had done them no personal harm and whom they did not even known. Manto saw the vast tragedy of 1947 with detachment, but not indifference because he cared deeply." 

Khalid Hasan has done a great job in translation and having read some of the stories in Urdu before, it was a pleasure to read them in English. It opens up a larger readership to Manto which he has deserved for a long time.

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain

 I finished reading the book the second time, read it first thirty years back.

Written by Attia Hosain, a member of a Taluqdari family of Oudh, who decided to move to Britain and not to Pakistan after the Partition, the title is drawn from a line of T S Elliot, 'There the Eyes are Sunlight on a Broken Column".

Set in Lucknow of 1930's it tells the story of people of privilege: a group of cousins and their friends. Told in first person by a character who shares much of her background with the author, it takes you back to the lives of a decaying class, the feudals of North India. Known as Taluqdars they had hereditary lands from Mughals and later from British Empire. Loyal to Crown, they had an almost total control on the lives of their land tenets and serfs.
By the turn of 20th century, many had personally moved to bigger cities and controlled the rural fiefdoms remotely, each generation bringing a different set of values and vision, although still subscribing to the same sense of privilege and authority.

Connection to the rural estate was for getting grains and rents, burying the dead, and later to get votes for elections.

The estate of Hasanpur is not that far away from the city and the description of the journey from the city to the estate looked like any other road trip to any of Punjab villages.
Syed Mohammed Hasan, Baba Jan, the old feudal lord is slowly dying in his Luckhnow mansion, Ashiana. There is a joint family system where his two daughters live with him, one widowed and one unmarried. The protagonist is the orphaned granddaughter whose parents had died. Her father's sister is raising her in a modern way as it was the desire of the dead father. Extended family members stay for long times.

Baba Jan's friends and acquaintances are from his class and share a common interest in things archaic and mundane. His only living son lives elsewhere and moves in after the patriarch dies.

He dies in the chaotic times of Muharram when the city is full of riots. The rituals of death take place in the city and the village. They are beautifully portrayed: the lamenting, the sharing of food , the three days mourning and how the life goes back on track.

Hamid, the son, now moves back to take the charge. He is an anglophile and his wife does not observe Purdah. He does not like joint family system and the sisters are dispatched to village or married off. Laila continues to live in the city and continue her education in the institutions run by the British. Later Hamid's two sons come back from Briton after finishing education and staying there for ten years.

The life of aristocracy, having different faiths and political inclinations but sharing a common social and economical interest, is ceremonial, monotonous and intriguing at the same time. The interplay of older generation and the younger one shows the tension of disagreements between them and how different generations handle them. It is as true as it is today as it was then.

It is perhaps the first, if not the only, English language piece of fiction by a native Urdu speaking person of that era. The language is flawless and one can imagine as if one is reading it in Urdu. The idioms and ways of expression as translated effortlessly as English sentences are uttered by characters who would never speak that language. It does not seem odd at all.

The cousins in this story are or the same age as my parents. This is a good peek into that time, a kind of 'people's history' of what went on in the hearts and minds of the young generation of that time. Similar to the Udaas Naslain, translated by the author himself in English as Weary Generations, it tells you their lives. They had all the range of ideas and thought and their conversations captured in these books tell you of the scope of possibilities and confidence they had. Women , educated in colleges, able to talk and express opinion on all the taboo subjects and accepted in their group of friends could be unimaginable a few decades later in Pakistan.

Seems things have moved backwards as much as on the surface we see the effects of material modernism.

Although the story is narrated by a member of the aristocratic family, the lives and thoughts of the 'other' class is told through the stories of the servants and less privileged relatives. The author does justice to those characters. Perhaps she and the character based on her has the capacity to go beyond their areas of comfort and look at the word through the eyes of the other class without patronizing or being judgmental.

Although it is a story of cousins and their personal affiliations and aspirations and basically it is a love story, the subtext of Independence and the Partition is played in the background without being onerous. Different members of the same family and circle of friends align themselves and route for Muslims League, Congress or for just the Feudal system. Landed aristocracy see its gradual downfall, politically and socially, and the eventual disappearance of its existence as a class. We see how the new rich gain ground and influence and the mercantile class become land owner transforming it to urban boom. 

And then, true to the title, the ultimate effect of Partition on the larger family, how it gets dispersed over countries and continents and unable to communicate with one another. Lines drawn on sand become permanent barriers and hearts, properties and lives are divided.

And how a young girl, born in a family of privilege, is able to keep her head balanced, able to see the world as it should be, and defies the authority of others in choosing her own destiny.

I am not sure why the novel did not get noticed in Pakistan as much as it should have been. I for one, did not hear about it until I moved to USA in 1988, It was first published in 1961 and is surely one of the best portrayal of pre partition twentieth century in North India.