Book review: Partition:
only one-quarter human —by
Khaled Ahmed
Humanity amidst
Insanity: Hope during and after the Indo-Pak Partition
By Tridivesh Singh Maini, Tahir Malik & Ali Farooq Malik
UBSPD, New Delhi, 2009
Pp186; Price Rs295 Indian
This very thoughtful and much- needed book says Partition was 75 percent
inhuman and depraved, but there was 25 percent of it which was human and
which has not been memorialised because of the dominant hostile narratives
that came after 1947.
The memory of Partition has concretised the communal fracture of India and
made it permanent in the shape of India and Pakistan. Even the ‘neutral’
accounts compiled after the more intense periods of nationalism have been
‘partitioned’, the Indian side putting on record the good deeds done by
non-Muslims, and the Pakistani side recording the acts of grace of the
Muslims.
This book could be the first of its kind. It is ‘unpartitioned’ in its
account of the residual good among two savage communities and puts its
hope in the 25 percent of the population of India and Pakistan to save the
subcontinent from descending into a Hobbesian end of its 1.4 billion
people.
Think of it, this can be done very easily too today, with the help of the
nuclear weapons that Partition has caused to appear like malignant growths
on the map of the region. The book contains interviews with non-Muslims
who fled to India in 1947 and 11 interviews with refugee families in
Pakistan. One doesn’t need to emphasise that they are moving in the
extreme.
Around 13 million changed home in 1947 and it took them two months to
complete the process. Hundreds of thousands got killed, women were raped
and children lost. The wound of it went deep, bequeathing to South Asia
one of the world’s most lethal sets of nationalisms that braked
development and prosperity and unleashed poverty-provoking wars. If there
was holocaust in the West this was one in which ‘no one community could be
held responsible’. Politely, it means both were abysmal. If that is what
the book says, which it does, then we are face to face with an evil that
was more pervasive and therefore more sinister. That means we were 80
percent all individual Hitlers.
Ashis Nandy thinks that the 25 percent Muslims and non-Muslims not
subscribing to the hatred of their community are the saving grace which
will finally rescue the Subcontinent from its historical death-wish
succubi. He makes a case for abstention of uniformity of thinking that
nationalism dictates because the 25 percent at Partition who did not
conform are today worth remembering.
One hopes that those in India and Pakistan who did not conform after the
Mumbai attacks in November 2008 will also be remembered some day when
madness has finally left us. But people like Ashish Nandy have always been
there though few in number: Khushwant Singh, Balraj Sahni, Kartar Singh
Duggal and Saadat Hasan Manto.
The book mentions only Manto as the Pakistani ‘deviant’. That is
understandable for two reasons: first that a community that dominates
numerically is bound to have more ‘original’ people; second, anxiety
levels in a smaller revisionist state are so high that deviationist
thinking is cruelly suppressed as opposed to the big status quo power
where ‘comfort’ levels prevalent in society tolerate deviationist and
innovative thinking.
One can name six Indian historians at the same level of deviationism from
the nationalist prescription as Pakistan’s Ayesha Jalal simply because of
this difference. But then people like Satish Agarwal, Papiya Ghosh,
Urvashi Butalia, and Ritu Menon, together with Ayesha Jalal, are no longer
simply Indians and Pakistanis; they belong in the category that this book
wants to idealise.
Should we forget Partition as an unpleasant experience? The book says no,
but in a way Partition will be consigned to oblivion once, somewhere
during the future generations, India and Pakistan become normal towards
each other. One reason one shouldn’t go along with the case for retaining
the memory is Pakistan’s upcoming Bab-e-Pakistan monument that will
memorialise the sufferings of the Muslim refugees without any reference to
the suffering of the non-Muslim refugees that went out of Pakistan.
Unless, of course, India and Pakistan enter a treaty banning one-sided
monuments and pledge to ‘bilateralise’ the suffering of Partition and
eulogise only the 25 percent that didn’t kill.
The authors have many ‘intermediaries’ of their pacific cause and they
include Pakistan’s great lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan who in his book The
Indus Saga told India that
it should permit the presence of ‘distinctness’, and told Pakistan not to
ignore the ‘commonalities’ that existed between the two countries.
The book focuses on the two Punjabs where ethnic and linguist
commonalities set up bonds that can be ignored but not denied. It is
termed ‘Punjabi ethos’, reaffirmed by physical contiguity and easy
official contacts across the Wahga border. The book enlists the contacts
made recently by the two Punjabi chief ministers Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi
and Amarinder Singh to highlight the jati networks that have not died in
Pakistan despite state efforts.
For instance, the Warraich tribe has flourished in Pakistan just as it has
in India among the Jats. In Pakistan Warraich is a familiar suffix to
Muslim names even though some leaders have taken it off to facilitate
their identification with all the population instead of just one tribe.
For instance, not many people in Pakistan know that Aitzaz Ahsan and the
family of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain are Warraich although it is known that
they both are Jats from Gujrat. But the stature of these Jat-Warraich
leaders in Pakistan is uncontested, the Chaudhrys at the political level
and Aitzaz Ahsan at political and intellectual levels. One can’t disagree
with the book that the Sikh state of Punjab can be the positive agent in
transforming and humanising the Partition experience.
The book recommends a ‘memorial of the 25 percent’ in the no-man’s land at
Wahga, but one must warn that the monument of Bab-e-Pakistan, coming up in
Lahore, will easily dwarf it with the malignance of its size and
dimensions. One may also in conclusion apologetically remind the authors
that Punjabis of Pakistan often do themselves no credit by monopolising
the negative aspects of Pakistani nationalism and are responsible, because
of their two-thirds majority in population, to arm-twist the rest of
Pakistan into perpetuating conflict with India. *
