In Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved , the epigraph is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner : “Since then, at an uncertain hour, /That agony returns,/ And till my ghastly tale is told/ This heart within me burns.” Shortly after completing the book, Levi, who chronicled the horrors of Auschwitz in eight books, committed suicide, with some arguing that he “killed himself because he was tormented by guilt — guilt that he had survived Auschwitz while others, better than he, had gone to the wall.”
Though his was a drastic end, one wonders whether enough has been written on the Partition, one of the most traumatic events in our history that killed at least a million people and displaced millions more. In fiction, there are books such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan , Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column , Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines , to name a handful, but surely there are more stories to tell around the tragedy and the path to reconciliation. How much do we know about the Bengal Partition, for instance, which led to riots and an unprecedented exodus from then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) into West Bengal? In 1994, Alok Bhalla edited three volumes of Stories About the Partition of India , as he wondered why even though Partition was a decisive moment in our social and political life, it had yet to become a central part of our nationalist discourse. He gathered stories from far and wide, by those who had been “appalled witnesses to an age of genocide”, including those by writers like Saadat Hasan Manto ( Toba Tek Singh ), Kamleshwar ( How Many Pakistans?), Narendranath Mitra ( The Four-Poster Bed ), Ismat Chughtai ( Roots ), and Samaresh Basu ( Adab ).
If one were to consider non-fiction, a superb recent addition is Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan , which argues that leaders of both countries were largely oblivious to “what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace.” Underscoring the catastrophic human cost, she explains how the recklessness with which it was completed has left a damaging legacy. Also counting the losses and examining how ordinary human beings wreaked such vengeance on the other is Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies .
With the wounds of 1947 still fresh, the “paranoia and hatred” keeping communities apart, don’t we need more lessons from the past to inform our present?
