A little over a decade ago, in a series of lectures organised to mark the 60th anniversary of the Partition of India, doctors Alok Sarin, Sanjeev Jain and Anirudh Kala made a joint presentation on a subject that had hitherto remained untouched in our understanding of Partition — the long term psychological impact of the trauma of the moment and of the processes that followed. Moved, and intrigued, by the many stories they had come to hear from their patients — many of whom had lived through it — the doctors had begun to make initial explorations into the subject.
At first, there was little they were able to find in ‘official’ records, but as their research developed (through a Nehru Memorial Museum fellowship and a Wellcome Trust grant), more and more areas began to open up. Occasional essays and short stories led to deeper explorations and this book, an edited volume that focuses on the psychological impact of that ‘moment’ in our history, is the result.
Partition as ‘madness’
The word Partition is often associated with the word ‘madness’. As we try to make sense of what it was that led people to turn against compatriots, neighbours, friends, and kill and maim and violate in brutal ways, we are constantly faced with many questions: did people just go mad? Are human beings normally like this? What does ‘normality’ actually mean? Do they have such a capacity for violence? What role does the state play in this?
Making sense of what happened is not only an ‘after-the-act’ phenomenon. As the editors show in their introduction and in their individual essays, politicians, bureaucrats, even Gandhi himself, were bewildered by the scale and spread of Partition violence.
As doctors, Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin, the two editors, are also troubled with such questions. To these, they add their own, going back into history to explore the setting up of medical establishments in India. What sort of psychiatric care was available, they ask, to deal with the many demons people brought with them? What kind of medical establishments existed at the time? How had they come about?
Tracing the difficult, sometimes contentious arrival of what came to be known as ‘western’ medical care in India — contentious because it was opposed by those who believed in the more traditional Indian methods — they ask how the universalisation that lies at the heart of medical science, was so vitiated by the prejudices and beliefs of colonial medical practitioners and their assumptions about the capability or otherwise of natives.
Further they explore the sedimenting of identities, in particular religious identities, as both the result of community models of health care where members of a particular community, through their welfare activities, ended up providing care, employing professionals, all from the same community. As well, they demonstrate how even medical services, supposedly premised not on the identity of the person seeking care, came to be communalised, so much that for example, patients in a mental hospital in Lahore were left without care when the nurses and doctors, principally Hindus, left for India. They note with concern the growing and tragic communalisation of this profession which is meant to transcend the borders of religion and identity.
The role of the state
Other essays in this collection nuance this rich seam of exploration, providing connections and parallels with the impact of terrible violence in former Yugoslavia (where seemingly scientifically minded doctors and psychiatrists enthusiastically joined in the project of the demonisation of the other and thereby implicitly supported the killings), Darfur, and Muzaffarnagar pointing out, with examples, the everyday acts in which the seed of partition already exists in daily life and the ways in which states are complicit in creating partitions and fomenting divisions in order to control populations.
The treatment of different forms of madness in literature dealing with Partition is supplemented by work that examines Gandhi’s ruminations on the futility of anger as a way of dealing with hurt and violation. A detailed account (by Ayesha Kidwai) of Mridula Sarabhai’s work with abducted women explores the discomforts and ambivalences that lie at the heart of a feminist certitude about patriarchy and makes a plea for the early social workers, Sarabhai and others, to be seen as ‘women who cast the first stone’, no matter that they were also complicit in supporting the nationalist agenda.
Sukeshi Kamra elaborates on the implications of our failure to confront the demons of Partition, our reluctance to historicise it reinforcing the point made earlier by the editors, that confronting partition, and partition violence with honesty, will mean ‘a rupture of cherished notions that anchor national identity’.
The book closes, unusually, with an essay that, rather like an introduction, sums up the arguments of each of the chapters and links them to each other.
Like all anthologies, this one too is uneven, but it is rare to find an anthology which is not. What is important though is that it opens up a new area of enquiry. If I was to sum up this book in one phrase I would say that thus far, we have talked of Partition being a division of hearts. This book shows it to be also a division of minds.
The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India ; Edited by Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin, Sage, ₹575.
Published - July 07, 2018 07:31 pm IST
