While a great deal has been written on Partition in India — in English as well as the four major languages most affected by the traumatic events, namely Urdu, Hindi, Bangla and Punjabi — there has been relatively little in Pakistan.
Save for Abdullah Hussein’s epic novel Udaas Naslein (written originally in Urdu and subsequently translated into English to much acclaim as The Weary Generations ) and Intizar Husain’s trilogy comprising Basti , Aage Samandar Hai and Naya Ghar , there has been a peculiar silence. That silence has been broken with great poignancy and immense grace by Salman Rashid in his new book which is part-memoir part-travelogue with a generous dollop of political observations and critical asides.
Understanding the ‘other’
We know this is not a run-of-the-mill book, timed to cash in on the 70th year of the Partition hoopla in 2017, from the dedication page which reads: “Dedicated to all those Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who lost their worldly possessions and sometime their lives for the creation of Pakistan.”
A Time of Madness: A Memoir of Partition could well have been a dark book, for it carries within it a terrible secret. Rashid, a well-known travel writer, who has travelled the world in search of stories, writes of his desire to come to India not merely to see the ‘enemy’ country but also to attempt to unravel the mystery about his family, the circumstances in which they left their ancestral lands in Ughi and their home in Jalandhar, and why they always maintained a stoic silence about the events that transpired ‘out there’ during the horrific humid days of August 1947.
That he chooses not to write a dark book and instead leavens his heart-felt narrative of a slowly unravelling mystery with empathy and compassion is laudable — especially in these dark days when it has become so easy to hate the ‘other’ and blame them for all one’s misfortunes.
From the dedication page itself, Rashid attempts to make common cause with all the others who were affected by the tragedy of the partition. Even the title — A Time of Madness — signifies that the terrible fate that befell his family was shared by many, many others. His own family, comprising his grandparents, his grandmother’s father, and two of his aunts, were a casualty, a number among the one million who lost their lives. And his own parents and aunts and uncles, who managed to save their lives and build new lives in the new Land of the Pure were also a casualty, a number among the nearly two million souls who were uprooted and forced to rebuild their lives in the greatest transmigration of human population.
A lingering sadness limns their life in the new land, a remembrance of things past and a great aching void created by that time of madness.
Choosing compassion
When he finally succeeds in getting a visa, Rashid travels to the land of his forefathers armed with a grainy photograph of a house on Railway Road in Jalandhar and dribs and drabs of memories gleaned from those who wished to put the past behind them.
His account of that journey begins thus: “On the twentieth day of March 2008, I headed home for the first time in my life. I was fifty-six years and a month old. Walking east across the border at Wagah, I was on my way to the fulfilment of a family pietas of very long standing. I was going to a home I had never known; a home in a foreign land, a land that state propaganda wanted me to believe was enemy territory. But I knew it as a country where my ancestors had lived and died over countless generations. That was the home where the hearth kept the warmth of a fire first kindled by a matriarch many hundred years ago, nay, a few thousand years ago and which all of a sudden had been extinguished in a cataclysm in 1947.”
Face to face
And in the end, when Rashid does indeed uncover the terrible secret, when the last clue to the puzzle has fallen in place, when he finds himself standing face to face with the man whose father had led a murderous mob, when he understands the reason for his family’s long silence, he finds nothing in his heart but understanding and compassion.
As to why this had to happen, the only solace, if there can be solace in a situation like this, is in the fact that such a tragedy did not just fall to his lot; it happened to millions.
However, if violence and bestiality are followed by guilt and remorse, forgiveness is possible. A heart-felt apology, even after seven decades, can heal old wounds. A Time of Madness seems to be telling us that while we may fall victims to the madness unleashed by political and religious leaders causing us to fall into pits of unimaginable darkness, it is up to us to find our way back to light. Only genuine remorse and real forgiveness can show us the way.
A Time of Madness: A Memoir of Partition ; Salman Rashid, Aleph, ₹299.
