We, as youngsters, carry no baggage. We have been untouched by the dark shadows, however sinister they might be. We are inspired only by sharing, giving, love and solidarity. Our hearts beat beyond this or that border. All borders!
By Richa Yadav
Train to Pakistan. The novel is written by Khushwant Singh. It’s a deeply sensitive book. It touches deep inside the heart. And it stays with you, within you, long after you have gone through its last page.
It shows how tragic and difficult a dark night can be. How tragic and difficult it is when one dark night follows countless other similar nights. A night without an end. Is raat ki subah nahin!
Hindus and Muslims, friends and neighbours for decades, became arch enemies overnight, baying for each others’ blood. Thousands of women were assaulted in broad daylight. Men were butchered in cold-blood.
The book is replete with, perhaps, the most horrific chapter in the history of India and the sub-continent. It draws heavily from the author’s own experience during those tough and turbulent days of Partition, when one country became two, with bitterness flowing like bile through its blood-soaked rivers.
It’s a book of literature, but he has recorded historical events, mass migration and displacement, even as the backdrop darkened each moment with the shadow of infinite violence and death.
Khushwant Singh has written about the lasting wounds which left their mark on peaceful and quiet villages on both sides of the border. He has documented the diabolical role of politics, and how the agents of death and division ran amok — night and day.
The book begins with a fictional Mano Majra, surrounded by villages, on the border of India and Pakistan. There are three brick buildings where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh families, with strong bonding, have coexisted peacefully for years. However, when they get the news of the riots in other parts of the country, and as vicious rumours spread all over, they became certain that this would now enter their harmonious time and space. Eventually, they are convinced, that even their home and homeland cannot escape this bloodshed.
Iqbal Singh, a western-educated Sikh, tries his best to deal with this terrible situation. Unfortunately, he is murdered as the book reaches its end. His death symbolize the seamless sorrow that becomes an epic tragedy during those long nights of dying, death and displacement.
Mano Majra is fictional. It represents all the collective spaces, the nuances, the expressed and hidden feelings, where all the characters have lived and survived with their joy and sorrow over the years. Like Miya Mir.
Million of Muslims then migrate on a ‘train to Pakistan’. Most of them were dead before they could reach their destination.
Thousands of homeless people stared at a blank future in India. Separated children looked for their mothers and fathers. Sisters looked for their sisters. Desperate mothers cried their hearts out, frantically searching through the crowd of refugees, looking for their lost children. Men were murdered.
Epidemics arrived. Disease came along with death. Hunger and homelessness stalked the ravaged survivors. There seemed no hope.
Independence arrived in India and Pakistan, after a long and protracted freedom movement, and so many sacrifices — but, at what cost?
The scars have healed since then. Now, new polarizations have been methodically manufactured in modern India. New, sinister shadows of hate and violence, are looming in the horizon. Old, tragic, terror-stricken memories seem to have come back.
That is what the book and the author tells us. Learn the lessons from the past. A nation is more than a religion, caste, community, identity. The body, mind and soul of a nation lies in universal humanism, in shared compassion and empathy. Raking up the nightmares of the past, to manufacture revenge in the present, will serve no purpose.
We, as youngsters, carry no baggage. We have been untouched by the dark shadows, however sinister they might be. We are inspired only by sharing, giving, love and solidarity. Our hearts beat beyond this or that border.
All borders!
That is why Train to Pakistan is a journey which reminds us of the past, only to tell us that, ‘No, history need not repeat itself!
Don’t repeat this past. Instead, create a new present and a new future. And, thus, create a brand new past.
A new story.
A new song.
A new train journey.
Richa Yadav is a Class 11 student of Dr BR Ambedkar School of Specialized Excellence (SOSE), Andrews Ganj, Delhi Board of Secondary Education, under the Delhi government.