Sunday, December 22, 2002		Books

Memories too painful to recall
Suresh Kohli

Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947
Penguin, New Delhi. Pages 524. Rs 395.

ANY recollections of Partition can at best be a painful reminder. A collection of creative writings on the tragic event needs no formal introduction. That’s probably why publishers of the book rightfully abstained from inflicting one on readers. Such an introduction is all the more unwarranted if an anthology of Partition literature consists of writings either done originally in English or rendered into it competently. What’s, however, strange is the nature of this compilation. It has the complete text of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan adapted for the celluloid rather sensitively by Pamela Rooks, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas which he has himself translated and which was made more famous by Govind Nihalani’s television serial and, 11 of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories translated by Khalid Hasan. The absence of any details about the translator is the kind of editorial lapse one has come to increasingly associate with Penguin Books.

These writings are timeless. They are the outbursts of writers who witnessed an unusual genocide, the worst kind of savagery, rather incomprehensible because the people who unleashed it shared a kind of umbilical bond until the devil in them sowed the seeds of permanent distrust and hatred. Emotions that continue to strain relations between the affected communities first surfaced around March 1947, all fuelled by religious frenzy and political ambition. The scars continue to haunt the survivors, particularly the Sikhs and the Hindus in India, and the Muslims in Pakistan. The saving grace is perhaps the hope of a reunion in the not-too-distant future.

Although there are some rare pieces of Manto here, the book does not include, for some unexplained reason, some of his better and more telling stories like Khol Do, Gurmukh Singh’s Vasiyat, Tetwal ka Kutta. While Manto was the chronicler of lived and experienced reality, Khushwant Singh and Bhisham Sahni could be described as redeemers of tragic nostalgia, of observed and reflected-upon reality. Their novels are documents of introspective reality, having been written in 1953 and 1973, respectively. Therefore, in direct contrast to Manto’s stark realism with a deep ironic pathos, there seems in fair abundance a conscious mixture of contrived realism and deliberate melodrama in both Train to Pakistan and Tamas.

In Tamas, an entire village goes up in flames because of a deliberate sacrilegious act of a slaughtered pig being placed outside a mosque. Bhisham Sahni has often been accused of needless pontification and a communal bias. In Train to Pakistan, originally published under the name of the village Mano Majra, it is the arrival of a trainload of dead bodies that sets the ball of murders rolling, fuelled and refueled by fanatics on either side. Train to Pakistan, though now widely claimed to be a classic, might not eventually be regarded as a great piece of literature. But it would survive as an honest piece of historical fiction. And that recent history is not easy to fictionalise is obvious in both these works.

Manto is of course the undisputed master storyteller who seldom went wrong. The inclusion here of A Tale of 1947 and Wages is a bonus, and Toba Tekh Singh unnecessary. But the translation by Khalid Hasan is a delight.