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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Night-Smudged Light
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| Yashpal’s monumental novel joins the conversation on Partition. |
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Published : 1 October 2011 |
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COURTESY PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA |
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| Yashpal’s novel meticulously describes a small neighbourhood in Lahore and the fate of its inhabitants.
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hootha Sach, first published in two volumes in 1958 and 1960, has long been considered by Hindi readers to be the most important novel on the Partition, but the fact that it was extremely long and—until a year ago—remained untranslated has kept it out of the robust conversation on Partition literature that has grown in recent years. I have waited nearly 20 years |
now to bring up the novel in discussions on Partition literature without synopsising the entire plot and supplying a full biography of the author every time I mention his name. I have longed to loan it to friends and hand it out as a Christmas gift. Unfortunately, hardly anyone I know reads Hindi. And I suspect those who do wouldn’t choose to read a novel of more than a 1,000 pages. This includes certain scholars who write about Partition literature and can read Hindi, but mostly rely on English translations, or have passed over Jhootha Sach in favour of shorter Hindi works. As Harish Trivedi remarks in his introduction to this translation, the conversation on Partition literature will need to be “substantially recast” now that Jhootha Sach is available in English. He adds, “So far, it may even seem, it has all been a bit like talking about Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.” The Prince of Denmark has at last made his entrance; let the conversation begin.
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HEN MANI RATNAM'S FILM Bombay was released in 1995, the scenes of rioting and chaos were heart-wrenching. The 1992-93 riots were still fresh in the memory of both viewer and filmmaker. It’s not easy to portray mass chaos: Ratnam followed family members as they were scattered among crowds; he focused on individual acts of violence |
and also of kindness. So soon after the event had transpired, there was no ready-made template for how to depict the Bombay riots. Ratnam created that template: in the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, scenes from the riots seem cribbed from Bombay. Slumdog was not a film about communalism, and the riots served as a plot device with which to separate the two young boys from their mother and send each into the world on his own. But this is precisely how art shapes popular memory and the imagining of historical events. The pathos of a transpersonal tragedy is not only kept alive through films, novels, stories, paintings and music, it is also created by them. Memory is abstract, and personal accounts are numerous, variable and limited to individual perspectives—infinite Rashomons unfolding in space. Histories can try to synthesise the multiple human stories of traumatic events, but visual art—including film—is far more successful at creating the images that come to stand in for memories. In this process, it is usually earlier, foundational works that forge the template for this memory creation that we will see referenced and repeated in films, books and other works of art.
The Partition has been a particularly difficult event to represent, both in historical writing and through the arts. With two different fronts, thousands killed, abducted or raped, and millions more migrating over the newly-drawn borders, the number of stories that can be told are infinite. But synthesis of the many tragic fallouts of Partition, and analysis of how it came about and what went wrong, has presented a thorny problem. The first depiction I remember seeing of the Partition was in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982). I must have been 13 years old and it didn’t occur to me at the time to analyse the stylised depiction of the onset of rioting, in which two kafilas (caravans) walk in opposite directions on the same road, just metres apart. The villagers in the scene carry their belongings on their heads and backs or in bullock carts. Something triggers anger; perhaps a hungry child or an exhausted parent. This is the last straw for an individual, who picks up a rock and flings it at the kafila on the other side. General rioting and chaos ensue. This, along with the film’s cartoonish depiction of Muhammad Ali Jinnah as what Salman Rushdie correctly identified as a Count Dracula-like figure (“The choice is yours, Mr Gandhi, Pakistan, or CHAOS!” he says menacingly in his clipped British accent), seemed to make perfect sense in the vocabulary of epic cinema. Years later, when I began to learn more about the Partition, it was that image, of the two kafilas side by side, that I needed to deconstruct first.
It was not until I had seen Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the Partition that I came to understand the origin of Attenborough’s depiction. The scene in Gandhi is clearly based on Bourke-White’s photograph of a kafila in Punjab. The photograph does not show two lines of people walking in opposite directions; that is pure cinema. But it is shot at a peculiar angle. Bourke-White appears to be crouched on the ground, or standing in a ditch beside the road. Somehow, the travellers in the kafila take on more significance from this angle. They loom. Bourke-White was addressing the conundrum of capturing this vast and widely-dispersed event while it was happening: how to make a group of people leaving their homes and lands forever look like more than just a few figures walking down the road. The brilliance of the photograph is that it suggests to us by the camera angle that this small number of people represent the vast tide of migration. The rest of her many disturbing photographs lack the crispness and simplicity that make this one iconic. Attenborough’s kafila is visually similar. In neither representation are there any trees or buildings cluttering the image. Attenborough borrowed from Bourke-White (whom he also made a character in his film) the spareness of the single line and turned it into the absurdity of two mutually hostile groups travelling in two lines in opposite directions down a single road. In both images the metonym of a few migrants stands in for the enormity of the whole.
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HIS APPROACH, of using snapshots to represent the whole, was also used by Urdu short story writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto, though in a very different spirit. Unlike outsiders Bourke-White and Attenborough, Manto had no interest in the majestic sweep of history. As a writer of short fiction, it was not incumbent upon him to represent an entire event or to |
explain its significance. But like the work of Bourke-White, and also of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who arrived in India shortly before Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, Manto’s first Partition stories were created in the immediate aftermath of the event. His slim collection Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins) contains 32 very short stories (what would be termed ‘flash fiction’ today) and was published in 1948. Unlike Bourke-White, Manto was not an eyewitness to the Partition violence that ripped apart his native Punjab. Despite the fact that he remained in Bombay during the most volatile months—those leading up to and following the Partition—the brevity and horror of his stories give the impression of immediacy, like snapshots taken along the route of migration. It is often difficult to convince people that his accounts should not be taken as actual reports from the front.
It would not be Manto’s style to attempt to write the definitive Partition narrative. Nevertheless, his 1955 story describing the divvying up of the inhabitants of an insane asylum, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, has taken on the iconic status of the one fictional narrative about Partition that everyone should read. ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which was written at a greater distance from 1947 and lacks the intensity and horror of Siyah Hashiye and other iconic Partition tales by Manto such as ‘Khol Do’ (‘Open Up’) or ‘Thanda Gosht’ (‘Cold Meat’), is an absurdist sendup of the bureaucratic nightmare left in the wake of the Partition in which everything from office furniture to abducted women had to be accounted for, divided up and repatriated. Not only did Rushdie famously include it as the only work translated into English from an Indian language in his collection of 50 years of Indian writing, Mirrorwork (1997), but historians such as Gyanendra Pandey, Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose have cited it as an example of the kind of literary work that can convey the trauma of an event like Partition much more capably than any historical narrative. Writes Pandey in an essay for Mushirul Hasan’s Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (2000):
…literary narratives, whether in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali or Punjabi, are an eloquent witness to ‘an unspeakable and inarticulatable history’. Evoking the sufferings of the innocent, whose pain is more universal and ultimately a vehicle of more honest reconciliation than political discourse, they provide a framework for developing an alternative discourse on inter-community relations.
True though this may be in theory, it is difficult to reconcile the sentiment with the claim that an absurdist tale such as ‘Toba Tek Singh’, for all its magnificence, fills this role. Strangely, despite his position in the canon of Partition literature as it has been fashioned in English language literary and academic circles, Manto’s stories have not so much contributed to the fashioning of memory about the event in other works of literature (other writers may have even felt skittish about straying into the territory of dark humour at which Manto excelled) as they have come to stand in for the idea, in Partition historiography, of ineffable trauma.
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HE PREEMINENT POSITION of ‘Toba Tek Singh’ in the canon of Partition literature is shared, perhaps even superseded, by one other work: Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s haunting poem composed on 15 August 1947, ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ (‘Dawn of Freedom’). The influence of Faiz’s poem on the way the pathos of Partition is imagined is so pervasive that it is not |
only quoted in virtually every work on the event, both fictional and nonfictional, but translations of various lines have even been used to title translations of works of Partition literature by other authors. In fact, Khalid Hasan’s translations of Manto’s Partition stories is titled Mottled Dawn (Penguin, 2004), a translation of a phrase, “Yeh daagh daagh ujaala”, from the first line of Faiz’s poem. Similarly, the translation of Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach, also published by Penguin, has been titled This Is Not That Dawn. The title is drawn from the second line of the same poem by Faiz, “Yeh woh sehar to nahin”. The first two lines have perhaps been most felicitously rendered by Agha Shahid Ali:
These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing....
| MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE / TIME LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES |
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The iconic Margaret Bourke-White photograph that inspired Richard Attenborough’s filmic depiction of Partition. |
Faiz’s poem is remarkable for its artistry, but also for its prescience, given that it was written on the very day of Independence, when the full story of the devastation and violence that would occur had yet to unfold. Nonetheless, the fact that lines from the poem have been used to title a collection of stories by one author, and to replace the original title of a work by another, is indeed curious. If Manto and Yashpal share any traits as authors, aside from writing about the Partition, it is their unadorned prose. Why, then, should their works be given titles drawn from a work of poetry?
Yashpal’s translator, his son Anand, seems a bit unsure of this in his translator’s note, where he writes:
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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A Non
7 October 2011
06:16 AM
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Another review of the same novel's Hindi version.
http://www.mouthshut.com/review/Jhootha-Sach-Yashpal-review-tlqqlpmlum
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Sneha
29 September 2011
02:26 PM
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I agree with the author's complaint about the title of the translation and I am sure Yashpal wouldn't have approved it. When his critics complained that his writings lacked "artistry" and were full of politics, he said he didn't see any need to justify or make excuses for it. He talks about it in an introduction to one of his earlier novels Dada Comrad. I don't see what the problem was with "False Truth." Like "War and Peace" they should have let it be.
Thanks for this essay anyway. I wish there were more biographical details. His life story is fascinating.
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