Borders and Boundaries in Indian Partition Literature

4461 Words18 Pages
Such was the magnitude of the devastation wrecked by the Partition of undivided India that it was, and is a mammoth task for writers to deal with it. Historians, for one, talked in aggregates: ten million refugees, two million of them dead, seventy-five thousand women raped and so on and so forth. These statistics fail to impart even a fraction of the enormity of the tragedy that was the Partition. Statistics do not tell us how women must have felt while drowning themselves in wells lest they be abducted by men of the other community. Statistics fail to tell us how for most people the deciding factor in choosing India or Pakistan was not politics or religion but insecurity. Statistics fail to even hint at the trauma of husbands and wives, sons and mothers separated by the Radcliffe line. And the last thing that statistics or historical narratives can ever do is to reflect on identity crises of innocent individuals at a time when identity could be altered by loot and rioting. Identity The Pakistani poet Harris Khalique is a Kashmiri, but he does not fit what he calls the "Kashmiri stereotype" ó "No pink cheeks or blue eyes, the only brother even darker than I am and the family hardly able to make out the difference between Pahari and Kashmiri." His friends often ask him derisively, "Sir, why donít you mediate between Pakistan and India? Kashmir is your land after all." Khaliqueís reply is that every town in the subcontinent is to him what Toba Tek Singh was to Bishen Singh. "I cannot mediate between India and Pakistan," he writes, "I am an unresolved business of Partition myself. You are right. I am not Kashmiri. I am Kashmir." 1 Another Kashmiri, Saadat Hassan Manto, was so aggrieved by a similar identity crisis that it was, partially if not wholly, responsible for his alcoholism and eventual death about eight years after the Partition. Communal tensions in

More about Borders and Boundaries in Indian Partition Literature

Open Document