Partitioned lives: narratives of home, displacement, and resettlement

306 Pages·2008·11.11 MB·English

by  Nandi Bhatia

Narratives of Home,
Displacement, and Resettlement
Anjali Gera Roy
Nandi Bhatia
ill
PEARSON
An imprint of Pearson Education
Copyright © 2008, Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under
copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this book.
Published by Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd., licensees of Pearson Education in South Asia.
Head Office: 482, F.I.E., Patparganj, Delhi 110 092, India
Registered Office: 14 Local Shopping Centre, Panchsheel Park, New' Delhi 110 017, India
ISBN: 81-317-1416-0
First Impression
Laser typeset by Starcompugraphics Private Limited, Delhi
Printed in India by Saurabh Printers
1
*£3* Seal
&C/D k3 £l.c
,. "- - --/ ' ' * \ • ‘-/-/'/';,^x^; '£Sf. "j i'-' '* ■
. . ; , C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
Anjali Gera Roy and 'Nandi Bhatia
1. Transcending Religious Identities: Amrita Pritam and Partition 1
Nonica Datta
2. Of Love, Martyrdom, and (In)Subordination: Sikh Experiences of
Partition in the Films Shaheed-e-Mohabhat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha 26
Nicola Mooney
3. The Diminished Man: Partition and ‘Transcendental Homelessness’ SO
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
4. Constructing Post-Partition Bengali Cultural Identity Through Films 65
Somdatta Mandal
5. Writing Partition: Trauma and Testimony in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India 82
Jennifer Yusin and Deepika Bahri
6. Partition and Post-Partition Acts of Fiction: Narrating Painful Histories 99 (£_
Sukeshi Kamra
7. Growing Up Refugee 116
Manas Ray
8. Crossing the Border in Opposite Directions: Two Partition Narratives 146
Shuchi Kothari and Rita Kothari
9. Partition in Transition: Comparative Analysis of Migration in Ludhiana
and Lyallpur 156
Pippa Virdee
vi PARTITIONED LIVES
10. Fires in the Kangra: A British Soldier’s Story of Partition
Deborah Nixon and Devleena Ghosh
11. ‘Moving Forward Though Still Facing Back’: Partition and the South
Asian Diaspora in Canada
Prabhjot Parmar
12. Eternal Exiles in the ‘Land of the Pure’: Mohajirs in
Mass Transit
Amber Fatima Kiaz
13. Refugee Women, Immigrant Women: The Partition as Universal
Dislocation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Paulomi Chakrabortj
14. Srinagar—Muzaffarabad—New York: A Kashmiri Family’s Exile
Shubh Mathur
15. Against Silence and Forgetting
Jonathan D. Greenberg
Notes on the Editors and the Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to this book. We gratefully
acknowledge and thank Debjani M. Dutta at Pearson Education India for her faith and
interest in this project; Bill Ashcroft for reading an earlier paper on geographies of
displacement; Serge Libermann for providing a guided tour of being a Jewish writer
in-place and out-of-place in Australia; fellows and staff at the Humanities Research
Centre and Cross Cultural Research Centre, Australian National University (ANU)
Canberra, particularly Debjani Ganguly, John Docker and Dipesh Chakravarty, for
believing that more stories need to be told; Arvind Kalia for the valuable archives at
the three ANU libraries; Devleena Ghosh and Paul Gillen for their invitation to talk
to faculty and students at Trans/forming Cultures, University of Technology at
Sydney; Patrick Wolfe for the Irish take on partitioned lives; Ralph Crane for tales
of the Raj; and Steven Muecke and Heather Goodall for their work on oral histories
and testimonies. Thanks also to Rosanne Kennedy, Simone Gigliotti, and Julia
Emberley for the opportunity to present some of the ideas from the introduction at
the ‘Testimony and Witness’ conference at ANU in February 2006, and to Marianne
Hirsch and Leo Spitzer for their example and encouragement on further developing
these ideas, at the same conference. We owe special thanks to Heather Goodall for
her enormously useful critical input on this project; to Ian Talbot for giving very
productive suggestions; to Teresa Hubei for invaluable comments; Jill Didur for
conversations; and to Satish Saberwal for reading parts of the manuscript and pointing
towards new published and unpublished material. We wish to acknowledge the
contributors of this volume for their support of the book and the timely completion
of their papers.
We also acknowledge the books and journals where the following papers first
appeared: Manas Ray s‘Growing Up Refugee’ in History Workshop Journal, 53, 2002;
an earlier version of Shuchi Kothari and Rita Kothari’s essay in Indian Journal of
World Literature and Culture, vol 1.1 January—June 2004:95—100; and Nonica Datta’s
Viii PARTITIONED LIVES
essay in Assertive Religious Identities: India and Europe (Manohar, 2006), edited by S.
Saberwal and M. Hasan.Thanks are also due to the University ofWestern Ontario
for providing institutional and research travel support, and to the Indian Institute of
Technology Kharagpur for granting leave and assistance for working on the project.
In particular, we wish to thank Partition survivors, family members, and friends
who have shared stories and conversations over the years, enabling a better under­
standing of the complexities of relocation and displacement, and providing the in­
spirational energy for this book: Gurbux Singh Bhatia, Joginder Bhatia, Harbans
Singh Bhatia, Shyama Bhatia, Amrik Singh Seera, Dalbir Singh Aulakh and Raghvinder
Aulakh, Daulat Ram, Dayanand, Krishan Lai Gera, Om Prakash Gera, Santosh Gera,
Motiram Kalra and Satwanti Kalra. Thanks to Preet, Ruby, andVishal for constant
support, and to Arif for being so delightful. To the Roys for a glimpse into the
Partition in the east, and to Sayan for his understanding.
Introduction
Aniali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia
On 28 May 2005, The Tribune, a newspaper published from
Chandigarh, reported on the potential eviction of Partition refugees in Rajpura,
Punjab from their temporary government-allotted accommodation, lovingly called
Kasturba Sewa Ashram by its inhabitants.1 The government’s attempt to reclaim its
land provoked panic amongst these refugees who faced the prospect of another
displacement. Even though the PepsuTownship Development Board that issued the
notice for eviction provides ‘unsafe’ construction as the reason for the notice, the
underlying motive for eviction and reclamation may be the soaring property price
of the land. The story itself remains a local affair, and despite the attention that
Partition has received—especially since 1997 with the emergence of scholarly
investigation of a deeply introspective nature on the ongoing trauma of Partition
with its varied memories and meanings for ordinary people—this story remains
excluded from national attention. And yet the story is important for several reasons.
It raises questions regarding nation-building in the host countries and the meanings
and implications of state protection for Partition migrants. According to Om Prakash,
president of the ashram,
We have used our meagre incomes to make this place liveable. For 55 years we
have been living here in the hope that the government would allot us this land
someday. But we have had no luck. Till 1970 we used to get Rupees 35 per month
as ration from the state. But now we don’t even get that. It is painful to witness the
state’s apathy. If we are thrown out, where does the government expect us to go?
(The Tribune, 28 May 2005).
Clearly, for this community, fears regarding adequate state protection have been
revived nearly 60 years later and jogged memories of the Partition, which is still
remembered as a tragedy, something that Tan TaiYong and Gyanesh Kudaisya call
‘dramatic’ with its ‘refugee movements, who.-e scale even at that time was described
X ANIALI GERA ROY AND NANDI BHATIA
as unprecedented in human history’ (2000: 8). Moreover, the impossibility of this
community’s return to places left behind explains why Partition may become the
central defining moment of their lives, giving way to anger, despair, unsettlement,
and even nostalgia—critical or uncritical—for their pre-Partition lives.
Scholars agree that the Partition involved the forced migration of about 12 mil­
lion people who moved across borders to their newly identified homes in India and
East and West Pakistan, cost approximately one million lives in riots and resulted in
the abduction of nearly 75,000 women (Butalia 1994; Menon and Bhasin 1998).
Descriptions of violence by survivors are well known by now: images of trains filled
with corpses as they arrived on both sides of the border, mutilated bodies, forcible
parading of women and men on streets, tattooing of women’s bodies with symbols
of the other religion, forced religious conversions, separation of family members
and abandonment of homes. Partition is remembered as a time of great uncertainty,
humiliation, anger, sadness and trauma but also one of survival and triumph about
having recovered and bounced back from the tremendous personal and .material
loss. The work of recovering ordinary people’s stories about the Partition has begun
in the last decade through a return to literary representations, survivors’ testimonies
and unofficial documents.These stories avoid building Partition as a grand narrative
of violence, revealing instead variegated responses of diverse ‘Partitioned subjects’
to its traumatizing violence before, during and immediately after Partition. Of note
are the testimonies collected by Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence (1998)
and Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin in Borders and Boundaries (1998). Striking for
the vividness and detail with which individuals recount moments of violence, of
frenzied mob killings, arduous travels with and without food and belongings, and
the loss of family members and friends along the way, they offer analysis that questions
the inadequacy of law and order, the complicity of police in the violence, and their
own vulnerabilities. Additionally, creative and personal narratives assembled by Alok
Bhalla (1994) and Mushirul Hasan (1997) in their collections of Partition stories,
historical and critical essays by Settar and Gupta in Pangs of Partition (2002), Sukeshi
Kamra’s Bearing Witness (2002), and Jill Didur’s critical analysis in Unsettling Partition
(2007), to name a few, usefully recover the hitherto buried creative writing inspired
by the Partition that intervenes in the elite nationalist scholarship which deals pri­
marily with official documents, private papers, and political biographies of those in
power and accords ‘short shrift’ to the personal stories of the people.2 Drawing on
published diaries, excerpts from autobiographies, personal accounts, poems, stories
and interviews, Hasan (1997), for instance, provides a wide array of individual and
collective experiences of migration, nostalgia, and refugee trauma during and after
the Partition, as does the collection of stories edited by Alok Bhalla (1994).3 In ex­
plaining the role of these stories, Bhalla emphasizes the multiple uses of memory.
While in some instances, memory offers a vision to ‘counter-violence’, memory of
INTRODUCTION Xi
the past also offers a ‘source of dignity in the present.’ Says Bhalla, ‘the history of
atrocities is not forgotten, but neither is a life of connectedness. The archives of
memory are used, not only to explore the life of greed and violence, but also as a
source for a life of communal togetherness again’ (ibid.: xxx—xxxi). Collectively,
these works address issues pertaining to the many silences surrounding the Partition:
historiographical, personal, state-inflicted silences, and the silencing of women, of
children and of communities.
Yet the story of the Rajpura refugees recounted above reinforces that the personal
narrative of Partition is still unfolding and demands the further recovery of ‘unofficial
histories’ that demonstrate the ways in which Partition marked a new temporality,
created not just through the violence of sectarian bloodbath but also through altered
geographies whose impact continues to be felt in the adjustments individuals and
families were compelled to make in their everyday lives. The further unfolding of
such stories, which have left their imprint on the minds and bodies of survivors and
refugees, on cities and localities, and live in the memories of those residing in the
subcontinent and in the West, constitutes one of the central concerns of Partitioned
Lives. In so doing, the book moves to the afterlife of Partition by focusing on the slow
and continuous struggle of selves, communities and refugees to resettle in new places
and to bring their experiences in dialogue to describe the comparative and interlinked
dimensions of migration. In order to ensure the inclusion of a range of voices, this
book brings together essays that provide accounts of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh experi­
ences, of Bengali, Sindhi, and Kashmiri refugees, the experiences of domiciled British
who remained on the margins of the Raj, and perceptions of migrants in Canada,
the USA and Austraha. We uncover such stories through a multidisciplinary approach
which, in addition to bringing together personal testimonies, interviews, and local
histories, also examines fictional forms such as literature and film.
The recovery of another layer of Partition history and its multidimensional
memories through testimonies, interviews, autobiographical narratives, fiction,
literature and cinema in this book addresses several key themes that open up new and
intersecting grounds for understanding the meanings of partitioned lives. First, it
demonstrates the complexity of Partition through an acknowledgement of its effects
across a range of geographical terrains within the subcontinent and beyond. Second,
it addresses the ways in which memories of Partition continue to circulate across
generations within the subcontinent, and mediate and intersect with the everyday
realities and negotiations of diasporic communities in the homelands they occupy.
Finally, it pays attention to the importance of memory and postmemory, evoking in
the process comparisons with the trauma and mourning for loss of homelands that
marks conditions of other forms of (involuntary or forced) migrancy, without minim­
izing the magnitude and scale of violence and displacement during Partition.To this
end, the book highlights literary—cultural representations as important tools of