Guest post by Mayank Bhatt
The literary segment of the on-going Kala Ghoda Art Festival provides a rare avenue to discuss the personal and collective trauma of the Partition and the panellists discuss the untold story of Sindhi migration.
Jackets, shawls and woollens really have no place in Mumbai’s winter that normally lasts for about 2-1/2 days. These are fashion accessories for a set of Mumbaikars that likes to believe it is liberal. But this year’s been an unusually cold winter for Mumbai. So, the khadi jackets, the woollen pullovers and the shawls did not seem out of place at the small garden of the David Sassoon Library at Kala Ghoda late Saturday evening; although the number of people at the garden did seem out of place. Perhaps the reason for the high turnout must have been the subject. So little of the Partition is ever discussed in Mumbai; it is such an India International Centre sort of issue.
Partition Narratives was the third programme in the literary segment of the Kala Ghoda Art Festival that commenced its 10th edition Saturday, February 2, 2008. Fittingly, it followed immediately after a brief homage to Urdu writer Qutratulain Hyder, who re-migrated from Pakistan to India in 1960, having initially gone to Pakistan following the Partition. Besides being a major voice of Urdu literature, Hyder was also a journalist having worked at the Illustrated Weekly of India, when Khushwant Singh was the magazine’s editor. She died in 2007. The homage programme preceded the Partition Narratives panel discussion at the same venue, and the audience overlapped.
Hyder’s story When the Prisoners were Released, the Times had Changed is part of the anthology on Partition literature edited by Alok Bhalla (Stories about the Partition of India, HarperCollins, 1994). This is one of the finest collections of short stories on the Partition by writers from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, and includes classics such as Sadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh and Rajender Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti. Bhalla was to be one of the panellists for the session. Having enjoyed his rich translations of these traumatic narratives, I was keen to see the writer in person. Unfortunately, he was not present. Apparently, the flight Bhalla was to take from Delhi was grounded, and he couldn’t have made it on time for the discussion even if had taken any other flight.
Fortunately, the discussion did not turn out to be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. In fact it acquired a completely different dimension thanks largely to circumstance. Bhalla’s absence constricted the panel to four members, a journalist, a poet and two academics; three of whom were Sindhi women — Anju Makhija, the Mumbai poet, Kavita Panjabi, head of the department of comparative literature, Jadhavpur University, and Rita Kothari, who teaches at St. Xavier’s College (Gujarat) where she also heads a Centre for Research in Translation on behalf of Katha. Rehan Ansari, foreign editor of DNA, was the fourth member of the panel.
Literature on Partition has a predominance of Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi writers, justifiably so considering the trauma and the horrors of Partition that Punjab and Bengal experienced were not faced with the same intensity by other regions of the subcontinent. “Trains full of dead bodies, heads severed and breasts cut,” (Kothari’s evocative expression) and the uprooting of lives, the pillage and loot that accompanied the trans-border migration of millions and the death of nearly half-a-million was a phenomenon that, undoubtedly, affected the entire subcontinent, but found resonance in the works of writers in Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi.
The uprooting of the Sindhis (Hindus from Sind who migrated to India) has remained largely buried in the collective memories of a generation of people who rebuilt their shattered lives in an unsentimental manner. They turned grievous adversity into collective opportunity and within a span of few decades came to embody the true spirit of entrepreneurship in free India. Their success has led to an erroneous belief that somehow the migration of the Sindhis was devoid of a sense of loss, trauma and tragedy that was witnessed by the Bengalis and the Punjabis. “After all, how could people who are so rich ever have been miserable,” seems to be the common refrain even amongst the most ‘enlightened’ Indians.
By sheer dint of hard work, ingenuity and enterprise, the Sindhis have emerged as a dominant business community in free India. This has generated tremendous animosity and led to an almost universal stereotyping of the Sindhis as shrewd, miserly and cold blooded business folks that evoke resentment, jealousy and derision but never empathy.
So, rather unexpectedly, the panel discussion on Partition Narratives actually turned into a chatty, conversational exchange between three intelligent and opinionated Sindhi women, who wouldn’t necessarily want to be described as such. Ansari was to sort of anchor the proceedings, but the women seized the discussion away from the theme Ansari tried to set. But the enriching narratives emanating from the women, made Ansari realise the futility of bringing back the discussion to any preconceived agenda.
Unsurprisingly, the narratives also expanded to encompass issues other than just Partition trauma to include a range of subjects as diverse as the erroneous description of Sikarpuri in terms of ethnicity and caste instead of geography, Sufi Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry’s popularity amongst a new generation of south Asians unconnected to and unconcerned about the Partition, the gradual, steady and sure decline of Perso-Arabic script, and with it the Sindhi language in India, matrimonial columns and the vain attempt to define an enemy country for a generation of people who couldn’t make themselves come around to accept such a status for their erstwhile homeland. All very eclectic and inspirational.
The first generation migrants, Panjabi explained, were far better equipped emotionally to deal with their personal loss and not use it as an excuse to turn rabid communalists that the later generations seem to have become. But perhaps that has to do with the rejection that the second generation faced in free India, their new home. Kothari underscored this when talking about the status of Sindhi in Gujarat. The second and the third generation want to discard this identity completely as it appears to come in the way of progress and unnecessarily hinders their progress and acceptance into a larger society that actively homogenises cultures. And who can say that this is restricted to just Gujarat.
But the most telling moment of the discussion — at least for me — was when Makhija narrated her first experience encountering ethnic bigotry in Adipur, Gujarat. The experience made her realise the deep-rooted prejudice and ostracisation that her elders faced for a major part of their lives in free India, and how until the Adipur experience – where Makhija was abused merely because she is a Sindhi — she never really could grasp the enormity and the arbitrariness of this phenomenon.
It shows how little the India has changed. This experience of arbitrary animosity is something that millions of migrants who have made Mumbai their home experience every day, continuously for many years. As in the past, the migrant is subjected to intense and targeted political animosity. Despite the much-touted steady march of globalisation, it appears that the true identifier is ethnicity and not nationalism (although nationalism is often a terrifying unifier and identifier), leave alone global identification.
And that is when Ansari’s suggestion begins to make more sense than it did at the beginning of the discussion. Ansari tried to hold a view that the most measured way to understand and interpret the migrants’ experience, especially many generations later, is through delirium. Delirium is not logical and rational. The subcontinent has never responded rationally to the migrant.
