A Meditation on Memory and Loss of a Sikh Family After Partition

The title ‘Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story’ is a bit quizzical. It is not as you would expect an homage to an undivided India, a period of history, fewer and fewer people have any recollection of. It is perhaps a clever conceit, a play on words, to refer to a time when personal relationships were paramount and we did not live in this atomistic world of rampant individualism. 

It is a daughter’s elegy to her father, Sardar Jitinder Singh or Jindo, a person whose funeral marks the beginning of the book and as such he looms through the book like Banquo’s ghost. But it is through the ingenious device of her father’s life that the book becomes much greater in scope than the life of her father.

It travels back in time 300 years from the time that her father’s family converted to Sikhism and as such covers her heritage, a brief reference to partition and the early decades of the Indian republic, the hope, the excitement and the idealism that period inspired. 

Jindo’s story is both singular and universal. It graphically describes the properties in Rajkot in Gujranwala district in West Punjab from which Jindo’s family came, the school he attended, Aitchison College in Lahore, the chief’s college and the difficult and problematical transition from feudal grandeur to the more modest egalitarian down and heel town of Karnal in Haryana. 

Jindo had to cope with the demands of his mother and family members who were not used to this change in circumstances. In this respect, Partition had a universal impact on the refugees. In Jindo’s case it was different in that he could not rid himself of that fall or demeaning of his family’s position. That led to him suffering from a sense of torpor, a listlessness rather like the Russian author Oblomov, in his classic book The Immortal Hero of Laziness, who distinguished himself as writing about retiring to bed and remaining in bed as being the ultimate nirvana. 

It is this peculiarity that the author plays with, the notion that lying down does not necessarily equate with laziness but represents a certain state of mind which Jindo described as araam. I have always drawn a parallel between our Indian sensibility, particularly those from landed estates, with the Russian sensibility which we see in authors such as Chekov and that is beautifully brought out by the author in the book. Conversations about petty things, rumination about the crop, family rivalries, all within the context of Karnal, a sleepy cantonment town where nothing really seems to happen.

The author reflects upon the fact that Karnal boasts a place in history, being named after Karan of the Mahabharata, adjacent to Panipat, the most consequential battlefield in India and being the gateway to Delhi. But Karnal emerges from the book as a caricature of small-town India, dry, dusty and important for being on the road to somewhere whether Chandigarh to the North or Delhi to the South. 

What we see is that Jindo seeks to recreate a semblance of his past in the present. His house in Karnal is grandly named Rajkot House, in memory of his estate back in Pakistan. But it is more than that. It celebrates the peculiar tryst the Punjabi has with his land. The possession of land gives wealth, status and position in a way that modern India has forgotten with its fancy cars, mutual funds and flashy weddings. 

The book also distills the Sikh experience, dealing with the Khalistani Movement, and the desire for pluralism at odds with the suffocating grip of Hindu nationalism which the country has been enduring. Jindo stands out in this regard with his Persian-ised Punjabi, his love for Persian and Urdu as well as his refusal to learn Hindi. This sense of cultural identity shines out in the book. 

The author beautifully delineates the notion of ‘Punjabiyat’, melding Sikhism, Islam and Hinduism with its Sufi and Bhakti songs and in Persian Punjabi verse with its profound connection to the soil. This is the lost world which Jindo hankered for and perhaps was the cause of his indolence and torpor. In this sense, he was singular from many refugees who never looked back and were only entranced by the future and the many glittering promises the new republic held out. 

Jindo is someone who has a deep sense of his self and that is powerfully displayed at the time of the Sikh riots when a mob of local people came to his house and he sat in the verandah unafraid of what might happen. He had fled one catastrophe; he had no desire to flee another. If there is one symbol of this book, it is that steadfastness and sense of place. 

Malavika, the daughter, has a somewhat different experience when she was in Delhi in 1984 but her voice is a new and refreshing one. The Sikh community has given India several writers of eminence, including the great Khushwant Singh and Patwant Singh, but Malavika gives a different perspective of the Sikh experience. One that rightly emphasises the need for recognition of plurality and pushing back against the strangled hold of homogeneity which has now become all-encompassing. 

This memoir is written in a rather modern fashion. It is not linear and the flashbacks can be irritating at times, but in defence, this is a powerful meditation on memory, on loss and on hope and one can forgive the author for this rather discordant presentation. 

There is much to learn in this book and for the generation that grew up in the 70s and 80s and much nostalgia. India, then, was a simpler, softer and, in many respects, a kinder place than what it has become. And this is a fitting elegy to that period of innocence.