The stories of the wanton mass violence – mob killings, loot, arson and rape – that accompanied the partition of India are at times so gut-wrenching that we tend to avoid revisiting them. Yet, as this historical chapter is being increasingly weaponised to create new communal conflicts, it has become futile to point out that killings were witnessed on both sides of the divide, that neither the perpetrators nor the victims belonged only to one community. What purpose does it serve anyway, except a crude acknowledgement that we can all be savages as much as we can be human?
More importantly, this response does not address how we should look at the violence itself, and the lessons we can take away from it as a society. Then there are moral questions around collective violence whose scope often marches beyond the ambit of historiography. This, perhaps, is where literature steps in.
If history is a record of events, literature is a document of emotions. A recent literary recitation event at the India International Centre in New Delhi called ‘Main Tum Hoon, Tum Main Ho (I Am You, You Are Me)’ attempted to address how we should grapple with this historic pain etched in the birth of our nation, and make sense of the collective violence that continues to be our most painful national memory.
Through stories and poetry by four prominent Hindi authors from Punjab – which saw intense violence in 1947 – the performance explored the anguish and pain people went through, and the reactions writers had to the time. The performative readings featured five stories: Bhisham Sahani’s Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai, Mohan Rakesh’s Malbe Ka Malik, Krishna Sobti’s Sikka Badal Gaya Hai, and two poignant stories penned by the legendary Agyeya, Sharandata and Badla.
The script of the performance was prepared by writer Purwa Bharadwaj, and the literary works were presented by Professor Apoorvanand, Alka Ranjan, Bharadwaj and Raza Haider. Each story brought with it a different emotion that people felt at the time of partition. The performance began with Bhishma Sahani’s Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai and ended with Agyeya’s Badla. Both are stories of refugees in a train in 1947. They are suspicious of each other, and justifiably so. However, the two stories have sharply different character arcs, pointing out how the violence affected different people differently, and changed them in myriad ways, good and bad.
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The sardar in Agyeya’s Badla defends a Muslim woman from the taunts of another passenger who mocks her, who had assumed that the Sikh man would join him since he is a refugee. He openly condoned the retaliatory violence against Muslims in Delhi’s Karol Bagh. While the burkha-clad woman had initially doubted the Sikh man’s intentions, he is the one who ended up escorting her safely to Aligarh. On the other hand, in Sahani’s depiction of a train to Amritsar, we witness Babu change from a timid and scared refugee to confronting abusive Pathans and stopping other Muslims from boarding the coach once he reaches India.
The sequence, Purwa told The Wire, was made to fit the tight one-hour timeline. “We didn’t want to cover specific timelines of the violence but rather reflect on the processes that informed the choices made by people who committed violence or saved the lives of others.”
Apoorvanand said, “We wanted to present the audience with the different choices available at every step to the people who faced the horrors of partition.” The circumstances, he added, “were different for different individuals but as these stories show, it was always possible to act with compassion.” The characters of Rafikuddin, Budhiya, or Zaibu don’t take extraordinary measures, but they still manage to cling on to their humanity, he said.
Between Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai and Badla, the narrators retold Mohan Rakesh’s Malbe Ka Malik, Krishna Sobti’s Sikka Badal Gaya Hai and Agyeya’s Sharandata. In Malbe ka Malik, through Rakkha Pehelwan’s change, we see how opportunism and greed takes over human relations in times of communal conflicts. Similarly, we witness Shera contemplating killing Shani in Sikka Badal Gaya Hai. Agyeya’s Sharandata offers a peek into how two people in the same family showed compassion and depravity, becoming killers and saviours of their compatriots from the other faith. The woman who saved the Hindu man just had one request, “To remember that there will be minorities in his country who will go through the same treatment.” She wants him to save them not because they’re Muslim but because he is a human. The event ended with the recital of Amrita Pritam’s Waris Shah sung by Yusra Naqvi.
The performance was a probe into questions around violence which we often shy away from as a society: “What distinguishes courageous violence from cowardly violence? What violence is an act of revenge? When a person participates in collective violence, do they absolve themselves of responsibility?”
Also read: How a Bengali Book Series Is Attempting to Make Partition History ‘Real’ for Children
Apoorvanand feels that it’s important to revisit this history through literature written by those who felt the pain of partition, especially in the light of the events of the last decade, if we really want to reconcile with our past. Since 2014, a significant majority of Indians have been warned by an overbearing friend or family that they must understand that secularism is a “myth”, and learn from India’s “real” history. This specifically refers to divisive retellings of partition history – now extensively available as WhatsApp fiction. The sinister intent of this WhatsApp-driven political propaganda disguised as “real untold history” is to weaponise the past and incite fresh violence by scratching old wounds.
We must not forget the stories of partition, even when bad faith actors force us to revisit partition violence again and again to serve their political agendas. But how we understand that violence and what we learn from it, is up to us.
In that sense, Main Tum Hoon, Tum Main Ho was an honest attempt at revisiting the horrors of partition. The spellbound audience in the packed hall proved that literature can humanise history and explain troubling truths about human choices.
Alishan Jafri is an independent journalist.
