Train to Pakistan By Khushwant Singh

Category: Fiction

Author: Khushwant Singh

Publisher: Roli Books

Price: Rs. 495

Year: First written, 1956,this publication, 2006





Tomorrow India celebrates 60 years of Independence from British colonial rule, Happy Independence Day,India!!! To commemorate the occasion I thought I would share with you a book that I always make time to read around this time of year. It is titled, "Train to Pakistan" and is written by veteran Indian journalist and author, Khushwant Singh. This book is one of my favorites because it describes simply, yet effectively, the price paid, in terms of lost lives, loss of property, displacement etc., the price India paid for its independence.

Having only just returned from vacation I haven't been able to write my own thoughts on Khushwant Singh's "Train To Pakistan", so I share with you what the New York Times had to say:

"Just days before the official birth of independent India and Pakistan in August 1947, Khushwant Singh, a lawyer then practicing in the High Court in Lahore, drove alone across what would soon become a bloody frontier and arrived here at his family’s summer cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas. From here, along nearly 200 miles of eerily vacant road, he would drive on to Delhi and, on its outskirts, encounter a jeep full of armed Sikhs, who would boast of having slain a village full of Muslims. In the face of such ghastly swagger, Mr. Singh, also a Sikh, would realize that he would never return home to Lahore, for what he had just heard was a chilling echo of what he had heard on the other side of the soon-to-be border, except that there Sikhs and Hindus were the victims. That solitary drive would also give shape to “Train to Pakistan,” Mr. Singh’s slim, seminal 1956 novel whose opening paragraphs contain one of its most unsettling lines: “The fact is, both sides killed.” An estimated one million people were killed during the partition, and more than 10 million fled their homes: Hindus and Sikhs pouring into India, Muslims heading in the other direction, to Pakistan. The novel tells the story of an uneventful border village that gets swept up in that violent storm. Now, in a new edition of the novel, in New Delhi has paired his story with 66 unflinching black-and-white photographs of the Partition era, some never before published, by the American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. This new incarnation of “Train to Pakistan,” has given the book what its author happily calls “a new lease on life.” It has also given Mr. Singh, who at 91 has borne witness to several rounds of carnage in his country, an occasion once again to warn against forgetfulness. “The wounds of partition have healed,” he likes to say as often as he can. “The poison is still in our system.”

To read further please go here

Over 10 million people were uprooted from their homeland and traveled on foot, bullock carts and trains to their promised new home.

The massive exchange of population that took place in the summer of 1947 was unprecedented. It left behind a trail of death and destruction. The Indian map was slashed to make way for a new country - Pakistan.

An aged and abandoned Muslim couple and their grand children sitting by the the roadside on this arduous journey. "The old man is dying of exhaustion. The caravan has gone on," wrote Bourke-White.

With the tragic legacy of an uncertain future, a young refugee sits on the walls of Purana Qila, transformed into a vast refugee camp in Delhi.

(All pictures are by Margaret Bourke-White and have been used in the Roli edition of "Train to Pakistan")

For more information on the Partition of India and India's subsequent independence do check out the Guardian's interactive feature on the Partition of India, 1947

Some more recommended reading and viewing:
(feel free to contribute your favorites)

Freedom at Midnight by Dominique La Pierre and Larry Collins (thanks, Sanjay) (NF)

What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin (F)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (thanks, A Reader) (F)

Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan (thanks, A Reader) (F)

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan (NF)

Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa (Thanks, Jennie) (F)

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (NF)

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hossain (F)

Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur (F)

Filming by Tabish Khair (F) (Thanks, Niranjana)

Can You Hear The Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami (F) (Thanks, Niranjana)



Films:

Deepa Mehta's "Earth"
(highly recommended)

Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi"

Hindi movie Pinjar

Partition
By, Ken Mc Mullen
78 min.
Based on Urdu writer's Saadat Hussan Manto's story about the partition of India and Pakistan. McMullen's film focuses on the historical footnote that inmates of lunatic asylums, like prisoners were transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistan asylums were sent to India. McMullen and co-writer Tariq Ali's adaptation is ambitious; the asylum becomes a reverse mirror for the seeming order of the political order, and the same actors, for emphasis play both the lunatics and the rulers.

More Reading on India:

"Inspite of the Gods" by Edward Luce (thanks, Madhu)

India After Gandhi by Ramachandran Guha (thanks, Madhu)


Also some words of thanks:

Please check out Jyoti's photo journal for her amazing pictures.