by Gulzar
It is a truism much acknowledged that translating any Urdu poetry into English is a task fraught with peril for, quite apart from the differences in literary culture and sensibility, there is also the matter of syntax and natural pauses peculiar to Urdu but alien for the English reader. And so, more often than not, what is incredibly beautiful and tremulously evocative in the Urdu original can come across as clumsy and pedantic, if not outright banal in its English translation. And when the images, motifs and symbols are culled from the minutiae of memories and real, lived experiences, they become all the more personal, even idiosyncratic. The challenge then is to carry the image, like a quivering will-o’-the-wisp, cross the barrier of one language, and attempt to tiptoe into another language and literary culture with at least some of its suggestiveness intact. It may be unfamiliar, even startlingly new, to the English readers, but that seldom matters; what does is its ability to conjure up a sight that moves both the head and the heart. And that is what Gulzar Sahab does in poem after poem as he takes his reader by the hand and draws them into a world that is highly individualistic and yet welcoming.
Dina, the home of his childhood, the one he left behind, figures in several poems, as does the experience of going back to Dina, be it through dreams or memories, save for that one time when he actually does go back – seventy years after leaving. The closest he can get to describing that experience is through a game he played as a child: Dhaiyya chhoona, in which a predetermined spot (agreed upon by all the children playing the game) had to be reached and the player had to touch that spot, however briefly, before running back:
It has taken me seventy years
To return to Dina and touch the dhaiyya
How much have I run in the wasteland of Time
How long have I played hide-and-seek!
Other bits of flotsam and jetsam, washed ashore by the tide of memories, find the most poignant expression in the poems chosen here: the rustic toy bhameri that a little boy had once tucked in his waistband as he had fled through a dark night, leaving his childhood home forever; the top he had once played with that has been turning ceaselessly in his mind ever since; the big girl who had once stolen a lump of clay from his schoolbag, nibbled at it and planted a kiss on his cheek; the wall on which he used to write in Urdu with a piece of charcoal; the little wooden stump he had once thrown on a neem tree laden with plump neem berries; the madrasa in the village school where he used to sit on a piece of sackcloth as he memorized his lessons; and many more besides. The millstone of Time goes around only once, as he tells us in one of his poems, grinding everything fine in that one cycle. Gulzar Sahab has poured a lifetime of experiences, memories, dreams and desires in the grinder; the result is a fine dust of memories that settles over this collection like sepia-tinted particles glimmering with wistfulness and hope.
Then there are the images: of a child playing Stapoo and jumping over roughly drawn squares on the ground as he crosses the bridge over the Jhelum in a steam engine and reaches Dina, where he was born; of going to the border to meet Manto’s Bishan from ‘Toba Tek Singh’ who is still standing at no-man’s land, his feet swollen, his mind unable to comprehend the enormity of his loss; of country paths redolent with damp earth and moist swings hanging in the rains; of sending a soft breeze, with a thousand gajras tied to its wrist, as a gift to a friend and a fellow poet across the border; of standing on Zero Line with the sun behind him and his shadow falling in Pakistan; of Abbu who used to call him ‘Punni’; of being made to bend over like a rooster as punishment by the schoolmaster; of crossing the border, time and again, with closed eyes for:
Eyes don’t need a visa
Dreams have no borders
Coming now to the short stories, here Gulzar Sahab comes out of the thicket of memories and allows himself to think with both his head and his heart. The stories included here cover the gamut of the Partition experience, from the harsh brutal reality of the gory events of 1947, to the wars that were fought between India and Pakistan, to the communal ill-will and mistrust that was bequeathed as a bitter legacy of the batwara, coming up to the consequences of that ill-will that continue to be felt most acutely in the state of Kashmir. Taken together, these stories throw the clearest, strongest light on the long-term consequences of the events that unspooled from 1947. The long shadow of Partition has never found such a searing yet deeply empathetic depiction in contemporary Indian writing by any living writer.
Gulzar Sahab differs from the ‘Partition generation’ of writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto and Krishan Chander in many ways; for one, he has the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of introspection. He is not interested in chronicling the events that led to the division of the subcontinent, or putting them in neat labels of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, or even apportioning blame. Instead, he wants to peel back, layer upon layer, the silence that had settled upon the lives of those most affected by the event. And it is this unpeeling of those long-held silences that he does in story after story in an attempt to make sense, retrospectively, of the horrors of the Partition. Also, the respite of time allows him to examine not just the gruesome acts of 1947 and its immediate aftermath with some measure of dispassionate enquiry, but also the consequences. Thirteen or fourteen years old at the time, he has had a long time to mull over the memories, to view and review in his mind’s eye all that he heard or saw, to go over the experiences of others he heard or overheard, to attempt to understand the narratives of loss and trauma his young mind was unable to process at the time. Time, the great healer, also lends perspective, and it is this perspective that makes his writings on the Partition so different from that of his predecessors.
‘Crossing the Raavi’ is short and sharp, relying on its brevity for its sting. With a few deft strokes, it recreates the havoc of those panic-stricken days of mass migration and the terrible human cost of the madness that engulfed ordinary men and women. ‘Two Sisters’, an extract from a forthcoming novel, tells the story of two sisters, brutalized and rendered homeless by the Partition, drifting like dry leaves from town to town, till they settle down in a place far removed from home, and attempt to rebuild their shattered lives only to find that the seed of despoiling can only yield a bitter harvest. The subject of raped and abducted women has cropped up in many Partition stories. Manto, perhaps, put it best when he asked: ‘Whenever I thought of those abducted women and girls, all I could see were swollen, distended bellies. What would happen to these bellies? Who is the owner who lies stuffed in these bellies: India or Pakistan? And what of the nine months of labour? Who would pay the wages – India or Pakistan? Or would it all simply be put in the account of cruel Nature? Isn’t there a blank column somewhere in this ledger?’ (‘Khuda ke Liye’, Manto). In ‘Two Sisters’, Gulzar Sahab tells us about two such numbers in this blank column.
A sweet story about the veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar changes the mood from despondency to hope; it reminds us that the bonds of shared living are stronger than the hurts and betrayals of history and the arbitrary drawing up of boundaries. In ‘Over’, ‘LoC’, ‘Two Soldiers’, and ‘Rams’, Gulzar Sahab takes us to the border, and again, in his characteristically humane manner, shows us how humanity may be challenged but can seldom be snuffed out totally by larger, geopolitical forces. The personal and the real, never far from the surface in much of Guzar Sahab’s writings on the Partition, reappears in ‘Partition’ to testify to the lengths people are willing to go to believe that their loved ones are merely lost, not gone forever. Make-believe is as much a part of coping as mistrust, as we find in the next story, ‘Fear’. Possibly set in the Mumbai of present times – the Mumbai scarred by communal riots – this story reminds us of the communal hatred that is as much a legacy of Partition as is Independence, and how it simmers beneath the surface of normalcy.
The hope and faith in pluralism and syncretism that suffuse Gulzar Sahab’s writing with a luminous glow is missing in ‘Smoke’. A dark story, it leaves a question in its trail: does individual will
have no place before the collective will of the mob? Drawing upon his own childhood in the Sabzi Mandi neighbourhood of Delhi, ‘The Jamun Tree’ recreates a neighbourhood poised on the brink of disaster as the ill winds of communalism tear asunder the social fabric of ordinary lives. ‘The Scent of Man’ and ‘Search’, two of the hardest-hitting stories in this collection, are both about Kashmir; both show how the situation in Kashmir is a consequence of the Partition. The stories also reiterate my impression that for Gulzar Sahab the long-term effects of the events of 1947 are a work in progress. He takes no sides and steadfastly refuses to look for heroes and villains; he simply wishes to show the horrific toll of a tragedy of such immense proportions on human dignity.
While much ink has been spilt on the political and historical implications of the Partition, relatively little has been written on the human aspect of this momentous event in the recent history of South Asia. Gulzar Sahab corrects this anomaly and, with this collection, addresses an old wrong. In foregrounding the stories of ordinary people – be they the foot soldiers who fight the real wars on ground zero or writers and journalists looking for answers and closure – against the hegemonic, larger narratives of nationalism and patriotism, he is showing us where the possibilities of healing and redemption might lie: with the ordinary people themselves!
July 2017
New Delhi
Notes
At Dina…
* Fuller’s earth is mixed with water and the paste is used to ‘paint’ a writing slate afresh; pregnant women are also said to have a craving for its sweet taste.
Dhaiyya
* A popular punishment for schoolboys was to bend over, put their hands through their knees and hold their ears; the punishment was known as ‘murga ban na’ for a person doubled over like that looked like a rooster.
* In this children’s game, a predetermined spot (agreed upon by the children playing) must be reached and the player must touch it before running back; it has led to a commonly used expression ‘dhaiyya chhoona’, meaning to touch something, however briefly, before coming away.
Millstone
* Gulzar Sahab had visited Dina, now in Pakistan, on 12 February 2013.
Bhameri
* A rustic toy.
Toba Tek Singh
* While the first line of this ambiguous statement from Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ may be dismissed as the gibberish of a madman (though many have taken it as an iconic pronouncement on the madness that was the Partition), the second line, roughly translated, means: ‘Let India and Pakistan be damned!’
Zindanama
* Literally, the story of a prison.
Eyes Don’t Need a Visa
* Reference to a famous ghazal by the Pakistani poet Ahmed Faraz, sung by the ghazal singer Mehdi Hasan: ‘Abke bichhde to shayad kahin khwabon mein milein / Jis tarah sookhe huwe phool kitabon mein milein’ (Separated again perhaps we shall meet in our dreams/Like dried flowers found in the pages of books).
Two Sisters
* This is an extract from a forthcoming novel called Two due in November 2017, to be published by HarperCollins.
Partition
* They addressed their son Sampooran as Punni. Here, the ji has been added as deference to a person of Gulzar Sahab’s stature. The mother, on the other hand, does not add ji when she addresses him as Punni later in this story. She also uses the more informal 'tu' when addressing him.
Rams
* The original title is ‘Dumbe’, plural for Dumba, which is a kind of sheep or ram with a large, fat and round stub of a tail; dumba is also used metaphorically to mean ‘fat’.
The Jamun Tree
* The second verse of the first surah of the Holy Quran, it is one of the verses most commonly repeated by Muslims in their lives, in a variety of situations, to invoke the infinite mercy of Allah, the Lord of the Universe.
Search
* This story is dedicated to Humra Quraishi.
A Dialogue: Gulzar and Joginder Paul on Partition and Their Fiction
* ‘Dera Baba Nanak’ was first published in English in The Little Magazine: Looking Back, vol. II, Delhi, 2001; later included in Favourite Fiction: 24 Stories from South Asia, TLM Books, Delhi, 2005.
* At the time of this dialogue, Manmohan Singh, born in Gah in Pakistan’s Punjab, was the prime minister of India, and Pervez Musharraf, born in Delhi, India, was the president of Pakistan.
About the Book
The Partition of 1947 has influenced the works of an entire generation of writers, and continues to do so. Gulzar witnessed the horrors of Partition first-hand and it is a theme that he has gone back to again and again in his writings. Footprints on Zero Line brings together a collection of his finest writings - fiction, non-fiction and poems - on the subject. What sets it apart from other writings on Partition is that Gulzar’s unerring eye does not stop at the events of 1947 but looks at how they continue to affect our lives to this day.
Wonderfully rendered in English by well-known author and acclaimed translator Rakhshanda Jalil, this compilation marks seventy years of India’s Independence. It is not only a brilliant collection on a cataclysmic event in the history of our nation by one of our finest contemporary writers, it is also a timely reminder that those who forget the errors of the past are doomed to repeat them.
About the Authors
Poet, author, lyricist, film-maker, and screenplay and dailogue writer, Gulzar is one of the towering figures of Indian cinema, culture and literarute. Both in Dina (now in Pakistan), his career in cinema took off as an assistant to film-maker Bimal Roy.
A stalwart of Indian literature and one of the finest poets in urdu/Hindustani, he has a number of poetry and short-story collections to his credit. He has published two volumes of his translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems, Baaghbhaan and Nindiya Chor. He is also one of the finest writers for childern in the country.
He is recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Bhushan. In 2008, he was awarded an Oscar for his song ‘Jai ho’ in Slumdog Millionare. He received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2014.
Rakshanda Jalil is a writer, critic, and literary historian. She was published over fifty academic papers and essays. She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindu-Urdu literature and culture. Her books include a translation of fifteen short stories by Intizar Husain entitled The Death of Sheherzad (HarperCollins, 2014) and The Sea Lies Ahead, a translation of Intizar Husain’s seminal novel on Karachi (HarperCollins, 2014).
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First published in India in 2017 by Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers India
Copyright © Gulzar 2017
Translation copyright © Rakhshanda Jalil 2017
P-ISBN: 978-93-5277-057-1
Epub Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 978-93-5277-058-8
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Gulzar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
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sp; Cover design : Saurabh Garge
Charcoal Sketches : Gulzar
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