My first thanks go to Peter Chappell and Satti Khanna whose film, A Division of Hearts, was what began this project for me. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my friend, C.V. Subbarao and for me, the greatest tragedy is that Subba is no longer around to critique, argue, find fault with, and support my work. I could not have carried on this exercise had it not been for my dear friend and onetime fellow traveller Sudesh Vaid who, when the burden of listening to stories of such tragedy began to seem particularly heavy, generously offered to come in and help. I have many families scattered all over the world. From the very beginning my London family, Olivia Bennett, Stephen Clues, Sarah Hobson, Aparna Jack, Naila Kabeer, Munni Kabir, Marion and Robert Molteno, Bunny Page, Anne Rodford, Rupert Snell and Paul Westlake have been a source of such deep support that it is difficult for me to find words to thank them. Not only have they provided so many homes away from home, they have put up with my endless encroachments on their lives, my demands on their time, and have good-humouredly allowed themselves to be coerced into reading ‘just five pages of the introduction’ at all hours of the morning and night, and especially before they are rushing to work. To them, my deepest thanks. In London too, other much-loved members of my family: Ian Jack, David Page and Ralph Russell have been particularly generous in providing feedback and gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) criticism and encouragement. To the editors at Granta I owe a debt of gratitude for having published part of my work in their special issue on India, for it was this that, in many ways, gave me the confidence to continue.
My London family is joined by my Hong Kong family: I am especially grateful to Geeta Chanda for all her cheering-on e-mails, and for keeping faith with my work, and to Nayan Chanda for his positive responses to it. My friends in Arena, Ah King, Ed, James, Jeannie, Kathy, Neng, Sumi, Titos and particularly and most especially, Lau Kin Chi for sharing her work and believing in mine. I thank too my Pakistan family, Ferida, Firhana, Lala, Neelam and their parents, for providing warmth, hospitality and much needed support: Shukria. In Morocco, my friends Fatima Mernissi and Layla Chaouni locked me in a room and fed and looked after me while I wrote. Fatima would quiz me every evening as I presented her with yet another revised plan of the book, and I had to spend the day preparing for this ‘exam’.
And at home: where shall I begin? So many people have read bits of this work. Not a week has gone by this last year without one or other of my many wonderful friends calling and egging me on. When are you going to finish this? Why don’t you just get on with it? Do you want someone to look at it? Had it not been for their encouragement, and sometimes their threats, I doubt I would have been able to let go of this manuscript. For their support, for their many readings of this and that, I am grateful to: Gouri Chatterjee, Robi Chatterjee for several years of reproach at not getting on with the job, Ella Dutta, Beatrice Kachuk for detailed feedback on my many attempts at making sense of this work, Anuradha Kapur, Arvind Kumar, Charles Lewis, Meenakshi and Sujit Mukerjee, Manjula Padmanabhan, Rajni Palriwala, Vinod Raina, Sanjeev Saith, Kumkum Sangari, Radhika Singha, Drago Stambuck for suggestions about the title which I did not take, Ramya Subrahmanian, Ravi Vasudevan. My thanks to my editor, Udayan Mitra, to my publisher David Davidar for his faith, his patience and his excellent advice on the details of my manuscript, and Zamir Ansari for believing in my work despite not being able to read it! At different times Subhadra Sanyal and Ram Narayan provided valuable research assistance; they unearthed new and constantly fascinating material and often pointed me in the right direction. To Shankar and Sanjay for giving up their weekends and typesetting in record time. To Upali Chakravarti and Geetanjali Gangoli for helping to read the proofs, also in record time. To my colleagues Bhim Singh, Elsy, Jaya, Ritu and Satish for things they will not even know about. To Henry Aronson for giving up a bit of his holiday and providing a reading ‘from outside’ and, especially, to my friend, Claudio Nappo, for believing in me, and in my work.
Three major debts remain. The first of these is to a small group of friends without whom I would not have been able to cope with this work. Not only have they read and re-read each page and chapter, but they have advised, criticized and been there for me at all times of day and night. An acknowledgment is a poor thing: I do not know how I can thank them enough, but an acknowledgment is all I have, so I offer it, with a truly deep sense of gratitude to: Uma Chakravarti, Primila Lewis, Tanika and Sumit Sarkar and Harsh Sethi.
Equally, I offer thanks to the many people who agreed to speak to me, who gave of their time, and trust. Had it not been for them, and their stories, this book would never have been written. Their names are too numerous to mention, and some may well not want them mentioned, but to them my sincere gratitude.
And finally, most importantly, my own family: my mother, father, Bela, my sister and editor extraordinary, Pankaj and Nilofer for coffee (much needed and without which I would have simply slept my way through the many years I have put in) and for the many discussions and readings, Rahul and Meera for the e-mail access at all times of day or night and for their general good humour, and my most beloved nieces and nephew Damini, Ishani and Vidur without whom life with this book would have been unutterably dull. From across the border, Ranamama, around whom so much of this work is woven, has been with me throughout this book, and I hope that one day I will be able to show him to it and tell him how much it has meant to me, and from another world, my grandmother Dayawanti/Ayesha whose spirit has remained with me throughout this work.
Thank you
‘The New History of Cephallonia’ was proving to be a problem; it seemed to be impossible to write it without the intrusion of his own feelings and prejudices. Objectivity seemed to be quite unattainable, and he felt that his false starts must have wasted more paper than was normally used on the island in the space of a year. The voice that emerged in his account was intractably his own; it was never historical. It lacked grandeur and impartiality. It was not Olympian.
He sat down and wrote: .... ‘This island betrays its own people in the mere act of existing,’ he wrote, and then he crumpled the sheet of paper and flung it into the corner of the room. This would never do; why could he not write like a writer of histories? Why could he not write without passion? Without anger? Without the sense of betrayal and oppression? He picked up the sheet, already bent at the corners, that he had written first. It was the title page: ‘The New History of Cephallonia’. He crossed out the first two words and substituted ‘A Personal’. Now he could forget about leaving out the loaded objectives and the ancient historical grudges, now he could be vitriolic about the Romans, the Normans, the Venetians, the Turks, the British, and even the islanders themselves. He wrote ....
Louis de Bernières: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Do you really think anyone will change with listening to your tapes? Yes, it’s true that the experience will be caught, that will be there, that this kind of thing happened during Partition, there is a kind of suffering that people don’t know or have forgotten about. And people don’t know that it was only then that we got independence. So this may help in remembering that, but other than that I don’t think this will make much difference to anyone.
Suppose the government plays some of your records. If you take fifty interviews, and they play one, and one person is such that he has had a bitter experience with the government — and this is entirely possible — and he criticizes the government. Do you think they will tolerate this? And there is one other thing. You keep these tapes, who knows what this is about? You will label these, saying this is about the Partition of India and Pakistan. You’ll make a card, with a number, and it will say experience of the person who suffered during Partition ... The truth is that this experience has been with us for a long time. Do you think these tapes will make any difference to the next set of rulers?
Manmohan Singh, village Thamali
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 1998
Published in Penguin Books 1998
Copyright © Urvashi Butalia 1998
Cover: ‘Excavated images to stain an old quilt cover, brought by my grandmother from Karachi in 1947, Version 2’ by Nalini Malani
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ISBN: 978-01-4027-171-3
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-314-1
The author and the publishers would like to thank Martin Seeker & Warburg and Louis de Berniéres for permission to quote an extract from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Berniéres (London, 1994)
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Other Side Of Silence Page 34
