A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  Shimla, this peaceful little town where the only threat appears to be the rumour of a cheetah and perhaps a monkey-thief on the road, is intimately connected with the last days of the Raj and the partition of India. This is well known, but walking along an isolated path in the woods, or in the paradisaical garden of the Institute, the reminder nevertheless manages to hit one with a jolt.

  In June 1945, the viceroy, Lord Wavell, invited Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Mahatma Gandhi, Tara Singh, and other Indian leaders to the so-called Simla Conference to decide on the future of India; specifically, what form self-government should take with respect to the representation of India’s minorities. Nehru, of the Indian National Congress, arrived straight from jail, where he had done time for civil disobedience. Jinnah, formerly of Congress, now represented the Muslim League, which was at loggerheads with Congress regarding the representation of Muslims in independent India. An astute lawyer, he was not very much liked by the British; the viceroy’s ADC, Peter Coats, privately called him “the Muslim in the woodpile.” The conference was a failure, for the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress could not agree.

  Wrote the Atlantic Monthly a few months later,

  The most powerful figure in Indian politics today is not the Viceroy, nor Mahatma Gandhi, nor Jawaharlal Nehru. It is a lean, gray-haired, impeccably dressed Karachi lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Moslem League. Upon his attitude depends the success or failure of the present attempt to solve the Indian problem.

  An arguable assessment, conforming to the portrayal of Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, which in its turn outraged the Pakistanis, who revere Jinnah as much as Indians do Gandhi, perhaps more. (A 1998 film on Jinnah’s life, with Christopher Lee playing the lead role, could not obtain distribution and came out as a DVD.) The partition of India, which had to be agreed upon after Simla, is debated to this date, the subject fraught with accusations and regrets. It was him; it was them; if only. History and historical interpretation, too, suffered division, and belong to two separate worlds.

  Not all Indian Muslims followed Jinnah; one of the delegates representing Congress at the Simla Conference had been Maulana Azad, who spoke Persian to Freya Stark, the well-known advisor to the British Empire. The irony was that it was Azad who was the practising Muslim, and not the “snappy dresser” Jinnah, who got his clothes from London’s Savile Row, did not speak Urdu, let alone Persian, and reportedly drank wine. There is a belief, therefore, corroborated by some of Jinnah’s later speeches, that it was a secular state for a Muslim majority that he had in mind, not anything like the current Islamic state with a gun-toting Taliban on the rampage. Perhaps he did not know his constituency well enough. Ayesha Jalal, a well-known Pakistani scholar in the United States, has even put forward the argument that Jinnah did not want a separate Muslim homeland at all, but merely used the threat as a bargaining chip to win safeguards for India’s Muslim minority.

  In 1947 arrived the last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, to oversee the division and independence of India. A Boundary Commission was established, which put up in Shimla at the Cecil Hotel in Chaura Maidan, to draw the boundary between independent India and the new state of Pakistan. The boundary was drawn, and the transfer of populations, which took place in the northwest and the northeast, was accompanied by scenes of gruesome violence in which half a million lives were lost. The figure is quite readily trotted out, as I have just done; but when one pauses to think about it, it is, quite literally, stunning.

  In what remained of India, in Gujarat, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, for example, substantial Muslim populations continued to live alongside a Hindu majority. But the acrimony and suspicion of Partition would remain, the Muslims of India for long left to wonder if they had made the right decision to stay, always wary, especially during the wars between the two countries, of being seen as a fifth column or rooting for the enemy. Taunts would be suffered, and Muslim areas of India dubbed “Pakistan” to this day. Countless bloody riots would take place. Today there are roughly one hundred and fifty million Muslims in India. The problem of Kashmir remains unsolved. The two countries face each other with nuclear weapons. And today’s Pakistan would surely be Jinnah’s nightmare.

  Raja Bhasin, the Shimla historian, wonders if the bloodbath of Partition could have been averted had there been no summer capital and had the government thus been more in contact with the people. He quotes Gandhi: “I can no more effectively deliver my message to millions by travelling first class than the Viceroy can rule over the hearts of India’s millions from his unapproachable Simla heights.”

  After Partition, most Muslims of Shimla left; Mahbub Ali’s Pathan ilk disappeared.

  It is fitting, then, that in this palace which hosted the Simla Conference to decide the fate of independent India, where Nehru and Gandhi and Jinnah and others came to wrangle, and ultimately where the line was drawn to divide the country, there takes place a seminar to commemorate the author Manto, whose stories are the most savage indictment of the insanity that prevailed at Partition.

  Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the greatest story writers the country (if one forgets for a while the political boundary that so incensed him) has produced. While Tagore has the lofty grace, the wisdom, the aesthetic quality, the diversity, Manto is the story writer, pure and raw, and his narratives about Partition are like a kick in the gut; they will never become simply quaint, simply great, simply admired; they will continue to shock and probe and haunt each generation as it grapples with the incomprehensible violence that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent and continues periodically to erupt.

  It is of course particularly satisfying for someone such as I—to whom the concept of the Partition comes as an offence on the self, because it asks me to choose, and it invites others to put a label on me—that this conference takes place on Indian soil, with visitors also from Pakistan (albeit via the United States). But most of these Manto fans are Hindus, if one wants to put a label on them; and they delight in Manto tales, just as they delight in stories about Faiz, another great secular writer who wound up on the other side, ultimately to be exiled. At this conference translations of Manto stories are read and debated over; themes therein are discussed; a three-volume collection of Partition stories is launched, compiled by the scholar Alok Bhalla, who travelled to Pakistan to collect some of them. And finally the film of Bhishm Sahni’s Partition novel Tamas is shown.

  But this seems too much dwelling on the tragic as the academic and the aesthetic. Tragedy becomes career. I decline to see the film on this occasion, after which the audience will undoubtedly meet for tea and cookies. The subject is still too raw for me; only three years before, there was the massive communal violence in Bombay and Gujarat that shocked me to the core. Still, this is intellectual life at the Institute, the former Viceregal Lodge, at its best. At another time, however, a professor of astrology comes to explain his theory of how the entire world received its civilization from India. The new nationalism is not far beneath the surface of this exposition. But the director, with all his philosophic composure, treats the astrologer with due respect, with a pointed and polite question at the end.

  After the food, when everyone is sitting around, she says to him, “Come on, sing.” And she announces, “Bhishm-ji will sing.”

  This is at the Sahnis’ farewell party at the director’s house.

  “No,” he says, in that gentle tone. “I don’t remember the words. Next time,” he promises, “we’ll come having practised.”

  But finally, after exhortations, the two of them sing a song from a film in which his brother Balraj had acted. Bhishm-ji’s voice is low, hers high; there are some false starts, words sometimes forgotten. The voices crack, but the melody is there.

  And once again I marvel at the presence of song in Indian life, the spontaneity, the love with which people in a circle will begin to sing. For now there are others among us who take their turn. London for some reason remind
s someone of a ghazal of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. It is the one he wrote before his death in Burma, in which he says there’s not even six feet of his beloved Indian homeland to be buried in. Does anyone know it? someone asks. Bhishm-ji and Sheila-ji sing: and the wonder for me is that there is help from everyone present, especially the Punjabis, who suffered some of the worst traumas of the Partition, some of whom were born on the other side. It is, after all, a ghazal by a Mughal emperor that they are reciting with such devotion.

  “I’ll sing an IPTA song,” Bhishm-ji then says. By this time a round or two of Scotch has been poured. “The words are not so great,” he smiles, “there’s hardly a tune, but I’ll sing it anyway, because it is an IPTA song.”

  And gently, unwaveringly, he sings.

  Excursion to the Plains: The Old House in Amritsar

  The year I do not remember, but there was great revolutionary fervour in Amritsar….

  I would spend the entire day at Jallianwala Bagh. Sitting under a tree, I would watch the windows of the houses bordering the park and dream about the girls who lived behind them. I was sure one of these days, one of them would fall in love with me.

  SAADAT HASAN MANTO, “The Price of Freedom”

  MY WIFE NURJEHAN’S FATHER is a Punjabi from Amritsar. In Dar es Salaam, where we were both brought up, she was a minority among Gujarati and Kutchi Indians. And so even she, speaking Kutchi and Hindustani (the pre-Partition cosmopolitan form of Hindi and Urdu), did not quite know how much of a Partition child she was. Those of our generation hadn’t even heard the word. Her father and mother moved to Tanganyika in 1946, just before the Partition. At Partition, the rest of the family made their escape in the night, leaving almost everything behind them, and headed for Bombay by train, whence they dispersed to Africa, England, Pakistan, Canada, and the United States. My father-in-law has returned to India many times, never to Amritsar. But he did send us to look at the place of his birth. I wonder at the knot of feelings he must carry inside him, which he has never revealed.

  Bhishm Sahni has a poignant story called “Amritsar Has Arrived,” which he read to us around the viceroys’ long oak table in the seminar room at Shimla one afternoon. In the story, during the tumult of Partition, a train leaves Lahore, bound south. Into a compartment get a tall Pathan of typical arrogant bearing and a mild-mannered, small Bania, from the trader caste, considered cowardly but cunning. The Bania withers before the Pathan’s belligerent boorishness, constantly deferring to him. Suddenly, however, the train stops, and the familiar clamour of a railway station is heard. Coolies get in. Amritsar has arrived! goes the cry. This city is now Hindu and Sikh, cleansed of its Muslims. (As Lahore, correspondingly, has been cleansed of its Hindus and Sikhs; one must always balance the narrative on this prickly subject.) The little Bania discovers a sudden ferociousness awakening in him, and it is the Pathan who begins to cower, and is ultimately murdered.

  We leave Shimla by taxi, go down to Kalka, and from there westwards on the Grand Trunk Road, which was not only the main setting but also a character in Kipling’s Kim. We pass Ambala—where Kim gave his coded message to the Colonel in his bungalow about an uprising in the north—Ludhiana, and Jalandhar, pass two of the great rivers of Punjab, the Sutlej and the Beas. On both sides are the fertile fields of the green revolution, growing wheat this season. The GT Road, built by the emperor Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century, begins at Peshawar in the northwest of Pakistan, passes through India, and ends beyond Calcutta in Bangladesh, spanning a distance of one thousand five hundred miles. We don’t see the throbbing pedestrian life that Kipling described on the road, but there are trucks and buses, and roadside dhabas with bare string cots spread out for travellers to rest and have their samosas, teas, paranthas, and the oiliest vegetable curries that go burning down your throat like acid.

  This trip is going to be short; there is a three-year-old to cater to, who is particular about where he pees. If he doesn’t approve of where you take him, he simply says, “Doesn’t want to,” and holds it in. The adults have had malaria in Africa and know their mosquitoes, they think; it is the two kids they need to worry about. The GT Road enters Amritsar in a street that is bizarrely lined with numerous bicycle shops. We find our accommodation, a guest house at the Guru Nanak Dev University, a splendidly spread-out green campus, and then, leaving a message for one Balwinder Singh, who is to show us the old family house, we head for the Golden Temple, where in 1984, in an operation called Blue Star, Indira Gandhi sent in troops against extremists fighting for a Sikh homeland, thus giving cause to her assassination.

  The Golden Temple is usually known as Harmandir Sahib (God’s Temple) and Darbar Sahib. It was built in the time of Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth of the Sikh Gurus, on a sacred pool called Amritsar (“pool of immortality”), which had been dug by the fourth Guru. It was this pool that gave the name to the city that grew around it. The foundation stone of the temple was laid in 1588 by a great Sufi from nearby Lahore, Hazrat Mian Mir. It was completed in 1601 and incorporates both Hindu and Muslim elements in its design. Situated on a platform in the pool, with a walkway bridging it to the gateway on the land, it houses the original Adi Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs, which contains the sayings of the Gurus and also some of the compositions of Muslim and Hindu saints. In a reverse tribute, in one of the ginans—songs—recited in the prayer house of my childhood, Nanak, the first Guru and founder of Sikhism, is listed among the great souls along with other mystics.

  The Sikh religion is a blend of Islam and Hinduism. Khushwant Singh, in his book on his people, calls it “a Hindu renaissance produced by Islam,” and “an edifice built as it were with Hindu bricks and Muslim mortar.” Belief in the one God and the paramountcy of the Book are reminiscent of Islam; the devotion of this God in the form of songs is akin to the devotions to Krishna and Rama of Hindu bhaktiism, devotional mysticism. Guru Nanak (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism, is believed to have been influenced both by Kabir (died 1398), a disciple of the great south Indian mystic Ramanand, and the Sufi Baba Farid of Lahore, who was also the master of Shaikh Nizamuddin of Delhi. This network of mystical influences spreading out across northern India is reflected in the common language of the songs, commonly called bhajans, of the mystical devotees, which are appreciated by masses of Indians to this day and celebrated even by Bollywood. It is said that when a young Guru Nanak reappeared after a mystical experience which lasted three days, during which he saw God, the first words he uttered were, “There is no Hindu and there is no Muslim.” Sikhism also did away completely with caste. It is even believed by some devotees of Guru Nanak that he made a visit to Mecca, where he performed some wondrous feats. All this was forgotten in the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh butchery and mutual cleansing of the Partition.

  Sikhs from across the world come to pay homage to the Darbar Sahib; yet it is a peaceful, orderly place and remarkably clean. Sikh bhajans are sung at the entrance, and as you leave you are given a prasad, which is sooji halwa—much to our excitement, identical to the prasad received at our khano, where it is called sukhreet, from the Sanskrit sukrita, meaning “well made.”

  Important for us, now that we are in Amritsar, is the family story: Nurjehan’s family had lived in the metal market area, Loha Mandi, behind the Golden Temple, two silver doors of which bear the handiwork of her grandfather or his father.

  In 1984, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, sent the Indian army into the temple to capture (“flush out”) Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, one of the leaders of the extremist movement, and other armed militants who were operating from within its confines. The military operation, called Blue Star, has since become infamous in Sikh and Golden Temple history. In the confrontation, Bhindranwale was shot dead among hundreds of others, many of them simply caught in the crossfire. The Akal Takht, the sacred seat of the Sikhs, a beautiful white building with a golden dome, was damaged. Directly as a result of this sacrilege of the holy place, the prime minister was assassinated by her two Sikh b
odyguards, and the head of the army was also killed. There followed in retaliation a massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, conducted by mobs, in which a few thousand people were killed, sometimes in the most gruesome manner. Seen among the mobs carrying out the violence were members of the ruling Congress party in their whites and police officers in their khakis.

  Operation Blue Star of independent India is an ironic reminder of another Amritsar bloodbath, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, which took place under British rule in 1919. To most Indians, there couldn’t be a greater difference between the two confrontations, though in the minds of many Sikhs, Operation Blue Star looms even larger. It is to Jallianwala Bagh, a short walk away, that we go directly from the temple.

  The scene is as it has been shown in the movies: a narrow corridor leads into an enclosed park. The corridor was blocked as General Dyer (who had been a student at the Bishop Cotton School in Shimla) brought his troops at a run into the Bagh. At the general’s orders, they took aim with their rifles, and on his command they fired on more than a thousand unarmed men, women, and children who had gathered for a protest.

  There is the well near the centre, into which people jumped to escape the bullets. On the boundary walls of the Bagh are the bullet holes. Plaques describe details of the incident. Our eleven-year-old is much taken with this story. Unprompted, he will describe it for his school project; and he will buy a book on the Indian Mutiny. This grandson of Partition refugees will return with a Sikh friend some years later and spend a night at the guest house of the Darbar Sahib.