Like Ali, the Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster. Yet it also transformed him into the supreme master of the Urdu short story. Before Partition, Manto was an essayist, screenwriter, and journalist of varying artistic attainment. Afterward, during several years of frenzied creativity, he became an author worthy of comparison with Chekhov, Zola, and Maupassant—all of whom he translated and adopted as models.
Although his work is still little known outside South Asia, a number of fine new translations—by Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck, and Aftab Ahmad—promise to bring him a wider audience. Although he faced criticism and censorship, he wrote obsessively about the sexual violence that accompanied Partition. Instead, he urges us to try to understand what is going on in the minds of all his characters, the murderers as well as the murdered, the rapists as well as the raped. As he tries to explain his affliction to Kalwant Kaur, his current lover, he tells the story of discovering the girl after breaking into a house and killing her family:.
I thought she had gone into a faint, so I carried her over my shoulder all the way to the canal which runs outside the city. Then I laid her down on the grass, behind some bushes and. Ishwar Singh opened his eyes. I had carried a dead body. Two or three years after the Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals.
The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India. It was difficult to say whether the proposal made any sense or not. However, the decision had been taken at the topmost level on both sides.
In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh. The need to earn a living forced Manto into a state of hyper-productivity; for a period in , he was writing a book a month, at the rate of one story a day. Under this stress, he fell into a depression and became an alcoholic. His family had him committed to a mental asylum in an attempt to curb his drinking, but he died of its effects in , at the age of forty-two.
He opted to live in India, but at the moment when Partition was announced he happened to be at a military workshop on the Pakistan side of the border. Within months, the two new countries were at war over Kashmir, and Ali was pressed into service by the Pakistani Army and prevented from returning to his home, in India.
In , the Army discharged him on the ground that he had become a citizen of India. Yet when he got to the frontier he was not recognized as Indian, and was arrested for entering without a travel permit. In , after serving a prison sentence in India, he was deported back to Pakistan. Six years later, he was still being deported back and forth, shuttling between the prisons and refugee camps of the two new states. His official file closes with the Muslim soldier under arrest in a camp for Hindu prisoners on the Pakistani side of the border.
Ever since , India and Pakistan have nourished a deep-rooted mutual antipathy. They have fought two inconclusive wars over the disputed region of Kashmir—the only Muslim-majority area to remain within India.
In , they fought over the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. In , after Pakistani troops crossed into an area of Kashmir called Kargil, the two countries came alarmingly close to a nuclear exchange.
Despite periodic gestures toward peace negotiations and moments of rapprochement, the Indo-Pak conflict remains the dominant geopolitical reality of the region. In Kashmir, a prolonged insurgency against Indian rule has left thousands dead and still gives rise to intermittent violence.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, where half the female population remains illiterate, defense eats up a fifth of the budget, dwarfing the money available for health, education, infrastructure, and development.
But the route that Pakistan has taken to defend itself against Indian demographic and military superiority has been disastrous for both countries. These groups have been creating as much—if not more—trouble for Pakistan as they have for the neighbors the I. Today, both India and Pakistan remain crippled by the narratives built around memories of the crimes of Partition, as politicians particularly in India and the military particularly in Pakistan continue to stoke the hatreds of for their own ends.
It was out of madrassas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged. In Delhi, a hard-line right-wing government rejects dialogue with Islamabad. Both countries find themselves more vulnerable than ever to religious extremism. In a sense, has yet to come to an end. By Pankaj Mishra. In addition to the British-controlled territories, the subcontinent also consisted of many other territories under French, Portuguese or Omani rule, as well as more than sovereign princely states ruled by local monarchs.
Upon independence, the British gave the princely states the option to join India or Pakistan — by signing the Instrument of Accession — or to remain independent. Some of these territories and princely states did not become part of India or Pakistan until recently. Today, Kashmir remains the only region of British India that has not been integrated into one of the two nations or gained independence.
As the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal were effectively split in half approximately seven million Hindus and Sikhs and seven million Muslims found themselves in the wrong country.
Believing they would return "home," many families left their valuables behind before they packed up their essential belongings and began the trek to India or West or East Pakistan now Bangladesh. Many never made it. How could neighboring communities, accustomed to centuries of relative peace have suddenly turned so violently upon one another? One could blame the July 15, decision by the British to hand over power only a month later on August 15, , a full ten months earlier than anticipated.
One could blame the hastily drawn borders, which were created by a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe who lacked basic knowledge of India and was given only five weeks to redraw all the borders of South Asia. One could fault the increasingly hostile rhetoric that accompanied the rise of Hindu and Muslim nationalism or the divide and rule policies of the British.
Whereas the popularly accepted narrative of Partition stresses each of these factors and characterizes the violence as neighbor turning against neighbor and bands of weapon-laden young men in the throes of a communal frenzy seeking out their next victims, these interviews provide different perspectives.
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