Abstract
The narrative of India’s partition is a story of unprecedented loss of life, destruction, barbarity and, of course, a story of how millions were forced out of age-old homes to rebuild lives from scratch. The generation that lived through the partition period has now mostly passed on. Not surprisingly however, writings on the partition of India continue with interesting new approaches seeking to understand and explain events, issues and contexts that have hitherto been oversighted. The extensive literature on the partition of India includes as many works of fiction as also conventional works of history. This volume is neither a conventional work of history nor a work of fiction. It is, in fact, a new approach to studying the psychological impact of partition and its aftermath. Some good studies have no doubt touched upon the trauma and its psychological impact but not with an approach that this study has attempted to do.
The editors of the volume are two well-qualified medical professionals trained as psychiatrists from leading institutions of the country. Dr Sanjeev Jain is the Professor of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru, and Dr Alok Sarin is a clinical psychiatrist at the Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, New Delhi. The eleven articles that are included in the volume seek to study and put in context the deep scars or rather psychological scars that the partition has left.
The idea of the volume is a new addition to the existing historiography on the partition of India. As the renowned psychiatrist Professor N. N. Wig in his foreword to the volume has noted, ‘the compilation links history and literature to psychiatry’. In doing so, it seeks to draw attention in a scientific and medical manner to the psychological impact of the tragic events of 1947.
Some of the articles are outstanding, but some appear out of context in a volume of such complex objectives. Even as the title of the volume suggests an emphasis on the aftermath of the horrific events, the eleven different articles that constitute the volume touch upon various different issues. The titles of the articles are: Setting the Stage: The Partition of India and the Silence of Psychiatry; The Partitioning of Madness; Balm and Salve: The Effects of Partition on Health Care; Partitioning of Minds and the Legitimization of Difference; Borderline States and Their Interface with Psychiatry; Writing and Rewriting Partition’s Afterlife; Refugees of the Partition of India; Anger is a Short Madness; Are We Women? Not Citizens—Mridula Sarabhai; The Rhetoric of Violence; Looking Within, Looking Without.
The article ‘The Partition of India and the Silence of Psychiatry’ by the two editors truly sets the stage. It draws attention to the manner in which this important issue has been oversighted. It explains the ‘unleashing of insanity’, so intimately is reflective of the horrific events. ‘The Partitioning of Madness’ too makes compelling reading. Very importantly, it examines and puts in perspective how human behaviour had reached a stage of bordering on madness. Several acclaimed works of fiction have dealt with the inhuman and beastly behaviour that people overcame in the region. This article discusses how much of the violence thought to be ‘fictionalised’ had actually take place. Those conversant with writings on partition would know that the exercise involved the division of virtually every asset—records files, the High Courts, the universities, official records of every department, the railways, the museums, banks, libraries, furniture, typewriters and even staff cycles. We already have several accounts of this. What this article very fascinatingly introduces the reader to is the division of the assets of the mental hospitals including the unfortunate patients. In the case of Punjab, for example, the division meant that 450 patients were shifted to India from what became Pakistan. Of these, 282 patients of Punjabi origin were admitted to the Amritsar hospital and the remaining 168 were sent to Ranchi. Many of these patients we learn were chronic and non-communicative. The article very sensitively questions the rational that determined this selection. The trauma of the patients can well be imagined.
Yet another article that makes for fascinating reading is ‘Balm and Salve’. It puts actual happenings into medical terminology—‘hysterical urge’. We are able to understand why people just rushed into being on the ‘right’ side. Countless are the reports of even police officers and government functionaries deserting their positions overnight. This was one of the main reasons for the anarchy that overtook Punjab. In comparison, things were less hysterical in Bengal at the height of the exchange of population. Not surprisingly, violence was less brutal and death figures were much lower. The article draws attention to how medical facilities and supply chains collapsed. It would have added to the richness of the content if a reference had also been made to the Kurukshetra Refugee Camp, the largest in 1947. It was here that about 3,221 people died due to various medical problems in just three months—November 1947 to January 1948. A reference could also have been in place in this well-researched article on the hospital that was set up in Lahore to especially treat women whose breasts had been amputated. Several reports have shown how doctors and medical staff performed unendingly and with great heroism.
Perhaps the deepest psychological scar that has resulted from the partition of India has been in the context of women. The recovery of women has been dealt with in the article ‘Refugees of the Partition of India’. Much has already been written on this both in the form of conventional history and acclaimed works of fiction. The article draws attention to several such writings. The chapter ‘Are We Women Not Citizens’ puts in context the important work of Mridula Sarabhai. Somehow the author has oversighted a key source, the Mridula Sarabhai papers at the Manuscript Section of the Nehru Memorial Library. It is well known that Mridula Sarabhai was a close associate of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and it was he who initially encouraged and supported her in the monumental task she took up. Her private papers contain a note prepared on 1 January 1948 that is titled ‘Note on Guardians of Minor Children’. It is important to understand the overall scene in the context of the psychological impact of partition. In these papers is also a note titled ‘Brief History of the Recovery of Abducted Women’. In this, Sarabhai has explained the problems she faced.
Sarabhai’s hard work had drawn extensive international attention to the issue of the abduction and recovery of women. This for some reason did not go down too well with the Government of India. Sometime later as Sheikh Abdullah began to walk a defiant path in Kashmir, Sarabhai came out in support of Abdullah, particularly when he was dismissed (1953). Nehru as records show was very sensitive to any exercise that sought to draw attention to the violence, the killings and particularly the suffering of women in the partition events. He was very unhappy with Sarabhai:
Our office must be completely aloof from Mridula Sarabhai…. Her good intentions may be accepted but she has done more harm to India during the last two years, than almost anybody I know of…she should have nothing to with the organization of recovery of abducted persons…. (SW, Vol. 34, p. 220)
The volume is undoubtedly important towards understanding an important result of India’s partition—the impact it had on common minds. For editors who task themselves with a new and challenging historiographical approach, the problem remains of ensuring that contributing authors keep in mind the broad framework of the volume itself. The partition of India is perhaps the most written-upon subject in recent times. Importantly, there is generally a consensus among most scholars with regard to the origin of the partition concept as well as how the whole narrative cannot really be compared with historical developments elsewhere in the world that may appear to be similar. The problem arises when we make observations that are sweeping or even judge the past with tools that are purely relevant to the present. The attempt, for example, to compare the recent communal unrest in Muzaffarnagar with happenings of 1947 is not quite in place (partitioning of minds). Likewise, in the same article, a comparison is drawn between the All India Muslim League Resolution of March 1940 (the idea of Pakistan) to the book by M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood (1939). Contentious as the observation is, it is important also to note that the seeds of the two-nation theory were far deeply embedded and the idea had evolved over time and for varying political and other reasons. To give such importance to the writings of Golwalkar that too in 1939 would not stand a fair historiographical examination.
The overdependence on the same set of writings—both fictional works and works of history—is another issue that seems to weaken the arguments raised in some of the articles. The importance of this volume however lies in the fact that it seeks to open a new field of research. This challenge has very ably been taken on in some of the articles. The book does explain very convincingly the madness of 1947 and how this insanity destroyed age-old foundations. That the psychological scars refuse to fade is only because for those who lived the trauma and, in many cases, the price paid by their following generation was for too much, not only in terms of the loss of life and destruction but also because people still remember with great nostalgia a way of life that was destroyed at such a short notice.