Abstract
As we approach the end of the seventh decade after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the trauma generated by the event continues to impact the subjective, political, literary and cartographic trajectories on either side of the still contentious borders.
Lending expression to this trauma has always been beset with complexities. For decades ‘silence’ was the primary trope of expression. Theorists like Cathy Caruth and Elaine Scarry argue that instances of intensive cultural trauma render language reductionist and indeed, the discourses of the Partition particularly bear out this perspective.
Official historiography and literature on the Partition is not lacking. But the figures, statistics, and data archived by the state agencies fail to provide as Nora points out, the ‘real environments of memory’ (Nora, 1989, p. 9), which is often at discord with ‘history’s truth’. Such memories survive only as lieux de memoire (Nora, 1989, p. 7), that is, ‘sites of memory’ existing only within the scarred psyches of individuals.
This resurfacing of the ‘victim’s tale’ is the thematic crux of This Side, That Side, an anthology of graphic narratives. Curated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, it is cited as an attempt at ‘restorying’ the Partition of the subcontinent. The book weaves 28 narratives from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. These pieces written and illustrated by nearly 40 people from diverse intellectual, aesthetic and nationalistic backgrounds are intriguing to the core.
Revisiting the events of 1947 through these microhistories, Vishwajyoti Ghosh collates divergent expressions of trauma. Each narrative invokes metaphors that have deep cultural, linguistic and familial resonances. Narratives range from King Solomon’s Fable interpreted by Tabish Khair to Nina Sabnani’s use of embroidery of the artists of Kutch region who had suffered immeasurably from the Partition. There are heart wrenching accounts of how millions of refugees still live a contested life in the Cooper Camp and the Geneva Camp in West Bengal. Some are written in a satirical vein condemning the haste with which the Partition was negotiated. Tabish Khair and Priya Kuriyan reinterpret King Solomon’s fabled wisdom by questioning the British sense of fair play. Irfan Master and Prabha Mallya’s narrative ‘Fault Lines’ brings into focus a predicament not unlike that of the inmates of a mental asylum in Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’. The inmates of a prison are free but they do not know where to go for they see no light, only darkness everywhere. The darkness is a metaphor for madness that blinded people in post-Partition context. Vidrohi and Tina Rajan’s narrative ‘Nur Miyan’ moves with its simplicity. It tells of a woman who desires the surma made by Nur Miyan but cannot apply it anymore because Nur Miyan has left for Pakistan. The grandson weeps for his grandma’s innocent yearning for the surma and the desire that he could fulfil it. These tales are a testimony to the way the warp and woof of the social fabric was ruptured forever by the Partition. Arif Ayaz Pyaare and Wasim Helal’s narrative titled Tamasha-e-Tetwal is interesting for its intertextuality. The text reworks Manto’s famous story ‘The Dog of Tetwal’. While in Manto’s story, the soldiers on either side of the border are engaged in pointless firing, trying to claim a dog as their own, ‘Tamash-e-Tetwal’ shows how the natives of India and Pakistan talk to each other across the river Sutlej about their daily travails belittling the border entirely. Bani Abidi’s contribution ‘The News’ is a brief insight on how the media is used as a tool to propagate conflicting agendas.
While the text owes much of the depth to its use of graphic art as a medium, it is also exhaustive in its textual, intertextual, and linguistic plurality. The narratives are in English, as well as in translations from Urdu, Hindi and Bangla. Interestingly, the collection has come at a time when documentation of the Partition is receiving a fresh impetus. The ‘Aar Paar’ initiative of 2000 by Shilpa Gupta and Bani Abidi, Video Art Installations of Nalini Malini, and Dastan Goiperformances are other artistic endeavours treading similar trajectories trying to restory the Partition through the mediums of visual art. While the above-mentioned attempts are primarily visual, This Side That Side stands apart by its artistically rich and yet effortlessly artless graphical stories. Coming at a time when graphic novel is gaining popularity as a genre in India, this text may not be as succinctly a powerful narrative as Speigelman’s Maus but one can definitely place it as a text offering immensely powerful insights into the history of the subcontinent. Its gamut of experiences of Partition and its afterlife is vibrant and rife with subtle undercurrents. From life in refugee camps, to the relentless search for elusive ‘home’, difficulties of cross border travelling, to the shared dreams, fears and horror—the anthology covers a wide spectrum.
What sets it apart from earlier narratives is that it does not linger on the corporeal violence. Much of it is on how Partition configures as a contemporary trauma. It uses multiple genres—poems, songs, dastaan (story) or reportage. While few narratives speak of the creation of Bangladesh and the influx of refugees, some others focus on exchange of population in 1947. There are stories of re-enactment of the same displacement and alienation of minorities in the countries they chose to remain in. The ‘fresh voices’ of myriad of journalists, translators and storytellers echo each other in their condemnation of the tragic event and the accompanying catastrophe. It is an evidence of the way aesthetics transcends map making. While borders divide and alienate, Pakistani writer Sonya Fatah’s piece in this collection is drawn by a Bangalore artist while Delhi’s Mahmood Farooqui’s piece is illustrated by a miniature artist in Lahore.
The curator of these narratives, Vishwajyoti Ghosh is uniquely situated amongst these stories and storytellers. Born many decades after the Partition, he experienced the event or rather is experiencing its ramifications as a child born in a refugee family. For the second generation, the perception of the event is mediated by the memories of the previous generation. Marriane Hirschh has pointed out how such post-memory claims generations born decades beyond the traumatic event. Hence, while official documentation archives Partition and encloses it within the boundaries of time and space, it ignores the way the event, its memories, and the cultural trauma it generated is alive and palpable after decades. As Suketu Mehta observes,
there are two competing forces in the telling: the grandparents and the governments. The governments have their own ideas of the story, … textbooks on both sides … gloss quickly over Partition, preferring to concentrate on the struggle for independence … So the child growing up in Lahore or Delhi or Dhaka shuttles between two tellings: what he is instructed at school, which he will have to learn by rote and regurgitate in the examinations, and what his old grandmother tells him in the last room of the house about the days of the junoon’ (fanaticism). (Mehta, 2004)
Hence, one needs a ‘telling’ that is different from the official telling. Ghosh in the foreword to the text expresses how he had once striven to write a book on Partition and how his dream eventually has taken the form of ‘tin trunk of memories’ (p. 7), memories not just his own but those which transcend the borders and take a peep This Side and That Side. Ghosh observes that the earnestness behindthis anthology stems from the desire to lend an ear as well as a voice to subsequent generations about how they have negotiated with the legacy of Partition. The book lays emphasis on what one can call ‘people’s history’. Its focus is not restrained either temporally or spatially. It brings together the continuing narratives of displacement, exile, trauma from the point of view of the masses.
Complex and intriguing it may sound but it cannot be denied that Partition invokes different images for different people. Images of loss, displacement, mutual distrust alternate with an equally strong desire to go back to the stories of shared beliefs, affection and desires. It is these stories, some uncanny, a few waiting to be told that coalesce in this collection. They are at once powerful and evocative.