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The present paper examines the claim, made on behalf of ‘partition literature’, that it is a more comprehensive account of partition than social-historical accounts. That it is non-partisan and humane. Through the readings of Alok Bhalla’s three volume collection titled Stories about the partition of India (1994), it is shown how in the process of translation and genre-formation, certain texts are ‘communalized’ and rejected or accepted after constructing an elaborate structure of justification. The paper shows how literature too partakes in the symbolic drawing of nation and community boundaries. Literary genres take shape not only to sift literature but to influence the social, political and other realms as well

         In recent years, History has fallen into disfavor in studies of Partition¹as the discipline that has suppressed the trauma of Partition in constructing the triumphalist narrative of the nation-state. Instead, these studies take recourse to myth, memory and literature to draw attention to “the other face of freedom”.² The assumption here is that myth, memory and literature bring people together while History is said to be divisive. While the universalist and liberal-humanist claims of British Literature have been questioned by Postcolonial Studies, Literature in general continues to be seen as the repository of universal human values. The literary presentation of Partition has come to be seen as a more ‘comprehensive’ account of Partition than the historical representation; it is said to be ‘unique’, ‘non-partisan’ and ‘humane’; it is seen variously as ‘social document’, ‘people’s history’, ‘voice of the silenced’.³ It is these qualities associated with the ‘literary’ in the context of ‘Partition Literature’ that I subject to scrutiny in this article. The article argues that the literary is as much a terrain of demarcations and disputed borders as is the political terrain.

The last two decades have seen a spate of translations mainly of short stories and novels set in the context of Partition. So large are the number of individual novels, anthologies of short stories and new editions of earlier translations of literary writings on Partition that today they constitute a significant body of literature that goes by the name of ‘Partition Literature’, taught and studied as such today in many universities in India and abroad. This body of literature includes translations from a wide array of Indian languages – Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, etc.- into English, and writers who belong to present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. If ‘Partition Literature’ appears as a site of confluence of literatures from different linguistic and national backgrounds, I want to draw attention to the uneasy relationship between the texts/translations that are being so brought together to constitute a body of literature. The journey of the texts from vernacular languages into English, from ‘provincialism’ to ‘cosmopolitanism’, from national into supra-national context is fraught with tension. An uneasy relationship and tension prevails, as the translations are imbued with contentious present-day concerns about nation, society and polity. The attempt of literature of bringing together and into English, a variety of texts to ‘resolve’ these issues and debates is what I call in this paper ‘Genre politics’. I argue that in the process of forming what I call the ‘genre’ of Partition Literature, criteria for selection and omission of texts/translations are being evolved; protocols for reading the texts/translations are being set in place, both in the metacommentaries on the translations (Preface /Introduction /Foreword /Essays) and in the actual translations - criteria and protocols that are not necessarily of the literary realm. Looking specifically at two translations – Alok Bhalla’s (1994) and Muhammad Umar Memon’s (1998) - of the same short story by Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi called Parameshwar Singh, which is set in the context of Partition, and also at the Preface/Introduction that frames the two translations respectively, and Bhalla’s discussion of “the politics of translation”, I cull out the debates and disputes over borders and boundaries, this time happening in the terrain of literature.

Not all texts are equivalent, and in the first section of this paper, I look at a particular principle of hierarchization of texts within the genre of Partition Literature. In the second section, I look at the two translations of the short story Parameshwar Singh to see how this principle of hierarchization imbues the translation, and in the last section, I look at how a text that may not fit the genre according to the given criteria is reinterpreted and worked into the genre.

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The Alok Bhalla-edited anthology of Partition stories is among the first of recent well-known anthologies on Partition. Bhalla’s anthology is a 3-volume collection titled Stories about the Partition of India (1994). It is not as if other anthologies of Partition stories have not been published before. But this has been among the first anthologies coming with the “boom” in Partition studies in the mid-90s. It is a collection of 63 stories. All except one which is originally in English are translations from various languages of the subcontinent such as Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Hindi, Sindhi, Malayalam, Dogri and Marathi.

In his Introduction to the anthology, Bhalla states that he finds most histories written on either side of the border too ideologically driven, written as they are “either by the apologists of Pakistan or by its bitter opponents” and hence these histories read either “like incantations” or “like old demonologies” (1994: xii). He turns to literature, he says, because “[c]ontrary to the communal histories, the stories about the Partition have more to do with the actualities of human experience in barbaric times than with ideologies…” (p. xiv). He sees any attempt to historically study the causes for the formation of Pakistan as a vindication of Pakistan (p. xiii). Though he does question the Hindu Right’s sole claim over India, he is dismissive of any narrative of discrimination of Muslims in India today.⁴ He also sees no differences or inequalities between communities because the balance sheet of Hindu-Muslims shows both sides to be equal.⁵

Bhalla seems to posit some values as inherent in Literature as opposed to History. But it is not as if he approves of all literary writings on Partition. He goes on to classify the various categories of stories on Partition and in doing so gives us an idea of the basis of selection of texts that should go into the making of the genre of Partition Literature. He classifies Partition Stories into four categories: 1) Stories which are communally charged 2) Stories of anger and negation 3) Stories of lamentation and consolation and 4) Stories of the retrieval of memories. Regarding this categorization Jill Didur says: “While this may seem to suggest that Bhalla identifies a variety of responses to the events of Partition, in actuality, he speaks about each of them in a progressive, hierarchical relation to each other, as if the modern national citizen-subject author eventually transcends more primitive and illogical states of being in direct relation to his/her correct remembrance of Partition” (http://www.carleton.ca/caclals/chimodir/Chimo32-web.htm). While Didur goes on to show Bhalla as a conservative-nationalist, the point I’m trying to make is that Partition Literature is not simply a descriptive label or an all-inclusive category, but it is a genre that is constructed through a process of grading, sifting and selection.

Let us look at the first category – stories which are communally charged - because that seemed to have been the crucial criterion for selecting stories for the anthology (Bhalla 1994: xviii). It is not as if Bhalla's anthology has no stories under this category of which he is severely critical. In fact his analysis of three stories that he sees coming under this category are pointers to why he is dismissive of the category. So these stories are part of his anthology more as an example of what should not constitute the genre of Partition Literature. Before we look at Bhalla’s reading of one of the three stories,⁶ Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi’s Parmeshwar Singh which Bhalla discusses elaborately, to see what his criteria for selection are, here are the bare essentials of the plot of Parameshwar Singh.

Akhtar, a boy of little over five years in age, separated from his mother, and a part of a foot convoy to Pakistan in the wake of its creation is saved by Parameshwar Singh from fellow Sikhs who want to kill the Muslim boy in their midst. Parameshwar Singh’s son, about the same age as Akhtar, it turns out, had been kidnapped on the other side of the border from where Parameshar Singh and his family had come a month ago. The rest of the story traces Parameshwar Singh’s attempt to get Akhtar accepted by his community and family without riding rough shod on the young boy’s sentiments. The story ends with Parameshwar Singh realizing the futility of his attempt, given the narrow-mindedness and hostility of his family members and therefore accompanying Akhtar to the border to restore him to his mother. Parameshwar Singh accompanies Akhtar to Pakistan, not because Akhtar “naturally belongs” there but because people around him make him feel that he is an alien and is unwanted. Parameshwar Singh’s daughter Amar Kaur is unambiguously hostile and cannot accept Akhtar at all. “ … Amar Kaur always looked at [Akhtar] as though he were an imposter, who at any minute would discard his turban and comb, and disappear reciting Qul huwa’l-Lah” (Qasimi, 1998:127). Further, Parameshwar Singh decides to take Akhtar to Pakistan after his wife and daughter unequivocally say that they can never forget their lost son and brother respectively, implying that Akhtar cannot be a substitute for their affections.⁷

             Bhalla however finds this story “not only a bit disingenuous, but … also cynically manipulative” (1994: xvi). He sees a halo around the Muslim child while Parameshwar Singh, he says, is treated as a caricature. Bhalla reads the story as the triumph of a young Muslim boy whose natural piety and inherent religiosity renders futile any attempt to keep him in a Sikh family/community and, he says that “[a]t the end of the story, Akhtar walks towards Pakistan, in the direction from which the morning azan rises into the sky – his mother, his nation and his true spiritual home await him there” (p. xvi). The question that arises here though is who sees Pakistan as Akhtar’s spiritual home – Akhtar, Qasimi or Bhalla?

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Copyright © CIIL and The Author 2006