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Bhalla’s discussion of Parameshwar Singh in this fashion draws attention to the criteria adopted in literary selection – those stories seen as “communally charged”, i.e. tilting the balance for one community against another are to be excluded from the genre of Partition Literature. The “communal” principle, so to speak, becomes the principle for ordering the texts.

II

If one reads the translation of Parameshwar Singh in Bhalla’s anthology (translated by Viswamitter Adil and Alok Bhalla) and also reads Bhalla’s discussion of the short story in his Introduction, it might not take long to be convinced that such stories which are communally charged should not be part of the genre of Partition Literature. But Parameshwar Singh is translated and anthologized in more recent collection of Partition Stories as well titled An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin book of Partition Stories (1998) and The Resthouse: Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi’s Stories (2000) both edited by Muhammad Umar Memon. Interestingly, talking in his Preface to An Epic Unwritten about what propelled him to take up this task of putting together yet another collection of Partition Stories after so many had already been published in recent times, Memon says:

I felt that the ideological underpinnings articulated in the learned introductions to the earlier selections worked as a sort of distorting filter against the material presented. In other words, I found them too intrusive for my comfort. Hence my decision to steer clear in my own presentation of any such narrowly nationalistic aspirations on the one hand, and of a kind of mealy-mouthed, neo-Gandhian mumbo-jumbo on the other (preface, 1998: xiii).

Although Memon does not name Bhalla, it is not hard to guess who he is talking about here because Bhalla’s Introduction is full of invocations of Gandhi.⁸ But more importantly from the point of view of furthering our analysis of Bhalla’s reading of Parameshwar Singh, Memon says that he finds many of the translations in these anthologies inaccurate and distorting and one of the stories he mentions as an example of such distortion is Parameshwar Singh (xiii). I compared the translations of Parameshwar Singh in the two anthologies – Bhalla’s and Memon’s, not from the point of view of finding out which is aesthetically better, or truer to the original⁹, but to find out what differences there are between the two translations and to see if it is possible to account for them.

While no two translations may be exactly alike and would invariably have differences, I found one instance of variance from each other on comparing the two texts particularly significant. When Parameshwar Singh, after pleading and rescuing Akhtar from his fellow community men, takes Akhtar to his wife, her surprise turns to hysterical anger when she realizes that her husband has brought a Muslim boy home and is pleading for his acceptance in the place of their lost son Kartar. She refuses to allow a Muslim boy in. People form the neighborhood  rush and prevent Parameshwar from beating up his adamant wife. It is at this point that the discrepancy between the two translations occurs. I will give the two translations below. First, the translation in Memon’s collection:

 

The people reasoned with her: Parameshwar Singh was doing a good thing. Making a Musalman into a Sikh was not an everyday occurrence. If it were the olden days, Parameshwar Singh would already have become famous as a ‘Guru’. That gave her some comfort… (1998: 134).

Now the translation in Bhalla’s anthology:

Everyone tried to reason with Parameshwar Singh. His intentions were noble, they agreed. In olden times, he would have been regarded as a saint. But now it wasn’t easy to teach a Muslim to become a Sikh. His wife was emboldened by their talk (1994: 164).

As is evident, in the first translation, people approve of Parameshwar Singh’s extraordinary action and reason with the wife, but in the second translation, people find his action an aberrant in the circumstances and futilely reason with him. Thus in the second translation, Parameshwar Singh’s action is seen and evaluated as the action of a mad man rather than seen as an action of an individual who rises above the circumstances of hate and hostility prevalent. In fact "Parameshwar Singh" is not the only story of this kind. There are innumerable stories of this kind in the genre of Partition Literature that show how individuals rise above narrow community considerations to help and rescue people belonging to the ‘other’ community. In fact such stories form the strongest basis for claims that Partition Literature is humanist and not narrowly communal. But Bhalla, it seems, denies such humanist renditions of Parameshwar Singh. In his analysis of the story in the Introduction, Bhalla sees Parameshwar Singh as “a bit dim-witted” (p. xvi). He accuses Qasimi of creating a caricature of Parameshwar Singh and in fact goes on to say, “… the sarcasm directed towards him, given his name, is always a little heavy-handed” (p. xvi).  If one were to read Parameshwar Singh in Memon’s anthology, one would probably find no irony at all in the title, which would point towards a more literalist reading – Parmeshwar Singh as someone who acted like a God rising above the pettiness of his fellow human beings. Parameshwar Singh’s wife and children would then not appear as “hysterical representatives of their tribe”, representing “the ancient antagonism between the Sikhs and Muslims” as Bhalla would have it (p. xvi), but as ordinary people shaped by the dominant discourse around them and thereby setting off Parameshwar Singh’s extraordinariness, given the circumstances.

In Bhalla’s anthology the category of communally charged stories that Parameshwar Singh is said to be a part of, is characterized as simplistic and one-sided. But the reading of the text above shows that Parameshwar Singh could just as well be read as a humanist text. But why is this reading eschewed? Bhalla, in the Introduction, says:

Qasmi (sic) refuses to acknowledge that in the 1930’s and 40’s inhumanity wasn’t the exclusive right of any one community. He should know this well, since he was the first editor of the progressive Urdu journal Savera and had written angry editorials against the Partition. Immediately after the Partition he changed his stance and wrote a poem entitled “Battle Cry of the Kashmiri Freedom fighter” (p. xvi).

Then does Bhalla’s reading of Parameshwar Singh as a “communally-charged story” have to do with its writer Qasimi’s going over to Pakistan, and his changed stance on Partition? Does Qasimi’s going over to Pakistan make him communal? Can a Pakistani writer get included in the genre of ‘Partition Literature’ only by decrying the formation of his nation? – these are questions that arise when we read Bhalla on Qasimi. We can also see here how the translation renders the text ‘communal’, which then becomes the ground for its inferiority and an instance of what should be excluded from the genre of Partition Literature.

III

Are there some stories that automatically merit inclusion in the genre of ‘Partition Literature’? Let us take the case of Sada’at Hasan Manto. In an article titled “The Politics of Translation: Manto’s Partition Stories and Khalid Hasan’s English Version” (2001:19-38), Alok Bhalla critiques Khalid Hasan’s translation of Manto’s short stories brought out as a collection titled Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition (1997). To begin with, Bhalla finds two serious problems with the translations: “One, its translations are highly inaccurate and disfigure the original. Two, it has no recognisable editorial policy” (2001: 20).¹⁰ According to Bhalla, “[t]he greatest damage [Khalid] Hasan does to Manto is to communalize him. He does so systematically, with design and in bad faith.” (2001:27). Thus having established Khalid Hasan as not only an incompetent translator, but also as irresponsibly manipulative, prejudiced, racist and communal, Bhalla turns to the discussion of Manto’s story titled Yazid which Khalid Hasan has translated as “The Great Divide” (1997:32-142).

The plot of the story goes like this: Karim Dad is the protagonist of Yazid who has lost his father in the riots accompanying the creation of Pakistan. His village has seen killings and destruction as a result of which the villagers are full of sorrow and anger, but Karim Dad realizes that life has to go on and soon marries Jeena whom he had set his sight on before the killings began. Jeena herself has lost her brother, killed when he was saving her from being abducted. But Karim Dad sees no point in endlessly mourning the dead. Soon the village gets the news that India is planning to dam the rivers to prevent them from flowing to Pakistan and thereby make barren their village lands. While this news is received with helpless anger by the villagers, Karim Dad remonstrates with his fellow-villagers for endlessly complaining without thinking of means and strategies to counter the moves made by India. He taunts them saying that one resorts to abuse only in helplessness, when one has run out of options. When he is asked what option there is, he points out that he cannot answer on behalf of thousands of others who will also be affected by the catastrophe. In this mood he receives the news of the birth of a son to Jeena and to Jeena’s horror decides to call him “Yazid”. Yazid is a Judas-like figure to the Muslims who apparently denied water to Hasan, Hussain and their followers in Karbala by damming the river. But why does Karim Dad decide to call his newborn son “Yazid”? When a shocked Jeena asks Karim Dad, “But do you know whose name that is?”, his reply is, “It is not necessary that this little one here should be the same Yazid. That Yazid dammed the waters; this one will make them flow again.” (1997:142). These words suggest that if Yazid is a hated figure for the Muslims, because he dammed and denied water to Hasan, Hussain and their followers, this Yazid, by making the water flow again and thereby removing the very cause for hatred will deprive the potency of the image of Yazid. A Yazid who acts favourably can no longer remain Yazid, the hated figure.

Manto seems to have written Yazid in the early years after Independence and after Manto’s own troubled move to Pakistan from India. The immediate provocation for the story seems to have been a threat to dam the rivers flowing from East Punjab, now in India, into West Punjab, Pakistan and the complicated river-sharing negotiations that were then underway between the governments of the two countries. Manto seems to have been moved at the human tragedy that the damming of rivers would lead to, and in fact, has conveyed his anguish more directly in his Pandit Manto’s first Letter to Pandit Nehru: ¹¹

… I was surprised to learn that you want to stop the rivers from flowing through our land. Panditji, you are only a Nehru [a settler on the riverbank]. I regret that I am just a measuring stone weighing one and a half ser [earlier in the letter, Manto points out that in the Kashmiri language, Manto means “munt”, a measuring stone weighing one and a half ser]. If I were a rock of thirty or forty thousand maunds, I would have thrown myself into the river, so that you would have to spend some time consulting with your engineers on how to pull it out (2001: 88-89).

Here is a clear indictment of the intended act of cruelty on the part of the Indian government. This does not however mean that Manto began to support Muslims/Pakistan or turned against Hindus/India. Yet Bhalla belabors this point in his discussion of Yazid, as if in anxiety to purge Manto of any “communal” intent:

Manto … wants to suggest that Yazid is not out there in a community whose faith is different from the Muslims, but a part of each of us, Hindus, and Muslims alike – that we are Yazids when we refuse to take responsibility for our actions or when we dream of killing as a way of proving our holiness; and, that the history of relations between the Hindus and the Muslims was as complicated a mixture of harmony and antagonism as is the case with any group of people who have lived together for ages. Thus, he uses Yazid, not to strengthen the historical or religious claims of a few survivors of the riots in Pakistan, but to replace the language of religion by the practice of a mode of analysis which is concrete, moral and psychological, and in the service of community-making (2001: 30).

 

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