Split Narrative

He’s been our conscience-keeper for long. Making television films on terrorism in Kashmir and on the Babri Masjid dispute in Ayodhya, capturing social traumas in The Burning Question (Shalini burning case) and Closed File (suicide of three Kanpur sisters). He also famously wrote the script of Aandhi (long accepted as a thinly-veiled fictional account of Indira Gandhi’s early years). But nothing quite prepares us for noted Hindi writer and critic’s sweeping saga Kitne Pakistan (Partitions), translated for the first time from Hindi into English, which puts History on trial like never before, and Partition is just a starting point.

There’s no easy way to map a 5000-year-old civilisation and Kamleshwar doesn’t try to keep it simple either. As his protagonist — Time — flits back and forth through centuries, he doesn’t restrict himself to India alone, taking perturbed world histories into account as well. Using the Partition as its key reference point, he drags Mughal emperors, Babar and Aurangzeb into court, summons Lord Mountbatten, Hitler and Saddam too for creating fractured nations, caught up in a never-ending spiral of violence. As Memory fills in as witness, refusing to allow a people to forget, the arbiter for the suffering multitude is a litterateur, of course, adeeb, who is granted mankind’s greatest gift — ‘‘fearless and eternal voice’’.

Armed with this, he embarks on a retelling of history, shredding the myths. He is first introduced as a writer who has experienced Partition, but plays multiple roles along the way: a journalist who takes on the establishment, an unrequited lover whose mistress is across the border, a historian who questions divinity, an activist against religious divide and the shattering consequences.

Along the way, he also asks some difficult questions, continuing in the fine tradition of Sadaat Hasan Manto (Toba Tek Singh) and Bhisham Sahni (Tamas) to name only two. He asks questions about the making of history and the truth behind reality. He laments the fact that ‘‘history, which can provide remedial insights into the past, is often cast aside.’’ Otherwise, why would society, which had already suffered Partition and trauma, go out of its way to build more Partitions, create more trauma? Why is there a Kargil after Kurukshetra? A Bosnia after Hiroshima? The original in Hindi was written in 2000, otherwise he may well have been asking the same about Iraq as well.

Sometimes adeeb’s philosophical digressions are a muddle and he has to be hauled back to reality. But the narration comes alive in the stories of Everyman like Buta Singh and Zainab, Surjit Kaur and her unconscious child, Vidya and her transformation into Pari (Parveen Sultana), the blind beggar Kabir; and in the court scenes where everyone has to answer why they let Dara Shikoh die. ‘‘The day of Dara’s beheading marked the dismemberment of Hindustan’s newly emergent composite culture,’’ rues Culture in adeeb’s court. ‘‘Since then, I am only half-alive.’’

As adeeb sees a horrifying vision spanning centuries — ‘‘before him lay a land called Hindustan whose citizens had no heads on their shoulders’’, he realises that the face of the entire human race has undergone a metamorphosis. It’s his job and Everyman’s to restore love and compassion in the world. ‘‘The novel was born out of a constant ferment within my mind,’’ points out Kamleshwar. And though the novel ends with the blind man on his way to plant trees in places of despair, the debate continues.

For, ‘‘efforts are on to create Pakistans of hatred in every nation in the world. That’s what happened in Bosnia, Cyprus, the fragmented Soviet Union and the new Russian federation. And it is happening in Afghanistan today. Using hatred as a prop, everyone is involved in creating new Pakistans against the interests of their own people.’’