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Journalism of Courage
What kind of Pakistan is in the making?8217;8217; Major Hasan, who8217;s returning from World War II to his beloved village Gangauli with its indigo warehouse, a pond and untarred streets, asks a group of Muslim 8212; and Hindu 8212; boys who are vociferously chanting 8216;Muslim League, Zindabad8217;. The boys pass him by without replying. His parting shot 8212; 8216;8216;anything built on the foundations of hatred and fear can never flourish8217;8217; 8212; is lost in the din of slogans.
Eventually, India will witness the agony and ecstasy over the massacres and festivities engendered by its partition. Many a marriage procession and funeral cortege will be seen making its way to its destination, without ever reaching it. No one knows where exactly Cyril Radcliffe8217;s line has ripped the land in two. But for those who mourn or celebrate, this line will be clearly visible. The area littered by the corpses of Hindus and Sikhs is Pakistan; the region strewn with the corpses of Muslims is India. 8216;8216;The corpses alone determined where the borders lay.8217;8217;
He8217;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 Gandhi8217;s early years. But nothing quite prepares us for noted Hindi writer and critic8217;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.
There8217;s no easy way to map a 5000-year-old civilisation and Kamleshwar doesn8217;t try to keep it simple either. As his protagonist 8212; Time 8212; flits back and forth through centuries, he doesn8217;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 mankind8217;s greatest gift 8212; 8216;8216;fearless and eternal voice8217;8217;.
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 8216;8216;history, which can provide remedial insights into the past, is often cast aside.8217;8217; 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 adeeb8217;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. 8216;8216;The day of Dara8217;s beheading marked the dismemberment of Hindustan8217;s newly emergent composite culture,8217;8217; rues Culture in adeeb8217;s court. 8216;8216;Since then, I am only half-alive.8217;8217;
As adeeb sees a horrifying vision spanning centuries 8212; 8216;8216;before him lay a land called Hindustan whose citizens had no heads on their shoulders8217;8217;, he realises that the face of the entire human race has undergone a metamorphosis. It8217;s his job and Everyman8217;s to restore love and compassion in the world. 8216;8216;The novel was born out of a constant ferment within my mind,8217;8217; 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, 8216;8216;efforts are on to create Pakistans of hatred in every nation in the world. That8217;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.8217;8217;
