Story as history

But is it history? Can Earth, and more particularly the novel which spawned it, be regarded as an authoritative account of the Partition experience? This is not some dusty academic issue. Histories of Partition have often focussed on high politics because there is so little conventional source material capturing the human dimension of that turmoil.

The historians’ custom has been to cold-shoulder works of fictionbecause they are, after all, works of imagination. The result is that all too often, the most vivid testimony is overlooked because it lacks the sanctity accorded to official archives and items of record.

Yet, more than half a century on, there can be no doubt about the need to understand more about the complex cross-currents of identity and political allegiance which resulted in Partition. Indeed, if there’s one disappointment about Earth, it is that the still simmering feud of south Asia dictated that the movie be shot at Lodhi Gardens and other venues around Delhi rather than in Lahore.

The film is perhaps less nuanced and less successful than the novel. But it does capture the sullying of the beguiling innocence of Sidhwa’s central characters, the seven-year-old polio-afflicted Parsi girl, Lenny, and her Hindu ayah, Shanta, as the city they so delight in tears itself apart.

The rivalry among Shanta’s circle of admirers in the park stands as a metaphor for the fight to carve up British India.“Hindu, Muslim, Sikh,” one character tells her, “all hover round you like moths round a lamp.” The denouement of the film, and the defiling of the ayah, can be seen as reflecting the despoiling of a country. The opening shot is of young Lenny with her caliper. The closing image is of Sidhwa herself reflecting on Shanta’s fate — “fifty years have gone by since I betrayed my ayah”, she says, “but I never set eyes on her again” – and then walking away, with a pronounced, and one must assume polio-induced, limp.

The implied message to the viewer is crystal-clear. The tale they have just witnessed is not a story of what might have happened in a Parsee household in Lahore. It is the truth — a recreation of Sidhwa’s childhood experience of Partition.

Many films suggest they are telling a historical truth without necessarily abjuring all elements of story-telling, and all the devices to which screenwriters resort to turn a good tale, or a good book, into a successful film. Yet the veracity ofEarth and indeed Ice Candy Man is worth exploring further, because the social historian has really no source beyond Partition literature, supplemented of late by oral history, to get inside the skin of Indian society at the moment of its most brutal rupture.

There are historical inaccuracies in Earth. For one thing, the announcement of where the Partition line would run came after Nehru’s `Tryst with Destiny’ speech, not before it. More importantly, the film takes some liberties with the novel. When Sidhwa declares at the close of the film that she never saw Shanta again after her abduction, and never learnt what fate befell her — well, that’s not how her book tells it.

But look at how closely Lenny seems to be modelled on the young Bapsi — the same age, of the same religion and the same city, and with the same disability. In Time magazine’s special issue on the Golden Jubilee of independence, Sidhwa wrote: “I was a child then. Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was aconstant of my awareness, alerting me, even at the age of seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore.”

In the article, Sidhwa makes no mention of her ayah, or Ice Candy Man and the other characters of her novel. But she does allude to many other incidents which appear in both the book and the film: her father bringing home a pistol in a satin-lined box; her Sikh neighbours fleeing to India and leaving their furniture in her mother’s care; and the camp for recovered women set up in what had been the Sikh family’s home.

She says of these women: “Terrible vendettas were enacted on their bodies, not so much to dishonour them as to humiliate the men of another faith.” And perhaps the young Sidhwa’s painful awareness of those women crammed into what had been her friends’ house was the genesis of the story of Shanta — not a literal truth (though for all I know it could be), but a realistic portrayal born out of first-hand observation and experience.

As with somany of the powerful Partition novels, Sidhwa lived through the events she describes. She saw the skies over Lahore alive with flames, just as Bhisham Sahni, author of Tamas, saw the bodies of Sikh women retrieved from a well at Thoha Khalsa, and as Krishna Baldev Vaid cowered in hiding with his family through the pogrom in Dinga, an episode retold in The Broken Mirror. All these novelists invented some characters and detail, but all would regard themselves as telling a larger truth, rooted in personal experience, about jealousy, betrayal, and the way communal identity blotted out other loyalties, and indeed any sense of shared humanity.

A few historians, notably Mushirul Hasan, have given some weight to literature in describing those times, and in dissecting the reason for the violence, and its consequence for those who survived. Yet many object that novelists are, to use that splendidly pejorative word, motivated, rather than objective observers. Bapsi Sidhwa has indeed stated in aninterview that the aim of Ice Candy Man was to `try and dispel certain erroneous and biased views that had come about in other writing — Indian and British — which was unfair towards Muslims generally’.

Yet, look at the sources which historians turn to with so much less unease than literature. Are official archives free of inaccuracy or improper motive? Do political memoirs rise above the partisan prejudices of the author? Can contemporary journalism be regarded as unfailingly accurate?

There is a bigger issue. The history of human society must take note of human experience, and when that is recorded most cogently in the form of fiction, than whatever the caveats, historical writing must be informed by that literary testimony.

Andrew Whitehead presents the `World Today’ on BBC World Service radio