A Time of Madness: A sentimental journey from Lahore to Jalandhar

A Time of Madness
A Memoir of Partition

Salman Rashid

Aleph Book Company

136 pages; Rs 299

This slim volume tells the story of a child born in undivided India, who grew up in Lahore after Partition, and decides to embark on a journey to discover the fate of the family he left behind in India. For this purpose, he takes a sentimental journey from Lahore to Jalandhar to piece together the story of his relatives, especially his grandfather and their fate after Partition. The author describes his journey to India as a “pilgrimage”. “I was going to a home I had never known… a foreign land, a land that state propaganda wanted to believe was enemy territory,” he writes.

The author starts off by locating an “informer” who would be able to tell him about the history of his ancestors who lived in Jalandhar in a house named Habib Manzil at Railway Road in Jalandhar. He also visited his village, Uggi, for this purpose. 

He discovers that his grandfather, the humane and respected “Dr Sahib” had joined the Muslim League and called for cow slaughter during Eid, a “most peculiar sacrifice … for a man who abhorred beef all his life”. What explains this metamorphosis? From the 1920s onwards, the Indian society became progressively more communal and seemingly sane people were often forced to take sides.

Inevitably, during the Partition riots, his grandfather’s family was a target of mob violence. A mob pursued his family, stabbed his uncle, threw his infant son off a terrace and raped the women. Astonishingly, the “informer” who relates this tale of carnage is the son of the man who led the mob — who incidentally repented his folly right up to his death in 1973. There is something cathartic about the fact that Mr Rashid was not allowed to pay for the autorickshaw that took him on his tragic journey of discovery to Uggi. 

This narrative is important for many weighty reasons not least the comparison the author makes of the social situation in Pakistan and India just after crossing the border. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to please the Mullahs, had imposed a ban on the sale of liquor, so visitors from Pakistan immediately started drinking “beer” which was freely available on the Indian side of the border. Another cultural shock that awaits Pakistanis the moment they cross the border is when they see “girls in jeans and T-shirts zooming about on scooters”. As Mr Rashid observes, “….in our good land, we molest passing women with our eyes all the time. There appears a well-wrapped shrouded creature with only eyes showing through a narrow slit and all available men leave whatever they are doing to scratch their crotches and ogle”. This is a clear message to Indian prohibitionists and conservatives who believe in the segregation of the sexes.

This book, which has seven chapters without any headings, is more than just a journey of discovery; it raises some larger issues connected with the Partition of India, the communalisation of society and the role of the British colonial rulers. “Clearly, the Raj had a very obvious … even comprehensive plan for what it wanted and it was working to that end.” Neither the last Viceroy Lord Mountbatten nor the Labour Party government of Clement Attlee in England were worried about the human price that the sub-continent paid for achieving their goals. The author is also not convinced by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly of August 11, 1947 that “the people were free to go their temples, mosques or any other places of worship”. The champion of the two-nation theory could not have really expected things to pan out that way, he reasons.

It is the British colonisers who ultimately won the battle and Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah had to accept the British decision. Another larger issue that arises from this study is the lessons from Partition. “We learned all the wrong lessons from Partition…. If we learned to be swayed so easily by the base lust for lucre, we also internalised the savagery and violence accompanying the creation of Pakistan”. 

Both countries have developed the “enemy” syndrome about each other, stoked by communalists on both sides. Hence, the author’s plea is for a “porous” border and free movement of people who can meet each other and see things for themselves and cease to believe in state-sponsored propaganda. The lesson from this story is that a state based on a “majority community religion” cannot promote harmony in society; only a religiously neutral state can be an umpire and an honest arbiter among inter-religious or intra-religious conflicts and tensions. This is a must-read for Hindutva votaries in India because they can learn the basic lesson — if they are intellectually capable of learning anything — that religion-based 

politics leads to conflict, divisions, partitions and bloodshed.