Suffering without borders

Truth is stranger than fiction. One has often wondered about the validity of this old saying, particularly after reading Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh. It is a short story about an inmate of a mental asylum, who dies literally on the freshly created border between India and Pakistan, almost as a stateless citizen of undivided India and without getting a satisfactory answer to his simple question that to which country his place of birth belonged after the partition "" India or Pakistan. Few stories have captured the madness of the idea of India's partition and the trauma it caused to over 20 million displaced Indians as effectively as has been done in Toba Tek Singh.

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, the author of the book under review, has established through her painstaking research that the partition of India had indeed many real-life victims whose stories were as bizarre and heart-rending as the life of the protagonist in Toba Tek Singh.

Zamindar's research starts with Ghulam Ali, a young havildar in the British Indian Army. When the partition was announced on June 3, 1947, Ghulam Ali was posted in Chaklala near Rawalpindi. When asked which country he would like to serve, as all those in government and military service were then asked, Ghulam Ali opted for the Indian Army because his familial home was in Lucknow.

But before he could leave Rawalpindi, riots broke out and he was prevented from returning to India. Consequently, he continued to work for the Pakistan Army. But in 1950, the Pakistan Army decided to discharge him on the grounds that he had originally opted for the Indian Army. He was taken to the Pakistani border post at Khokrapar and was "forcibly removed" into Indian territory. The Indian government did not recognise him as an Indian and deported him to Pakistan on the grounds that he was a Pakistani.

This story does not end here. Ghulam Ali moves court in Pakistan to be recognised as a Pakistani citizen, a plea that is dismissed and this time the court declares him an Indian citizen. With no option left, Ghulam Ali 'buys' himself a Pakistani passport and crosses the border to live with his family in Lucknow. Six years later in 1957, the Indian government asks him to leave India as his application for Indian citizenship is rejected. Once again, he is deported to Pakistan, where he is kept in a Hindu camp as an Indian. Later, the Indian deputy high commission in Pakistan looks at his case sympathetically and organises his return to India on "a restricted Indian passport that does not confer on him rights to citizenship".

Zamindar's book looks at the trauma of Muslims who were rendered stateless just because Pakistan was created ostensibly for the Muslims of India. But did the Muslims living in different parts of India benefit or did they become a victim of this experiment? The author's assessment is that the impact of the partition was not restricted to only that period of displacement of people in those few months of 1947. It continued longer. With interviews with Muslim families, the author examines that trauma in all its various shades and how the families were devastated.

One of Zamindar's telling arguments is that the Muslim families were separated not because members of a family chose to live in one country or to move to another. They were separated because of the way the border between India and Pakistan was constructed. An interesting piece of revelation is that after a year of partition there were more Muslims arriving in Delhi than the number of Muslims who left Delhi. The author's thesis is that a large number of Muslim families who may have left Delhi in the wake of partition had reconsidered their option and chose to return only to find that the houses they lived in had become "evacuee" property, occupied by those who had been dispossessed of their houses in Karachi or Lahore.

Zamindar's book is not just about the partition. It also deals with the largely ignored issues that confronted the Muslims after the partition happened "" how the permit system paved the way for passports and how evacuee property legislation on both sides of the border created massive displacements. There is no doubt that Hindu families may have also gone through similar trauma. But then Zamindar's book is admittedly limited in scope and focuses only on Muslims.

THE LONG PARTITION AND THE MAKING OF MODERN SOUTH ASIA
REFUGEES, BOUNDARIES, HISTORIES

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Penguin/Viking
xvi+288 pages; Rs 495