Sometimes Good People do Evil Deeds (Train to Pakistan - Khushwant Singh)

Member Name: koshkha

Product:	Train to Pakistan - Khushwant Singh
Date:	27/01/08 (771 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Astonishingly moving prose with shocking photographs

Disadvantages: Might take you a bit of effort to track down a copy

Historical Background
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During our last holiday in India we discovered that you can't go to Northern India - and particularly the Punjab - without being repeatedly reminded about the Indian Independence Movement, the 1947 'Partition' and the horrific consequences of Britain's some-might-say 'over hasty' departure from India.

The hotel owner in Delhi told us how his family lost everything when they had to leave Pakistan and fought for decades to rebuild their fortune. We stayed with a friend's Sikh relatives in a small village in the Punjab which had originally been a Muslim village and heard that his grandfather was famed locally for the number of Muslims he killed and threw down the well. We heard of families divided by the green line that separated the new country of Pakistan from India. In Amritsar we saw the memorial to the martyrs of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre - one of the most significant events in the Independence movement - and in Shimla we stood in the room and next to the table where the negotiators drafted the proposals for Independence. At the border with Pakistan we watched the guards on either side posturing and performing for the crowds to display their disdain for their neighbours.

It has been suggested that Britain, faced with mounting debts as a result of the Second World War, finally saw that it just wasn't a good idea to try to hang on to India any longer. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, was said to be in a hurry to get the job done, get out of India and get home again. And so after decades of campaigning for a free country, India suddenly found its long-awaited independence was rushed through with unseemly haste. Against the desires of leading campaigners such as Mohatma Gandhi, the country was to be divided into two - and later three - separate countries along an arbitrarily drawn line that sliced through the Punjab.

Under this 'Partition' India would be a secular land and home to the Hindu and Sikh population whilst the Muslims would get their own country, Pakistan. Pakistan was itself in two parts - East Pakistan (later Bangladesh - but that's another long story) and West Pakistan. Partition in the summer of 1947 led to the displacement of an estimated 10 million people, loss of land and property, widespread abduction, rape and violence and most shockingly, the murder of an estimated million people in some of the most horrific slaughter of the 20th Century. In villages where different religions had lived peacefully side by side for centuries, neighbours turned on one another whilst perhaps surprisingly taking very little action against the British who had ruled them for so long.

The Train to Pakistan - 50th Anniversary Edition
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The Train to Pakistan is a fictitious account of the impact of Partition in a small country town called Mano Majra which sits beside the railway line. All the events described are based in fact but delivered as fiction. It's fair to say that you couldn't make it up if you tried - nobody would believe this if it wasn't documented, photographed and proven to be true.

My copy of The Train to Pakistan is the 50th Anniversary Special Edition in which Kushuvant Singh's classic story is illustrated with the photographs of American photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Pramod Kapoor (who wrote the introduction to the edition) had the creative idea to bring together the words of Singh and the photographs of Bourke-White, correctly identifying that the synergy between the two would create a stunning and very moving tribute to both and to those killed during the events that form the focus of the book. It's worth noting that the anniversary referred to is that of the original publishing of the book and not of the events themselves.

The writer Kushuvant Singh is widely recognised as one of India's finest historians and writers. Yet even he took a long time to assimilate the horror of Partition before finally publishing The Train to Pakistan nine years later. Singh was living in Lahore and his Sikh family had little choice but to head for India, leaving their home and valuables in the care of a trusted Muslim friend who protected both and later sent everything to his friends - even the half-drunk bottles of alcohol in the drinks cupboard.

Margaret Bourke-White was sent to India in 1946 by Life magazine to document the fall of the British Empire. I can only say that once you've seen her photographs you can appreciate that she was both a very brave woman and one with an extraordinarily steady hand and strong stomach. She had previously photographed German concentration camps so perhaps death and devastation had become her bread and butter.

The Plot
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In the village of Mano Majro, the Sikhs are the landowners, the Muslims their tenants and the district magistrate is a Hindu. It's a model of calm country life and inter-racial harmony. Into this peaceful setting arrives a band of dacoits (bandits) who rob and kill the local money lender - a Hindu. The police arrest the usual suspect - a local bad boy (or budmash) by the name of Jugga Singh. He would have a cast-iron alibi but it's not one he can use - he was with his Muslim girlfriend, the daughter of a local weaver and the mullah at the local mosque. Her dad will skin Jugga if he finds out they've been together.

Arriving the day after the killing, the mysterious European-educated young man with the ambiguous name of Iqbal heads to the Gurdwara (Sikh temple) to ask for a place to stay and finds himself also arrested in connection with the dacoitry.

So far it's just the village politics of small lives in the country. But suddenly, whilst we are quietly learning about the characters of Mano Majro, a train pulls into the station and is surrounded by the police and army. The villagers stand on their rooftops trying to find out what's happened - why has nobody left the train? Where are all the passengers? When they are all asked to bring whatever wood and oil they can spare to the station, it becomes apparent that the train was filled with the slaughtered bodies of Sikhs fleeing Pakistan and the materials are needed for a funeral pyre.

Mano Majro is suddenly thrown into the harsh reality of mass exodus. What had previous been rumour is suddenly reality. But the people swear it won't happen to them, they won't see harm come to their friends and neighbours, things don't need to change.

The summer of 1947 was also marked by some of India's worst ever flooding. Soon the rivers rise and fill with the floating bodies of slaughtered and drowned animals and people. Mano Majro can't ignore the outside world any longer. Realising that the village will soon have to take in Sikh refugees, the locals decide it really would be safer for their Muslim friends to go to the refugee camps - just until it all calms down and they can come home again.

Soon we see how the people of Mano Majro are influenced by outsiders and corrupted to turn on their old friends. Plots are hatched, tales are spread of death and destruction in other towns and villages, a frenzy is whipped up very quickly and when a second train of corpses arrives, there's no wood to burn them and a giant pit is dug beside the railway. Will the activists succeed in carrying out their plot or will someone take a stand and prevent devastation and destruction and a complete collapse of civilised behaviour?

Key Characters
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Jugga Singh - the bad boy who has been in and out of prison for most of his adult life but might just have more backbone than anyone suspected
Iqbal - who is the mysterious young man and is he really what he seems? What is his religion and why won't he confirm it?
Malli - the leader of the dacoit gang and surprising puppet of the authorities
Hukum Chand - the Hindu district magistrate in love with a young Muslim prostitute
Noora - Jugga's lover and daughter of the mullah
Meet Singh - leader of the local Gurdwara


Every one of these characters was based on someone that Khushwant Singh knew well. Whilst the names are changed to protect the innocent - and not so innocent - and not everyone did what their characters did - all the people existed and all the events took place but not necessarily the same people and the same events.

Opinion
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This is a book of astonishing historical impact. I've read others on the topic and even spent a couple of weeks getting (I'm ashamed to say) bored by another tale with similar setting. There is nothing boring about The Train to Pakistan and it stands on its own merit for the story even without the historical importance. Singh writes in such a way that the reader can't help but be drawn into the every-day happenings of small town life or become involved in the lives of the key characters. Nobody will read the book without knowing about the setting, and so having a sense of impending doom lurking silently in the background. You find yourself hoping that this will be the one town that stands up to the madness all around yet feeling sure that somehow it will all go bad and good people will be dragged into b ad actions.

I was actually left at the end of the book unsure about who had sacrificed themselves (no clues about how, in what way or whether the gesture was futile or successful) and only by reading the foreword (always best left until AFTER you've read a book, I find) did I entirely 'get' the final plot twist. However, in some respects, the ambiguity that I found actually added to my interpretation of the story.

Bourke-White's photos could so easily have distracted from the story but they don't. She has a unique style in which people are photographed slightly from below, giving them an added dignity that might otherwise be stripped by their circumstances. The living are worn and exhausted, carrying their friends, family and possessions but shown with a statuesque dignity that's at odds with their circumstances. The dead are photographed without any attempt to lessen the horror of their situation - streets full of half decayed corpses being picked over by vultures, rivers swollen with the floating bodies of the dead. The cover carries a warning of shocking images and they really aren't exaggerating.

Where to get it
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I paid 495 Rupees (the cover price - about £6.50) for my copy in a book shop in Delhi - you can find the same edition on Amazon second hand for £8. Try - if you can - to get the 50th Anniversary version with the photos. They really are worth the extra effort to track down.

Summary: An outstanding tale of India during Partition