Picture Credits: bookgeeks
Examination of the varied groups of people not only increases cultural and social understanding of that time and place, but it also shows that the blame could never be placed upon any one group. All are equally responsible and have their fair shares in the chaos created.
Introduction
Book’s Name - Train to Pakistan
Author’s Name - Khushwant Singh
Genre - Historical novel
Language - English
Synopsis- Spoiler Alert!
As the refugees fled, they were exposed to the constant violence often cropping up whenever Hindus and Muslims were in close proximity. Little by little, death and murder became normal for them.
Muslims were deported on trains to Pakistan and Hindus to India, if we consider statistics, nearly ten million in total. But within weeks, almost a million were already dead. The trains run continually, and people called them ‘ghost trains’.
In this frenzy of chaos and violence is Mano Majra, one of the last remaining peaceful villages on the frontier. Mano Majra is diverse, and constitutes both Hindus and Muslims, but also Sikhs and Christian sympathizers. It is written that they lived in harmony through being dependent upon each other.
The story of ‘Train to Pakistan’ begins with the murder of Lala Ram Lal, the moneylender of Mano Majra, and one of the very few Hindus in the community. A marauder, Malli and his gang of robbers were the ones to kill Lala Ram Lal, but the maladroit police oversees Mano Majra and the surrounding villages falsely imprisoning two men, Juggut ‘Jugga’ Singh and Iqbal Singh, for the crime.
The local town badmash, Jugga is a large young man who is known for a bad reputation but as ironic as it sounds, has a good heart. He is the lover soul of Nooran, the daughter of the village imam, and a bitter enemy of Malli.
Iqbal Singh is a social worker from Delhi who comes to Mano Majra in hopes to inspire the locals to start taking political actions and decisions in the ‘New India’, but he instead gets caught up in the confusion and violence of the frontier.
About the Author
Khushwant Singh, born Khushal Singh, (2 February 1915 – 20 March 2014) was a journalist, politician, lawyer, Indian author and a diplomat. His experience in the 1947 Partition of India became an inspiration for him to write ‘Train to Pakistan’ in 1956, which also got adapted into a film in 1998), which became his most well-known novel, and even one of the best-known novels of all times.
He was appointed as a journalist in the All India Radio in 1951, and then he moved to the Department of Mass Communications of UNESCO at Paris in the year of 1956. These latter two careers encouraged him in order to pursue a literary career. As a writer, he was best known for his penetrating secularism, humor, sarcasm and a perpetual love of poetry.
His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Indians and Westerners were laced with acid wit. He served as the editor of several literary and news magazines, as well as two newspapers, through the decades 1970s and 1980s. Between 1980-1986 he also served as the Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India.
Khushwant Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974, but he returned the award in 1984 in order to protest against Operation Blue Star in which the Indian Army raided Amritsar. In 2007, he was then awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India.
Train to Pakistan is basically a historical novel by the writer Khushwant Singh, published in 1956. It memorizes the Partition of India in 1947 through the perspective of Mano Majra, which is a fictional border village in the book.
Instead of depicting the Partition in terms of only the political events that surrounded it, Singh dug deeper into a perspective of local focus, providing a human dimension which brings to the event a sense of reality, horror, and believability.
This is a story of religious persecution and the aftermath of the displacement. During the Partition of India in 1947, Hindus and Sikhs were made to move to India, and Muslims were forced into Pakistan, regardless of family history. Some families were displaced after many generations of living in one place or the other.
Themes Involved
The Partition of India and Religious Warfare
Singh’s novel was set up in the fictional town of Mano Majra during the summer of 1947, in the year of the infamously blood-filled Partition of India.
Postcolonial Anxiety and National Identity
The book highlights how the Partition didn’t only divided the nation geographically, but it also delimited the British colonial era from that of postcolonial independence.
Power and Corruption
Iqbal Singh and Juggut Singh are written as two men from different castes who end up sharing a cell together. They both were imprisoned under false charges of conspiracy in order to commit loot against the Hindu landowner Lala Ram Lal.
Honor and Heroism
Iqbal went to Mano Majra, a town that he has never visited before and knew nobody there. He expected to inspire villagers over there to foster the political changes.
Gender and Masculinity
Even as love proves to be a powerful force within the desperate world of the book, ‘Train to Pakistan’, women in the plot were routinely denied autonomy and were defined primarily by their relationships to men.
And at the same time, men of the story were subjected to stringent expectations of masculinity that might shape their prevalence towards the violence around.
Famous Quotes
'When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.'
'Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.'
'Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.'
'Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view.'
'The doer must do only when the receiver is ready to receive. Otherwise, the act is wasted.'
The Bottom Line
After the whole purgatory of situations, Muslims said that the Hindus had planned and started the killing. While, for Hindus, the Muslims were the ones to blame. The prime fact is that both sides were killed equally. Both were shot, speared and clubbed.
Both the communities got tortured and women of both the religions were raped. It wasn’t a fault of the single community, both are equally deceived in the eyes of nationality.
My Ratings for the book - 5 on 5
Get a copy from Amazon - Train to Pakistan
Written By - Pavas Shrigyan
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