Politics, partition, and poetry

There are not enough creative writings on partition penned in Punjab, especially poetry, and this may be due to guilt infested post-partition trauma that triggered collective amnesia and conscious forgetfulness

Partition of the Punjab is not a single event, it’s a never-ending process, a procedure call in a bruised, shared memory. During my engineering studies, we were taught computer languages, threads, processes, and in-memory process data structures. Threads can create additional threads and a single process can spawn several other processes. This is exactly how partition of the Punjab is perceived by us Punjabis — full of threads, processes, and unanswered procedure calls.

Shared memory that carries thick scars of hate, inhumanity, fear of the other and refuges of monolithic religious identities. Hindu Mahasabha, Arya Samaj and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) continuous hate-mongering in Punjab, League’s campaign, Direct Action and Civil Disobedience, Master Tara Singh and Akalis’s sword stretches and the Congress’s naked arrogance sowed seeds of mass hatred and fear at grass-roots levels that resulted in this slaughter, loot and loss of life and material. The irony of all this brutality is that the riots of Dabbi Bazar (Lahore;1927), Shaheed Ganj (Lahore;1935) and even the Great Calcutta Killings of 16 August 1946 in the League-run Bengal couldn’t deter the undivided Indian leaders to pause, think and reflect.

In contrary, Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, then Chief Minister of Bengal was writing in Calcutta’s The Statesman that “Bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves if needed for a noble cause” (Midnight’s Furies by Nisid Hajari; 2015). While the non-violence preacher, Gandhi, was thumping Wavell’s desk on August 27 1946 in the viceroy’s office, forcefully declaring that he wants self-governance at any cost even “If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it” (Wavell: The Viceroys Journal, edited by Penderel Moon).

By 1946-7, by which point the partition of India had become inevitable, partition of the Punjab was still avoidable if the wider Sikh leadership hadn’t listened to Baldev Singh, and if the Maharaja of Patiala had agreed to negotiate with League. Punjab was a Muslim majority province, as per the 1941 Census of India, Vol VI Punjab had 53.2 per cent Muslims, 29.1 per cent Hindus, 14.9 per cent Sikhs, 1.5 per cent Christians and 1.3 per cent other religions. It’s also pertinent to mention that the idea of the partition of India and Punjab was first echoed by Arya Samaj leader Lala Lajpat Rai especially in his December 14 1924 article in The Tribune (KK Aziz, History of Partition of India) and the first ever ban on the RSS was also imposed in Punjab on January 24 1947 by the then Unionist Party Government.