This ‘
gali biraadari
’, as Yashpal calls it in Hindi (i.e., same-street community or fraternity) constitutes the emotional and imaginative core of the novel. First glimpsed in its humdrum and cheerfully quotidian aspect at the beginning of the novel, it soon develops splinters and is then devastated out of recognition as its inhabitants flee helter-skelter to save
their lives. As and when they are later reunited hundreds of miles away in strange Indian cities across the newly drawn border, they instantly reaffirm their old-street loyalty than which they seem to know no greater bond. This little lane is what Partition has parted them from; having to leave their homes here is what has split their lives asunder. This is probably among the most vividly and vibrantly evoked locales in the whole modern literature of the subcontinent, and such depiction is made the more poignant by the fact that all too soon it is irrevocably gone and lost forever. The emotional impact of the novel seems to be in direct proportion to the imaginative completeness with which Yashpal created this core location, for the rest of the novel seems to follow naturally and inevitably from it. It is possible to map the lanes, roads and various neighbourhoods of Lahore accurately enough from this novel, as it is in the case of Joyce’s Dublin which was also recreated from memory in exile, with the difference that in this case, the geographical verisimilitude exists not only for its own sake (or indeed for art’s sake) but also serves to undergird the imaginative authenticity of the historical tumult.
Such scrupulous specificity of space is fully matched by Yashpal’s plotting of fictional time. The main characters are quickly introduced and then, all of them are shown to live under an air of tense apprehension as more and more dire news follow in rapid succession. The hero Jaidev Puri is himself a writer and an engaged journalist who serves as an antenna for political developments on the fiercely contested national stage. The year 1946, resonant with urgent political sounds of all kinds of import, gives way to 1947, and now each day seems to dawn with some new foreboding. Over the last few months in the run-up to Independence, from May 1947 onwards, almost each successive development is flagged with a precise date by Yashpal: 4 May, 11 May, various dates in June when the deadline for transfer of power is still believed to be June 1948 as announced by Attlee, and then from late July almost every alternate day is marked by unforeseen events that gather pace to sweep the characters literally off their feet. It is as if the whole cast of the novel were holding their breath and listening to the ticking away of a time-bomb.
In contrast, the second volume of the novel, covering a whole decade
from 1947 to 1957 and set in Delhi, Jalandhar and Lucknow with many spatial intersections, unfolds at a markedly slower pace, to convey mimetically the effect that while lives can be uprooted and devastated in virtually a moment, before one knows what has happened, it takes forever to pick up the pieces that are left and to rearrange them in some residual pattern of survival. In the novel’s compositional harmony and rhythm, the sweeping
drut
of the disaster is followed by a long
vilambit
of rescue and recuperation. The novel carries on until 1957 for one other strategic reason, which is that Yashpal wishes to show a corrupt Congress minister losing in the general elections held that year!
The novel begins with the death of an old woman and though the laid-down rituals of mourning that follow are somewhat comically treated, the death and the change in domestic order is a premonition of many more deaths and the change in the political order that will swiftly follow. It is significant that it is a woman who dies and not some old patriarch, which is the figure more familiarly deployed in fiction to signal the change of an era. Throughout his fiction but most notably in this novel, Yashpal creates a whole range of strong women characters, with Tara, Kanak, Sheelo, Urmila and Banti the foremost among them, who are nearly all distinctly attractive in traditional feminine ways but who turn out to be far more than that. Being women, they are, predictably, the main victims of the catastrophic events and they suffer the most, but then, unusually, they also pick themselves up and with sheer grit and determination and a sturdy independence of mind and action, they build a new life for themselves—except Banti who dies protesting against hypocritical male norms of family honour.
In a large number of cases, such reconstruction of their lives involves not only overcoming adverse public circumstances but also taking a decision to liberate themselves from the men thrust upon them by arranged marriages, and boldly marching out in defiance of all convention to forge new bonds with other men these women have themselves chosen to love. Their valiant actions in the public sphere are fully matched by their hard-won autonomy in that inner domain which is equally the arena of sexual politics.
Correspondingly, it is the men in Yashpal’s scheme of things here who behave abominably (Somraj, Mohan Lal), or give in and resign themselves with a forced cheerfulness to the circumstances (Pandit Girdharilal), or betray weaknesses of character which subject them to moral degeneration, as in the case of the hero Puri and his political patron Sood. There are, of course, a few good men like Ratan and Gill and above all Dr Pran Nath who play positive roles in private and public life and also help and support the women in various ways—and that is how they prove themselves worthy of the women who choose them.
The novel depicts the gradual fall of the hero, Puri, from his high ideals and principles to devious self-serving practices. In contrast, in what proves to be the central strand of the novel, it also shows the rise of his sister Tara from the depths of the misery and degradation inflicted on her by men to becoming perhaps the most impressively successful of all the fractured and dislocated humans who have been washed upon a strange land and left stranded by the hurricane of history. In her quiet but resolute way, she embodies best the unbreakable spirit of the Punjabi refugee of whom we glimpse numerous other nameless examples inhabiting and indeed swarming the streets and public spaces of Delhi in this populous novel. They are not ‘
sharanarthis’
(refugees) but, as Yashpal calls them, ‘
purusharthi
s’, a term that connotes determined pursuit of a high goal worthy of a true man. In this sense, Tara, with all her innate grace and courtesy, proves herself to be as much of a purusharthi as any man in the novel.
This is the more remarkable because she has suffered as no other character has in what is virtually a sea of suffering. Her abduction and rape seem to constitute perhaps the nadir of all the cruel and dastardly acts committed in the whole novel—except that she is a little later herded together with a number of other women who, we discover, have suffered a similar or even worse fate as they now sit half-naked and starving in the enclosure where they have been locked up and tell their grievous tales to each other.
This whole episode, with its multiple narratives of several raped women whom their ill fortune has momentarily brought together, is presented by
Yashpal in his usual plain prose and seemingly flat style (
sapaatbayani
), with his unblinking narratorial eye not failing to register some little jealousy and class envy among the women even in this extreme situation. But this is because Yashpal tells the whole and unadorned truth with an apparently artless art which is deceptive in its cumulative effect. He appears to follow closely the curve and trajectory of events and to imitate the tenor and sweep of life itself, though this is of course a careful artistic construction. Shortly after the novel was published, Kunwar Narain, a Jnanpith-award winning poet, had acutely enough observed that it lacks any element of poetry and the critic Ram Svarup Chaturvedi has pointed out that in this whole vast narrative, there are few moments when a character stops and reflects on what she or he has experienced. But then, they all seem so constantly buffeted and tossed by the workings of circumstances that they are busy enough just keeping themselves afloat, and as for poetry—as Wilfred Owen said of his poems of World War I—‘the poetry is in the pity’. It is not the pity of the author for the characters or the pity of the hapless characters for themselves, which are hardly ever in evidence, but the pity that events have turned out in as they have.
Nevertheless, even in this unremittingly realistic and at places naturalistic flow of the narrative, one may discern a design or pattern that heightens the intensity of the experience. Tara is abducted and raped by a Muslim goonda but, in Yashpal’s ordering of events, this is but moments after she has walked out on her no less brutal and abusive Hindu husband on her wedding night. There is irony in the fact that it is a Muslim young man she had loved and wanted to marry and she is now raped by a Muslim. After carrying her home and dumping her on the floor, her abductor Nubbu goes out and lies down and slowly smokes one cigarette and then another and only then saunters in to rape her, with the kind of impersonal cold-bloodedness that we find in Manto’s short stories such as ‘Open Up’ or ‘Cold Meat’—except that this scene has none of the charged theatricality of Manto.
As Nubbu rapes Tara, his wife sits outside the door cursing him to hell. The sub-human Nubbu is not dignified by the author with a formal proper name; in fact, he is during the act of rape pointedly and repeatedly called just the ‘
mard
’, and his motive for the act is not only to violate a Hindu woman
but also to make money, first by stripping her of all her jewellery and then by selling her off for twenty-five rupees. After the rape, Tara is surrounded by sympathetic Muslim women, and then taken home and looked after by another Muslim, Hafiz-ji, who is a
hafiz
or custodian not only of the Koran (which one must have by heart to earn the title) but equally piously of this woman of another faith; she in turn observes with him and his family the daily fast for ramazan. Hafiz-ji does later suggest to her that she should convert to Islam, and she seems half willing, for she does not care much for either faith. When thrown together with those other raped women, she recalls Hafiz-ji’s offer and wonders what good remaining a Hindu has done her and whether she might not have been better off turning a Muslim.
Too many subtle ironies attend upon this climactic scene and enrich its meaning for it simply to have ‘happened’ without consummate artistic mediation. Another similarly layered and nuanced aspect of this novel is the apparently plain enough language used by the narrator as well as by the characters. Language is, of course, not only a medium here but also a major plank of the agenda of communal division, as is openly enacted and debated time and again in the novel. All the characters in Lahore whether Hindu or Muslim or Sikh speak Punjabi and several words in their speech and even in the author’s own narrative are translated within brackets into Hindi by the author himself. The language of formal discourse and literature is Urdu; Puri is an Urdu journalist, and it is only a few women who are proficient in Hindi. Language in this novel is thus not a cause of division but an emblem of shared community, and most characters can speak any of the three languages named above, as well as English, according to the demands of the social situation while the highly anglicized senior bureaucrat Rawat can even quote Kalidasa in Sanskrit. A nicely discriminated deployment of such multilingual polyvocality becomes a means of characterization in the hands of the novelist.
In two interrelated postcolonial formulations, the nation is theorized to be an ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson), and the novel is acclaimed as the literary genre peculiarly suited to ‘narrate the nation’ (Homi Bhabha).
Even without the benefit of these recent assertions, and in fact ever since Gandhi in 1918 declared Hindi to be the national language, a number of major Hindi novelists have shown a keenness to take up the burden of narrating the nationalist movement and the liberation of the nation, including Premchand (
Rangabhumi
,
Karmabhumi
,
Godan
), Bhagwati Charan Varma (
Terhe-Merhe Raste
,
Bhoole-Bisre Chitra
) and Satchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ (
Shekhar: Ek Jivani
), to name only the foremost.
It is Yashpal’s particular distinction that he has in this epic novel narrated not one but two nations, which are not so much India and Pakistan of the two-nation theory (for he leaves Pakistan well alone), but the vatan and the desh. In his narration, the vatan, or the organic and ‘knowable’ community, has to be left behind for the desh, the ‘imagined community’, to come into being and to march on to its future (in the sub-title of the second volume, ‘Desh ka Bhavishya’, The Future of the Nation). It is a sombre and sobering narrative but not ultimately a tragic one, for most of the characters heroically fight the tumultuous circumstances and forge a new life for themselves in the new nation—above all Tara, who at the end of the novel is an undersecretary with the Government of India.
Such is the overwhelming nature of the historical material out of which this novel is shaped that Yashpal seems to keep in abeyance or at least under artistic control even his familiar ideological predilections. Apparently, he had thought of not Tara but Kanak as the heroine of the novel in which case it might have ended with her marrying Gill, the Marxist activist. As a confirmed ‘terrorist’ turned communist (though he never formally joined the Party), Yashpal had a long-standing quarrel with Gandhi which was not only ideological but almost personal. When Yashpal had bombed the Viceroy’s train, Irwin was travelling to Delhi to meet Gandhi, a meeting which did go ahead on the same day as scheduled, and Gandhi wrote in the next issue of
Young India
(2 January 1930) an article condemning the bombing under the title ‘The Cult of the Bomb’, in response to which the HSRA published ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ drafted by Yashpal. A visit by Yashpal to Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram and a conversation with him did not help to settle any of the issues between them, and a particularly trenchant tract by Yashpal, titled
Gandhivad ki Shav-Pariskha
(Gandhism:
A Post-mortem), was published at the height of the differences between Gandhi and the communists in 1942. But one would guess none of this from the novel which has many characters critical of Gandhi but also acknowledging the unique power and influence that he wielded, as in the powerfully realized scene set in the evening of the day Gandhi broke what was to be the last of his fasts on 18 January 1948. Nehru comes in for criticism too in the novel but, nevertheless, Tara and the man she finally marries, both work for the government. The nation is a going concern, the
desh
clearly has a
bhavishya
, and the somewhat perfunctorily stuck-on populist conclusion only reinforces the message: ‘The people are not inert. Nor are they always silent. The future of the nation is not in the hands of leaders and ministers; it is very much in the hands of the people.’