The Sea Lies Ahead

by Intizar Husain

  Contents

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Glossary

  ‘This land is different; its sky is different.’

  Azadi vs. Batwara

  There has never been a uniform, un-variegated, one-dimensional response to the partition among the Muslim intelligentsia. The Urdu literature of the partition years – which, it must be stressed, was written by both Muslim and non-Muslim writers – reflects a bewildering and often contradictory array of opinions. The Muslim response is equally, if not more, bewildering and contradictory. Taken together, the Urdu literature of the partition years, which comprised the novel and the short story (which flowered rather spectacularly during this period), as well as poetry, reportage, autobiography, diary, journal writing and journalistic writings, presents a broad spectrum of opinion. Reactions vary from nostalgic lament for a lost age to attaching blame and apportioning responsibility for the terrible misfortunes that had befallen all those who had been affected, in some way or the other, by the partition. And indeed, as scholars have noted, such was the impact of the partition that there was hardly any Muslim family that had not lost one member or more, or not been affected by the events spiraling out of 1947 in one way or another.

  While there is a general agreement that the murder and mayhem that accompanied the partition was a human tragedy of epic proportions, there is far more ambivalence in the ways of dealing or accepting its consequences. A study of Urdu literature from this period also reveals a wide range of possible reasons why some chose to stay put while others migrated; often economic reasons predominate over religious ones and pragmatism supersedes ideology. While the majority of writers made a conscious effort to hold up the tattered fabric of secularism in the face of communalism, bitter and painful memories also find expression, especially in a range of first-person accounts, diaries, etc. One is unable to discern a commonality of concerns or any coherence and common ground save the obvious assertion that countless innocent lives were lost due to the political decisions of a mere handful.

  That there are multiple histories rather than a history of the partition is borne out by studying the literature produced on either side of the newly-created border. In contrast to Indian sentiments, a section of Pakistani writers viewed the creation of Pakistan as a logical culmination of a historical process and therefore cause for joy rather than mourning, a reason to look forward rather than over one’s shoulder at what once was and had ceased to be. The breaking away of a section of population that was viewed as a tragedy of epic proportions by the ‘Congressi’ Muslims in India was perceived as a triumph of Islamic nationalism by the votaries of the Muslim League. Moreover, there was always one group (it could be Muslims or Hindus, Indians or Pakistanis though it is often difficult to categorize as one or the other as the writers don’t always name the ‘other’ community) who felt they had been singled out (in comparison to the ‘other’) for the terrible retributions that accompanied independence and was therefore, more inclined to beat its chest. While many Indian writers refer to the cataclysmic events of the year that was annus horribillis as batwara (literally meaning division but commonly referred to as partition or taqseem in Urdu), for the Pakistani writers the year marked the beginning of azadi (freedom) and the birth of Pakistan as an independent country.

  Two worlds – the lost and the emergent – fused and merged after 1947. In the years that followed, pathos, confusion and conflict reigned supreme despite the avowals of joy and celebrations of new beginnings. Delhi and Lucknow, the two great centres of Muslim culture in Upper India – the London and the Paris of their milieu – lay decimated. Across the border, Lahore and Karachi too were bursting at the seams with strangers looking to put down roots in an alien soil that would henceforth be their home. Forces of urban renewal and demographic change were at work everywhere. The inhabitants of these new cities didn’t know whether to celebrate their hard-won independence or mourn the passing of an era and a way of life. Should one celebrate the birth of a new nation? Should one rejoice at gaining independence at the end of a fierce and prolonged struggle? Or, should one mourn the loss of an age and the end of pluralism and syncretism? Should one search for new directions? Or, were all routes to regeneration irrevocably closed for this weary generation?1 These questions, and many others, jostle for answers in the outpourings of partition chroniclers.

  To further compound this confusion, one set of writers who had written with joyous abandon on the imminent azadi all through the 1940s adopted a taciturn silence. In the polarized arena of the Urdu literature of the late ’40s and early ’50s, the silence on the partition could also possibly be due to the loquacity of a set of writers called the progressives. The more one group wrote about the horrors of partition, the more the other side lapsed into a silence that seemed to obliterate individual suffering, loss and pain. Quite apart from the distillation of a lived experience that provides valuable clues to the historian and lay reader alike, the literature of this period is of great importance to the literary historian because it shows how political events shaped literary sensibility like never before and the rise of a literary movement called jadeediyat (modernism) coincided with the decline of another called taraqqui-pasandi or progressivism. But that is not the subject of this introduction! Here I must confine myself to providing as comprehensive a background as I can to Intizar Husain’s trilogy on the partition which comprises Basti, Aage Samandar Hai and Naya Ghar.

  But I must return, briefly, to the tug-of-war between the progressives and the modernists that dominated the literary scene in the years after the partition: with the creation of Pakistan, several former progressives, who were by now either vehemently opposed to the progressive ideology (most notably M. D. Taseer and Muhammad Hasan Askari) or uncomfortable with some of its jingoism (such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz), adopted defensive postures about an entirely new phenomenon – Pakistani tehzeeb. Powerful literary critics and ideologues such as Muhammad Hasan Askari, who mentored upcoming writers such as Intizar Husain through a literary grouping called the Halqa-e Arbab-e Zauq (‘the circle of men of good taste’)2, expounded the notion of a Pakistani national culture through a slew of columns, op-eds and essays.3 We get a glimpse of the expectations of the new state from its intellectuals in Qudratullah Shahab’s memoir Shahabnama, published though it was as late as 1986.4 Shahab is however not uncritical of the state of affairs. In the short story, ‘Ya Khuda’, he exposes the hypocrisy of those who quote Iqbal yet indulge in hoarding and black-marketing of scarce commodities, making a mockery of the cracks between state and society. As we shall see in the novel that follows, once the rosy idealism of the early years rubbed off, the issues of corruption and moral turpitude became as important as rising Islamism.

  The task of the publicists was advanced by a new breed of ideologues who heralded the creation of Pakistan as the dawn of a new era. The works of prose stylists such as Fateh Muhammad Malik opened up a new chapter in Urdu literary criticism called Paksitaniyat, or the study of the sovereign state of Pakistan. Advancing Askari’s notion of a writer’s commitment to the nation-state, Mumtaz Shirin compiled a collection of short stories on the partition, entitled Zulmat-e-Neem Roz; considering the impact of the partition on Urdu literature, it is interesting that this was the first ever anthology on partition in Urdu. New-age Pakistani critics, such as
Asif Farrukhi, have admitted to a certain self-censorship on the part of the Pakistani writers, an attempt at what he calls ‘to re-write the past.’ Farrukhi also points out two important things: one, the fallacy of the Urdu critics – incidentally on both sides of the border – to refer to partition-related literature as fasadat ka adab, i.e. literature devoted to communal riots; and two, the ‘manipulation’ of literature according to a critics’ own ideological mooring.

  Much of partition literature is personal and cathartic. A compulsive scraping of wounds, a cataloguing of unimaginable horrors and a depiction of a sick, momentarily depraved society is, often, the creative writer’s only way of exorcising the evil within. It served the needs of its times in a rough and ready sort of way, but it is patchy, uneven, often incoherent. Much of it falls under what has been termed waqti adab, or topical literature. Given the propensity of most writers to focus on violence and communal tensions, the Urdu critics have called these stories fasadat ke afsane, or riot literature, again serving to deflect the attention from partition per se and turning the cause-and-effect equation upside down.

  Equally worrying is the lack of historical awareness among the writers themselves. References to political events, resolutions, statements, etc. are vague; the focus is on the ‘impact’ of partition on the common people rather than why the political leaders failed to resolve their disputes over power sharing and ended up carving the country along religious lines. By and large, the Urdu writers have been content to write of consequences rather than reasons, effects rather than causes, of partition. They have even deployed myths, allegories, fables to paint on vast canvases in broad brush strokes. This is evident in the titles of some of the most representative and anthologized of these works: Jadein (Ismat Chughtai) or Udaas Naslein (Abdullah Hussein). If there are as many ways of interpreting the partition there are no clear answers to why some chose to migrate leaving home and hearth behind in search of a promised land. It remains a mystery why some went while others stayed, often in the same family. Chhote Miyan, a character in The Sea Lies Ahead, puts his finger on the nub when he says, ‘It was a wave that was sweeping people off their feet. Now, when you think about it, it seems strange that those who went did so thinking what they did, and those who stayed back did so thinking what they did.’

  ‘History alone will decide whether we have acted wisely and correctly in accepting partition,’ wrote Maulana Azad in India Wins Freedom. As far as the Urdu writer is concerned, the jury is still out. Moreover, a lot depends on the composition of the jury. Is it a Pakistani jury or an Indian one? For on the question of state and nationhood, the Urdu writers on either side of the border seem to have little in common.

  The Muhajir Experience

  A necessary fall-out of partition was migration. The displacement, dislocation, uprootedness and alienation that came in the wake of the transfer of power have been well documented in both autobiographical accounts and works of fiction.5 While Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is the most well known and most anthologized depiction of the trauma caused by such forced removal from one’s ancestral land, the literature of this period is replete with examples of how the dearly beloved suddenly, virtually overnight, became forbidden, even alien. Some writers showed pathos or stoic acceptance; others reacted with anger and hostility. Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi’s autobiographical, Dehli ki Bipda (‘The Calamity of Delhi’), written in the centuries-old elegiac shehr afsos (literally meaning ‘lament of the city’) tradition, is a haunting tribute to the vanished glory of Delhi, a glory he likens to other great ‘Muslim’ cities such as Cordoba and Granada.6 In lyrical prose, he recounts the irreversible changes wrought to the city’s moral, intellectual, cultural and social fabric by the outflow of its Muslim population and influx of refugees. In a similar vein, writers who left East Punjab to find a new home, sometimes barely a few kilometres across the new border, have waxed eloquent on how wonderful everything was in their old home and how new and different everything appears to be on ‘this’ side of the border. A case in point would be A. Hameed who wrote of Amristar (or Ambarsar as it was pronounced by the locals), the city of his birth: ‘For me Amritsar is my lost Jerusalem and I am its wailing wall. I do not remember anything of Jerusalem; he must remember who forgets.’

  A commuter train, called the Babu train, ran daily between the twin cities of Amritsar and Lahore, ferrying workers to and fro. Barely 30 kilometres apart, partition cleaved an unimaginable rift between the two cities causing immense sorrow and pain to many. A leading light of a group of Punjabi intellectuals who comprised the ‘Amritsari School of Thought’, A. Hameed’s account entitled ‘My First Day in Pakistan’ is free of bitterness and blame. It recounts in a matter-of-fact tone the hardships faced by the early lot of refugees: how food was scarce, jobs even more so, how the neighbourhood committee of the Muslim League doled out free flour, but even that stopped after two weeks and how his family faced its first starvation.7 Even in this dire state, Hameed notes how he heard an announcement in the street one day: ‘This is the Pakistan Broadcasting Service. Earlier, we had always heard, All India Radio, Lahore. This is the Pakistan Broadcasting Service. It felt good. We were convinced we were sitting in our own country.’ Despite the lingering nostalgia, Hameed’s oeuvre shows no regret for the migration across the border. I have chosen to give the example of A. Hameed and his nostalgia – for a city that was a bare 30 kilometres away and Hameed’s shared language, dress, cuisine, culture with those on ‘this’ side of the border – to highlight how those who had come from the ‘other’ side, from the dusty heartland of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar as well as from towns and villages across the length and breadth of India must have felt in this new land, peopled though it was with fellow Muslims. Imagine how someone like Intizar Husain would have felt for whom everything was new and different! His lament for the neem tree left standing behind in his courtyard in Dibai, his yearning for the taste of Mitthan halwai’s sweets in dusty Bulundshahr and his nostalgia for the flavoursome idiomatic zubaan of his Phuphi Amma as she regaled him with stories must be seen against this background of all-pervasive loss and dislocation.

  Like everything else written during and about this period, migration too has been viewed and interpreted in different ways. As in the depiction of partition-related violence, some writers catalogue the horrors witnessed on the way and the difficulties in finding safe havens on the other side of newly-demarcated borders, others view it as salutary experiences with the potential to draw lessons from past mistakes. Of all these depictions, Intizar Husain, who migrated in 1947 from Bulundshahr in Uttar Pradesh, has chosen the most unique form; he has depicted the migration as hijrat, an experience akin to the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina in June 622 AD and therefore an experience that transcends human sufferings.

  Compared to the poets who have written sparingly on the partition, the prose writers have given especial importance to it. Their predilection for focusing on the communal violence that spiraled out of it raises some disturbing questions.8 Did they do so out of the conviction that it was ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or from any real understanding of the long-term consequences of partition? Or, was it because the only meaningful reality for them was the present, and the present contained violence and degradation and misery in such ample measure? While some modern critics such as Muhammad Hasan Askari believed rioting and violence cannot become the subject of true literature9, the progressives believed that violence was a natural consequence of the ill-will sown by the Cabinet Mission Plan of 16 February 1946 and the Mountbatten Plan of 3 June 1947.10 Interestingly, while modernists like Intizar Husain chose to view the partition as hijrat or migration in the sense of a recurrent historical event that allowed the writer to explore the past while laying bare the present, for the progressives, the partition was an opportunity to dwell on the present. For, it was in the present, that there was hardly any Muslim family that had not lost one member (if not more) or whose lives had not been affected by the trauma in some way or the other.

/>   The literature of the early years of Independence reflects a knee-jerk reaction to immediate events. Nothing demonstrates this better than the work of Manto.11 Writing in a similar vein, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chughtai, Hayatullah Ansari used shock as a strategy to allow their readers to deal with and go beyond the paralyzing effects of what was a tragedy of near-Biblical proportions. It would be several years before some semblance of reflection, introspection and evaluation could emerge. A preoccupation with pain and sorrow, in a sense, blinded the early crop of writers – blinded them, that is, to the moral, political and intellectual contradictions that only a crisis of an unprecedented scale can precipitate. Those who began their literary careers after the horrors had abated somewhat are in a better position to analyse the political and social faultlines revealed by the partition. It was only with the gradual passage of time that the Urdu writer could seize the events of 1947 and view them as catastrophic even apocalyptic events carrying within them the seeds of renewal.

  Writers like Intizar Husain, who began their literary careers close on the heels of the great partition chroniclers such as Manto, were better placed to view the partition and its consequences. In story after story, we see him ruing the possibilities that partition presented but were lost or frittered away. He talks of how, suddenly, almost by accident, partition allowed writers like him to ‘regain’ a great experience – namely hijrat that has a unique place in the history of Muslims. Yet, as he has said in an interview, ‘And the great expectation we had of making something out of it at a creative level and of exploiting it in developing a new consciousness and sensibility – that bright expectation has now faded and gone.’12

  Intizar Husain and Aage Samandar Hai

  There is no denying that Intizar Husain’s contribution as a storyteller is enormous, especially in the genre of partition narratives. If Manto laid bare the ugliness of 1947 and its immediate, brutish aftermath with the urgency of a field surgeon, Intizar Husain probes those wounds ever so gingerly, peeling away layers from old memories to reveal wounds that have still not healed and may never heal, at least not in his life time – and certainly not when fresh wounds are repeatedly inflicted on skin that is still sore and tender. The Sea Lies Ahead shows us the old wounds and tells us how new ones are being added day by day and year by year while everyone watches helplessly; it talks with searing honesty of the ethnic violence that spiraled out of control in Karachi and how no one made any effort to stem its bloody tide. Asked what would be the sum total of Pakistan’s recent history, a character in the novel replies pithily: ‘Mushairas and Kalashnikovs.’