Other Side Of Silence Read online

  Whatever its limitations, the oral narrative offers a different way of looking at history, a different perspective. For, because such narratives often flow into each other in terms of temporal time, they blur the somewhat rigid timeframes within which history situates itself. Because people locate their memories by different dates, or different timeframes, than the events that mark the beginning and end of histories, their narratives flow above, below, through the disciplinary narratives of history. They offer us a way of turning the historical lens at a somewhat different angle, and to look at what this perspective offers. I do not want to argue here that oral narratives can replace what we see as history, only that they can offer a different and extremely important perspective on history, a perspective which, I believe, enriches history.

  I have come to believe that there is no way we can begin to understand what Partition was about, unless we look at how people remember it. I do not wish here to carry out a literal exercise of first seeing how people remember the history of Partition, and then attempting to penetrate their narrative for its underlying facts to arrive at an approximation of some kind of ‘truth’. Instead, I wish to look at the memories for themselves — even if they are shifting, changing, unreliable. James Young says: ‘Whatever “fictions” emerge from the survivors’ accounts are not deviations from the “truth” but are part of the truth in any particular version. The fictiveness in testimony does not involve disputes about facts, but the inevitable variance in perceiving and representing these facts, witness by witness, language by language, culture by culture.’2 I can find no more eloquent description of what I hope to do in this book.

  Collecting material is sometimes the easiest part of putting a book together. The difficult decisions come when one wants to try and figure out what to include and what to leave out. Over the many long years that I have been working on the subject, I have interviewed perhaps seventy or so people. While this is a number that sounds quite substantial to me, in terms of the number of people who were affected by Partition, it is negligible, an indication of the fact that no single individual can tackle this project in its entirety. While one part of this book is made up of my telling of Partition stories, in the other parts, people I have interviewed tell their own stories. But of the number I spoke with, I have included only a fraction. This is not because the others are not worth reproducing. Rather it is because each story has been virtually impossible to edit out of this book for one reason or another. And in the end I have chosen to use a rather arbitrary criterion. I have included the stories that meant the most to me, stories of people with whom I have formed real friendships, or stories to which I keep returning again and again.

  In presenting the interviews to the reader, I have taken the liberty of narrativizing them — that is, I have removed the questions posed by the interviewers, and have let the text run as one continuous narrative, although no chronological alterations have been made. And in a few cases, I have retained the interventions made by other people, particularly in instances where they add to, or illuminate, certain aspects of the text. This shaping of the interviews to turn them into more ‘readable’ texts has been done quite consciously. I do not believe the transcript of any interview can ever be an unmediated text. In transferring words to text, so much is lost: the particular inflection, the hesitation over certain thoughts and phrases, even certain feelings, the body language, which often tells a different story from the words, and indeed the conscious ‘shaping’ of the interview by the interviewer who is usually in a situation of power vis-à-vis the person being interviewed. Given this, I thought it pointless to pretend that the interviews could appear before the reader in some ‘pure’ form and have edited them into what I feel is a more readable form. The full text of each interview, and indeed of the ones I have not used here will, I hope, be housed in a library or archive so that they can be used by others researching this area.

  The fact that most interviews took place in family situations also meant that women were seldom alone when they spoke to us. Much of the time the interview had to be conducted in the nooks and crannies of time that were available to women in between household tasks. Equally, if their husbands or sons were around, they tended to take over the interview, inadvertently or otherwise, making women lapse into a sort of silence. This is not uncommon — many oral historians have written about the difficulty of speaking to and with women, of learning to listen differently, often of listening to the hidden nuance, the half-said thing, the silences which are sometimes more eloquent than speech. Listening to women is, I think, a different thing between women, than it is between men and women.

  When I reread the interviews now, it strikes me that there are some very clear differences in the speech of men and of women. Is there such a thing, then, as a gendered telling of Partition? I learnt to recognize this in the way women located, almost immediately, this major event in the minor keys of their lives. From the women I learned about the minutiae of their lives, while for the most part men spoke of the relations between communities, the broad political realities. Seldom was there an occasion when a man being interviewed would speak of a child lost or killed, while for a woman there was no way in which she could omit such a reference. This is a question I discuss further in the conclusion to this work.

  The process of identifying people to speak to was an almost random one. I first began to consciously speak to people when I was working on a film called A Division of Hearts made by two friends for Channel 4 Television in Britain. But once I had begun, almost everywhere I turned, there was a story to be listened to. In Delhi particularly, you can be sure that almost every other Punjabi person over a certain age has a history of Partition somewhere in his or her family. I would often find myself stopping on roads to talk to people I thought looked the right age. Once, after talking to a family in Jangpura in Delhi, I came out to find an auto-rickshaw to take me home. The driver was dressed in the salwar-kurta that is typical of Pakistani Punjabis. I asked him where he was from. He responded with a question — one that is commonly asked when you ask north Indians where they are from. Are you asking about now or earlier, he said. The word ‘earlier’ is only an approximate translation of the word that he actually used: ‘pichche se’, which refers to something that comes from an earlier time, and has been left behind. I told him I was interested in where he was from ‘earlier’, not now. He said he was from Baluchistan, and had stayed on there for nearly ten years after Partition, in a small village where a community of Hindus lived peaceably, without any problems. Soon, we were in his house talking about his recollections of the time. One day, as I walked out of a take-away restaurant in south Delhi, clutching a roti and kebab, I was accosted by a beggar woman asking for money. She spoke in Punjabi, an unusual thing, for there are very few Punjabi beggars in the city. I asked her where she was from. She responded with the same question: now or earlier. I gave her the same answer and she told me she had come from a small village called Chak 53, that she had walked over with the large kafila of refugees and had ended up, by a circuitous route, on the streets of Delhi, begging. In this way, I moved from one person to another, one story to another, and collected stories, almost randomly. This is one reason why there is no clear pattern to the oral narratives in this book.

  Some patterns will, however, be discernible to the reader. For example, many of the interviews I have used come from the same region — Rawalpindi district — and relate to incidents of violence that took place there in March 1947, just a few months before Partition. Often, in an attempt to recreate the communities that Partition destroyed, people moved en masse to one place, or were housed by the State in a particular place. When I began to track down Partition survivors, I was led, first of all, to survivors of the Rawalpindi violence who lived in a middle class area in south Delhi. One person put me in touch with another, and then another and in this way I collected many stories. It is for this reason that the accounts of Rawalpindi survivors form a major part of my work.

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p; Apart from all the methodological problems that attach to oral narratives, they are also very difficult to deal with in practical, structural terms. How do you structure a book that is primarily made up of such accounts? Should it contain just the texts of the interviews, should there be an accompanying commentary, should there be analysis and/or explanation, should the interviews be long or short, and so on. I have grappled with all of these questions. In the beginning, I thought it better to simply put together a book of oral accounts, without any explanation or commentary. Gradually, I came to believe otherwise: as a reader, and a publisher, I know that very few readers actually go through a collection of oral accounts unless they are very short, and I thought the things people said in the interviews were too important to be either summarily cut short, or just put together without any comment. Also, if I was shaping the interviews, I felt I needed to point to what, for me, was significant in those interviews. As I got more involved in the work, I found there was a great deal I wanted to say, in addition to what the people I spoke to had said. There were their stories, as they told them, and there was what I learnt and understood from those stories. I then began to think of a way of meshing the two together. The structure that you see in the book now, with excerpts from interviews forming a major part of the analytical chapters, was what emerged from this. Even so, there remained the problem of where and how to locate the full text of the interviews. I felt it important that at least for the small number that I had selected, there be a place that was an integral part of the book. After much thought, I decided to place all interviews together in a separate section at the end of the book. But having once done that, the same problem re-presented itself: would people actually read them, or would they see them as simply adjuncts to the other chapters? It seemed likely that that was what would happen, and to me the interviews were far too important to be put aside as an appendix. Finally, I decided to move the interviews into the main text, and to supplement what I have said in each chapter with one or two interviews. Inasmuch as it was possible, I tried to relate the interview(s) to the chapter in which they have been included, but this was not possible each time. It is difficult, indeed it is too pat, to have, at the end of each chapter an interview that perfectly fits the subject matter of that particular chapter. Had I had a list of chapters in mind before starting this work, I might have been able to consciously look for interviews that could directly relate to specific subjects. As it was, my interviews did not fit any particular pattern. Nonetheless, I have chosen to place them alongside each chapter because I believe they offer insights into all, and more, of the things I have discussed in this book, and are not only limited to the chapters they figure in. Sometimes, then, the interview begins the chapter, at others it ends it, and in one instance, it provides the thread that weaves the chapter together. I think the reader may find it helpful to keep this in mind while reading the interviews.

  While interviews form my primary sources, I have also looked at diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports and the kinds of documents that I feel are important for my work: letters written by different people, reports of enquiry commissions, pamphlets and, of course, books. From these I have reconstructed many different ‘voices’ of Partition: official, unofficial, informal, others. These include the voices of people telling stories, the voices through which they speak in memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, those that emerge from the official narratives, those that are evident in communal discourses, and woven through all this, my own voice, reading, speaking, questing, hazarding explanations.

  Together, these have made for a narrative in which my presence, as author and interpreter, is quite visible, some would say almost too visible. I make no apologies for this. I can only say that I have always had a deep suspicion of histories that are written as if the author were but a mere vehicle, histories that, to use Roland Barthes’ phrase, ‘seem to write themselves’. The absence of the ‘I’ in such histories helps perhaps to establish distance, even to create the illusion of objectivity, perhaps to establish factuality. I have no wish to pretend that these histories, these stories, are in any way an ‘objective’ rendering of Partition. I do not believe such a thing is possible. For the many years that this work has been with me, I have felt involved in it, intensely and emotionally, politically and academically. To pretend then, that this is a history that has ‘written itself’, so to speak, would have been dishonest.

  In the process of working on Partition I have become, like every other researcher or writer who gets involved, obsessive about this work. For years, I have thought of little else. One of the things that troubled me enormously when I began was precisely the lack of what is known as objectivity in my work. There was no way I could deny a personal involvement; no way I could pretend that there wasn’t an emotional entanglement; no way I could wipe out my politics. It has taken me several years to feel comfortable with this fact. If this account is read as history, it may well be thrown out the door. Perhaps then, the best way to read it is to add the word ‘personal’ to the history that I am attempting in this book. And to throw out, once and for all, any notions of objectivity or distance. This is a personal history that does not pretend to be objective.

  There is also another reason that my voice moves in and out of these stories. Oral history is a methodological tool that many feminist historians have found enormously empowering. Looking at women’s narratives and testimonies, and placing them alongside, or indeed against, the official discourses of history, has offered feminist historians a new and different way of looking at history. How does ‘history’ look when seen through the eyes of women? How does it evolve, in narratives and testimonies, when women talk to women? But while oral history has been empowering, it has also brought its own problems. After all, the telling is always only one-sided. How, further, can such historians ensure that the subjects of their interviews are not simply the ‘raw material’ on whose experiences they will build their theories? In some instances, oral historians, and particularly feminist oral historians, have attempted to return the results of their research to their subjects, in an attempt to not be exploitative. While such attempts establish sincerity of motive, they do little to change the equation of power that underlies the collection of oral testimonies: for long after your subjects have spoken to you, their voices will live on in your work, they may help to promote your career, and while they continue to figure where you are concerned, the subjects themselves will recede further and further into the background. The always troubling awareness of this ambivalence has directed me to choose a methodology in which I make no pretence at being a shadow, in which I attempt to put the stories I have heard at centre stage, along with what I felt, and continue to feel, about them. Thus, although this book is not ‘only’ about women, women, their histories, the methodologies they have created, lie at the heart of it. It is as a feminist, someone to whom the tools of feminist historiography are important, that I approach this work.

  There is, however, a major lacuna in my work: it is one-sided; it relates only to one aspect of Partition — that is, the partition of Punjab. I have not looked at the east, at Bengal, at all. In the main this is because I do not have the language; also the partition of Bengal was so very different from that of Punjab that I would not have known where and how to begin. Equally, I have had no access to information, interviews or anything else from Pakistan (other than, of course, the story of my uncle, and here there was a connection of blood, as well as one other interview that I have borrowed from the work of some friends). It is one of the tragedies of Partition that researchers working on this major event in the history of the subcontinent can only have access to both countries — India and Pakistan — if they belong to a third country. Not only are files and documents not easily available to researchers from either side, but, when attempting to interview people, the baggage of bitterness and pain makes it virtually impossible for someone from India to interview people from Pakistan — or indeed the other way round — about something as emoti
ve as Partition. I have tried, on many occasions, to do this, but without success.

  The interviews you will see in this book were conducted over a period of several years. When I began to talk to people, I had no fixed plan in mind: a book was not on the agenda and it was only gradually that the idea for one crystallized. I decided quite early on, however, that I would not follow a particular pattern in the interviews — that is, that there would be no fixed questionnaire, no chosen ‘sample’ of people, in terms of geography or class or any other category. I would simply ask people to speak about that time in their lives, and let the conversation take its own course, to flow in whichever direction seemed appropriate. This was a deliberate decision: if one is to do a proper collection of people’s histories of Partition, no one individual can carry out such an enterprise. Any individual attempt then, such as mine is, remains limited. Given this, carefully constructed questionnaires, or thought out samples, do not help to make the exercise any more complete. I decided therefore, to follow whatever pattern the interviews dictated, and to locate people in whatever way seemed best. Thus I spoke to many people, over extended periods of time — sometimes, as in the case of Damyanti Sahgal, the interviews lasted several months.