Implicit Rhetoric of Genocide in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956)

Abstract

The article explores the complex nexus of the legal and the literary by re-envisioning the idea of genocide as a legal, social as well as political concept, as the violence engendered by it continues to cast its shadow over humankind. The relevance of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan lies in its vivid portrayal of how mass passions of religious antagonism result in gripping accounts of bloodshed and forced expulsion of ordinary people in South Asia. The paper also seeks to contest the narrow understanding of genocide where the victim and perpetrator communities are perceived as exclusive categories. Through this exemplary novel, the paper attempts to foreground how fictional narratives mirror the basic conceptualizations of genocide as enshrined in the United Nations Genocide Convention (1948). The paper delves into the blurred distinction between victim and perpetrator communities in the context of partition in South Asia. The article engages in a close textual analysis to shed light on the synthesis of the literary and legal context of genocide in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan. The paper establishes how reading the novel from the legal point of view underscores the contentious nature of genocide that prevailed during the time of Partition.

Introduction

Accounts of genocide are a common concern of the international community as it continues to unleash its terror on civilian populations around the world. The recent instances of genocide in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria have made this issue of genocide all the more pertinent in public discussions. The themes of mass extermination, jingoism, human rights violations and mass displacement explored in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan make it an interesting study for legal analysis. ³ In the South Asian context, the concept of genocide is all the more relevant owing to its legacy of two major partitions; first in 1947 into two independent nation-states: India and Pakistan; second in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan from West Pakistan, thereby creating the independent state of Bangladesh.

Khushwant Singh has established himself as a distinguished novelist, lawyer, politician and journalist. He rose to prominence with his enduring works on Sikh history. His books, such as The History of Sikhs (1953), Train to Pakistan (1956), I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (1959), Delhi: A Novel (1990) and Ranjit Singh: The Maharaja of the Punjab (1963), reflect the pervasive influence of Sikh consciousness in his writings. Historical facts and fictional elements are ingeniously juxtaposed in his novels. In this novel taken up for the purpose of the study, Singh effectively blends his gifts as reporter and historian to vividly portray the bestial horror and violence characterizing of the border regions during the Partition. The fictional village of Mano Majra located on the border of India and Pakistan offers a microcosmic view of Indian society where the erstwhile communal harmony among the villagers is disrupted by the atmosphere of religious fanaticism plaguing the nation. In narrating the crisis, Singh reveals how the invasion of outside forces—a train full of corpses of Hindus and Sikhs, refugees and finally a group of militant Sikhs from the city—generates religious sentiments among the apolitical villagers. Singh launches a scathing attack upon nationalists and politicians whose endorsement of nationalism turns out to be purely rhetorical. The bureaucrats who claim to promote unity are actually complicit in creating ethnic rivalry amongst the innocent villagers.

Singh represents characters belonging to different religions and professions, such as Juggu, a Sikh peasant; Iqbal Singh, a political worker; Meet Singh, a Sikh priest; Hukum Chand, a Hindu magistrate; Lala Ram Lal, a wealthy Hindu moneylender; Imam Baksh, a Muslim weaver; Hassena, a Muslim girl and so on, to reveal the transition in their relationship enforced by the fires of violence and riots ignited by politicians. Amidst the whirlwind of Partition, Singh also redeems his enduring faith in a sense of humanity through the character of Juggu. The novel’s impassioned cry for unity and tolerance has powerful resonance even today in the context of socio-politically volatile subcontinent.

Among the widely cited reviews on Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan, some of the prominent ones are Radhika Chopra’s analysis of the predicament of the common man resulting from the brutality unleashed by the Partition and corruption of bureaucrats and the fanaticism of religious leaders to redress the situation ⁴ ; Rituparna Roy’s book chapter on the significance of trains and redemptive power of humanity with regard to mayhem arising out of the Partition ⁵ ; Jasprit K. Gill’s focus on the subversion of stereotypical representation of Sikhs as violence mongers and terrorists ⁶ ; and Syrrina Ahsan Ali Haque’s exploration of the multiple perspectives on Partition by the diverse religious communities inhabiting the village of Mano Majra. ⁷ These scholars dwell on the communal harmony among the villagers in the pre-Partition days and its subsequent disruption by the diabolical bureaucrats and a few fanatics in the post-Partition days. They observe a redeeming sense of humanity embodied in the Sikh character Juggu in order to redress the subaltern identity of the Sikhs. In their discussion of the novel, they emphasize on the multiple perspectives on Partition by exploring the dialogic potential in the form of interaction among characters belonging to different religious communities. British critic Anthony Burgess comments that Singh ‘identifies himself with the men and women of ordinary homes, pubs, schools, prisons, using all kinds of language, flinching at no situation’ ⁸ (quoted in Singh 60). Another critic Harish Raizada praises the objectivity and detachment achieved by Singh in the depiction of the brutalities. Raizada states, ‘Khushwant Singh’s treatment of brutal atrocities committed on either side of the border is characterized by artistic objectivity and detachment. He exaggerates nothing, he leaves nothing’ ⁹ (quoted in Singh 61). Twinkle B. Manyavar regards it as ‘one of the finest realistic novels of post-World War II Indo-Anglian fiction’ ¹⁰ (quotedin Singh 61). Most of the analysis on Train to Pakistan tends to focus on the unprecedented violence of Partition rather than engaging in a genocidal analysis of the novel.

Khushwant Singh claims that through this novel, Train to Pakistan (1956), he condemns the animalistic nature of human beings arising out of religious ideology. In an interview, he states ‘You know, I think that human beings often behave worse than animals. I have enjoyed dogfights and cockfights. But these animals and birds don’t go beyond certain limits. Man, on the contrary, can be viciously brutal’. ¹¹ Singh asserts that other than the fabricated story of a trainload of Muslims being saved by a Sikh character, Juggu, all the other characters have been taken from real-life people he encountered in Partition days.

Though popular Partition novels, such as Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1973), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988), are replete with genocidal facts and the intertwined relationship between history and ordinary people, it is Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan which deserves critical attention as the fictional village of Mano Majra located on the border of India and Pakistan serves as a prototype of genocidal violence in Indian society where the erstwhile communal harmony existing among the villagers is disrupted by the onrush of religious fanaticism plaguing the nation.

South Asia and Genocide Studies

The South Asian region can hardly be characterized as a monolithic entity owing to its multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic, multiracial and multi-religious identities. Partha Chatterjee in his influential book The Nation and Its Fragments states that Western discourses of nationalism refuse to accommodate and acknowledge the fragmentary, plural and local histories of nationalism in postcolonial societies in order to assert their ‘epistemic privilege’ ¹² over the non-Western world. He believes that the legacy of nationalism as an emancipatory feature of anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa has been tarnished by ethnic politics and corrupt regimes. The proclivity for a grand homogeneous narrative of a nation in the South Asian context runs the risk of collapsing its numerous identities. ¹³ Homi K. Bhabha, in the introduction to his edited book Nation and Narration, acknowledges the attempts made by the nationalist rhetoric to propagate the idea of a nation as a ‘continuous narrative of national progress’. ¹⁴ Bhabha questions the organic theories of holism of community which constructs national unity through discourses of ‘out of many one’ (294) [original emphasis]. Such discourses obscure the lives of people located at the margins. Bhabha advocates a holistic view of the nation which includes the discourses of migrants, minorities and other marginalized communities. ¹⁵ Gyanendra Pandey asserts ¹⁶ that the dominant nationalist historiography uses categories such as ‘national’ and ‘secular’ to project a seamless variety of nationalism. In doing so, it privileges the mainstream over the marginal and expects the minorities and other fragments of society to fall in line with the mainstream. Revisionist historians like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin also share the view that there is a lacuna in nationalist historiography which elides the dreadful happenings and emotional dimension of history. They argue that there is a need to recover marginal voices and survivor’s accounts that constitute important fragments of history. Chatterjee, Bhabha, Pandey, Butalia, Menon and Bhasin all emphasize upon the importance of fragmentary narratives in resisting the homogeneous narratives of the nation.

Nationalism was valorized as an ideology which generated positive consciousness of solidarity, homogeneity and national aspiration among the natives. However, within decades after independence, the glorified connotation of nationalism changed as internal differences based on certain divisive factors, such as religion, language, gender, class and caste, cropped up, thereby affecting its unifying purpose. Across the subcontinent, communities that had existed in harmonious relationships for centuries engaged in terrifying sectarian violence resulting in mutual slaughter on an unprecedented scale never experienced before. The border areas witnessed mass killings with rape, abduction, genital mutilation and the public humiliation of rival community pervading the atmosphere. ¹⁷ Given this situation, it becomes all the more important to ponder upon the furore in the form of genocide in these socio-politically volatile regions.

Despite the fact that incidents of genocide across the world may be characterized as histories of political crisis and human rights violations, the social and structural contexts triggering varied forms of genocide in South Asia are quite different from the Western context. Sayantani Jana provides a nuanced understanding of genocide by classifying Indian Partition as a form of ‘decolonizing genocide’. ¹⁸ She argues that both state and non-state groups mobilized a specific kind of organized violence during decolonization. The existing definition of genocide by the Genocide Convention 1948 as well as by the Rome Statute does not accommodate the non-state agents of genocide. The retaliatory nature of violence with blurring distinctions between perpetrators and victims seems to characterize the ethnic homogenization impulse of the rival communities. Christian Gerlach, too, in his study of genocide affirms the significant role played by non-state groups in determining the timing and nature of assaults. Neeti Nair in her book Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India contests the monolithic characterization of Partition violence by arguing that circumstances determined the varying degree of violence in different places. Indians grappled with the idea of multiple imaginings of the nation based on their religious affiliations. In the Partition context, mostly community violence rather than violence perpetuated by state agents pervades the atmosphere. The societal fractures precipitated by the colonial state ultimately gave way to genocidal conflicts. So, it becomes imperative to move beyond Eurocentric definitions of genocide in order to understand how genocide affects postcolonial societies. Khushwant Singh’s novel foregrounds genocide as an intergroup conflict rather than relegating community violence to the background. The instances in the novel reflect that ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are not mutually exclusive categories, but that people tend to alternate between the two identities in a cycle of action and counteraction. ¹⁹ Singh portrays how communitarian identities ensure that Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in Mano Majra suffer equally during the outbreak of Partition violence. The nature of genocide during the time of Partition is significantly different from the common understanding of genocide. The present-day definition of genocide is influenced by the great Holocaust. Therefore, in a situation of violence when both communities kill each other, the definition of genocide in existing international law falls short. Primarily during the time of decolonization and Partition, along with the state, the contesting communities were also actively involved in mass violence.

Partition as an object of scholarly research has been taken up by experts from diverse fields. There has been a steady flow of literature on cataclysmic events of partition affecting the Indian subcontinent. However, little scholarly research has been undertaken to show how literary imagination participates in the process of representations of genocide in the context of South Asia. Most of the available scholarship has been confined to the European and African genocides. Fictional responses to genocide have remained confined to that of European Jews in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War, Igbos in Nigeria (1966–1970) and Tutsi in Rwanda (1990–1994). These genocides seem to stand out in the discourse of genocide literature. Major artistic responses, such as Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones (2000), Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday, at the Pool in Kigali (2000), Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947) and Elie Wiesel’s Night (1956), reflect the same. Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba’s The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel (2021) and Rebecca Jinks’s Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm (2016) underpin how the Holocaust is considered ‘paradigmatic’ ²⁰ and ‘prototypical’ ²¹ genocide in literary constructions of genocide.

Though a plethora of texts, such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988) and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1973), brings into limelight the afflictions of the masses unleashed by innumerable accounts of genocide, the bitter memories of genocide on the collective consciousness of the innocent masses in the subcontinent as reflected in Partition literature remain comparatively unexplored. Due to a lack of legal interpretation of genocide as reflected in Partition literature in South Asia, the victims do not receive any compensation and the perpetrators of genocide escape punishment. It becomes difficult for international criminal law to take note of and convict offenders of genocide in South Asia.

In the context of South Asia, there is a dearth of scholarly engagement with international criminal law from the interdisciplinary perspective of law and literature. Predominant tendencies have been to address humanitarian law and violation of human rights in the context of women or to explore the potential of imaginative literature in depicting the trauma of violence. A dedicated study on the four core crimes of international criminal law—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crime of aggression in relation to law and literature—remains relatively comparatively unexplored. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan provides a microcosm of the ‘conditioning factors’ ²² (Pegorier 167) that actuated the violence of genocide during the partition of India. The text aids in creating awareness relating to religious polarization in the hope of averting genocide or similar crimes in the future. Ed Morgan’s The Aesthetics of International Law, ²³ Christopher N. Warren’s Literature and the Law of Nations, ²⁴ Susan Tiefenbrun’s Decoding International Law: Semiotics and the Humanities ²⁵ and Chenxi Tang’s Imagining World Order: International Law and Literature in Early Modern Europe ²⁶ have played a pivotal role in exploring international law in conjunction with literature. However, in the context of South Asia, the field of law and literature scholarship is still in its nascent stage of development with no discernible tradition as such in terms of books or scholarly papers.

Gregory Stanton, one of the leading scholars in the field of genocide studies, sheds light on ‘ten stages of genocide’, ²⁷ which may not necessarily be linear but might be a useful tool for deterring genocide by the timely intervention of the international tribunals. The 10 stages are as follows: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination and denial. ²⁸ Khushwant Singh’s novel emerges as a classic study of genocide in South Asia as it provides a graphic account of the stages mentioned by Stanton.

The definitions of genocide have developed from the jurisprudence of the ad hoc tribunals International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Military Tribunal Far East (IMTFE) and the Genocide Convention 1948. On the basis of the analysis of cases, it has been observed that the permanent international court and the ad hoc tribunals conduct trials on the basis of three elements, namely, organization, preparation and extermination. ²⁹ The prosecutors need to prove the presence of these three important stages before the permanent court and ad hoc tribunals in order to file formal charges against the suspect. Organization: Genocide is an organized crime where the state machinery or particular community designs genocidal plans to persecute another group. Preparation: The specific victims are identified and separated because of their ethnic, political or religious affiliations. Extermination: refers to mass killings. ³⁰

Partition novels examine the ways in which religious nationalism and linguistic nationalism condemn minorities to persecution and genocide. It explores how genocide is driven by ‘an explicit ideology of national purification and cleansing’. ³¹ . Martin Shaw offers a broader understanding of genocide where he defines genocide as the destruction of socio, cultural and material conditions of group identity. He considers genocide as a ‘master concept’ ³² that aims at annihilating the foundations of life of targeted groups. The proclivity towards a homogeneous national identity lends impetus to genocidal violence or targeted massacres.

Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin for the first time coined the word ‘genocide’ in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in response to Nazi policies of the systematic annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe during the Second World War. ³³ The origin of genocidal studies gained momentum in the post-Holocaust era and after the establishment of the United Nations. A comprehensive treaty on genocide was adopted unanimously by most of the member states of the United Nations.

Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as the ‘destruction of a nation or ethnic group’, ‘not only through mass killings, but also through a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of a national group, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’. ³⁴ Lemkin considers genocide primarily as ‘a technique in German occupation practice during the Second World War’. ³⁵

Law Meets Literature

Though literature does not contribute equally to all facets of law, the value of literature can be discerned in its depiction of legal aspects related to culture, language, religion, etc. The Partition has been the central event in Anglophone Subcontinental Literature. The history of genocide, the sheer atrocities it inflicted upon a considerable portion of minorities and the mass expulsion that it engenders continue to serve as a predominant literary theme in subcontinental fiction. No postcolonial citizen of the subcontinent possessing a sense of history can ignore the pervasive influence of the catastrophic event of the Partition on contemporary life. Historians Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose in their book on South Asian history validate the role of literature in portraying the violence of Partition. They opine that ‘The colossal human tragedy of the partition and its continuing aftermath has been better conveyed by the more sensitive creative writers and artists for example in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories and Ritwik Ghatak’s films than by historians’. ³⁶

The legal aspects implicit in Khushwant Singh’s partition novel Train to Pakistan subtly indicate the colonial roots of genocide during Partition in India. The elaborate description of religious antagonism on the border area of India and Pakistan fuelled by the divisive mindset of colonizers without any thoughts of reparation lends a kind of credibility to the legal context embedded in the text. The colonial policies of divide and rule solidified religious differences, thereby accentuating interreligious antipathy by pitting one community against the other. The locus of the Partition may be traced to the communalizing agendas of the colonizers. Herein lays the seed of the brutal communal violence of genocide in the Indian subcontinent.

Wendy Nicole Duong ³⁷ focuses on the interplay between law and literature in terms of rhetoric. She considers rhetoric as the common thread that connects the two apparently divergent and incompatible disciplines. Wendy states:

Rhetoric has been, and should always be an essential part of lawyering. When used in the context of law, the art and craft of persuasion inherent in the study and use of rhetoric helps produce and stimulate social activism, which is undoubtedly an integral function of law. ³⁸

Imagery refers to the persuasive use of images in any work of literature that appeals to the human senses. It signifies ‘all the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem or other work of literature, whether by literal description, by allusion or in the vehicles (the second references) of its similes and metaphors’. ³⁹ Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bapsi Sidhwa and many other artists have used this rhetoric to describe Partition scenes that still haunt the memories of subsequent generations. The ghastly images of Partition help the readers to conceive the communal hatred, a colossal scene of carnage and wave of migration that marked the Partition of India. Khushwant Singh’s novel reflects how the rhetoric of imagery works in tandem with content to help the readers to visualize the gruesome and heart-wrenching accounts of genocide that shook the subcontinent. The repercussions of the iconic images of Partition: trains full of corpses and gunny sacks filled with chopped-off breasts on the human psyche, individually as well as collectively, help in capturing the affective dimension of genocide.

The arrival of the trains gradually changes the peaceful relationship existing among different communities inhabiting the village. People belonging to different communities who had previously lived as family members grew suspicious of each other. Singh, being a Sikh, describes in his book that a train comes from Pakistan’s side full of slaughtered Hindus and Sikhs. On the contrary, for the Muslim inhabitants, quite suddenly every Sikh in Mano Majra became a stranger with an evil intent … For the first time, the name Pakistan came to mean something to them—a haven of refuge where there were no Sikhs (Singh 128).

The Sikhs started saying ‘Never trust a Mussulman’; they said:

The last Guru had warned them that Muslims had no loyalties. He was right. All through the Muslim period of Indian history, sons had imprisoned or killed their own fathers and brothers had blinded brothers to get the throne. And what had they done to the Sikhs? Executed two of their Gurus, assassinated another and butchered his infant children; hundreds of thousands had been put to the sword for no other offense than refusing to accept Islam; their temples had been desecrated by the slaughter of knife; the holy Granth had been torn to bits. (Singh 128)

Singh engages in a voyeuristic representation of the atrocities committed by Sikh and Muslim males upon the women. The Muslims recollect rumours of their womenfolk being forced to take off their veils, stripped and compelled to march down the bustling streets and raped in the marketplace by the Sikhs in Patiala, Ambala and Kapurthala. The Sikhs, on the other hand, engage in a discussion regarding the malicious intent of Muslims and the chastity of Sikh women. They claim that a Mussalman should never be trusted because they butcher infant children and women indiscriminately. Many Sikh women refugees jumped into wells, burnt themselves or committed suicide. The rest were paraded naked in the streets and raped in public and later murdered. This novel shows how all the communities suffered during the time of Partition. Unlike the Holocaust, where the European Jews were the main target of ethnic cleansing designed by the Nazis, or the genocidal conflicts of Africa which were mainly orchestrated by the state machinery or the powerful community, the violence depicted in Khushwant Singh’s novel reveals that the communities alternate between the two identities, that is, at times they act as perpetrators and at other times they are the targets of genocidal conflicts. So, the definition of genocide that inherently considers one community as the victim community and the other as the perpetrator community does not cover the genocidal characteristics of the Partition era.

Although some scholars, such as Donald Davidson, Wetlaufer, Richard Posner and Stanley Fish, seem to be sceptical about the application of artistic methods to legal interpretation, it must be admitted that the imaginary world of literature might prove to be effective in capturing the environment that triggers international crimes such as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. ⁴⁰ In the novel, Singh effectively blends his gifts as a reporter and historian to vividly portray the sectarian sentiments that ultimately lead to genocide on an unprecedented scale never experienced before. The fictional village of Mano Majra located on the border of India and Pakistan offers a microcosmic view of Indian society where the erstwhile communal harmony among the villagers is disrupted by the atmosphere of religious fanaticism plaguing the nation. In narrating the crisis, Singh reveals how the invasion of outside forces—a train full of corpses of Hindus and Sikhs, refugees and finally a group of militant Sikhs from the city generate religious sentiments among the apolitical villagers. Khushwant Singh’s novel problematizes the narrow idea of genocide which was influenced by the Holocaust. It shows how physical violence and mental torture can be inflicted upon different communities at the same time during a conflict. Thus, the novel broadens the understanding of genocide for legal and literature scholars.

The army officers instigate the villagers to take revenge upon the Muslims by citing various instances of violence committed by their Muslim counterparts upon Sikh and Hindu women. One of them states ‘For each woman they abduct or rape, abduct two…Had the women committed crimes for which they were ravished?’ (Singh 157). Another officer equates property and women as man’s possessions: ‘One should never touch another’s property; one should never look at another’s woman. One should just let others take one’s goods and sleep with one’s sisters’ (Singh 143). These instances narrate the ways in which the elevated status of women as the embodiment of their religious values ironically positioned them as targets of violent patriarchal assertions of community and nation.

Though law and literature as disciplines are based upon logical interpretation and imagination, respectively, it cannot be denied that literature can play a pivotal role in the evolvement of legal norms. Human behaviour is one of the meeting points of law and literature. Imaginative corpus might facilitate in understanding the human psyche and subsequent situational behaviour of individuals and communities in a society.

Train to Pakistan re-envisions the idea of genocide as a legal, social as well as political concept. Several instances depicted in the novel help to re-imagine the conditions giving rise to genocide. The instances of mass atrocities in the politically volatile border region reflect the official criteria for genocide as laid down by UNGC. The fact that the victims were identified on the basis of their religious affiliations and then killed deliberately in a well-planned manner because of their group membership reflects the genocidal tendencies deeply rooted in the Partition era. When the novel opens, the indigenous people of Mano Majra are not even aware of the violence of Partition spread elsewhere. They are untroubled by the convulsion of killing, looting and rape that shook other parts of the country. The fact that the Sikh priest considers Mullah’s prayers as an indication of his own prayer time and intones a prayer in the temple indicates the kind of harmonious atmosphere that prevailed in India among various religious communities. The Gurudwara is the place where they discuss their common problems. All three communities worship a three-foot sandstone which they regard as their local deity. Singh delineates how the three communities existed side by side in Mano Majra: ‘Mano Majra had only three buildings: one was the house Lala Ram Lal, the Hindu moneylender; the other two are the Sikh temple and the mosque’ enclosing a common ground (Singh 2). These scenes actually hint at the kind of unity which was a living actuality in Mano Majra before the violence of Partition swept in. With the passage of time, after the declaration of Partition in 1947, the same trains turned into ghost trains for the innocent villagers as trains arrived with loads of corpses and created panic among the villagers.

Singh launches a scathing attack upon nationalists and politicians whose endorsement of nationalism turns out to be purely rhetorical. The bureaucrats who claim to promote unity are actually complicit in creating ethnic rivalry amongst the innocent villagers. Singh highlights evidence of the instrumental role played by the administrators in orchestrating allegations against innocent people who are not involved in any offence. The authorities ignite panic among the villagers by arresting people based on their religious faiths. Iqbal, a westernized and educated political activist deputed by the People’s Party of India to Manu Majra to organize the peasants, is arrested along with Juggu on the ground of suspicion of the murder of Hindu moneylender, Ram Lal. Hukum Chand roars at the sub-inspector for arresting Iqbal, the stranger, without enquiring about his parentage and religion. Doubting him to be a Muslim agitator, the sub-inspector orders his policeman to strip him in order to examine whether he has been circumcized or not. Though Iqbal refuses to be identified as a Muslim, the sub-inspector conjures up a plan to associate his name with the Muslim League so that they might trap or charge him with any mischief in the Sikh-dominated border. Through the conversation between the sub-inspector and the magistrate, Singh takes a dig at the vested interests of the incumbent administration in arresting Iqbal. For instance, the sub-inspector justifies the arrest by stating: ‘We would have had to arrest him in any case if he was up to mischief so near the border. We can charge him with something or other later’ (Singh 69). The diabolical practice of Hukum Chand, the magistrate emerges in his order ‘Fill in the warrant of arrest correctly. Name: Mohammed Iqbal, son of Mohammed Something-or-other or just father unknown. Caste: Mussulman. Occupation: Muslim League worker.’ (Singh 69).

Singh laments the political game played by the authorities to banish the minority Muslim community from the border area. When the sub-inspector informs Hukum Chand that the actual criminals Malli and four other villagers from Kapura have been traced, and the constables have been deputed to arrest them, Hukum Chand questions him abruptly, ‘Who are Mali and his companions, Sikh or Muslim?’ (Singh 104). His malicious intent emerges in the way he orders his sub-inspector to let off Mali and his comrades in crime instead of releasing innocent victims Juggu and Iqbal. He believes that it would have been more convenient to instigate hatred among the Sikh villagers against their Muslim counterparts had the convicts been Muslims. His statement, ‘The knowledge of that and the agitator fellow being a Leaguer would have persuaded Mano Majra Sikhs to let their Muslims go’ (104), reflects the hypocrisy of those in power.

Hukum Chand and his police force precipitate communal rivalry instead of ensuring peace and amity among the villagers. The sub-inspector orders his head constable to release Malli and his companions in public so that any possibility of suspicion regarding their innocence might be ruled out. His deliberate attempt to trigger hatred against the Muslims is evident in the way he instructs the constable to inquire casually from the villagers regarding the whereabouts of Sultana and his gang even after knowing well that the gang had left for Pakistan. His provocative nature is reflected in the way he associates Iqbal’s name with the Muslim League to incite the villagers against the Muslims. He commands the constable to bring Iqbal into the limelight by unnecessarily inquiring about any mischief committed by him in Mano Majra masquerading as a Sikh. For instance, when the head constable informs him about the Sikh identity of Iqbal, the sub-inspector replies ‘There are many Iqbals. I am talking of a Mohammed Iqbal, you are thinking of Iqbal Singh. Mohammed Iqbal can be a member of the Muslim League’ (Singh 119).

Khushwant Singh presents a medley of instances to weigh the repercussions of the colossal wave of Partition upon the villagers in Mano Majra. Meet Singh’s conversation with Iqbal reflects the hospitality of the Sikhs even in trying times. When Iqbal enquires if could stay in the gurdwara for two or three days, Meet Singh assures him that anyone could take refuge comfortably at his place of worship. In another instance, when the lambardar informs the inhabitants of Mano Majro about the mass-scale evacuation of Muslims from the neighbouring villages, they express their bewilderment as to how one could ever betray their loyalty to fellow villagers ‘What I would like to know is how these people asked their fellow villagers to leave. We could never say anything like that to our tenants, any more than we could tell our sons to get out of our homes’ (Singh 132). Again when a group of armed Sikh admonishes the villagers for their generosity towards the Muslims, Meet Singh asserts that the Muslims of Mano Majra should not be punished and killed for the crime committed by Muslims elsewhere. These dialogic interactions hint at the villagers’ yearning for the existence of a hybrid community.

Raghunadha Reddy ⁴¹ considers values ‘as the life-blood of law.’ He states: ‘Values are the social ideals which form the matrix from which legal principles are evolved by the judges or the legislators.’ Lord Devlin also states that ‘public morality provides a firm structure to any human society, and that the law, especially the criminal law, must regard as its primary function to maintain this public morality’. ⁴² It has been observed that the violation of equality, freedom of religion and language, and freedom of expression during Partition has been taken into account in the future by framers of the Constitution by assuring these values of justice, equality and liberty to its citizens by incorporating it in the form of fundamental rights and directive principles of state policy. The Hart–Fuller debate on the relationship between law and morality is one of the most fascinating scholarly debates in jurisprudence. While Hart believes that the existence of legal structure is not contingent on its adherence to morality in a certain way, Fuller, on the other hand, advocates an ‘inner morality of law’, ⁴³ which should govern legal procedures and institutional practices. Ronald Dworkin also affirms of the influence of morality in law when he states that law is ‘embedded’ in morality, or ‘flows from’ morality, or ‘branches from’ or is a ‘branch of’ morality. ⁴⁴

The literary narratives can aid ‘order-seeking mission of law’ ⁴⁵ by promoting social reform. For instance, in the novel, Juggut Singh, the Sikh criminal, is in love with Nooran, the daughter of a Muslim weaver who is also the leader of the mosque. In spite of the religious rivalry plaguing the entire nation, Juggut is even prepared to sacrifice his life for the Muslim girl. Sikh fanatics gather near the gurudwara and devise a plan to blow off the train which carries Muslim refugees evacuated from Mano Majra and send it as a gift to Pakistan. Juggut comes to know about the plan. He cuts off the rope tied across the steel pan and thus saves a train full of Muslim passengers including his love Nooran, thus sacrificing his own life.

Through the character of Juggut, Khushwant Singh probably highlights the Sikh tradition of valour, heroic action and selflessness. Juggut emerges triumphant over caste and creed distinctions. His thoughts widen from being a Sikh to a broad-minded Indian. In order to rectify the misrepresentation of religious values, Singh ends the text with Juggut’s life-saving spiritual act of sacrifice for the Muslim people of his village. His act is presented as a kind of expiation ritual in order to purge the Sikh community and nation as a whole of its past sins committed in the name of religion. In this case, the narrative pleads for a better world where human beings rise above narrow societal classifications, restore trust and thereby promote peace in society.

In drawing an analogy between literary and legal interpretation, Dworkin devises two hypotheses, namely, ‘aesthetic hypothesis’ (applicable to art) and ‘political hypothesis’ (applicable to law). Under the ‘aesthetic hypothesis’, he considers that in the context of law, the study of literary interpretation may be helpful or necessary to arrive at the best legal analysis, and to accord the legal text the best moral result regardless of what the original intent might have been’. ⁴⁶ Based on this hypothesis, it may be inferred that the instances depicted in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan help in understanding the intention, objective and varied connotations of genocide in the context of Partition. Under the ‘political hypothesis’, Dworkin believes that ‘the best interpretation depends on the judge’s total system of beliefs, based on both history and ideals. Legal interpretation, therefore, is political, yet individualized.’ ⁴⁷ The positioning of the novelists in a vantage point in history affords them the scope to develop their own perspectives on historical events. Their creative output is influenced to a certain extent by their spatio-temporal location, their own experiences and the communities they represent. For instance, Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (1956) is inspired by an incident he encountered in the Partition days. A few days before the Partition of India, Singh was on his way to his home in Delhi. When he reached the outskirts, he experienced a strange sight, a jeep full of armed Hindus and Sikhs celebrating their victory after killing all the villagers in a Muslim village. Singh, being a Sikh from western Punjab, found it difficult to imagine that he would never be able to return to Lahore again. This encounter inspired him to write a novel condemning the animalistic nature of human beings arising out of religious ideology.

The bifurcation of Punjab into Hindu- and Sikh-dominated East Punjab and Muslim-dominated West Punjab unleashed sectarian violence, communal rivalry and brutal uprooting on both sides of the newly created national border. Singh denounced the event vehemently in a press conference:

We must not forget the partition because it is relevant today. We must remember that it did in fact happen and can happen again. That is why I keep reminding people who clamour for an independent Kashmir or Nagaland to remember what happened to Muslims when some of them asked for a separate Muslim state… ⁴⁸ .

This novel has been identified for analysis as it encapsulates the reality of genocide that followed in the aftermath of Partition across the country. The novel portrays vividly how mass passions of religious antagonism resulted in gripping accounts of bloodshed and forced the expulsion of ordinary people. Manohar Malgonkar calls it ‘one of the bloodiest upheavals of history: twelve million people had to flee, leaving their homes; nearly half a million were killed; over a hundred thousand women, young and old, were abducted, raped, mutilated’. ⁴⁹ Khushwant Singh in a conversation with Manleen Sandhu recollects his lived experience of how the way to Delhi from Lahore wore a deserted look during the Partition days. His following statement reflects the horrifying situation during the time of Partition ‘I drove on a totally empty road, blank road, all the way to Delhi. I didn’t see a soul till I reached Delhi….’ ⁵⁰ The violence-plagued days before Partition shatter his dream of staying back at Lahore as the proposed split of the subcontinent on the basis of religion compels his family to abandon their home to cross the border into India.

Khushwant Singh’s religious side is evident in a subtle way in his novel Train to Pakistan. He attaches great significance to his own Sikh community in the novel. Singh attempts to project the Sikhs in a positive way by emphasizing their welcoming nature as evident in lines uttered by Meet Singh in the novel:

‘This is a gurdwara, the Guru’s house—anyone may stay here’. (Singh 37)

‘Everyone is welcome to his religion. Here next door is a Muslim mosque. When I pray to my Guru, Uncle Imam Baksh calls to Allah’. (Singh 39)

Through the character of Juggut, Khushwant Singh highlights the Sikh tradition of valour, heroic action and selflessness. A critical study of the novel reveals that Khushwant Singh refers to the repeated massacres of Sikhs by the Muslims. He does not dwell on the way thousands of Muslims were killed and women raped by the Sikhs. He focuses mainly on the Muslim atrocities against the Sikhs.

Gerald B. Wetlaufer ⁵¹ points out that the rhetoric chosen for law is often ‘anti-rhetoric’ ⁵² as law thrives on ‘clarity, objectivity, rigor and toughmindedness’ ⁵³ rather than being dependent upon ‘the colorful, action-packed, or emotion-based language borrowed from literary art’. ⁵⁴ He advocates a restrained and ‘discipline-specific’ rhetoric of law in order to achieve aesthetic beauty without compromising on the principles of law. Wetlaufer believes that the open-endedness and indeterminacy of artistic language might hinder the pursuit of truth in law. Richard Posner in his book Law and Literature highlights the importance of literature only in terms of improvement and interpretation of judicial opinions. He believes that literature has very little to offer in terms of interpretation of constitution and statutes. Posner argues that the frequent appearance of law and literature is ‘a largely adventitious circumstance’. ⁵⁵ Wai Chee Dimock in her book Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy states that the literature fails to meet the burden of jurisprudential principles and complicates the monologic truth of law. Dimock considers literature as ‘the genre that unsettles judgment and resists the kind of neat closure which law seeks’. ⁵⁶

The unprecedented carnage, mass casualties and a colossal wave of displacement triggered by the Partition undoubtedly strengthened the Constituent Assembly’s resolve to include the ideal of secularism as an inalienable part of the Constitution of India through the 42nd Amendment enacted in 1976. The framers realized that the adoption of secularism is the only remedy for a political system shaken apart by sectarian conflicts rooted in religious identities. In due course of time, secularism evolved as a powerful umbrella concept in the post-independence period to uphold the diversity and democratic framework of the Indian nation, and thereby avert the chances of any other Partition in the future.

The Partition of India has undoubtedly left indelible repercussions in the minds of the common man. Even after 75 years of the cataclysmic event, we have not been able to bury our religious differences, which is evident from the rallying cry for Hindu nationalism, various sectarian conflicts and forms of discrimination pervading the nation. For the new generation of Indians who were not even born when Partition happened, literature may serve as a repository to visualize the communal hatred which resulted in the disintegration of the nation. Partition novels aptly encompass the anguish of millions who were attacked in their homes and places of worship, abducted and raped and later slaughtered by members of their antagonistic community. The predicament of religious polarization as depicted through varied instances in imaginative literature might help the new generation to conjure up the past and manifest a better future for themselves by upholding the values of humanity.

Conclusion

The article concludes with the idea that Khushwant Singh’s novel provides an interesting study of how genocide is influenced by the mass passion of religious antagonism that seems to dominate the Partition era in South Asia. It has been observed that the time frame of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan is contemporaneous with the evolution of genocide studies in the international arena. Though South Asian literature with its major preoccupations on themes of nation, nationalism and identity has immense potential to contribute to our understanding of the mass violence of genocide and the realm of law relating to it, there is scant academic research on literary analysis of international law relating to South Asia. Unlike the European nations where the perpetrators of genocide are brought to justice by international and other ad hoc tribunals, it becomes difficult to punish the violators of human rights in the context of South Asia during the time of Partition. The article reflects how the nature of genocide in Partition literature is different from the understanding of genocide in the West. It is observed that during the Partition riots, the perpetrator community becomes the victim community, at times the other way around. In such a situation, both the community suffers irreparable loss of human life and property. Therefore, reparation remains a utopian dream for the innocent masses.