Tomorrow, Independent India will be a year older. Partition will be pushed further under the stacks of the subcontinent’s history. Many would argue – “Move on. It has been seventy-eight years. Partition is long over. Those who lived through it are dead.”
Two, the only novel written by Gulzar, who was born in what is present-day Pakistan and displaced in 1947, continues to answer back and refute this assertion even after eight years of being published. Gulzar remarks that the novel addresses the “work-in-progress nature of the cataclysmic events of 1947”, pointing to how the process of settling down and coming to terms with the haunting memories of Partition is forever ongoing. Reflective of this, Two does not end with the birth of a new nation, or in the overnight sprouting of borders, or with millions turning into refugees. It follows the journey of the uprooted and their endless search for a home over the subsequent five decades. The title, “Two”, also captures the partition of a land into two nations. But what it is truly suggestive of, is the Partition of a people. The cover page reads: “We were one people. One parted. Now we are two”.
While it does not portray an ever-so-rosy picture of an undivided India, (briefly glossing over communal cracks that had existed in the Indian society long before Partition), it does underline the deeply integrated lives of a people who were forcefully severed in its aftermath. People who did not choose this fate had neither a part to play in it, nor could they comprehend it while it was happening to them. Until much later after it had. The friendship of Master Fazal and Master Karam Singh, Fauji and Lakhbeera and the affinities between those separated continue to blossom on the foreign soil years after the Partition, standing as suited instances of this integrated nature. The threads of an intertwined way of life that transcends the divides of religion weave throughout the novel, manifesting in a web of characters across class, caste and religion, crossing the newly-formed borders together on one truck. Two, dwelling on the fate of the refugees on the truck in the face of the 1984 Sikh Genocide and the Kargil War of 1999, is also a stark reminder of the continuance of Partition and the inhumanity that history can bring out in humans. The Hindi writer Krishna Sobti once said, “Partition was difficult to forget but dangerous to remember”. Such is its painful legacy, and many of us—the number is substantially large—continue to voluntarily sign up to live, remember, read, write, and talk about it. But more often, the pain of this remembrance and the remembrance of this pain chooses us, refusing to leave.
Gulzar is the undisputed master of his art, and Urdu serves as the linguistic vehicle that best carries the weight and depth of his words. Which is why when one reads Two, the English translation (by the author himself) of his originally Urdu/Hindustani novel Do log, the reader misses the nuanced essence of the rendition of the author’s storytelling as it may have first been conceived in his imagination, that is, his natural medium of writing. The interstices reveal themselves more fully to the reader of Hindustani; to whom the translation, despite the best attempts of the author, may in some places seem very literal. Gulzar acknowledges this, along with the hurdles of translating this experience of Partition from another tongue (as it is so interspersed). He writes in the foreword, “many words and phrases in Punjabi, Saraiki and other dialects spoken in that area of Punjab which became Pakistan after Partition”, about the region he came from; the one he had to leave behind. He conveys his lingering unease with the final product of this exercise of translation. Regardless, it is transcended by the greater significance he places in the stories of the journeys of the refugees reaching a broader readership. In doing so, he gives these unnamed characters in the blood-strewn tale of Partition their due space on the walls of history. However, my concluding words to the reader would be this: If you know the Devanagari script and the Hindustani language, read the book in its original form. If not, read it nonetheless.
— Edited by Lakshmi Yazhini, design by Neenu Elza
Article 19 