Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh | 1956 | Grove Press | Paperback $ 16
In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people — Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs — were in flight. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. One of these villages was Mano Majra.
It is a place, Khushwant Singh goes on to tell us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the “ghost train” arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endures and transcends the ravages of war.
Once again, I have chosen to read this title specifically because it is something out of the ordinary, for me — a book in translation, a classic from beyond the canon that makes up what we call literature in the West, and a story of a far-away place of which I have very little personal experience.
Also once again, I must confess to being uncertain about how exactly to review this book. I can certainly see what it has been heralded as a classic work of literature from India + Pakistan, but it was also not at all the sort of book that I would normally like to read or that I feel able to unreservedly recommend.
I will say that I appreciate the pace of the book and its… economical-ness, I guess? The book is short, but A LOT happens. One thing you could never call this book is boring.
I also appreciated the focus on individual characters and their unique, personal reactions to the unstoppable crumbling of society around them. Even the village in which the story is set seemed almost like a character itself, made up of all the others. This is the sort of story which brings a real human and on-the-ground perspective to an otherwise unimaginably large-scale historical event.
I didn’t particularly enjoy the prose, which seemed rather clunky; it is possible this is just a consequence of translation. The story also seemed to jump around a bit, with only jarring transitions (or no recognizable transitions at all) from character to character or event to event.
The other thing which really set me aback was the commonplace sexism and associated violence. One of the earliest scenes is of a rape. One of the main characters — who are all men, of course — is Sikh ne’er-do-well who has fallen for a higher-status girl, who is Muslim. They meet up late at night and he proceeds to have his way with her, despite her protesting and struggling to get away. His later actions in the story portray him as caring for her deeply, so I presume this is meant to be the start of their “love story” (gag). I think the most generous reading of this scene is that it is meant to portray her as a “good girl”; she must protest as a matter of course, but she actually wants to be with him (à la “Baby It’s Cold Outside”).
However, even in that case, it still seemed to me like quite a violent scene rather than either loving or sexy, and that violence is of a piece with the other ways in which women are treated in the book. Another main character becomes obsessed with a teen prostitute. A newlywed bride is gang-raped after her husband is killed in front of her. None of these women seem to have real agency in events, or a voice with which to tell the story from their own point of view. They are all objects of male violence, either personally or in service of the greater political conflict or both, and that’s all. I’m just not generally interested in reading this kind of thing. This made me simply irritated with the book as a whole and took me out of the story, rather than immersed and invested in either the action or characters.
As far as my own recommendation might go, I can say that this is possibly a good choice for readers who are looking for a comparatively humanistic, individual-character-focused perspective of the Partition, particularly from an author who personally experienced it — so long as you are confident in your ability to stomach the relentless depictions violence, tinged inevitably with the standard flavor of misogyny of the time.
Links:
- Obituary of Khushwant Singh from The New York Times
- Interview with Khushwant Singh from The Punch Magazine
Publication information: Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1994. Print.
Source: Public library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products
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