OVER THE LAST year or so, translating this book has carried me on an unexpected journey. It has taken me on an extended trip down memory lane, often reminding me of the warren of bazaars and mohallas around our first home in Gali Punjab Singh in the walled city of Amritsar. It has also brought forth the humbling acknowledgement of how little I know about the city that I have proudly called home, the city where I was born, where I spent my first twenty-two years, and where I have now returned to spend my remaining years.
While writing the afterword for Hymns in Blood, I had mentioned growing up in a city where there were virtually no Muslims. This book, set entirely in the Amritsar of 1947, took me deeper into the subject—into erstwhile Muslim neighbourhoods like Chowk Farid, Sultanwind and Sharifpura that had merely been names. It brought alive the completeness of the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1947. We had grown up hearing stories about the violence perpetrated by the Muslims of East Punjab on the Hindus and Sikhs who streamed into Amritsar as refugees. But here was a stunning counterpoint. According to the 1941 Census, the last one conducted before Partition, Amritsar city had a population of 391,000 and Amritsar district had about 656,000. Muslims, concentrated mostly in the city area, constituted 46 per cent of the total. And after reading my grandfather’s account in this book, it was clear that virtually all of them were either killed or forced to flee because of the violence, fear and insecurity faced by them after March 1947, as Hindus and Sikhs avenged the ravaging of their own communities in east Punjab through brutal reprisals.
It’s a part of our history on which we don’t like to dwell too much, just as we speak of the Golden Temple and the Durgiana Temple as the city’s two principal religious attractions but have virtually obliterated Khairuddin Mosque from our collective memory. Built in 1876 with white marble and green embellishments on its domes and minarets, it was once called the Jama Masjid. Its expansive courtyard accommodated thousands of devotees for the namaz every Friday and on special occasions. But during the years when we were growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, it was hidden behind a nondescript alleyway off the bustling Hall Bazaar market and scarcely received a second glance.
It caught my attention a few months ago when I read a report with a photo in the Amritsar supplement of The Tribune showing a large number of Muslims celebrating Eid al-Fitr at Khairuddin Mosque. A few more inquiries and it became clear that after seventy-five years, the city once again has a substantial Muslim population, most of them migrant workers who have come from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and have now made Amritsar their home. They can’t fill the cultural void left by the en masse departure of Punjabi poets, writers, and intellectuals in 1947; but it is interesting to see that the second generation of these new migrants speaks fluent Punjabi with a distinct Majha accent has developed local roots and may end up becoming an integral part of the city’s social fabric. One such crew of construction workers from UP was busy at our new house in Amritsar. The air was rife with reports of a communal riot in Nuh in the neighbouring province of Haryana and of Muslims being targeted in Gurgaon. I overheard one of the workers telling his worried family back home that they were in Amritsar and felt absolutely safe here.
The other leg of the same journey into the past has fired up a desire to know more about my grandfather—not just the genial, saintly figure that we saw when we were growing up but Nanak Singh as a formidable public intellectual of his era. It was clear that he was trying to convey some of his own strongly felt convictions through the voices of Satnam and Naseem in this book. But a closer re-read of his autobiography Meri Duniya also revealed that there are incidents revolving around Satnam that our Bauji had drawn from his own experiences during the Partition.
In the chapter titled ‘Under the influence of ’47’ in Meri Duniya, he says, ‘I saw buildings being set on fire, I saw people being stabbed, I saw young women being paraded naked in public, I saw the most immoral acts being committed with impunity. But I was helpless—a weak, pathetic figure who could do nothing meaningful to assist anyone. The only real exception was the time I somehow managed to rescue a few Muslim women and children from the flames of a building in Chowk Paragdas and escorted them to a lorry leaving for Pakistan.’ The incident, narrated through the actions of Satnam in chapter five of this book was independently corroborated to me by my late father, who, as a fifteen-year-old, recalled hearing the details from my grandfather when he came home and explained why his clothes were caked in blood.
He also speaks about the impact that the relentless cycle of violence had on his own psyche. His deep sense of melancholy and lethargy, his lack of appetite and insomnia would probably be called a serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in today’s terminology. Conventional medical interventions failed to make any impact and eventually it was his recourse to the Sikh scriptures and meditation that lifted him out of the morass. Satnam has a similar experience as recounted in chapter twenty-two.
Satnam’s leadership of the Unity Council to champion the cause of communal amity is a strong reflection of the way Bauji read the teachings of Guru Nanak, Sant Kabir, and others in the Sikh scriptures and Guru Gobind Singh’s dictum about the oneness of humanity, which became the essence of his own creed. Also, parts of Naseem’s passionate address in chapter twenty-seven seem to flow directly from Bauji’s deeply introspective essay on religious identity titled ‘Am I an Atheist?’ in Meri Duniya. Although he was a devout Sikh, he seemed to be aware that his strong advocacy of interfaith harmony during those troubled times might tempt his detractors to brand him an atheist. Was he trying to pre-empt this through Naseem’s words?
Naseem’s character in this book also brings out another crucial aspect of Bauji’s intent as a novelist. He was deeply disturbed by the plight of women in contemporary society and tried to address that through stories that are profoundly empathetic towards women. I had an early and fortuitous introduction to this subject because my mother was finishing her masters’ dissertation in Punjabi when I was still a toddler. The topic of her dissertation was ‘The female characters in Nanak Singh’s novels’. It was later published as a book, and I recall hearing discussions about it while I was still a child. Bauji himself addresses the topic in a particularly reflective essay in Meri Duniya, in which he describes the way he tried to highlight society’s unjust and oppressive treatment of women in each of his novels. But he also laments the way his books from the 1920s and ’30s have pious female characters like Veena in Pavitra Paapi, Sundari in Chitta Lahu, and Usha in Jeevan Sangram, who became helpless victims of social evils. Why did they have to commit suicide or get killed? Why did I put such a low price on their lives, he recalls wistfully. He adds that he would never have allowed them to die if he had written the same novels today (1957) and refers to later novels that have strong and assertive female characters like Sulochana in Adam Khor, Kamini in Kati Hoi Patang, Lalita in Sangam, and Menaka in Banjar, who can serve as role models and inspire women to demand their rights.
And then there’s Baba Bhana—noble, learned, and generous; spiritual, altruistic, and seemingly detached from material comforts—a character that comes out so vividly in these two books but also one that is present in one shape or form in several other novels. There is the memorable Waryam Singh in Adh Khidya Phul (Translated as: A Life Incomplete), Baba Rodu in Chitta Lahu, Sant Som Prakash in Kagtaan di Bedi, Pyaaru in Door Kinara, and others. All of them are loosely based on Giani Bagh Singh, a scholarly preacher at the Singh Sabha Gurudwara in Peshawar, who had a pivotal influence on Bauji while he was a distinctly wayward teenager. The Giani’s gentle, unobtrusive guidance had a transformational effect and the young man born as Hans Raj in a struggling Hindu family adopted the Sikh faith, imbibed its values of service and sacrifice and became Nanak Singh. Bauji recalls how these values were put to test when Peshawar was ravaged by the influenza or ‘war fever’ pandemic that was brought to these parts by soldiers returning from the First World War. He joined the team of volunteers assembled by the Giani to provide relief to affected families. Several members of their own team fell ill and a few even died as they worked day and night to provide food and medicines to the sick and helped bury or cremate the dead. The Giani stood out like a beacon during those dark times and Bauji continued to re-invent him in his novels whenever he needed an extraordinary figure in a difficult situation.
As this book also shows, Bauji was well ahead of his times—at least in the context of Punjabi literature—in the way he used his novels as platforms to articulate his concerns about religious bigotry and communal strife, social inequality and oppression of the lower castes, endemic poverty and institutionalized corruption, blind faith and superstition, and a host of other ills plaguing contemporary society. As he says in his essay ‘This is how I write’ in Meri Duniya, ‘A novelist is both a guardian and a guide of his society. He is also its doctor. Through his books, he tries to warn the society of dangers that lie on a particular path and urges them to turn away from it…’ He adds that while the novelist does not possess any magic wand that can transform society with a mere touch, he does have something else that is quite powerful—his psychological understanding of society, his analysis of some of the deepest parts of the human mind, some of its most sensitive feelings. He has the power of his pen to sketch ordinary and extraordinary characters along with the skill to draw fine lines and to add psychological shades and colours to his portraits.
But did he succeed in his endeavour to catalyse social reform through his novels? Not really, he acknowledges as he surveys the dismal scene around him. And yet, he adds in his essay, ‘I do have a certain sense of satisfaction, even of pride, that my books had some impact on my readers and may have forced them to think about some of these issues. I am convinced that a few were even motivated to do something tangible, and to that extent I can say without hesitation that I did succeed in my mission.’
This book is being published at a time when religious divisions are once again raising their ugly head in our country. Naseem’s stirring message to her compatriots is also a wake-up call to us seventy-five years later.
Amritsar
September 2023
Navdeep Suri