Violence in Train to Pakistan Tannishka Singh 2010BB50043

What is violence? “A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.” ― Maximilien de RobespierreThe word violence (from the Latin root, Violentia), irrevocably draws out in our minds images about gore, rape, the wars of yesteryears and the terrorists (and videogames) of today. More often than not we think of the perpetrator as being the more powerful of the two (the other being the victim). Hannah Ardent sets her discussion of violence apart from what she sees as the mainstream discourse of the topic. According to her, this discourse takes violence to be identical with power. It culminates with Mao saying that ‘power comes out of the barrel of a gun’. Power arises from the consent of groups. Arendt defines it as ‘the human ability not just to act but to act in concert .It is created at the moment of the initial getting together of a group of individuals, and dispersed once the group ceases to exist. It relies purely on the number of individuals supporting the group, or rather, within the group. Violence does not require numbers in that sense. It relies on implements, eg, arms. Arendt outlines two extreme forms of the interaction between power and violence. Those are the extreme form of power, All against One, and the extreme form of violence, One against All. Arendt uses the example of a disruption in a lecture. If one individual was to successfully disrupt the class by some violent means, where all other students wanted to continue peacefully, it would be not due to the individuals greater power, but rather due to the groups choice not to exercise its power.In domestic affairs, violence can serve to sever an individual’s freedom. This occurs both in a physical sense. One can be bound, shackled, tied and manacled. But more importantly, in a metaphysical sense, one would be prevented from doing what one ought to do. This forces the individual to the will of one power or another, and eliminates the ability of the individual to form power. The former occurs not by enhancing the power of those who control the means of violence, but rather by diminishing that of those who do not. The latter, happens by preventing the individual from being able to form new groups, which would result in a competing power being created.

The book

Train to Pakistan was Khushwant Singh’s first novel, published in 1956. About the novel he said, “ the beliefs that I had cherished all my life were shattered. I had believed in the innate goodness of the common man but the division of India had been accompanied by the most savage massacres Known in the history of the country. I had believed that we Indians were peace loving and nonviolent that we were concerned with matters of the spirit while rest of the world was involved is the pursuit of material things. After the experience of autimn 1947, I become as angry middle-aged man, who wanted to short his disenchantment with the world. I decided to try my hand at writing.” 

First of all, just going by the quote, the author comes across as taking part in the western construct, which Edward Said has described as Orientalism. Khushwant Singh was born in a very rich family to Sir Sobha Singh, better

known as the builder of Lutyen’s Delhi or in some cases as “adhi dilli da malik” (less known is the fact that he was also one of the chief witnesses against Bhagat Singh in his trial). As someone who had witnessed the World War 2 and the communal violence in the country, which had reached unprecedent heights since Muslim League’s Pakistan proclamation, I find it a little had to believe that people like Khushwant Singh (whose 2-volume book, history of the Sikh people is quite critically acclaimed) still believed in the innate goodness of man, especially in a country which from before the birth of Christ has been a land populated by ever-warring small kingdoms, subjected to the bloody invasions of rulers like Ghori, Taimur-i-Lang, etc.. However, people in the west believed the mystical country which gave birth to pacifists like Buddha, Vivekanand and Gandhi to be quite free of the bloodlust fever, which was plaguing every animate object in the world then. It seems that Padmavibhushan Khushwant Singh too partook in that belief.Khushwant Singh writes in his book, “Muslims said the Hindus had planned and started the killing. According to the Hindus, the Muslims were to blame. The fact is, both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped.” It is an apt description of what transpired during the partition period, once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority, resulting in a huge number of deaths. Estimates of the number of deaths vary, with low estimates at 200,000 and high estimates at 1,000,000.The book is divided in 4 sections: Dacoity, Kalyug, Mano Majra and Karma. Dacoity, is a term used for "banditry" in Hindi, Kannada and Urdu. The spelling is the anglicized version of the Hindi word and as a colloquial Anglo-Indian word with this meaning. Thus, the name of the first section in itself is a violent word, which describes an act in which a small, armed group prevents the often larger group of people from exercising not only their rights but also power. Kali Yuga (literally "age of [the demon] Kali", or "age of vice") is the last of the four stages the world goes through as part of the cycle of yugas described in the Indian scriptures. Kali Yuga is associated with the apocalyptic demon Kali, not to be confused with the goddess Kālī. The "Kali" of Kali Yuga means "strife", "discord", "quarrel" or "contention", all of which can be associated with the violence that happened during the partition of India. Karma means action, work or deed,it also refers to the principle of causality where intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual. I find it to be an apt name for the last section of the book, as Singh adopts a very important concept from Hindu and Sikh religion, which clearly says that violence will engender violence, thus he condemns the people who used religion as an excuse for the terrible acts they performed, by using the cornerstone of their religion itself.

The book’s opening introduces us to the communal violence in the country. Singh describes a tiny nondescript village on the banks of river Sutlej in the Indian Punjab. The village has people of the major Indian religions: Muslim, Sikh, converted lower castes, and a single rich Hindu family, who all live in apparent harmony. Singh uses the motif of the train throughout the book, the whistle of the goods train serves as the curtain raiser for the first violent act in the book, where the dacoits kill the only person in the village, who owns a

brick house, a powerful moneylender while also taunting another dacoit who lives in the village, Juggat Singh, who meanwhile was busy raping his paramour, a muslim girl. We are also introduced to another character, Hukum Chand, who more or less is a stereotypical Indian bureaucrat, corrupt, manipulative and lecherous, who also as a matter of fact almost rapes a girl (courtesan) the age of his daughter, Another character is the educated, wealthy communist Iqbal. He has no religious allegiance and arrives at the village from a train in which police forces, brought to to control the growing violence near the border were also travelling, in order to spread the message of the communist party of India, to free people from the shackles of capitalism and release them in a red utopia bereft of religion, inequality, etc.. Both Juggat and Iqbal, both are put in jail one to resolve the identities of the dacoit and the latter because of his alleged relation with the muslim league, a doubt spawned by his name.The Kalyug section again begins with the train motif, this time not only carrying the corpses of the massacred Sikhs and Hindus to Mano Majra, but also the very real consequences of the partition of India to the small village. The rains come to the village, but instead of the usual joy they bring dread for Hukum Chand as he fears that the rains will douse the fire burning the corpses, thus fanning the communal rage infecting the refugees and the so far tolerant Sikh community of the village. Hukum Chand decides to deport the muslim tenants in Mano Majra, in an attempt to stave off violence, but this disrupts the order of the village. The released bandits gain control over the properties of departing muslims (a classic example of what Ardent calls violence). The young Sikh and his band of impassioned youth who paid the gurudwara a visit to recruit members to ravage the train carrying the muslim refugees are also another example of a small group forcing the Sikh villagers to act not of their own accord. Through his rhetoric he put them in an uncomfortable position and the Zizek’s objective violence (more on this later) Is again seen at play here, when the violence inherent in the mores of the society, in the non violent normalcy of everyday can cause outbursts of the more visible subjective violenc, that is, the people getting riled enough to violate the very people they had harmonious relations with. The sacrifice of Juggat Singh for his lady love can again be seen as Karma at work, the dacoit who was under probation for a history of violent attacks dies a horrible anonymous death.

Thus, Singh not only describes what Slavoj Ziziek calls “subjective violence”, that is, the more visible form of violence performed by a clearly identifialble agent (the dacoits in this case, the trains filled with bodies of hindus and muslims) but also the other two less visible forms of the triumvirate called violence, where one is the “symbolic violence”, which is embodied in our language (“I know it all. Our Hindu women are like that: so pure that they would rather commit suicide than let a stranger touch them. We Hindus never raise our hands to strike women, but these Muslims have no respect for the weaker sex. ”) and systemic violence, which Zizek describes as the catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems (the declaration of partition or going even further back to the proclamation of Pakistan by the Muslim League). Zizek further states that

subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non- violent zero-level. The very notion that this objective violence (symbolic and systemic violence) is unseen sustains the level with which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Thus, among the people of Mano Majra lived a dacoit under probation whom the people knew and accepted as a part of their community (“He went past the villagers, smiling and raising his manacled hands in a greeting to everyone.”) and the partition of the country of the country and its violent excesses did not have an impact on their day-to-day lives.

[Note:- Zizek’s writing style is fairly complicated, peppered with references to Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Hegel, Heideger and other philiosphers but as far as I understand, the partition violence depicted in the book can also be called “divine violence”, a term Zizek adopted from Walter Benjamin, to designate an act or brutal disruption which exists external to any law that could maintain it. He further states that such acts are dependent upon building up of rage capital in people over a period of time due to thymos( rage,envy competition), its release occurs when it reaches a critical point, which usually happens when it combines with other kinds of strong emotions like nationalism. It can be argued that British’s policy of divide and rule coupled with actions of communal forces in the country may have led to the build up of this rage capital.]

References

1 Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh, 1956

2 On Violence, Hannah Ardent, 1970

3 Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Slavoj Zizek, 2008

4 Orientalism, Edward Said, 1978

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khushwant_Singh

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobha_Singh_(builder)

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India