Fragmented history
Partitions is therefore all about hurt, about the sense of historical loss. The writer clearly takes the vivisection of India in the 1940s as a point of reference to explain all the other partitions that have occurred throughout the long stretches of history. It follows then that the narrative is an allegory that seeks to explain the human condition through zeroing in on human folly. The American Barbara Tuchman, who once expounded on the march of folly from Troy to Vietnam in a work that remains seminal, would have recoiled from Kamleshwar's even more raw observation of life and its mutilation at the hands of history. But life, with a capital L, is again what the Adeeb -- judge, scholar, lover, thinker and one of us -- makes it out to be. You could be forgiven for thinking the adeeb, or call him the voice of human conscience, approaches the issues from the Olympian heights of boredom. He really does not; he merely looks down with disdain at the way men of power have carried themselves through the centuries. There is a certain magical quality that Kamleshwar brings into the work, through letting the adeeb connect with the past, the purpose being to explain the present, or whatever soiled parts are brought under microscopic study.
And thus the flesh and bones of the thousands upon thousands of dead rise from their graves or emerge from their funeral pyres to complain of the ignominies they were put to in the times they walked the earth. That thin, fearsome thread of ancient religious strife -- one did not call it communalism then -- runs through the tales. Do invasions by foreigners always lead to a battering of the soul? Babar, otherwise known as the founder of the Mughal empire, is not quite aware of why he must be summoned before the adeeb to answer to charges of modern-day religious fratricide. He only conquered India when there was no kingdom left for him, in Ferghana or elsewhere, to preside over. The dynasty he gave birth to never developed roots in the subcontinent and yet left its indelible impressions on the Indian psyche. That is what enraged ardent indigenous Indians like Sivaji, whose goal in life was to harass the puritan Aurangzeb to the end of the latter's days. Could that have been the earliest stage in the Pakistanisation of life in India?
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Such questions are left hanging heavily in the air, though a reasonably good degree of misery comes in remembering the perfidy the poet Iqbal may have committed when he raised his voice in support of a homeland for India's Muslims. Was he not the man who sang Sare jahan se accha yeh Hindustan hamara et cetera, et cetera? He most certainly was, but then, that is what history is all about. It changes men in as much as it transforms or mutilates history. The Portuguese and the Dutch and the French all move at brisk pace through this allegorical narrative of history; and then they are overshadowed by the shrewdest of these foreigners, the English. The landscape of history takes on strange new shapes and hues, with newer sets of foreigners barging in to push earlier ones to the fringes.
Do not forget, though, that in all this exposition of human psychology and nationalist-religious politics across time, there are the moments when love between man and woman, transcending the barriers put up by stubborn faith, sprouts in the unlikeliest of places. The Muslim Salma and the Hindu adeeb stroll along the beaches, bathe in lunar light and then give themselves over to raw, carnal passion. There could be a moral here, or a simple fact of sociological history: despite the broken fragments of history littering our world, it is the heart that continues beating through the sensuality of woman and the ardour of man.
Partitions is what you have known all along. It is a fragmentation of civilization, a severe wounding of it. On a certain plane, it elevates relationships. Watch, though, how Mahmood Ali the peon, conflict-free, links the disturbed ones through their upheavals. The allegory is all.
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