Train to Pakistan: Anti-nationals welcome aboard

India is a strange country. At one time all one needed to prove loyalty or affinity was to wear a costume, mention a genealogy, talk about any affinity to place. Place has mnemonics, a spiritual resonance which space did not have. Today, however, things have become different. We have a new set of rituals.

There are not the old rites of passage where traditional societies had rites of manhood or sacred thread ceremonies. These are tests, but like IIT entrance exams, which one has to pass with regular frequency. Today we have patriotism tests where loyalty has to be certified for ethic, marginal and dissenters. The new opposition is between loyalty and sedition. It replaces the old one between citizen and refugee.

Dissenters

Beyond loyalty tests, there is the branding or marking of dissenters by condemning them to a neither-land called the train to Pakistan. Today the train to Pakistan is a fictitious entity, a device which conveys or marks dissenters as non-belonging, out of India, moving towards Pakistan but belonging to neither place.

A train to Pakistan today is an act of labelling. When the distinguished Kannada author, UR Ananthamurthy, said he would not like to live in a Modi-ruled India, Giriraj Kishore immediately put him on the train to Pakistan. It is the one train that needs no waiting, no reservations for dissenters, there is a perpetual tatkal. Dissent facilitates an efficiency of disposal from bureaucratic states which are otherwise slothful.

The very idea of the train to Pakistan sends one down memory lane. Firstly, the idea of the train and the metaphor of the journey is a poetic one. Trains have dominated the cinematic landscape and in fact one cannot think of movies without trains. But the train to Pakistan is a significantly poignant memory. Mention it and one thinks of the Partition, of the exodus of refugees from both sides. One thinks of the train to Pakistan as a reciprocity of murder and rape.

In fact, it has become such a significant fiction, that people even internalise the memories of their parents and grandparents.

Years ago while doing fieldwork I remember the political scientist, Chandrika Parmar, talking of a businessman, a manufacturer of effluent treatment plants talking of travelling on a train from Lahore to Amritsar. He talked of hiding in the bathroom watching the killings. He talked in copious and impressive detail. It took the interrogator six interviews before she discovered that the informant had internalised the memories of his father. He was a child during the Partition and he and his mother had crossed the border several months before this event.

Silence

In a literary sense the train to Pakistan immediately evokes two major writers. First, Manto and of course, Khushwant Singh.

In Manto's stories, the very silence, the taken for granted was evocative. One of his stories begins with the sentence that the train from Lahore to Amritsar was five hours late. A simple sentence denoting a length of time. Yet it captured worlds of understanding. Readers knew that the journey was of half an hour.

They knew that the delay meant murder and mayhem. Manto did not have to describe the goriness of violence. All he needed was a simple statement that provided a trigger to memory a mnemonic that unleashed memories of holocaust still waiting to be unravelled.

As legendary as Manto was Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, a legendary novel which was also produced as a major movie. Singh shows that the train had become a reified memory of pain. In the earlier part of the novel he talks of the role of the train in the everydayness of memory.

The driver always insisted on pressing the siren as he passed the village. The train was also time-keeper to the crucial rituals of the society. The Muslim priest, he had an hour to go after the siren for prayers to begin and the Hindu priest realised rituals would begin an hour after the Muezzin. This easy rhythm of train gets frozen as a carrier of innocent victims between Lahore and Amritsar.

Memory

Today the Partition and its history might seem distant but its memories are alive, glowing like tired embers in Punjab and Bengal. In fact, the memory today has become a floating metaphor, a floating signifier for displacement, exile and mayhem. The train to Pakistan is a list like the ship of fools during the medieval era. Regimes did not know how to classify mad people. Madness was a liminal, intermediate category.

As it was not classifiable it was not locatable. Mad people could not live on land. They were therefore put on ships and sent out to sea. As a result we have the idea of the ship of fools.

Train to Pakistan evokes similar memories. The train is now the home of dissenters, anti-nationals, people you don't agree with. Today, it is not just an object of condemnation. It has become a precious category, a place where dissenters feel at home. I would love to be on this new train to Pakistan and I was thinking of all the dissenting intellectuals, marginal, writers, protesters who I would enjoy the journey with. The train to Pakistan is what I wish to propose as a toast to every country. Bon voyage.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)