Chaman Nahal’s Azadi begins with that great bugbear of identity – the question of language. Lala Kanshi Ram, a middle-aged, Arya Samaji, self-made, successful grain merchant of Sialkot, tutored in the rhetoric of Vedic heritage being the only true heritage of India, dutifully fills in “Hindi” as his mother tongue for every census document, even as he neither speaks nor writes it.
“When he opened his mouth he spoke Punjabi, the rich and virile language of the province to which he belonged. And when it came to writing, whether the entries in his shop ledger or a note to the vendor down the road, he wrote in Urdu.”
Refusing to allow the language a religious character, he says he had learned it from his father and from the primary teacher in his village a few miles out of Sialkot, neither of whom was Muslim. In this acknowledgement of Urdu as his own, Lala Kanshi Ram breaks down the artificial linguistic binary altogether too much of our esteemed citizenry continues to still cling to – that of Hindi and Urdu belonging to two distinct religious demographics. This forced divisiveness, in language, and in other aspects of an otherwise shared culture and history, is what much of Nahal’s narrative portrays and critiques.
Ushering in azadi
Published in 1975, Azadi won Nahal the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977. Much has been written about the novel in the almost fifty years of its existence. It finds itself on multiple South-Asian syllabi, especially since the Gandhi Quartet, and Hachette India’s new edition of 2023 has now restored it to front displays in bookstores. In this 77th year of azadi, when questions of divisiveness, identity, and belonging continue to haunt us, a re-reading of this tale of Partition seems apposite. Keeping a taut timeline, the narrative starts in Sialkot, on June 3, 1947, with Viceroy Mountbatten’s public broadcast announcing the Partition, and ends in Delhi, on January 30, 1948, with the news of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
In Sialkot, Lala Kanshi Ram’s family – his wife Prabha Rani and son Arun – with other members of their community, huddle around a radio set, waiting to be told their fate. The Punjab of 1947 had already begun to witness communal unrest and the audience that gathered to listen to the radio broadcast, a group of Hindus and Sikhs from different professions, all aware of their minority status, all carrying their own fears and apprehensions about decisions being made for them. Nahal brings together multiple families living together as tenants of Bibi Amar Vati, the landowning matriarch who holds Lala Kanshi Ram in especially high regard. The Mountbatten Plan, as it came to be known, was a violation of the trust common people, minorities on both sides of a divided land, had placed in their leaders. Partition would necessarily mean displacement. It would mean the loss of home, land, and history.
Nahal constructs the picture of a syncretic society, crumbling away under the pressure of communal and nationalistic pride. The novel traces the story of families forced away from their homes into refugee camps. “How can I be a refugee in my own home?” Kanshi Ram asks when told he must leave the life he has made for himself and transfer to a camp. Loss of property and loss of prospects aside, “the pinch was that he should have to give up this land, this earth, this air. That’s where the hurt lay!” Once rendered homeless, the idea of “azadi” is rendered troublesome.
August 15, 1947, in the Sialkot refugee camp, is just another rainy day. The families, we are told, “felt inexplicably proud” of Independence, but they belong nowhere, have no country to affix their pride to, no reference points for celebration, no news of happenings in newly constituted India. There is no plan for their relocation, no preparations to take them across the border. Pakistan does not want them, but India seems in no hurry to bring them/find them a home either. Nahal writes of violence, of trains carrying the dead, of houses burnt and livelihoods lost. He details the difficult journey thousands chose to undertake, as convoys on foot, sometimes accompanied by Indian troops committed to taking them to safety. Violence continued to haunt these kafilas, with planned attacks, killings, rape, and abductions. Nahal’s protagonists do finally reach India, only to find themselves still uprooted, still without a plan, and still alienated from the world around them. “Azadi” remains an abstraction, an idea that does not easily translate into a tangible truth.
The aftermath
Nahal wrote in his 2001 introduction to the book, replicated in this volume,
“For the historical novelist, human suffering of the moment has greater significance. Calamities like Partition will in all probability occur in the future as well. But their blows can be somewhat deflected if we remain aware of the traumas we have been through. That was the core of this novel, though as a novelist it was not my business to be pedagogic. I wanted to tell a story, not write an essay on the subject. So I take up an average Indian family living in a small town and show how their entire lifestyle and attitudes are changed by the Partition.”
While the book accomplishes exactly this, the story is told in the voices of men- heroes, victims, and witnesses – with women seen, but largely, not heard. There is a distinct absence of women’s voices in the novel. They exist only as bodies that lack agency and are defined by kinship relations and the gaze of men. Nahal dedicates the novel to his sister, lost to the violence of the Partition, but the women in Azadi never quite emerge from the fug of homogeneity. Even when imaged as conscious of selfhood, like Kanshi Ram’s daughter and Arun’s sister, Madhu, they are turned into types instead of individuals. Madhu becomes a prop for Arun’s initiation into manhood, and by extension, into patriarchy. The woman he subsequently falls in love with, in defiance of caste and class strictures, is a shadow of the sister he has lost. His first love, Nur, a Muslim girl he has known since early childhood, whose family he has the closest relations with, is easily discarded when his physical proximity to her ends. This (inter)changeability, alongside the insistent voyeurism that dogs the portrayal of women in the narrative, remains a gap in an otherwise compelling narrative.
The discourse of freedom in India is impossible to separate from the discourse of communal violence, alienation, and loss. Azadi is, within this context, a crucial document that chronicles the lived history of a people, telling a story that critiques the role of political leaders, Indian and Pakistani administrations, and the bloodlust that is an immediate consequence of divisive political rhetoric.
Its epilogue-like Part III, appropriately titled “Aftermath”, details the struggles of scores of Kanshi Rams, Aruns, and Sunandas who attempt to build their lives afresh in the face of extreme apathy and rampant corruption. The new country the refugees from Sialkot now must call home had already failed this transplanted population. “We had no right to ask for freedom,” Kanshi Ram had averred when faced with the inevitability of Partition. Having faced the worst of its repercussions – the fragmentation of families, the systemic humiliation of women, deaths, loss of dignity – he repeats, “We are all equally guilty… whatever the Muslims did to us in Pakistan, we’re doing it to them here.” He says he has ceased to hate the “other” because the same excesses were faced by people on both sides of the border.
Steeped in trauma, framed by witness accounts, the novel resolutely steers away from jingoistic simplifications. Nahal, like most writers and artists who lived through the Partition, whether in India or Pakistan, celebrates “azadi” while never losing sight of the collective agony and grief it has left a long legacy. Today, as we celebrate the festival of azadi and enthusiastically re-frame the narrative of the nation, this is a lesson we would do well to not lose sight of.
Azadi, Chaman Nahal, Hachette India.