From the foreword by CM Naim
In response to the communal violence at the time of the Partition, a massive body of literature was produced in Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and – what I directly know – Urdu. Urdu writers on both sides of the new international border produced countless short stories and several novels about those times.
One critical issue they faced was: how does one create a piece of fiction about a reality so horrible? Some responded by doing a “balancing act” – if five victims of one religious persuasion were mentioned in the beginning, they were matched by five victims belonging to the other religion at the end.
Some also felt that to bring the warring communities together they must put the final blame on a common enemy: the erstwhile colonial rulers. Other writers wrote as partisans; they saw their own community as being only a victim, and blamed the other community for being the exclusive perpetrator of violence.
Most of these writings emphasised the “magnitude” of the violence – the killings, the rapes, the destruction of property, the uprooting of populations. Only a small corpus explored the truly horrific – the casual betrayals, the meanness and cruelty in seemingly ordinary acts, the human capacity to routinise inhumanity – the evil in the “banal”.
Saadat Hasan Manto in his stories of the Partition riots neither blamed any single group nor tried to distribute the blame equally. His significance and the lasting power of his stories lie in his focussing on those moments when a man, despite having done horrible things, could be shown as still being capable of doing ordinary little things. This strategy did not lessen the horror of the man’s actions; in fact, it enhanced it by making them the acts of someone not unlike us. At the same time, it made it possible to envision some hope, some capacity in mankind that could be harnessed to fight against such horrors.
The hatred and violence of 1947 was blamed by most writers at the time on the machinations of our erstwhile colonial rulers. Almost all of them felt that to bring the Hindus and Muslims together they had to find a common enemy in the English. But the events of the 1970s and the 1980s are different. We must face the fact that “the enemy is us”.
To my knowledge, literary responses to contemporary communal violence in the sub-continent have not been extensive in any of the three countries and their many languages. For example, in Urdu in India, there are any number of short stories and poems about the present plight of the Muslims, but there are no major novels, anthologies or special issues of magazines. Likewise, I know of no work of imagination in Urdu from Pakistan that tries to explore the trajectory that communal violence has taken there.
In fact, in the sub-continental perspective, one can cite only two books that have made a significant impact in this area: Lajja (Shame) in Bengali, by the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, and Shahar Mein Curfew (Curfew in the City) in Hindi, by Vibhuti Narain Rai. Nasrin’s book gained immediate notice in South Asia and abroad due to the fatwa issued against the author. Rai’s book has remained much less known even in India, though it did generate the wrath of some votaries of Hindutva, who successfully prevented it from being made into a film.
Both Nasrin and Rai have written about the persecution of minority communities by the majority communities to which they themselves belong in their respective countries. Otherwise, the two books are very different.
Nasrin’s linear narrative covers thirteen days in the life of a Hindu family in Dhaka in 1992 with considerable speed and passion; it also contains lengthy segments of a purely documentary nature. The latter generally dismayed reviewers in Bangladesh and India. But the novelist Amitav Ghosh more accurately understood the aims of Nasrin’s narrative when he wrote in The Telegraph of 24 June 1994: “… taken on its own terms, the book’s strength can be seen to lie precisely in what appear to be its formal weakness. In its breakneck urgency, its direct and unembellished Bengali prose, in the narrative inseparability of its fictional and documentary material, in its polemical repetitiveness and its undisguised emotional immediacy.’
He then went on to compare Nasrin with the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, and argued that the two “have pioneered one of the most powerful forms of our times. The polemiction – polemical fictions that are perhaps the most appropriate possible literary response to the oppressive banality of contemporary religious extremism.”
In another way too, these documentary sections are exactly what makes Lajja so significant. They give names and professions and homes to those who otherwise get mentioned only as anonymous statistics. Nasrin wishes us not to forget those ordinary details that make these victims of communal fanaticism not unlike their enemies – in the end, so like us.
Rai’s novella is not “polemiction”. It is, in fact, quite modest in ambition and execution. Though begun in 1980, in response to a riot in Allahabad that he personally observed as the senior superintendent of police there, the book came out only in 1988. Its episodic narrative covers three days in the life of a small neighbourhood in Allahabad in the grip of a curfew during the riot. Divided into nine short chapters, it alternates between the story of Sayeeda, the wife of a bidi-maker, and her family, claustrophobic in effect in being confined to their one-room house, and other simultaneous events that take place elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” is spatially more open and varied, but – affected by the curfew – equally distorted and horrifying. The two progressions meet in the penultimate chapter, where a police party conducts “searches” in Muslim homes – the home of a nationalist lawyer, Sayeeda’s home and the palatial compound of the Haji. At the end of the book, the curfew continues.
Despite a few instances of authorial interventions, Rai seems to strive for a cool, sometimes ironic and detached voice. Nevertheless, he too wants us to come close to the victims of violence and persecution through our knowledge of their ordinariness. Thus Sayeeda, perhaps the central character in his novella, is not just a grief-stricken mother whose baby daughter dies during the curfew but also a rural person who hates using the latrine in her new home in the city.
Rai’s narrative is not about the “riot” itself, or rather, it is not about the killing and pillaging and raping, the events that were very much the focus of the narratives of the stories that were written about the riots of 1946 and 1947. It is not a story of people gone barbaric in the heat of a moment of passion or revenge. It is about cold, calculated greed and blind, senseless hatred.
From the novella
By the end of the second day of the curfew, the bubbling latrine and the steaming heat had turned Sayeeda’s home into a little hell, and its residents were beginning to collapse under its miasmic air. In the morning, Sayeeda had opened the door to go into the latrine but had reeled back, desperately struggling to suppress her nausea. The whole day went by, but she didn’t use the place even once. She stopped eating; out of her fear, she did not even take any tea that morning.
Sayeeda’s daughter had lain all day long in her grandmother’s lap. Three days of dysentery had devastated the poor two-year- old. Today, since noon, she had been vomiting too – an obvious victim of cholera. But only her mother and grandmother were concerned about her.
The father and the grandfather squatted in another corner of the gloom-filled room and were so lost in their bidi-making that anyone coming in from outside would have mistaken them for ghosts. Their naked torsos were sticky with sweat as their busy hands flew back and forth, phantom-like, over the small piles of bidi leaves, tobacco and thread.
In the opposite corner, Sayeeda’s two brothers-in-law and her nephew were listlessly playing carrom. That was the only means of entertainment in the house, and the boys were getting bored with it, for they had been at it most of the day. They would play a few games, then quarrel and stop, only to start again after a while. Today their neglect of work didn’t bring them kicks and curses because there weren’t enough tobacco and leaves for everyone in the house. Only Sayeeda’s sister-in-law was moving around, trying somehow to prepare some food for the family.
Sayeeda had brought home only two days’ medicine, but in all the confusion and worry she had given it all to the baby in just twenty-four hours. By noon, there was none left. She had been casting scared glances at her husband; a few times – disregarding the respect she owed her father-in-law – she had even addressed her husband directly and begged him to get some more medicine. But the two men kept on working in their silent, stolid fashion.
Her husband had had a nasty experience that morning when he had agreed to fetch some water from the public tap; he was in no mood to listen to another such request. They had a tap in the house, but it let out only a faint drip of water and that too for only an hour or so mornings and evenings; their remaining need had to be met from the public tap at the entrance to the lane.
Twice a day there was a mad scene out there when the neighbourhood women jostled and quarrelled as they tried to get whatever little water they could. Most of the houses in that lane had no more than one tap, which couldn’t supply enough water even in the cold days of winter. Now, of course, it was hellishly hot and people could feel thorns in their throats. That’s why that morning Sayeeda’s husband, entreated by his mother, decided to take the risk of stepping out.
Not a drop of water had come into the house from outside since the time the curfew was announced. What had dripped – as usual – from the tap in the house had been used. By dawn there was hardly more than a bucket left. So, when his mother begged him, Sayeeda’s husband had picked up the buckets and stepped out into the cool twilight of the lane.
After more than twelve hours of confinement, the openness of the lane was delightfully soothing. The sun had not yet come out and a refreshing cool breeze blew. The lane was dead silent. The cots that used to line it end to end every night were nowhere to be seen. The familiar narrow lane seemed wide and open. The only living beings were some stray dogs. Even the cows that used to meander through the lane chewing cud, seemed to have been affected by the curfew and disappeared.
With a bucket in each hand, Sayeeda’s husband took a few scared steps. The public tap was about a hundred yards away, but soon he could hear it. The tap was open and – it being quite early in the morning – running at full blast. The splash of the water on the ground could be heard even at a distance. No one, as usual, had bothered to shut the tap yesterday, and, equally as usual, water was pouring out of it at dawn. The only difference was that normally, even that early, there would be a few women at the tap, while today it seemed totally abandoned.
After a few more steps, his fear began to leave him. He even started to enjoy himself. The tiring night had left his body fatigued; now the gentle morning breeze freshened him. Softly he began humming a song. By the time he arrived at the tap he was so oblivious that he didn’t notice how loud his song had become. Before placing a bucket under the tap, he cupped his hands under the cold jet and washed his face and arms. The water was coming out with such force that, despite his efforts, his lungi and vest were drenched. The water felt cold and its touch made him shiver with pleasure.
Whether it was due to his loud singing or their own desire to have a wash, there suddenly appeared two police jawans, yawning, still half asleep. He became aware of them only when they started cursing and lashing at him with their canes. ‘Mother f ...! Bastard! Whatthef ...areyoudoinghere? Gettingyour mother f . . . ed?’ They kept hitting him on his legs and hips.
His second bucket was barely half filled. He stumbled and almost fell down but, quickly recovering, he picked up the buckets and ran homeward. The jawans saw no purpose in running after him – perhaps they were too tired after being on duty all night. One of them cupped a hand under the tap and began to drink; the other stood by, shouting foul abuses at the fleeing man.
He stumbled several times and the water in his buckets kept splashing, but the fleeing man didn’t slow down. He felt sure that the two messengers of death were still in hot pursuit. When he finally entered his house, there were barely four bowls of water left in the two buckets. That’s why, despite Sayeeda’s repeated – silent, as well as vocal – requests, he had felt no urge to go out for the child’s medicine. He had kept his head bowed and continued with his work.
Frustrated, Sayeeda stopped saying anything to him. Whenever the child threw up or defecated in her grandmother’s lap, Sayeeda would get up and, with a most miserly use of water, clean up the mess. Sayeeda’s mother-in-law had seen several of her own children die; it wasn’t difficult for her to realize that the little girl was nearing her end. But for Sayeeda it was her first experience as a mother.
Excerpted with permission from Curfew In The City Vibhuti Narain Rai, translated from the Hindi by CM Naim. Penguin Books.