THE stock of writings known as Partition literature has, with the passage of time, gained added value other than its original literary value. Perhaps more so in India than in Pakistan, scholars engaged in the study of the Partition tend to treat these writings as a valuable source.

I became aware of this situation when, during the 1980s, a scholar from India, Alok Bhalla, arrived in Lahore and met in particular those fiction writers who had written stories about what had happened during the Partition. He conducted a research of such stories written in different languages of the subcontinent, including English. In 1994 he brought out a collection of these stories translated in English which has been published by HarperCollins, India, in three volumes under the title Stories about the Partition of India.

Bhalla divided these stories in four categories: the ones which are communally charged; stories of anger and negation; stories of lamentation and consolation; and stories of the retrieval of memories.

According to him, the stories belonging to the first category are simply “communal narratives”. But in spite of a deep dislike for this kind of partisanship he accommodates such stories in the collection in order to be objective in his study.

The largest number of stories belongs to the second category, stories of anger and negation. Foremost among these writers is Manto, who according to Bhalla, is very realistic and thus shocking: “Those who have seen the carnage can only stand and wait for death like Toba Tek Singh, who stands in no man’s land between two ‘pious’ nations and calls down curses upon both.”

The stories belonging to the third category “are primarily concerned with the survivors of those genocidal days.” These stories, as explained by him, “deal with the struggle for coherence and with their determination to avoid facing anything which could remind them of the blind forces unleashed by jingoism, hateful invective, chauvinistic nationalism and religious pride.”

The story writers belonging to the fourth category accept the fact of Partition “as an irreversible part of our geopolitical reality and place it at the centre of their concern for the fate of the civilisation of the region.” Bhalla adds: “Yet they draw upon their historical, cultural, and personal memories to organise their narratives in the hope that such recollections would harmonise us and so persuade us to find a way out to a different future”.

Bhalla ends his study by saying that these stories stand witness to a period when we fell out of a human world into a “bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy.”

If such is the value of these short stories, we can include one more kind of writing which was employed in those times. A number of writers chose to express themselves in the form of reportage, which was a direct way of narration and so more suited for recording one’s reactions and observations in times when events were happening quickly.

I am reminded here of three different writings that won popularity because of their documentary value, in addition to their literary expression. They are Mahmood Hashmi’s collection of reportage, titled, Kashmir Udas Hai, Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi’s reportage, Dilli Ki Bipta, and Mashkoor Hussain Yaad’s, Azadi Key Chiragh.

Bhalla expects a writer depicting his co-religionists to be considerate towards those belonging to the rival community undergoing a similar situation on the other side of the border. But perhaps it is too much to expect from one who is helplessly watching his kith and kin caught at the hands of the rioters. Mashkoor Hussain Yaad finds himself in such a situation. He had, along with his family, tried to escape riot-ridden East Punjab. But they were all doomed to death except Yaad, who miraculously succeeded in escaping to Pakistan.

Azadi Key Chiragh is an eye-witness account provided to us by the lone survivor. Therein lays the value of this account. He has suffered so much, seen so much and has lived to tell the harrowing tale.

However, Mahmood Hasmi is in a better position and can afford to be dispassionate while giving an account of what he observed during the disturbed days of 1947 in Srinagar and Jammu. He had managed to escape from there in the January of 1948. He tells us that he wrote most of his account under the shadows of deodar trees of Tarar Khel where he had joined the newly established office of the Azad Kashmir government. And he assures us that he has been strictly faithful to his observations and has not allowed his imagination to intrude into his narrative.

The book was published with a foreword from Mumtaz Shirin who compared it with Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and said that here is a happy blend of documentation and art. And that it is something superior to reportage and a little less than a creative experience.

As for Dilli Ki Bipta, Shahid Sahib is very bitter while narrating the sad tale of how the old Dilli wallas were compelled to leave their ancestral homes and take refuge in Purana Qila before migrating to Pakistan.

He also gives credit to Nehru, who on one occasion personally tried to grapple with the rioters. But Nehru, according to Shahid Sahib’s perception, was a lonely man in this situation who did not enjoy the co-operation of the administration.