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Vikram Singh Nirwan

Dr. Vinod Kumar Singh

Literary Historiography

M.Phil.

Roll. No. 440

8th July 2019

This Side That Side: Restorying the ‘Comparitive’ Partition.

This Side That Side is an anthology of graphic narratives curated by graphic novelist

Vishwajyoti Ghosh, it features numerous graphic narratives that tell life stories of people and

their experiences during and after the partition of the Indian subcontinent. The text brings

together a multiplicity of backgrounds under one banner, the stories are based in different

contexts and geographies of the subcontinent such as Karachi, Lahore, Bangladesh, Delhi,

Madhya Pradesh and some stories are have no settings at all making them more elusive and

fluid. The stories range from poems, life stories, fables, stories of escape, displacement, loss,

and trauma and more importantly, stories of identity loss and migration. The multiplicity

extends to the authors too as the individual authors are based in various parts of the Indian

subcontinent and even beyond. Majority of the narratives are collaborations between visual

artists like painters, illustrators, cartoonists, graphic novel authors, film directors etc. and story

tellers such as poets, novelists, writers etc. Most of the stories follow the conventional form of

panels and gutter spaces but some of them are extremely fluid and creative with the canvas. As

Nayar notes in his essay The forms of History:

“The anthology works at making traumatic history visible, but eschews direct

representations of violence. I use the term “invisible history” to suggest, first, the

absence of direct representation of the violence of the Partitions and displacement;

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second, the survivors’ repression of the traumatic events; and finally the condition

of invisibility to which they have been consigned.” (Nayar)

The collection of narratives with varying backgrounds provide a comparative

understanding of partition and its various experiences. The grand narrative of partition is based

merely on trauma and violence but as Willem van Schendel suggests that Partition must not be

viewed an event which is one of a kind. He calls for a comparative study of partition and not

as a peerless event, partition should not only be looked at with only one event of 1947 but other

partitions should also be located within the South Asian context. The 1971 partition and the

creation of Bangladesh for example, has direct effect on the present Indian citizenship laws and

it also gives birth to the Bengali and North East Indian experience of partition. The following

narratives are based in different premises that incite a need to look for comparative experiences.

The first narrative of the book is named as “An Old Fable” written by Tabish Khair, a

poet and a writer, it is visualised by film maker Priya Kurian. “An Old Fable” opens the book

with an overarching visualisation of partition that how a child disputed between two women is

cut into three pieces by an all knowing king. It is portrayed as an absurd story to show the

obliviousness and ignorance of the people who supported this act. The king is shown as a

caricature of a British imperialist with a flat hat, a monocle, a smoke pipe, dressed in a long

tailcoat. The story highlights the distance between the state and the common people as they do

not understand the words “law” or “reason” for which the king is famous for, they think “it is

an advanced variety of cholera” which is ironic. The crowd is triumphant at the idea of cutting

the baby horizontally and vertically, in the end the decision “…in the name of reason, Science,

and above all, law and order, this newborn, stinking, undiapered child should be cut in half,

and each half given to each of the disputing mothers.” The mothers wept and the crowd is
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shown rejoicing at the decision “*Two parts, one for you, one for me. Two jobs, one for you,

one for me. Two…” (Ghosh, 26) the king was adorned with titles such as “a Daniel,”

“Suleiman” and “Harishchandra.” The idea of obliviousness among the common people and

ignorance regarding its implications is shown in other stories as well that such a crucial decision

is taken while they were sleeping or were imprisoned in their ignorance.

The next two stories “Fault Lines” and “Border” share the same idea of not knowing

what was happening and the passivity of a majority of the population. Irfan Master and Prabha

Mallya’s “Fault Lines” feature two prisoners who are waiting for something but it is not

specified. They are oblivious to the facts and on goings of the outer world. One of the most

impressive imagery is a sweeper cleaning the floor and it is an image of a map on which he is

sweeping away names of places like Karachi, Amritsar, Lahore, Sind, Bengal etc., it could be

the sweeping away of identities that are going to be affected by this division. The dilemma of

waiting and to find purpose keeps them busy, the story ends with the image of Rabindranath

Tagore walking in with the keys. Similarly, “Border” by Kaiser Haq and Hemant Puri features

a man who procrastinates while dreaming of a woman, on waking up he finds that the nation

he was sleeping in has changed, “a hot knife that slices through the earth, without the earth’s

knowing, severs and joins at the same instant, creating a wry humour- whole families eat under

one flag, shit under another.” (Ghosh, 47) The story ends with the image of a man lying on a

map that show the freshly divided states, here passivity is more prominent as the speaker quotes

“You raise the universal flag of flaglessness. Amidst bird anthems dawn explodes in a lusty

salute.” (Ghosh, 49) It marks the stripping of one’s national identity as he has become

“flagless,” he has become a refugee in waiting and again passive about the struggles he will

have to endure.

Another bunch of stories talk about memories and the division of natural frontiers such

as rivers. Ravish Kumar and Ikroop Sandhu’s poetry-like narrative “Which Side?” is adapted
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from a Facebook status by Ravish Kumar which he calls “Laprek,” short for Laghu Prem Katha

(short love story). It shows two people sitting, a man and a woman discussing partition and the

entities it will eventually divide, “Will the partitioning of this land divide us as well?” “Will

they portion away the Ganga?” “Will they portion away Sutlej?” “Come, let’s play. You mark

a line across the Yamuna, and I’ll mark one too.” “Let’s be Jinnah and Jawahar; let’s fill a

container each with our river and carry them home.” (Ghosh, 55) When she asks him if the

partition will divide us as well, to which he replies, “Yes, Sonali, they will divide us. In this

new book of accounts of Jinnah and Jawahar, whose count will you prefer, Sonali?” (Ghosh,

57) Memory has always been an important aspect in the literatures of displacements and

migrations, “Noor Miyan” by Vidrohi and Tina Rajan shows a split in the historical

understanding of a child-narrator as he cannot fathom the idea of the partition. As Nayar argues:

“Noor Miyan’s absence from their lives suggests a lack of comprehension of historical

processes, where incomprehensibility is an ellipsis, an explanation left out. The

contexts of Noor Miyan’s departure are unclear to the child, and the survivors’ trauma

is founded on both this departure and the lack of knowledge about it. All the child

knows is that a familiar face is no longer available. The plaintive “does that mean we

were no one to him?” suggests the despair of neighbours and acquaintances separated

by a political decision andby the violence it unleashed. The child’s query does not

simply represent an epistemological quandary about who belongs and who does not:

it is aligned with the gap in the very representability of Partition.” (Nayar)

The knowledge of the child-narrator is limited to his memories of his grandmother and

the youthfulness of her eyes because of the surma Noor Miyan used to sell to her. The story

ends with him scattering her ashes in the river. “The river is no longer a river but has turned

into her eyes and the ashes in my hand are the surma that will line those eyes. And in this way,

for one last time, I applied Noor Miyan’s surma to my grandmother’s eyes.” (Ghosh, 67)
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Similarly, Nayar also talks about another story “Know Directions Home?” by Ilustrator and a

professor Nina Sabnani. The graphic narrative by Sabnani recounts the memories of partition

and migration, “Know Directions Home?” features a group of people who are being escorted

back to the border. Sabnani’s text features a lot of visual ellipses in the form of dotted and

continuous lines that represent a break in the history that refugees and immigrants are out of

the history. Refugees inhabit a liminal space of the no man’s land and assertion of one’s

demand become more important in such a contingent space. It is evident that an immediate

contingency is prevailing, but the group manages to meet its end through willed assertion “No

we won't. You are lying about taking us to India. We will not get into the trucks now. We will

stay here and die.” Hence, in order to establish a history, and a narrative, assertion is important,

this kind of resettlement eschews the modes of political patronage and fetches them citizenship

after eight years.

Some narratives are directly based upon the 1971 experience and contain strong

elements of connection with their home landscape such as the rivers in “Making of a Poet” and

the Sundarban marshlands for the refugees in Dandakaranya Camp in “A Good Education”.

The characters of these narratives display a strong diasporic consciousness, a yearning to return

to their homeland or to get assimilated in their new found home. “Making of a Poet” by M

Hasan and Sukanya Ghosh is a story about the speaker who visits Nitya Malakar the poet and

learns about his journey as a poet and how he keeps his homeland alive through his imagination.

The speaker felt that he could smell Bangladesh inside him, flowing like a river, a very personal

one. The concept of place imagination runs strong, when asked about what the land means to

him as a poet, he replied, “The birds, the trees, don’t belong to some particular land. There is a

real land that exists outside and there is one in the imagination.” (Ghosh, 142) He tells a story

about a man who fell sick and was diagnosed with an incurable “disease of dreaming”, he

dreams of returning to his village and keeps swimming even if he is tired. The speaker feels
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fortunate that he possesses a passport, an identity, a nationality whereas the poet does not have

any papers to prove that he belongs to Bangladesh. It brings up the concept of documentary

citizenship that papers substantiate your existence to the state whereas the poet does not need

any modern forms of legitimacy. “More and more, the most inhuman things keep happening in

the name of rationality and civilisation. I wish people could feel more and know less; we could

then have a less smart world, but maybe a better one, with fewer walls and more roads and

bridges.” (Ghosh, 145) The narrative ends with the poet saying that his imagination makes him

a poet.

In the story “I want to be a Tree” by Syeda Farhana and Nitesh Mohanty, Tara a Bihari

Muslim in Bangladesh recounts her memory through which the narrative makes results of the

1971 war apparent. “a family that stayed together in 1947, now breaks apart in 1992 with the

breaking of the Babri Masjid in India”. The visuals are photographic in nature coalesced with

drawn artwork, it flows like a collage of images and at times it slips into a poetry like rhythm.

Tara keeps questioning her mother's decision to stay back in India and now she suffers the same

dilemma about her identity as a Bihari Muslim in Bangladesh. She says she will keep acting in

this refugee camp as a war survivor and as a Bangladeshi citizen. She calls her dilemma a

rudderless journey but she says "If I close my eyes, I can see my roots entering the soil, this

land I stand on" and "I can feel my roots spreading and finding a home in the soil. This is my

land too and all I want to be is a Tree."

“A Good Education” by Vishwajyoti Ghosh is based upon Amiya Sen’s text Aranyalipi

(The Forest Chronicles) which is based on her experiences with the refugees in the camps of

Dandakaranya in Madhya Pradesh. The story is about Amiya Sen who works at Kasturba

Niketan, a rehabilitation home for partition refugees which is located in Delhi. She is sent to

Dandakaranya camp in Madhya Pradesh, a government run refugee resettlement camp. The

very first visual representation of the camp is striking as a large board reads
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“DANDAKARANYA MADHYA PRADESH”, a huge crowd of refugees with sullen faces

stands and among them a similar male figure with an Uncle Sam hat stands over a barrel that

reads “US AID”. The journal entry by Amiya Sen reads that these people from East Bengal are

“… the real lambs of partition. Pushed by the anticipated attack of death, they reached

the Indian border. The very sight of the made the West Bengal government scream,

‘There’s no space here – we can’t accommodate them’ Despite being unlettered and

helplessm they show such dignity! But who will understand! We are such a self-

oblivious race” (Ghosh, 152)

She was on an education project run by the government to provide the children of

refugees ‘a good education’, it sounds absurd that the people who are living on ‘US AID’

actually require a good education as even survival was a struggle in the desolate camp of

Dandakaranya. Where the state cannot provide them with the bare minimum wants to uplift

them through education and by taking away their children for at least fifteen years, such doubts

plagued her. The government project would break families who had already lost their homeland

as it was not possible to move entire families to Delhi, but her duty compelled her to convince

and mobilize the people. The doubts were even deeper because there was no certainty that the

camp will remain during the period, the dispossessed people were further to be divided and

displaced. Unexpectedly, the women relented and most of them agreed to send their children

away. She writes in the end, “These women crossed the sea of death to come so far and were

at the very end of their tether. They were willing to let go their only support – their children, I

stood frozen. Delhi would be happy, for them I had succeeded.” (Ghosh, 159)

In conclusion, the stories of displacement and dispossession should be taught and read

more widely because as citizens under a stable administration the concept of place belonging

and nationality has no or less critical consideration. An ordinary paper citizen can become
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dispossessed at any moment and be treated as a disposable human waste. Such narratives

sensitize us towards displaced people and even minorities, that the quest to belong is not an

easy one, it is convenient to create exclusivist policies towards immigration for a government

but difficult to create a sensitised and a well-informed body of citizens.

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Word Count: 2545.

Bibliography

 Nayar, Pramod. (2016). The forms of history: This Side, That Side, graphic narrative

and the Partitions of the Indian subcontinent. Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 1-13.

 Jayal, Niraja Gopal. Citizenship and Its Discontents: an Indian History. Harvard

Univ. Press, 2013.

 Schendel, Willem van. The Bengal Borderland: beyond State and Nation in South

Asia. Anthem, 2005.

 Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in

India. Cambridge University Press, 2007.