Train to Pakistan
What is the novel Train to Pakistan about?
What event does Train to Pakistan depict?
What happens in the plot of Train to Pakistan?
Who is Juggut Singh in Train to Pakistan?
Train to Pakistan, historical fiction novel, originally published as Mano Majra in 1956, by Indian author Khushwant Singh. Train to Pakistan is believed to be the first novel in English to take the partition of India as its subject. The partition, enacted under the Indian Independence Act of July 1947, split British India into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan along hastily drawn borders separating predominantly Hindu and predominantly Muslim regions. About 15,000,000 Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims crossed these new boundaries in one of history’s largest mass migrations. Many people were killed in attacks on refugee groups and trains crossing the border. Estimates of the death toll range from 200,000 to 2,000,000. Cultural memory of such scenes became fixtures of partition literature. Scholars have noted that literature preserves experiences often missing from official accounts of the time. Novels, in particular, record the suffering of ordinary people that nationalist historiography frequently overlooks.
Read more about the historical context of the novel: British raj, Wagah-Attari border, and Radcliffe Line.
Plot
The story unfolds over a few weeks in the summer of 1947 in Mano Majra, a fictional village near the Sutlej River lying along what will become the boundary between the two emerging countries. The village’s Sikh landowners and Muslim tenant farmers have coexisted for generations. Its inhabitants remain largely indifferent to the independence movement; village elders reason that freedom will benefit the educated while cultivators will merely exchange one set of masters for another.
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The novel is arranged in four chapters: “Dacoity” (armed banditry), “Kalyug” (in Hindu cosmology, the dark, disordered age of the world), “Mano Majra,” and “Karma” (universal causal law in Indian philosophy). The plot is set in motion when dacoits (armed bandits) rob and murder Ram Lal, the village moneylender and head of Mano Majra’s only Hindu household. The police suspect Juggut Singh, a Sikh peasant with a criminal record who, on the night of the killing, was secretly meeting Nooran, the daughter of a Muslim priest and weaver. He is later arrested and held in custody despite his claim that he was away from the scene of the crime. The murder leaves the villagers uneasy and forms the first crack in their orderly lives.
The trains that pass Mano Majra’s small station order the villagers’ days so completely that fieldwork, prayers, and sleep are timed to their passage. It is the disruption of this rhythm that first signals to the village that something has gone wrong in the world outside. The author creates a sense of looming disturbance using a description of the railway schedule gone awry:
People stayed in bed late without realizing that times had changed and the mail train might not run through at all.…Instead, ghost trains went past at odd hours between midnight and dawn, disturbing the dreams of Mano Majra.
At first, the villagers experience the partition only through these unsettling disruptions and scattered reports from elsewhere. They confront its violence directly only when a train from Pakistan pulls in loaded with the bodies of slaughtered Sikh refugees, which the authorities burn in secret. A second such train later arrives, and its dead are buried. The arrival of these trains and news of communal massacres in places such as Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bihar erode the village’s sense of security, despite the inhabitants having lived in harmony for years prior.
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Another strain on the villagers’ bond is the calculated maneuvers of Hukum Chand—the district magistrate. Mirroring the country’s division on the national scale, he has resolved that the Muslims must leave his district. He orders the police to release Malli and his gang—who had actually committed the murder of Ram Lal—in front of assembled villagers. He also tells the police to inquire whether anyone has seen Sultana, a dacoit everyone knows has already fled to Pakistan. His question insinuates that Mano Majra’s Muslims had been sheltering criminals.
The Muslims of Mano Majra are evacuated to a refugee camp with only what they can carry, debating whether they will return; they are in fact bound permanently for Pakistan. Meanwhile, armed gang members plan to ambush the train that will carry the departing Muslims across the border. They string a thick rope across the railway bridge at a height set to sweep off and kill refugees riding on the carriage roofs as the train passes beneath.
Hukum Chand suggests releasing Juggut from custody, hoping that he will help avert the disaster since Nooran, Juggut’s beloved, is among the passengers. In the closing scene, just as the train approaches, Juggut climbs up to the rope and slashes it with his kirpan (the ceremonial sword carried by observant Sikhs). As the gang members shoot at him, Juggut severs the rope and falls; the train passes unharmed, over his body, into Pakistan.
Significance
Train to Pakistan is based on Singh’s traumatic experiences of communal violence in Lahore, where he witnessed killings, woke up to murderous chants of miscreants, and had his house seized by violent mobs on the eve of the partition of India. The novel earned commendations from authors such as Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh. According to the writer K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, “Train to Pakistan projects with pitiless precision a picture of the bestial horrors enacted on the Indo-Pakistan border region during the terror-haunted days of August 1947.” The novel was adapted as the 1998 film Train to Pakistan, directed by Pamela Rooks.