Communal riots : The heart of darkness

In a dispatch entitled ‘Mountain of mistrust between communities’ (Times of India, September 4, 2012) the correspondent Naresh Mitra quoted two displaced persons staying in two different relief camps in the Kokrajhar district of Assam, Basanti Narzary, a Bodo woman from Shimultapu, and Anuwar Hussain Juardar, a Muslim man from Dawaguri, that brought out a strikingly parallel predicament for both the communities.  Basanty was quoted as saying “Our neighbours are all muslims and we had very good relations with them prior to the clashes. We used to sell our agricultural produce in the same market and frequently interacted with each other. I don’t know how all this happened and what kind of relation we will share once we are rehabilitated in our village”. Contrast this statement with what Anuwar conveyed : “Beore the clashes, Bodos and Muslim farmers worked together in paddy fields. Even I worked for many of my Bodo neighbours. One of the closest Bodo persons to me was Anil Boro. I don’t know whether Anil Boro will be the same person once we come back to our houses at Dawaguri ”. In an ironic coincidence Anuwar from Dawaguri was rehabilitated in a relief camp at Shimultapu High School, while Basanty in her relief camp in Jaraguri was wistfully thinking about her house at Shimultapu with spacious rooms, a courtyard, kitchen and garden that was burnt by miscreants on July 23 !    

While many inmates started leaving relief camps in Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri districts, there was this palpable suspicion and worry in the minds of Bodos and Muslims, who have lived peacefully as neighbours before clashes and were also good friends. The ethno-communal clashes have changed everything for them now. 

In his deeply emotional reminiscence on Shyam, his very close and dear friend from the Bombay film world of 1940s, the great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto made an observation on the subject of communal feelings with a remarkable perspicacity (“Shyam : Krishna’s Flute” in “Bitter Fruit”, Penguin Books, 2008).

“Once during the time of Partition”, writes Manto, “when a bloody fratricidal civil war was being fought between Hindus and Muslims with thousands being massacred every day, Shyam and I were listening to a family of Sikh refugees from Rawalpindi. They were telling us horrifying stories of how their people had been killed. I could sense that Shyam was deeply moved and I could understand the emotional upheaval he was undergoing. When we left, I said to him, ‘ I am a Muslim, don’t you feel like murdering me ?’

“ ‘Not now’, he answered gravely, ‘but when I was listening to the atrocities the Muslims had committed … I could have murdered you’.

“I was deeply shocked by Shyam’s words”, Manto continues, “perhaps I could have also murdered him at the time. But later when I thought about it I suddenly understood the basis of those riots in which thousands of innocent Hindus and Muslims were killed every day.

“ ‘Not now … but at that time, yes’. If you ponder over these words, you will find an answer to the painful reality of Partition, an answer that lies in human nature itself.” No wonder many of Manto’s short stories reflected this almost unavoidable perversion of human nature at the critical juncture of partition. The bigger tragedy is that this indulgence has not been held in check, the genie of communal bad blood has repeatedly come out and wreaked havoc time and again in different areas of post-partition India among varied communities and groups.  

Despite being close neighbours and good friends for years, ordinary people belonging to different ethnicity or religion suddenly allow themselves to be incited by rabid communal rumor and hate mongers and start believing in the irreconcilable demonic ‘otherness’ and the evil intent of the community on the opposite side of the divide as an inevitable consequence. Unspeakable cruelty, bestiality happen which both groups could hardly understand or explain later while mending up the badly mangled fabric of their life as a composite community just as Basanty and Anuwar, sitting in the relief camps of Kokrajhar, were hard put to find a clue to the upheaval they experienced a few weeks ago.  

Manto stories – 1

Sometime ago finished re-reading a collection of short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Apart from some well-known partition stories, there are several other notable ones imbued with the trademark sensibility of Manto. The chaos and confusion (quite often accompanied with utter drunkenness which could be a metaphor for the unhinged time and place), as well as raw emotions surface in many stories where action mostly belonged to the turbulent period 1920-1950. Manto seemed almost like a detached observer of the big social and political transformations and the attendant changes brought on the human beings by poverty, destitution and lawlessness that preceded and accompanied partition. Though his emphathy for the predicament of the lowest among the lowly is unmistakable, nevertheless he characterizes and catalogues layers of depravity and villany to which human beings can descend to (especially under some special conditions like dislocation and uncertainty in the context of the partition) with almost a scientist’s empiricism. He appeared to look at his characters much as a biologist would unemotionally handles his petridishes and the bottles of specimens.

Side by side there are also some amazing stories of immense charm and innocence – especially the stories of apparent sexual awakening in the adolescent and the young adults. His empathy for the down and out, especially women (sex workers or others) in difficult and unenviable conditions (whence conventional morality had come unstuck) is well known, but he does it with a simplicity and sureness of touch that is breathtaking.

His partition stories apart (where much of his fame lay and the cold savage fury that characterizes his writing remains unsurpassed), I found ‘New constitution’, ‘Last salute’, ‘Odour’, ‘The blouse’ and ‘Wild Cactus’ in this collection great reading and were as good as any in the world literature.