[Reader-list] Partition and holocaust

[tarunksaint]

hello all,

I'm sure the list administrator smiled today. Such a rich exchange of views, and some first-rate writing to boot. This is what reader lists should be like. It's nice to be reclaimed from purgatory!

Some interesting insights based on the comparison of the partition and the Holocaust in Rana's posting. The questions he raises are apt and require a more elaborate response than is perhaps possible in this posting. However, on the specific point as regards representation of the partition in literature, one can hazard a few ideas in response. On the contrary, rather than just silence, as Alok Rai has pointed out, the partition generated a whole host of narratives in the early phase which in Manto's phrase, (in Khuda ki kasam) saturated the senses of the readers. Salacious stories about the violation and disfigurement of women in particular and about violence in general circulated widely, and drew on the repertoire engendered by communal violence in previous decades. it was this sort of writing that writers like Manto began to engage with, and ironise. Alok Rai calls this writing 'a pornography of violence'. it was thus easier for conventional moralists perhaps to classify Manto the way they did, given the lurid outpourings then prevalent in both communities, perhaps more visible amongst Hindus and Sikhs on this side of the Radcliffe line. 

the variant of psychic numbness in the case of this experience was thus a little different from that of the Jewish survivors or the hibakusha, after the atom bomb exploded in Hiroshima. In the instance of the holocaust, the imperative to bring to justice to the perpetrators lent an urgent moral dimension to the narratives about the worst excesses of fascism (one could think of Resnais' Night and Fog as an early instance of documentation of the genocidal machine in the aftermath, and recently Eichmann in Jerusalem, screened here at the Documenta event, as an attempt to grapple with the banality of evil which Arendt has eloquently written about). it is also true that 'the Holocaust industry' ( the title of Finkelstein's book on this subject) has exerted a pernicious influence on public opinion on the middle east in the U. S., and on American foreign policy, but that's a debate which has received a fair share of attention. 

Imperatives of nation building, in the case of south Asia, led to a strange dichotomy arising, in which public proclamations of secular nationalism were accompanied by a denial of the atrocities and revenge killings, the pogroms and abductions, even as the killers went scot-free. Meanwhile, narratives about the other community continued to be in motion, like a blight on the imagination. It would be absurd to argue for just one kind of writing about partition in a prescriptive sense. That may be a matter of personal predilection as well . But there are political implications to the way in which there has been a recent resurrection of the tropes and set pieces, the stereotypes and images of that phase. This has been the case in the vernacular press, in the realm of propaganda videos, and writing in languages such as Hindi as Ravi Kant has pointed out. the metaphor of partition has never had such resonance, on both sides of the border. 

The comparison made as regards the sacralisation of the Holocaust thus does not really apply in this case. it is as if the Eichmann trial never happened, as if the Nazi party were able to reinvent itself in an acceptable way, and then get on with business as usual. No taboo has been left unspared in terms of the scrutiny and close study which followed the fascist era. Here, the internal violence of honour killings, and the systematic decimation in the external sphere across North India is just beginning to come to the fore. Anders Hansen has actually termed that violence in the public domain a variant of genocide, even though state involvement was restricted to becoming a passive witness. 

The writing on the subject of the partition at its worst has been cloying and nostalgic; at its best it has allowed for a reexamination of the partition metaphor from a variety of angles, especially so in the context of recent episodes of communal violence. The fascism of the everyday has a history to it, certainly, unless we are to ascribe a primordialist irrationality to the people at large. And one looks forward to writing that breaks up the myths of naïve nationalism, that redefines the rules of representation . The bleak and unsparing ironies of Abdullah Hussein in The Weary Generations, or the surrealist tone and black humour (predicated on a reworking of Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist mythologies) in some of Intizar Hussain's stories are examples of this. I only wish that film-makers were as imaginative, given the reach of the medium (yes, Karvan did have its share of problems as well!) .

More anon,

Rgds,

Tarun

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