Only way to remember Partition’s madness is to say, ‘never again’

Telling It Straight

Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Like all German words, it is a complex conjugation. It means “struggle to overcome the past”. It is, however, specifically associated with Germany’s process of coming to terms with the traumatic history of Nazism and the Holocaust. Dealing with embarrassment and remorse, Vergangenheitsbewältigung continued over several decades, in court, in academic circles, among the political class, and through the media. German police academies are located alongside the concentration camps to serve as a reminder and a warning to never forget, and to prevent a repeat.

If it is the question of guilt and the necessity of the remembrance of suffering that has animated the German narrative of the Holocaust, the brightly coloured paper cranes of Hiroshima are a monument to pray for world peace. These, or for that matter the US military operation in Vietnam, were horrendous events that led to thousands of deaths, and reshaped those societies. Their memories have been institutionalised through Holocaust museums, Vietnam memorials and reconstructions of Hiroshima.

If that is how civilised societies and countries deal with the tragedy and trauma of unspeakable horror inflicted in the recent past, the Modi government has chosen a rather distressing way of observing August 14 as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”. As the Education Secretary wrote to universities and colleges, the government is marking the day “to showcase the sufferings of the Partition-affected people”. If this is a move towards memorialising Partition, it sounds ominous by reopening healed wounds of that period to look at them through a particular political prism. This comes from a government that doesn’t want students to read about the Gujarat riots of 2002. Is it a drive to produce, to use Shahid Amin’s evocative phrase, an “uncluttered national past” of Hindutva’s imagination?

The obvious question about it is the choice of the date. What is the significance of August 14, but for the fact that Pakistan belatedly advanced its official Independence Day to that date? If it was about marking one of the most violent events of Partition, it should have been August 16, when ‘Direct Action Day’ was announced by the Muslim League in 1946, leading to unprecedented violence in Calcutta. At one level, it seems to hark back to what Craig Braxter noted in 1969 -- “when independence came on August 15, 1947, the RSS proclaimed a day of mourning for the destruction of the “sacred indivisibility of Bharatmata”. At another, the choice of date is meant to belittle Pakistan’s I-Day.

That Partition was accompanied by immense violence and human suffering is an undeniable fact. In his speech in the Constituent Assembly on December 19, 1948, Sardar Bhupinder Singh Mann called it a holocaust. Unlike the Holocaust, the violence accompanying Partition was not industrialised slaughter, directed from a distance, by the State against one community. It was not even the violence of a colonial State against the people. It was death and destruction between communities and groups who were also simultaneously being freed from their colonial chains. In keeping with the extraordinarily confused nature of this extraordinary time, complexities of events continue to confound historians and writers till date.

A tragedy of this magnitude needs extreme sensitivity to be narrated and remembered, even at the best of times. Individuals, families, homes, villages, and linguistic and cultural communities were torn apart. New borders, communities, identities and their accompanying politics were created almost instantaneously. Those memorialising them have to be aware of this complexity and should be willing to see the devastation from multiple perspectives. They must also accept the ambiguities of various actors and their motivations. A clear-cut articulation of blame like in the Holocaust is impossible. There is danger in translating memories, myths and legends into pornographies of violence, particularly in today’s fraught times. We already live with WhatsApp forwards and alt-history accounts of Hindutva proponents, fictional and non-fictional, that have worked to do nothing other than spread the communal poison.

This is not a new challenge. It was faced by India’s leadership at that time as well. Gandhi responded by using his moral power to stop, or reduce, violence. Nehru, as the head of the government, used the overstretched State to deal with what had become both unthinkable and unmanageable within days. But the political leadership, abetted in great measure by Gandhi’s assassination, located the tragedy in “a moment of madness”, more akin to a natural calamity, where people lost control of their senses. They used the feeling of hope in a newly independent India to guide people to transcend their suffering and create a better life that this country offered to them. The idea was to look forward to the future, move ahead and ensure that the tragedy is never repeated. It was a struggle – “of people fighting to cope, to survive and to build anew; as a history of the everyday in the extraordinary,” to quote historian Gyanendra Pandey.

The finest way to remember a great human tragedy is to look at the Mahabharata. As Gandhi said, it was fought “not to show the necessity or inevitability of war, but to demonstrate the futility of war and violence.” This becomes evident in Shanti Parva, where “at the end, the victor is shown lamenting, and repenting, not only the outcome, but the very idea of causing so much pain, such gigantic devastation and violence”. That is what India’s Partition was also about, and it is the only way in which it ought to be marked. By saying, never again!