Azadi

by Chaman Nahal

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Life in Sialkot goes on with a hum, until the fateful news arrives, like smoke it lingers and begins to settle into homes that have sheltered generations. Within days reality dawns, terrible passions are unleashed, and lives are rent asunder. In Chaman Nahal's intense novel one encounters the full force of the great tragedy of Partition.

Release date: July 17, 2023

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 360

Sample

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

‘A classic.’

– Diana Athill

‘Nahal’s work will take its place as one of the rare tragic narratives in Indian fiction…intensely felt and poignant.’

– Mulk Raj Anand

‘A poignant and moving narrative…full of lessons that will never be learnt.’

– New York Times

‘Moving, dignified, and enthralling.’

– Sunday Times

‘Nahal’s impressive and elegantly written novel…tells more of the truth about Partition than any historical study.’

– Times

‘As long as novels like Azadi are written in the language, there is strength and continuity in the English novel.’

– New Society

‘Mr Nahal, with detailed description of the daily lives of seven families… shows how they were swept along by events. Hindus and Muslims spoke and wrote one Punjabi language, implicitly respected each other's religion, intermarried, shared business interests, attended mixed classes in schools, joined a mixed police force and mixed arms regiments—but in 1947 it all disappeared. Mr Nahal’s simple and moving story brings out each of these points.’

– Times Literary Supplement

‘Here is India. India colourfully, penetratingly, amusingly and agonizingly. No one but an Indian could have written this book, and not many Indians would do it as well as Chaman Nahal.’

– Seattle Times

‘Done most convincingly, revealing the contradictions, the illusions, the smallness of outlook and occasional acts of kindness and humanity in the face of common disaster.’

– Sunday Standard

‘A wonderfully deep and interesting story that is full of the flavour of India, the Punjab, and the time.’

– John Kenneth Galbraith

‘Chaman Nahal, an Indian writer of unusual ability, has come close to answering the question of the slaughter of the innocents in the compelling novel Azadi.’

– Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Mr Nahal’s achievement is to show through the eyes of his main character, Lala Kanshi Ram, a Hindu, how people insist on the same patterns of behaviour for themselves whatever their circumstances, whether “free” or not.’

– Guardian

‘This novel depicts in graphic detail the catastrophic incidents that took place immediately after the announcement in June 1947 of the British intention to quit India after partitioning it.’

– The Hindu

‘Hope and renewal are mingled with terror. The reader is moved but heartened, terrified but uplifted. Therein lies the unique quality of the novel.’

– All India Radio

‘A Passage to India written by an Indian…with a lyrical, loving tone.’

– Chicago Tribune

‘The power Nahal displays is his sympathetic human involvement, his ability to show that in spite of wide differences in social mores between India and the West, man is man wherever you find him.’

– Carlos Baker

‘A magnificent work of fiction… It should be required reading at our universities.’

– Hindustan Times

‘In Azadi Chaman Nahal describes this disaster and this tragedy with brilliancy, compassion, and great humanity.’

– Maxwell Geismar

‘Chaman Nahal is a brilliant writer. The book is a good illustration of painstaking and painful documentation.’

– The Tribune

‘Novels such as Azadi can help us to know and understand other peoples, to find some meaningful sense of our common humanity.’

– Kansas City Star

‘This is a wonderful book; it has the air of absolute truth. Funny, tragic, horrifying and ultimately noble, it succeeds in its aim of depicting the agony of a whole great country and at the same time telling us something about human nature in all its richness.’

– British Book News

‘One of a very few Indian novels in which portraits of both male and female characters are equally well drawn.’

– Barbara Harrison in Learning about India

‘Told with a confident realism lost to English fiction.’

– Observer, London

‘This is a warm and optimistic book because it believes in people.’

– Birmingham Post

‘There have been many books written on India from various aspects and various points of view. But I have not read anything with this depth of understanding or concern for a long time.’

– Business Times, Kuala Lumpur

‘This is a book very well worth reading.’

– Times of India

‘Chaman Nahal brilliantly draws a portrait of a war-torn land and of one family trying to bring order and safety to their lives… A memorable journey and one related so dramatically and realistically that it is likely to live forever in our minds and our hearts.’

– Chicago Sun-Times

‘Sparked by humour, wise, calm…this fine book illuminates not only a bad time in history, the lot of the Hindu and the Muslim, but the human condition.’

– Sunday Telegraph

‘No one…has dramatized this terrible episode in our recent history with such sweeping power and authenticity.’

– Bhabani Bhattacharya

First published in the United States in 1975 by Houghton Mifflin

First published in India in 1975 by Orient Longman

This edition published in India in 2023 by Hachette India

(Registered name: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd)

An Hachette UK company

www.hachetteindia.com



This ebook published in 2023

(text) Copyright © 1975 Chaman Nahal

(text) Copyright © 2023 Ajanta Kohli and Anita Nahal

Map illustration by Neelima P Aryan (adapted from the original by K.B. Kumar)

The introduction has been excerpted from the original version that appeared in the 2001 edition of the book.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Ajanta Kohli and Anita Nahal assert the legal right to be identified as the copyright holders of this work.

Cover design and illustration by Pia Alizé Hazarika

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system (including but not limited to computers, disks, external drives, electronic or digital devices, e-readers, websites), or transmitted in any form or by any means (including but not limited to cyclostyling, photocopying, docutech or other reprographic reproductions, mechanical, recording, electronic, digital versions) without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents (other than those obviously genuine) are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

Subsequent edition/reprint specifications may be subject to change, including but not limited to cover or inside finishes, paper, text colour, and/or colour sections.

Paperback edition ISBN: 978-93-93701-86-2

Ebook edition ISBN: 978-93-93701-89-3

Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

4th/5th Floors, Corporate Centre,

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Originally typeset in Bembo, 11.5/14 pt

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INTRODUCTION

At the time of Partition, I was in college and like many others was completely taken aback by the decision to divide the country into two separate states. More than fifty years after that event the scars still show, in my reaction to ethnic violence, ethnic insults and ethnic demands which surface every now and then in the same divisive, unwholesome vein. What have we learnt from that monumental event in our history, if we persist in confrontation instead of dialogue?

Azadi was published many years after Partition. In the meantime I mulled over the vagaries of history which like fate I came to regard as an adversary of man: it also heaped unrelieved misery on him. One can perhaps explain away fate; faith in reincarnation and karma allows us to rationalize these impositions. History is made by man here and now and its disasters are avoidable.

Though history can be a bane for humanity, it can also be a boon. New ideas are discovered in its course, new notions floated, new horizons make their appearance. Even Mahatma Gandhi is part of history and what could be a greater blessing for us than to have had him as our leader? While analyzing and assessing history then, we have to be extremely objective.

For the professional historian, historical developments constitute so many events. He categorizes and catalogues them in a sequential manner, trying to find a justification for what happened; he is not concerned with emotions and feelings. For the historical novelist, human suffering of the moment has greater significance. Calamities like Partition will in all probability occur in the future as well. But their blows can be somewhat deflected if we remain aware of the traumas we have been through.

That was the core of this novel, though as a novelist it was not my business to be pedagogic. I wanted to tell a story, not write an essay on the subject. So I take up an average Indian family living in a small town and show how their entire lifestyle and attitudes are changed by Partition. As in every novel, there are some autobiographical bits in this one as well—the fact that I was born and raised in Sialkot, the town still closest to my heart, and that I had a sister who was assassinated during Partition, a sister I loved most dearly and who was the very epitome of personal dignity in the face of tragedy.

In Azadi I was largely concerned with showing how the partition of India in 1947 destroyed an existing harmony which had prevailed for centuries. India is known for its cultural synthesis, and never once when I was growing up did it strike me that I belonged to one particular sect and had to act according to its norms. The norms by which we lived were Indian norms, accepted and acknowledged all over the country and practised as such.

The first section of the novel, ‘The Lull’, establishes the harmony that kept the various communities in Sialkot together. Lala Kanshi Ram or Chaudhri Barkat Ali and their families never make religion the basis of their day-to-day decisions, nor does anyone else. Choices are made on the basis of economics, expedience, necessity and above all friendship. But these choices don’t bring about a rift amongst them at any point. The greatest harm political decisions such as Partition do is that they polarize ethnic groups and place them in their own narrow confines and compartments; they force them to act their ethnicity out. Chaudhri Barkat Ali remains affable and friendly towards Lala Kanshi Ram till the end but the link between the communities in general is temporarily smashed.

To register further the cultural collapse of the time, I decided to show how the emotional damage caused by Partition occurred within each family itself, no matter what their ethnic identity. Lala Kanshi Ram, Prabha Rani and Arun feel altogether isolated and can hardly communicate with each other when they reach Delhi towards the end of the novel.

In the vast drama that unfolded after Partition, thousands were on the move at any given time, thousands were living in refugee camps, thousands were looking for new homes, thousands had turned destitute overnight. In all, ten million people were involved in the horror.

Kartar Devi, my remarkable sister, who perished in the riots and to whose sacred memory this novel is most humbly and respectfully dedicated, was twenty-seven when she died. When the communal riots aggravated just after Partition, she considered Wazirabad, the village where she lived, unsafe and along with her husband tried to reach us in Sialkot. But the train in which they were travelling was stopped along the way by a hostile mob and they were both cruelly murdered, as were hundreds of others on the train.

She was the most vivacious, the most provocative, the most engaging individual I have ever known; nothing could put her down for long. Her spirit has always been with me, in all the work I have done as a novelist, in whatever stories I have written. She continues to be the motivating force of all my faith, all my beliefs. For tragic and disturbing though her short life was, it raises a couple of even more disturbing questions.

Are wars and conflicts, which kill so many, which inflict unimaginable pain, which eventually resolve nothing, which bring out only the animal in us, necessary? Can’t they be somehow avoided? More importantly, what do the lives of ordinary people like myself and my sister, amount to? The chronicles of the world are studded with luminaries alone—those who make it to the top. What about millions upon millions of us who happen to be just ordinary, making do with whatever comes our way? What is our reward? Who will ever remember us?

And this sister of mine perches next to me and mocks me and makes fun of my fits of depression. All lives have a meaning in a vaster context we cannot see. Not a single life is wasted away. Carry yourself with dignity, with uprightness, with firmness, no matter what. That’s its own reward.

The character of Madhu in Azadi is partly based on her; she figures in some of my short stories and articles as well. Only very imperfectly, very imprecisely. My writing has failed to come up to the excellences of her life.

I’m aware that countless other sisters of mine were also done to death, raped, or whisked away in a similar fashion. And not only in Pakistan but here in India as well—my sisters from other faiths. The novel is a tribute to them all.

Even though there was distress of the same magnitude and horror in Bengal at the time of Partition, I refrain from covering that region; I was afraid of making a factual error somewhere. I stay firmly close to the Punjabi character and scene.

Indian towns are built on the guild system. A large number of communities belonging to a particular trade or profession live together in specific parts of the city and form a certain web. For a novelist to know his characters, he has to know his city. He has to know the connection between each mohalla and its residents: the jewellers, the ironsmiths, the carpenters, the hookah manufacturers, the watch makers, the rickshaw pullers, the weavers, the barbers, the butchers, the sweetmeat sellers, the cobblers, the temple priests, and many others.

Such people ever float at the back of my mind though I may not directly bring them into the story. The shuffle of their feet, their wide-open, white eyes, their slim but firm, dark chests, their unkempt hair, their panther-like agility and swiftness, their broad smiles constitute my never-ending reveries. As a writer, I look upon myself too as an artisan. I too work with my hands, when I’m chiselling away at words, sharpening pencils or pounding on my keyboard. The voice in me remains dormant until I have rubbed shoulders with these people. I’m only one of a crowd.

The sublime for me thus exists in the mundane and the ordinary. Prabha Rani packing her trunk while leaving Sialkot, Nur’s reaction to the death of Madhu, Lala Kanshi Ram looking for a house in Delhi, Sunanda running her sewing machine in her room, are more momentous moments for me than the regalia and fanfare of aristocracy.

It is worth recording that there are two versions of Azadi now extant. The first one was published in 1975 and was lucky to get the attention of several highly reputed international critics. I realized then that there was a lot of strength in our freedom movement and perhaps the whole story could be retold by a novelist. Even though Partition itself was a disaster, the country did win its freedom from the British, a unique achievement by any account. Indeed, whatever power and momentum we have today as a nation stems from that period, and I decided to write a series of novels about it, a task on which I spent nearly a quarter of a century. I create another family in those novels, living in Amritsar, many members of which come under the sway of Gandhi. Through marriage I establish a relation between them and Lala Kanshi Ram, and the second version of Azadi has a fifty-page Epilogue to carry that connection to a conclusion. It was published in 1993 as the final volume of The Gandhi Quartet. The version appearing here is the original one of 1975.

Whenever I am present at a seminar, conference or classroom where the novel is discussed, I am invariably asked one question: why was there violence when people were willing to leave and migrate? There is no clear answer to this except that humanity at such moments stoops to its lowest. No religion, no sect, no mode of worship will sanction or condone organized aggression against the innocent. Yet, such aggression has occurred repeatedly in the story of mankind, much to its shame.

The 1975 edition has been translated into many languages, but the one that has given me the greatest satisfaction is the Urdu translation. It was done by my learned friend and colleague, Shujaud-din Siddiqui. That a Muslim scholar living in the heart of Delhi should accept and approve of my generalizations was immensely gratifying for me. He was also in agreement with me about the overall bonds that continue to survive amongst ethnic communities in India, occasional clashes or lapses notwithstanding.

I shall not offer an explanation or justification for writing in English. With the world-wide acclaim Indian English has received, any such clarification is superfluous. I will say this much about the mother tongue myth, though. The mother tongue gives no special edge to a creative writer; you are lost for words there as well when you are trying to balance the language and your narrative.

Using his skill, an artist creates vast, congenial spaces for us all. This is where his inspiration comes in: in expansion into the unknown and unfamiliar. The refurbished world he brings into existence has to be a more enjoyable place to live in, and he might well succeed if he is lucky. It is right over there, inviting us to test it out. We have only to take a step ahead.

New Delhi

May 2001

Chaman Nahal

CHAPTER 1

IT was the third of June, 1947. This evening, the Viceroy was to make an important announcement. That’s what Lala Kanshi Ram told his wife Prabha Rani, whose education had become his task. Lala Kanshi Ram was not too literate himself—it is doubtful if he ever finished high school. But life had rolled him around, misfortunes had come and gone, and this had given an edge to his intelligence. And then he at least knew fairly well one local language, Urdu, which was the first language he had learned to read and write. His own language was Hindi, or so it was supposed to be. For over twenty years he had been an ardent member of the district Arya Samaj, and one thing that the Samaj had done was to give status to the low and the humble. Was he the son of a rich man or poor? Did he inherit landed property or did he not? These were the questions the Arya Samaj did not care one bit for. So long as you could tie a white turban on your head in a becoming manner, and so long as you boasted of an upright moral character, you were a khandani, a worthwhile citizen. And the Samaj taught him in no uncertain terms that the true heritage of an Indian was the Vedic heritage, and the true language of an Indian, Sanskrit—the language of the Vedas. Since Sanskrit was an ancient language, its modern derivative Hindi would do if you were unable to get that far back. So when the census was taken by the government every tenth year, Lala Kanshi Ram dutifully entered against the column for mother tongue, the word ‘Hindi’. But he neither spoke Hindi nor ever wrote it on paper.

When he opened his mouth he spoke Punjabi, the rich and virile language of the province to which he belonged. And when it came to writing, whether the entries in his shop ledger or a note to the vendor down the road, he wrote in Urdu. Who said it was the language of the Muslims? He had learned it from his father and from the primary teacher in his village a few miles out of Sialkot, and neither of the two was a Muslim. The upshot was that every morning, after his breakfast, he spent at least a half hour reading through the Urdu newspaper he took. No one in the house was allowed as much as to whisper during this sacred half hour. ‘Don’t you see your father is looking through the paper?’ Prabha Rani would tell Arun sternly, if he made the slightest sound. And in that rebuke was the pride of select ownership. For wasn’t her Lalaji the most learned man in the whole neighbourhood? Wasn’t he an avatar of Vishnu, so far as she was concerned?

Lala Kanshi Ram at such moments was propped up on his bed. Having finished his bath and his morning prayers, he would be ready for his nashta. ‘Nashta’ was one of the Urdu words Lala Kanshi Ram liked particularly, it gave him the feeling of status. What he in fact took in the morning was a glass of milk. A heavy breakfast did not agree with his system. And Prabha Rani would boil pure cow’s milk, let it cool a little, and serve it to him in a long, brass tumbler. She no doubt knew how important his health was to her and the entire family. Who else was there to take care of her if he was gone? Who else had she in the entire wide world? Her eyes brimming with sentimental tears, she poured a lot of thick cream on top of the milk—cream that she made at home by boiling up the leftover milk of yesterday. She also threw a handful of peeled almonds into the brass tumbler, before she took the milk to him. These almonds she soaked in water, last thing at night before she went to bed. In the morning she had only to press them lightly from one side and out came the white, smooth nuts slipping on to her hand.

This hot stew of milk, patchy cream and white almonds, with at least four spoons of sugar in the mixture to give it the right flavour, Prabha Rani carried to Lala Kanshi Ram, sitting on the bed. Each man’s bed in this house was his divan, so to say. It was a middle-class home, and they did not have a separate living room. There were tables and a few chairs, but they were only used when a guest arrived. The family sat down and relaxed on beds—except for Lala Kanshi Ram who used an antique, sprawling easy chair in the evenings. Lala Kanshi Ram had his bed in the chaurus room (it so happened it was square—chaurus), Prabha Rani in the next room, and Arun in the very last room, at the back of the house. At night the arrangement was somewhat altered, depending on the number of guests in the house, but no one dared intrude into the chaurus room, at least not during the day. It was the citadel of the Head of the Family, as the data processing forms of the government would have him called. He sat there alone and undisturbed.

Lala Kanshi Ram took the long, brass tumbler of milk from Prabha Rani, and wrapping himself in a chader, leaned back against the round, tightly stuffed pillow. It was then he opened the morning paper and, adjusting his glasses, resumed his own and his wife’s education. And while he rolled the milk in his mouth with infinite pleasure, taking time to crunch-crunch the almonds and break up and swallow the thick cream, his eyes roved on the page with their own hunger. And from time to time he spoke up aloud.

‘Arun’s mother, you know what? Germany has turned round and attacked Roos.’ (Coming as it did from a mouth filled with milk, ‘Roos’ sounded far more impressive and terrible than Russia.)

‘They’ve dropped an atom bomb on Japan!’

‘Today Gandhiji goes on a fast unto death.’

‘We have a new Viceroy now—Lord Mountbatten. He is related to His Majesty the King.’

Very often he stopped in the middle of his exclamations, and looking up from the page peered at his wife from above the rim of his glasses. Patiently he asked: ‘You know what a fast unto death means, don’t you?’ Prabha Rani nodded her head in slow appreciation, but Lala Kanshi Ram went on in a liberal mood: ‘It means a fast until a person dies.’ He took on a tearful tone: ‘Gandhiji might now die—he might pass away!’ Prabha Rani uttered a desperate ‘Hai Rama!’ and satisfied he had created the right dramatic tension, he passed on to other subjects. Or he asked: ‘You know what an atom bomb is?’ And when his wife doubtfully shook her head and said, no, she did not, Lala Kanshi Ram had the time of his life. Pontifically he lurched forward and took hold of the opportunity (with both hands, as it were) of revealing the mysteries of the universe to this peasant woman, whom he had married when she was only thirteen and who could not tell an ‘alif’ from a ‘bai’—who till this day thought they lived on a flat earth and not a round one. He had since taught her many things, including how to sign her name, though she still could not read and write. He would teach her more, he said to himself complacently.

‘So you don’t know what an atom bomb is!’ And he chuckled to himself, while Prabha Rani stood with her eyes on the ground, looking guilty.

‘An atom bomb, Arun’s mother, is a bomb filled with liquid fire,’ he said slowly, rolling the milk in his mouth. He had a slight doubt—wasn’t that what it was? He went on with confidence: ‘Millions of people perish when you drop such a bomb.’ There was no problem about that—it was all in the paper. But what really was the bomb? What was the principle behind it?

‘You remember the Mahabharata, don’t you?’—and he looked at his wife with a little annoyance at her slow grasp of things. ‘Remember the last days of the epic battle?’—his wife was now vigorously nodding her head, and saying, yes, yes, yes. ‘The fire darts they threw at each other, the Kauravas and the Pandavas?’ After a pause: ‘Well, it is like that, the atom bomb. You throw a dart or a bomb at your enemy, and that burns him up!’

‘Then it is nothing new these Angrez loge have made?’

That line of reasoning was to Lala Kanshi Ram’s taste. It prevented serious thinking, and it satisfied some deep national urge in him.

‘New?’ he said with obvious relief. ‘What are you talking about? No other nation in the world can ever touch the glory of the Vedic civilization, can ever invent anything we haven’t already found out. And these English particularly, they’re a race of monkeys, who till a few hundred years back used to live in jungles. Why, you ought to read Satyarth Prakash. The entire Europe was a piece of swamp, while great kingdoms flourished in the land of Bharata.’

‘Did many people die in Japan?’ asked Prabha Rani eagerly, to convince him how much she valued his discourse, while in her mind she was thinking of the food which would soon burn in the pan.

‘Millions!’ whispered Lala Kanshi Ram in sorrow for his suffering brother, secretly relieved it was the brother who was the victim.

His finest moments of elation came when the news pertained to the British royal family. Like any other Indian he had a prejudice against the British (he spoke of them as the Angrez—the English). He hated them for what they had done to his country and wanted azadi. Throughout the Second World War, he had prayed they be defeated by the Germans. The news of German victories, at front after front, had pleased him beyond measure, and when eventually they were held and contained by the British, Lala Kanshi Ram did not give up. With the coming of flying bombs in 1944, with hundreds of V-2s falling on London every day, and the chance of a British defeat again becoming pronounced, he loudly proclaimed he had known all along that one day the Germans would defeat this bunder race, the monkey race.

But deeper down, he also admired the British—in any case he enjoyed the safety of the British Raj and hugged it lovingly. All said and done, the British had brought some kind of peace to this torn land. Think of the Sikhs after Maharaja Ranjit Singh—or the Marathas. Think of the Muslims in Delhi or in the Deccan. When had this country ever been united? Who let down warriors like Porus or Prithvi Raj Chauhan? For that matter, who let down the Moguls in their fight against the British? Always our own men, our own kith and kin!

And the British had somehow made a nation of us. Or was it Gandhiji who had done that? Lala Kanshi Ram was confused about this point, but he did not let that interfere with the drift of his argument. There had been less bloodshed in India in the two hundred years of British Raj than in any similar period in the past. No one could deny that. Even Gandhiji or Jawaharlalji would have to concede that. The British had brought peace to the land and they had brought justice. They no doubt were pagans, they had no religion worth the name (‘no awareness of the atman, I tell you’), and he knew all their church services were a fraud. Their hymn singing and the stupid smile with which their padres moved about were merely snares for the unwary, to make a few more converts to Christianity. Lala Kanshi Ram knew all that, thanks to Swami Dayanand. But he also knew that in impartiality they were miles ahead of any Indian he knew of. He could get his way with any of his countrymen—a few rupees into the man’s pocket and the deed was done. But try and bribe an Englishman! Lala Kanshi Ram quaked at the mere thought of it.

What sent him into raptures over the British was his schoolboyish passion for pageantry: their bands and their parades and the colour of their uniforms. Baljit Raizada, the nationalist editor of the paper he took, said in his columns men like him were simpletons. The British, he said, were not as just as they were made out to be. It cost you nothing to be just with people when you were not a party to their petty disputes. What of the injustice the British had visited on the entir