#72, Research Article: ‘Teaching Partition Fiction Through Technology’ by Imran Surti

Genre is a key means by which we categorize the many forms of literature and culture. However, it is also much more than that: in talk and writing, in music and images, in film and television, genres actively generate and shape our knowledge of the world. It is a French term derived from the Latin words genus, generis, meaning “type,” “sort,” or “kind.” It designates the literary form or type into which works are classified according to what they have in common, either in their formal structures or in their treatment of subject matter, or both. The study of genres may be of value in three ways. On the simplest level, grouping works offers us an orderly way to talk about an otherwise bewildering number of literary texts. More importantly, if we recognize the genre of a text, we may also have a better idea of its intended overall structure and /or subject. Finally, a genre approach can deepen our sense of the value of any single text, by allowing us to view it comparatively, alongside many other texts of its type.

Genre is not an easy matter to discuss; on the one hand the term is relatively new for social scientists, while on the other it has a very long and at times confusing history in literature and the visual arts. There have certainly been some fundamental difficulties with the traditional conceptualization of genre in the humanities. The first is a surprising confusion in the meaning of the word ‘genre’ itself. The concept goes back to the basic distinction made by the Greeks between the dramatic, epic and lyrical forms of literature: that is, a distinction made partly in terms of mood and theme, and partly of mode of presentation and the relationship with the audience. The current meaning of ‘genre’, which dates from the nineteenth century, is ‘a style or category of painting, novel, film, etc. characterized by a particular form or purpose’. In literature, a genre can be defined by form (such as drama, poetry, proverbs, letters), by mood (as comedy, tragedy), or by content (as history, memoirs, autobiography); even though certainly these are usually closely tied together. Genre may also refer either to a type of text, or to an element within that text because all these definitions cut across each other. It has been impossible to agree on any settled definitions of genres, or to group them convincingly as major and minor genres and subgenres.

The problem of definition has indeed seriously concerned some of the most influential literary critics. Thus Northrop Frye wrote in 1957 in his classic Anatomy of Criticism that ‘the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it’. Genre now seemed to many radical critics as an unacceptably superficial and external way of categorizing works of literature, especially for ‘phenomologists’, with their concern for exploring ideology, values, individual ‘subjectivity’, feelings, the subconscious and the irrational. Turning their backs on genre was helpful in allowing them to extend the whole arena of literary criticism and to analyze numerous texts which until then would not have been considered works of literature at all. On the other hand, perhaps more surprisingly, even those who still concentrated on major creative works had been uncomfortable with genre, for it seemed increasingly clear that the less original a work the more likely it was to fit comfortably into a genre category, while the greatest creative works defied such easy formal categorization.

It was evident that other literary forms besides autobiography, and most notably the novel, also drew on a mixture of experience, observation and imagination. For many critics indeed, it seems better to treat both autobiography and the novel, alongside biography and other types of historical works, as particular forms of the major genre of narrative. From this perspective the study of ‘the narrative construction of reality’ is an approach which has brought literature increasingly close to history.

Genre is a privileged object because of its mediation between social and textual structure: ‘Social patterning and textual patterning meet as genres’ (Cope and Kalantzis 1993: 7).

“… Genre analysis is concerned primarily with whole texts and their social functions. Sentence and clause analysis is only performed in order to explain the workings of the whole text and how it realizes its social purpose.”

(Cope and Kalantzis 1993: 10)

Genres carry and organize their culture and fashion our sociality in the broadest sense. As Carolyn Miller puts it:

“What we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have. … We learn to understand better the situations in which we find ourselves and the potential for failure and success in acting together. As a recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality.”

(Miller 1994a: 38)

Teaching literary genres to the students of literature poses a great challenge for a teacher, especially when it comes to teaching advanced level students. It may even be a baffling experience if the appropriate meaning of a particular genre and its characteristic features do not get communicated to the students. However, in order to ensure a meaningful communication, a teacher may use complementary technological devices like television or projector in order to display either genre related films or slideshow of photographs along with elaborate theorizing. As a research student working on Partition literature and as a teacher of Partition fiction at undergraduate level, I felt the need of utilizing the available resources at my disposal. I happen to teach one of the most celebrated Partition novels entitled Train to Pakistan written by Khushwant Singh. The task was difficult in the sense that I had to make an underlying, seamless relationship between the immediate present and ‘the significant past’ palpable to the students; to demonstrate the harrowing realities of the Partition; to show how fiction aesthetically incorporates such embittered, holocaust-like tragedy and simultaneously preserves essential human values.

Let me enumerate a few essential characteristics of Partition literature that I intended to communicate to my third year B.A. students before teaching them the said novel:

1) The best of the literature that emerged in the wake of the Partition bears the imprint of the struggle to grapple with pain and suffering on a scale that was unprecedented in South Asia. The Partition Literature became a repository of localized truths, sought to be evaded and minimized by the dominant discourse on the Partition. These narratives offer insights into the nature of individual experience, and break the silence in the collective sphere. Trends in recent Partition research represent a shift away from the parleys and betrayals in the domain of High Politics, towards an emphasis on the subalterns as both victims and perpetrators of violence, the sociology and motivation for widespread rioting, the resulting psychological trauma, and most importantly, the feminist concern with recovering lost stories of sexually violated and abducted women during the Partition.  New Archives of survivors’ memories are being created to supplement the available sources such as autobiographies and biographies, poetry and fictional accounts.

2) Novelists who have written about the Partition, especially those who lived through its days of terror, take their stand beside those who suffered, in order either to bear witness or to offer solace, to call down damnation on those who were responsible for it, or lay a wagner on a life of good sense in the future, to rememorialize nostalgically communities in the past or speak with bitter irony about the possibilities of life in post-colonial days. The best of them, however do not repeat what the historians already know—that there was violence of such fiendishness that each reminder of it still comes as a shock to our decencies and still violates our sense of a common humanity. Indeed, they seek to make connections with the social and cultural life of a community in its entirety within a historically specific period. That is why, these fictional accounts, unlike narratives of the historians, which move with certitude towards a definite end, contain all that is locally contingent and truthfully remembered, capricious and anecdotal, contradictory and mythically given. Their endings too are various. While some manage to find their way out of the realm of madness and crime, others either mark out the emotional and ethical map of our times with indelible lines of screams, ash, smoke and mockery, or crumble into shocked silence. These narratives either assume the existence of a communally shared history in pre-partition India, or imaginatively set up, with the help of small remembered things, images of the sub-continent as a place of tolerant communities as structural counterpoints to the dispirited sense of exile and pain after the division. Their fictionalized life-worlds of villages and small towns invariably suggest that there was an essential feeling of relatedness between the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, not merely a passive acceptance of different customs and beliefs. That is why, perhaps, hardly any of these texts seriously concern themselves with defining the metaphysical identities of different groups, but assert that such identities only be forged in the social relationships established between human beings in the process of living together; that is in the daily interaction between people which gives to theological beliefs a significance and a value.

3) Another element that nearly informs all these narratives is the note of utter bewilderment. Each of these narratives finds the Partition and the massacres so completely without historical or social reason, that is to say, extremely absurd, that all they can sometimes do is to record that the place they called ‘home’ or ‘basti’ was reduced to, and that the memories of a society with collective rites and traditions, songs and legends, names of birds and trees, were tinged forever with acrid smell of smoke and blood.

4) Despite the enormity of violence around them unleashed by the demand for two separate nations, Partition literature is replete with characters who resist the pressures of theological bully-boys and ideological thugs, and refuse to migrate; refuse to leave their homes or their lands just because some politicians claim that different forms of worship demand different cultural, moral, and political citizenships. There are other fictional works which speak about the pathos of the people, who refused to leave after the Partition; who refused to be coerced into believing that India could be divided into two religiously defined nations. There are countless characters in Partition fiction who are bewildered by the new borders India and Pakistan because for them their home was their ‘basti’ and, hence, their country. Attached to their ‘home’ were all the ideals of well-being and ‘well-doing’. It was their sanctuary; their affective and moral space; and it was sufficient. Unfortunately, however, the politics of religious identity which surrounds these ordinary characters is hasty, restless, and crass.

5) In Partition literature, characters never aspire to be part of some exceptional religious group. Their understanding of their selfhood is that they are ordinary people with limited means and abilities, and that they are vulnerable. They are self-conscious about the fact that they live within a network of people with different religious convictions whose right to a share in their living spaces has to be acknowledged.

As a matter of experiment, I chose to teach the characteristics of Partition literature, with reference to one of the most celebrated Partition fiction of all times—Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan—keeping in mind the learner-centered approach. In order to make the process of teaching and learning, a two-way business, I decided to elicit responses from my students, instead of feeding them with elaborate theory on the essential characteristics of Partition literature. I prepared a worksheet containing two different set of Partition photographs, followed by a few questions—ranging from general description of the given photographs and their common theme to the particular instances from the novel that resemble the given photographs.

QUESTIONS

1. Give a brief description of the above shown photographs.
2. What do you think is a feature common to all the three given photos? Can you suggest a word or a phrase that poignantly captures the above displayed tragedy?
3. Enumerate and comment on the situations that resemble the above shown tragedy from the novel Train to Pakistan written by Khushwant Singh.

I selected a group of 24 students for my purpose. As per the responses of these students, the first set of photographs deals with the cremation of the dead bodies of the persons who were brutally killed during the communal riots that followed the Partition. The streets are shown flooded with charred corpses lying around, and are then taken for cremation in a truck or are cremated on that very spot. The common theme in these photographs is ‘mass-killing’, ‘mass-murder’, ‘massacre’, ‘carnage’, ‘genocide’, ‘annihilation’, ‘extermination’, ‘savage or physical violence’ etc.

There are three particular instances in the novel Train to Pakistan that resemble the given photographs. First, the arrival of the ‘ghost train’ from Pakistan, carrying the defiled corpses of Sikhs to the railway-station of the village Mano Majra, followed by the magistrate Hukum Chand’s inspection of the train and his resulting psychological trauma at the horror of the bloody sight. Second, the villagers gather at the bank of the river in order to enquire about the flowing log-like objects in the water, which ultimately turns out to be the dead bodies. Third, the authorities ask the villagers to provide them with enough quantity of kerosene and wood for the cremation of dead bodies in return of a good amount of money. Thus, the first significant characteristic of all Partition literature is the depiction of mass-killing that followed the Partition.

QUESTIONS

1. Give a brief description of the above shown photographs.
2. What do you think is a feature common to all the five given photos? Can you suggest a word or a phrase that poignantly captures the above shown experience?
3. Enumerate and comment on the situations that resemble the above shown tragedy from the novel Train to Pakistan written by Khushwant Singh.

The second set of photographs deals with the large-scale migration of people across the borders, covering hundreds of kilometers either on feet, or in a bullock-cart, or in a train. They give an idea of how the common people undertook the Herculean task of migrating either to their ‘Promised Land’ or to an ‘Alien Land’, whether out of willingness or coercing, whether forced or chosen. The common theme in these photographs is therefore, ‘migration’, ‘exodus’, ‘uprootedness’, ‘dislocation’ etc.

There are two particular instances in the novel Train to Pakistan that resemble the given photographs. First, the authorities shift the Muslim villagers of Mano Majra to a nearby camp, and later to be taken to Pakistan by a train, due to the fear of communal riots breaking out in Mano Majra with the continuous arrival of Sikh refugees and Sikh fanatics. Second, in the last scene of the novel, Jugga, the real hero sacrifices his life for his beloved Nooran, and thereby saves all the Muslim passengers on the train. Thus, the second significant characteristic of all Partition literature is to show large-scale movements of people in the quest for shelter, safety, life and even identity.

The third important characteristic of the best of Partition literature, however, deals with the optimistic side of life in the midst of such terror, that is to say, with the preservation of essential human values. The novel Train to Pakistan provides at least two such instances. First is the scene of an emotional farewell given by the Sikh villagers of Mano Majra to their Muslim brethren on their way to Pakistan. They depart grief-stricken from their ancestral village. Second scene is of Jugga’s supreme self-sacrifice at the call of love, call of humanity, and the call of God. Instead of indulging into the ongoing communal frenzy, Jugga redeems himself by being the chosen one of God. It is people like Jugga, who provided the silver lining amidst the dark clouds of communalism on the horizons of sky. Both the scenes basically suggest the ‘life-preserving’ and ‘life-enhancing’ quality of culture and language. They re-assert the fact that prior to the Partition, the two major communities of India shared thousand years of solidarity and companionship.

The fourth characteristic of Partition literature is poignantly presented in Train to Pakistan, that is to say, Mano Majra is not only a physical space; it is not merely a village for its inhabitants, but also a part of their mental construct. It is a place which they call ‘basti’ or ‘home’, which has nurtured and nourished them from within, with which a sense of familiarity and identification is possible. It is a place which not only structures their daily routine but also defines their very existence and identity.

All the four characteristics are brilliantly presented in the 1998 film-version of Train to Pakistan directed by Pamela Rooks. Instead of elaborate theorizing, the method of displaying the Partition photographs and the film complemented me as a teacher in making my students feel interested in perhaps the most momentous and even unprecedented period of South Asian history. Instead of simply being the passive receptor of information, this experiment helped me in stimulating appropriate responses from my students, and thereby to make the class more learner-oriented.

Thus, the added feature of technology gave an opportunity to me as a teacher to mobilize the sensitivity as well as the sensibility of my students for comprehending the Partition literature and its essential characteristics, and thereby to make the teaching sessions more meaningful, interactive, and effective.

References

Bhalla, Alok. 2006. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chamberlain Mary, Paul Thompson (Eds.). 2003. Narrative and Genre. London and New York: Routledge.

Cope, Bill and Kalantzis, Mary (Eds.). 1993. The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. London: The Falmer Press.

Frow, John. 2006. Genre. London and New York: Routledge.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/genres

http://news.bbc.co.uk/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/south_asia_indias_partition

Miller, Carolyn R. ‘Genre as Social Action’ and ‘Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre’, in Aviva Fredman and Peter Medway (eds.) Genre and the New Rhetoric. 1994. London and New York: Routledge.