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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes distance and time, which separate the two nations along with the hoard of other things, she very
soon realizes the truth of it after Tridib’s death. This sense was already in her when she told the
narrator: Those people took a long time to build that country, hundreds of years, years and years
of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood—with
their brothers’ blood with their fathers blood and their sons’ blood. They know they are a nation
because they have drawn their borders with blood. Was is their religion. That’s what it takes to
make a country. Once that happens, people forget they were born this way or that, Muslim or
Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: They become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you
have to achieve for India, don’t you see? Ironically this happened with India too and against a
common enemy as well but each time Indians fought it was for British and not for themselves.
Indian—Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs fought together bravely against the British in World Wars I
and II and in other wars in the British interest.
However, her nationalist faiths fail her after the sad experience in Dhaka. She wants completely to
do away with other half: Pakistan occupied ‘east’. She thinks of a solid demarcation between the
two nations but once again she fails because she comes to realize that these borders have a feeble
existence and no bloodshed can make them real and opaque. There had been a spree of violence,
plunder and rape on either side of the border during the partition but even then it remained
porous and so is now. It would be desirable here to make a mention of narrator’s feelings who
believed in the reality of nations and borders; he believed that across the border there existed
another reality. The only relationship his vocabulary permitted between those separate realities
was war or friendship. He did not realize then that the relations between countries are governed
more by diplomacy and hypocrisy than the blatant truth.
On narrator’s father’s remark that she might see some greenery between the two countries at the
border, she is totally swept off her feet: But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are
people to know? I mean where is the difference then? And if there is no difference both sides will
be the same. It will be just like it used to be before. When we used to catch a train in Dhaka, and
get off in Calcutta the next day without anybody stopping us. What was it all then— partition and
all the killing and everything if there isn’t something in between?
The novel does not explain the meaning of political freedom in the modern world but it certainly
raises this question to think over. The force of nationalism, which can be destructive at times,
however, has been well demonstrated in the novel. The shadow Lines we draw between people
and nations can be both an absurd illusion and source of terrifying violence. In 1964, Tha’mma
flies of Dhaka, she wonders if she would be able to see the borders between India and East
Pakistan from the plane because after so much of violence and human slaughter, she feels that two
nations would have built strong walls to distinguish. When her son laughs and asks her if she
thought that the border was a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other like
it was in a school atlas, she says, ‘of-course not’. But surely there is something— trenches perhaps
or soldiers or guns pointing at each other or even just a barren strip of land, which they would call
no man’s land? When she is told that she might see some green fields, she laments the mutilation
of motherland for nothing. Born in Dhaka and separated from her birthplace by a history of
bloodshed and lines on a map, Tha’mma loses her linguistic accuracy when she thinks of ‘home’.
She fails to understand how her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her
nationality. Where politically it may be essential to have a separate identity and sovereignty the
same cannot be said of the people of that state. It may be something thrust upon them, not
required by them because they cannot divide the experience or their memories. (General Cariappa
on the eve of bidding adieu to the Muslim soldiers on partition said, “ We have shared a common
destiny so long, that our history is inseparable. We have been brothers and we shall never forget
the great years we have lived together. We shall meet again and whenever we meet it will be like
brothers.”)

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