Remembering to forget

In this exclusive first extract from her new book on the inheritance of Partition, Aanchal Malhotra recounts an interview that encapsulates the process of wilful forgetting

The Hindi writer Krishna Sobti, born in Gujrat, present-day Pakistan, had once said that Partition was difficult to forget but dangerous to remember. On the fragile boundary of remembering and forgetting can be found the stories of Partition. In September 2018, while on field research in Jammu, I record an interview which for me now encapsulates the process of wilful forgetting. One evening, Sumedha Mahajan – who has helped set up this interview – and I are invited to tea by the family of a gentleman who had migrated in November 1947 from Mirpur district in what is now Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Sumedha’s grandparents too are from Mirpur, as also distant acquaintances of this family. We are taken to a brightly painted room, where a young man gives us some background information about his father, whom we will soon meet.

Sumedha exchanges pleasantries about her family, and I talk about the work I will be doing in Jammu. After we finish our tea, he leads us to an inner room, where an elderly, balding man is sitting on the bed. Behind him, on the ochre yellow wall, is a calendar featuring Hindu gods. As he shifts around to get more comfortable, I

get a fleeting glimpse of some Urdu text tattooed on his right forearm and the symbol of Om on his outer palm, between the thumb and forefinger.

Everyone around us is smiling, his family is delighted that a scholar has come to speak about his experiences of the journey from Mirpur to Jammu. He must have conceded as well, since he greets us when we enter the room, but then

he retreats

In the Language of Remembering

Aanchal Malhotra 713pp, Rs 799; HarperCollins

into silence. His eyes are wide open, but they are fixed on the ground, staring at nothing and no one... clearing my throat, I ask about where he was born and when. He answers each question, but his gaze never meets mine.

“And what was it like?” I ask him. “Mirpur? Bohot badiya, it was good. It was a place where everyone was happy until they weren’t. It was a good place,” he replies.

“Do you remember it?” He nods. “Watan toh watan hota hai, it’s my birthplace after all.”

“What do you remember about it?” “Well, it is in Pakistan now, drowning under the water of the Mangla dam, but when the water level recedes, I have heard that our old city rises to the top.” This is the longest sentence he has spoken, and his arms limply create a bridge, a dam, before us. Then, just as quickly, he brings them down and folds them back in his lap.

His family members remind him of the anecdotes he has told over the years. Everyone starts talking at once, remembering bits of memory, fragments of family lore... Son, daughter-in-law, other family members are sitting around us, even the children are playing with their toys, peeking in from behind curtains...

They tell us about how his mother’s brother-in-law couldn’t walk and remained locked inside a room when the family left in November 1947; they couldn’t go back for him. They tell us how his sister-in-law’s neck was hacked with an axe, a kulhari.

They speak of the Alibeg concentration camp, where his friends were held, and how young girls of the family were picked up and carried away by people known as Kabailis. They cradle their arms before their bodies as they tell us about a fourteen-day-old baby wrapped in a shawl and brought to India over a journey of three days with nothing to eat or drink. After a while, there is only noise; there are too many voices but not the

one that truly matters. Seated on the bed, the elderly gentleman is swaying very softly from front to back, his bulging eyes still fixed on the ground.

The family members coax him to remember, but he doesn’t. They speak louder, for he cannot hear well. I look at Sumedha and breathe in sharply. I don’t know what to note down any more...

My heart is breaking with guilt for what I can only assume is going through his mind. He doesn’t divulge any sadness, but he doesn’t discount it either.

Over the voices of the others, his son finally says, “Mirpur di koi gall sunao na, tell us something about your home.” He speaks in Pothwari, which has all but disappeared from modern conversation. It sounds like Punjabi, and I can catch some words, but it is much brisker, and his intonations make the language sound more musical than when I have heard it before.

His wife leans in closer to her father-inlaw and repeats, to make sure he can hear, “Mirpur di gall?” The gentleman shakes his head from left to right and returns his empty gaze to the ground. “Koi changi si gall? Something good, a good memory. Achchi yaadaan vi sunao,” she prompts.

“Koi takki di gall, kedi takki thi ghar de kol, tell us about a street close to your home,” his son says again. But his father says nothing about Mirpur. He just keeps swaying softly from front to back, repeating, “Everything was very good, people were happy with one another. Sab kuch theek tha.”

There are no other words he offers, for sometimes forgetting is as important as remembering.

*

The memory of Partition is complex by all accounts – studied seven decades on, it is a canvas left with many blank spaces. Purposefully forgetting to remember, consciously remembering to forget. Sometimes “cannot remember” can also mean “I don’t want to remember”. And in returning to the notion of transference, I deduce that no matter how nuanced a memory we may collect from another, no matter how close it may feel to us... it will never truly be ours, for we have not experienced it.

In this sense, the conversations in this chapter are born from the understanding that received memory of Partition is distinct from eyewitness recall, because it will always be mediated by unavoidable distance. Those who preserve the memories of their ancestors and others are not trying to emulate any feeling, but to create new engagements with the same memory...

Every generation feels differently, and within that generation there will be further distinctions among groups. The purpose of conversations with subsequent generations on the memory of Partition – its remembering and forgetting – is purely to understand how memory is disseminated, discovered and reclaimed.