Partition By Thanda Gosht

India’s Independence and the consequent Partition was one of the most imperative historical events of the 20th century, which led to the brutal carnage in which at least one million Hindus and Muslims lost their lives, hundreds of thousands of children were lost and abandoned, women raped and abducted apart from the families that were torn apart. The poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his Subh-e-Azadi aptly captured the pain, anguish, disillusionment and the traumatic realities: “Yeh daghdar ujala yeh shab gazida sahr, woh intizar tha jiska woh yeh sahr to nahin” (This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn. This dawn is not that dawn we craved for – S A I Tirmizi, The Paradoxes of Partition 1937-47). The harrowing realities of Partition and the

Thanda Gosht, first published in March 1949, portrays the effects of six days of continuous prowling, pillaging, and murder and it illustrates the impact of violence on its perpetrators. The protagonist Ishwar Singh is unable to make love to his wife, Kalwant Kaur, and it is because of the traumatic psyche; he professes trying to rape a young woman after he murders six members of her family. And after trying to rape her, he discovers that she is dead, is “cold meat,” “colder than ice,” which he himself becomes at the end of the story. “Ishwar Singh opened his eyes. ‘She was dead… I had carried a dead body… a heap of cold flesh… jani, give me your hand.’ Kalwant Kaur placed her hand on his. It was colder than ice.” He loses his potency. The story powerfully symbolizes the brunt of brutality and sadism on its perpetrators, too. Ishwar Singh’s impotence following the rape provides a compelling symbol of the loss of human sensibilities during August 1947. Ishwar Singh represents all those who, in the name of nationalism, engaged in barbarism and extreme madness. “Partition not only created a mad atmosphere but also made its victims mad, insane, losing their mental balances due to traumatic experiences” (Tiwari

He creatively discusses that violence in any form or in any circumstances and the obliteration of one segment of people; belonging to any religion or state can never be tolerated. Manto thus justifies his kind of nationalism in his stories where he vehemently rejects the mindless partition and division. Gilmartin rightly quotes “the desperate attempt to maintain the linking of place, ancestry, sanctity, and moral order was cast against the backdrop of a fixed Partition of territory that symbolically torn these linkages asunder. No work of literature encapsulates this more dramatically than Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story, “Toba Tek Singh”.... (1998: