Jhootha Sachझूठा सच

About the book

Jhootha Sach (False Truth) is a Hindi novel by Yashpal, published in two volumes in 1958 and 1960. It is set in Lahore before the Partition of India in 1947 and in the India that followed, and it follows a brother and sister from a lower-middle-class Punjabi Hindu family through the break-up of their world. Long considered the most important Hindi novel on Partition, it has been called the War and Peace of Hindi literature for the scale of its canvas.

The two volumes are Vatan Aur Desh (Homeland and Nation), published in 1958, and Desh Ka Bhavishya (The Future of the Nation), published in 1960. Together they run to more than a thousand pages. Yashpal wrote in a note to the novel that he wanted to show the political atmosphere of the country in its historical reality, mixing real events and dates with imagined lives.

What happens in Jhootha Sach?

In Lahore in the 1940s, Jaidev Puri and his younger sister Tara grow up in Bhola Pandhe ki Gali in Shah Alami, in the walled city, the children of Master Ram Lubhaya, a schoolteacher and staunch Arya Samaji. Puri, an idealistic young writer, works for the pro-Congress Urdu daily Pairokar and falls for Kanak, his wealthy student, the daughter of a rich Urdu publisher in Gawalmandi. Tara, who wants an education rather than an early marriage, loves her Muslim classmate Asad Ahmed, a Communist studying at Forman Christian College.

As communal politics poison Lahore in 1947, Puri loses his newspaper job after a provocative editorial, and the family marries Tara against her will to Somraj, a loafer. On the wedding night, 28 July 1947, the in-laws' house is firebombed. Tara escapes, is abducted and assaulted, and is rescued by a devout Muslim scholar, Hafiz Inayat Ali, before being held with other abducted women and then brought across the border by a government delegation. Puri witnesses a train massacre and reaches Jalandhar as a refugee.

The second volume follows the two of them through ten years of rebuilding. Tara, carrying the lasting trauma of what happened to her, educates herself and rises into the civil service, becoming an undersecretary in the Indian government. Puri, the once idealistic progressive, grows compromised and self-interested as he climbs in post-independence Delhi.

Tara and Puri

Tara is the centre of the novel, and her story is what makes it unlike other Partition novels. Yashpal does not end her story at rescue. He follows her through the long aftermath: the injury she cannot get treated as an unmarried woman, the shame others try to put on her, and the stubborn education that carries her into government service. Her rise is not a reward for suffering but a record of what survival costs.

Puri is her opposite. He begins as the idealist, the writer who believes words can change the country, and he ends as a man who has traded his ideals for position. The contrast between the two is the novel's argument: that independence tested people, and that the test went on long after 1947. Around them, Asad gives up his love for Tara for the sake of communal harmony and party discipline, and Kanak represents the wealthy Lahore that the Puris can visit but never quite join.

Themes

The title itself states the theme. Vatan, the homeland, and desh, the nation, are not the same thing in this novel, and the gap between them is where the tragedy lives. Yashpal writes about the loss of a shared Punjab in which Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu lived side by side, and about the violence that ended it. He writes about women as the ones who paid the highest price for Partition, and about the long shadow of sexual violence, which he treats with a realism rare for its time. He writes about class and caste, about love across religion, and about the corruption of idealists once power is in reach.

The novel also records a world in detail: the lanes of Shah Alami, the colleges of Lahore, the newspapers and publishing houses, the refugee camps and the new government offices of Delhi.

The author

Yashpal (1903 to 1976) was a Hindi writer who had lived the politics he wrote about. A member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, he was imprisoned for six years for his part in the revolutionary movement, married in jail, and was banned from Punjab after his release. He settled in Lucknow, founded the magazine Viplav and a publishing house, and wrote more than fifty works. Jhootha Sach is his best known book. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1970 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1976 for his novel Meri Teri Uski Baat.

Reception and legacy

Jhootha Sach has been called arguably the most outstanding piece of Hindi literature written about Partition, and scholars have praised it as the most successful synthesis of Partition's scale, weaving archival documents and newspaper reports into the fiction. The critic Daisy Rockwell has singled out its portrayal of Tara's long-term trauma as unusually realistic, and Harish Trivedi, introducing the English translation, said the conversation on Partition literature would need to be substantially recast once the novel was available in English.

That translation, This Is Not That Dawn, translated by Yashpal's son Anand and published by Penguin in 2010, takes its title from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem Subh-e-Azadi. For Punjabi readers the novel is a portrait of a lost Lahore: its lanes and colleges, its newspapers and publishing houses, and the shared culture of Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu that Partition broke apart. It remains in print and in discussion more than sixty years after its first volume appeared.