Mera Pakistani Safarnamaਮੇਰਾ ਪਾਕਿਸਤਾਨੀ ਸਫ਼ਰਨਾਮਾ

About the book

Mera Pakistani Safarnama is a Punjabi travelogue by Balraj Sahni, listed in his works as published in 1960, after a visit to Pakistan. Its subject is the most charged journey a Punjabi of his generation could make: going back. Sahni was born in Rawalpindi and raised there, and the Partition of 1947 put his childhood city, his ancestral town and his college friendships on the other side of a new border. Cinemaazi, in its long feature on Sahni, notes the choice he made as a writer: he penned the travelogue in Punjabi, his mother tongue, as the language for the true expression of his feelings and thoughts.

That is the book's whole method. This is not a film star's tour diary. It is a homecoming written by a man who had spent 1947 in Rawalpindi itself, leading young men on bicycles through riot torn streets to try to stop the killing, and who now returned to find the streets of his boyhood in another country. The travelogue records his memories and emotions on that return, as Aman Ki Asha's account of his Pindi connection puts it, and it has kept its place as one of the classic Punjabi accounts of crossing back.

Why did Balraj Sahni go to Pakistan?

The best documented of his return journeys came in October 1962, at the invitation of his old friend Dr Nazir Ahmed, principal of his alma mater, Government College Lahore. Cinemaazi records that it was a private visit which received little press coverage, with no film star welcome, except at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, where students gathered around him for autographs. Sahni was also scouting, the same account says, for a joint India and Pakistan Punjabi film on Partition, inspired by the Pakistani film Kartar Singh (1959). The film was never made, but the journeys fed the travelogue's world: a Punjab divided on paper and undivided in memory.

The journey home

Aman Ki Asha's account follows the homecoming in detail. In Lahore he met old class fellows and neighbours such as Imtiaz Ali Taj, Ahmed Rahi and Abdullah Malik, men of his Government College years. He visited Bhera, his ancestral home town near Sargodha, from which his grandfather had moved to Rawalpindi. In Rawalpindi he went back to the family house his people had left in 1947 and reported that much was as the family had left it, even the furniture. He visited the shrine of Bari Imam, Company Bagh, now Liaqat Bagh, and Topi Rakh, now Ayub Park, and his old college, Gordon College.

Every stop carries the same double feeling, and it is what gives the book its lasting ache. The places are intact and the people welcoming, but the traveller is a guest in his own childhood. A house kept as it was left, furniture and all, is a kindness and a verdict at once: the past has been preserved precisely because the life that filled it did not come back. Sahni, the actor who played ordinary people with dignity, writes as one of them here, a son of Rawalpindi reading his own city like a letter forwarded to a new address.

The author

Balraj Sahni (1 May 1913 to 13 April 1973) was born Yudhishthir Sahni in Rawalpindi, into a family whose ancestral home was Bhera. He studied at Government College, Lahore, where the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was among his class fellows, took a master's degree in English literature, taught at Tagore's Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, and joined the BBC's Hindi service in London as a radio announcer, working alongside George Orwell. Back in India he acted with the Indian People's Theatre Association, and Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1953) made his reputation as the face of honest, realist cinema. He received the Padma Shri in 1969. His second travelogue, Mera Rusi Safarnama (1969), written after a tour of the Soviet Union, earned him the Soviet Land Nehru Award, and he also wrote his film autobiography, Meri Filmi Aatmakatha.

Reception and legacy

The Safarnama belongs to the small shelf of Punjabi books that hold the two Punjabs in one pair of hands. Written in the mother tongue by one of the most famous film actors in India, it showed readers on the Indian side what a return actually felt like, street by street and friend by friend, and it remains a primary account that later writers on Sahni return to: Cinemaazi's feature and Aman Ki Asha's search for his Rawalpindi home both build their stories around it. Aman Ki Asha closes by remembering Sahni as not only an artist but a pacifist who left no stone unturned for peace and harmony. The travelogue is that pacifism in book form, a Punjabi going home across a border and writing down, carefully and without bitterness, everything he found still standing.