Train to Pakistan

About the book

Train to Pakistan, published in 1956, is Khushwant Singh's first novel and the most famous Partition novel in Indian English. It tells the story of August 1947, the British withdrawal, the drawing of the Radcliffe Line, the largest mass migration in human history, through a single fictional village on the new border: Mano Majra, a place so small and remote that Partition, at first, does not seem to concern it at all. (Mano Majra was, incidentally, the novel's original title on its first release.)

The book's power comes from this narrowing of focus. Instead of parliaments and viceroys, Singh gives us a village of Sikhs and Muslims who have lived side by side for generations, the Sikhs owning most of the land, the Muslims working as labourers, and watches what happens when the outside world's madness arrives by rail. It is a short novel, written in plain, muscular prose, and it has never been out of print. Along with Amrita Pritam's Pinjar (1950) and the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, it forms the essential triad of Partition literature.

In 1998 the novel was adapted into a Hindi film by Pamela Rooks, its premiere, planned for 15 August 1997, was halted by the Censor Board, and it finally released in 1998 to critical acclaim at international festivals.

Plot and themes

Mano Majra in the summer of 1947 is a village where nothing much happens, and the residents like it that way. The rhythm of life is set by the trains that pass on the bridge over the Sutlej. Then a local moneylender, Lala Ram Lal, is murdered in a dacoity, and suspicion falls on Juggut Singh, Jugga, the village's Sikh badmash, a dacoit with a record, who is secretly in love with Nooran, a young Muslim weaver's daughter.

Two outsiders arrive: Iqbal, a young educated social worker from Delhi whose background the novel keeps deliberately ambiguous, and Hukum Chand, the district magistrate, a cynical, hard-drinking administrator who represents the colonial state in its death throes. Both are arrested on suspicion; both are, in different ways, helpless.

Then the event that changes everything: a train arrives from Pakistan carrying not passengers but corpses, hundreds of murdered Sikhs and Hindus. The village that had lived in harmony is transformed overnight. Refugees pour in with stories of atrocity; the local Muslims, suddenly terrified, prepare to leave for Pakistan; and a plan is hatched to massacre the departing Muslim train as revenge, a rope stretched across the railway bridge to sweep the passengers off the roof.

The climax is one of the great endings in Indian fiction. Juggut Singh, the dacoit, the man with nothing to lose, learns that Nooran is on that train. In the novel's final pages he climbs the bridge in the dark and throws himself across the rope, sacrificing his own life to derail the massacre and let the train pass safely into Pakistan. The criminal becomes the only moral man in Mano Majra; love, not law, saves the day.

The novel's themes are stated with unusual bluntness for 1956. The first is the fragility of communal harmony: Singh shows how quickly centuries of coexistence can be poisoned, and how the poison is manufactured, by rumour, by revenge, by men with agendas. The second is the moral bankruptcy of the state: Hukum Chand, decent in flashes, is ultimately a functionary who lets horror happen on his watch. The third, and the one that gives the book its enduring power, is redemption through love. Juggut Singh is no hero for most of the novel, he is a thug, a drunk, a jailbird. His final act does not erase his past; it transcends it. Singh's point is radical: that grace is available even to the graceless, and that it arrives not through religion or politics but through one human being's love for another.

ਲੇਖਕ

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) was India's most famous man of letters for half a century, novelist, journalist, historian, and professional contrarian. Born in Hadali in the Punjab (now Pakistan), he trained as a lawyer, served in the Indian Foreign Service, and then became a journalist, most famously as the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, which he turned into the country's liveliest magazine.

Train to Pakistan was his first novel, written when he was forty-one. He followed it with I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi: A Novel (1990), his other masterpiece, The Company of Women, and the autobiography Truth, Love and a Little Malice (2002). He received the Padma Bhushan in 1974 and returned it in 1984 in protest against the Army's assault on the Golden Temple during Operation Blue Star; in 2007 he accepted the Padma Vibhushan. He died in Delhi on 20 March 2014, aged ninety-nine, having written a newspaper column almost to the end.

Reception and legacy

Train to Pakistan was recognised immediately as a major novel, the first work of Indian English fiction to treat Partition at full length and without flinching. It established Khushwant Singh as a novelist and became the book against which later Partition novels are measured, from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children to contemporary retellings.

Its reputation has only grown. It is taught in schools and universities across the world, and its final scene, the dacoit on the bridge, has entered the collective imagination as one of Indian literature's defining images of sacrifice. The novel's moral clarity about communal violence has made it a book people reach for in every season of tension; its refusal to let any community claim a monopoly on victimhood or virtue keeps it honest.

Pamela Rooks's 1998 film, delayed by the censors, brought the story to a new audience and festival acclaim. But the novel remains the thing itself: short, sharp, and impossible to forget.

Read it if

Read it if you want the essential Partition novel in English, this is where to start, and many readers never need to go further. Read it alongside Pinjar to see the same catastrophe from a woman's Punjabi perspective and a man's English one. And read it if you believe fiction can be both page-turning and profound: Train to Pakistan is a thriller, a love story and a moral reckoning in under two hundred pages.