Memoir as Testimony: Remembering the Partition through Fikr Taunsvi's Chhata Darya

The Partition of the Indian sub-continent took place 72 years ago in an apocalyptic rupturing of a shared homeland into two newly independent countries. Yet, the shadows of what scholars have termed the “long Partition” continue to cast deep-rooted and ever growing divisions across the social, cultural and political life of generations of people in both nations, decades after the event. Studies on the Partition and history texts on both sides of the border have till recently, consciously focused on the colonial hand in Partition, its high politics and the communal genocide that characterized this tragic carve-up, maintaining a conspicuous silence on its agonizing human trauma and suffering.

However, in recent times, memory studies have begun to play an important role in questioning the way political, social and cultural systems ‘remember ’or ‘silence ’historical events. Memoirs, journals and oral narratives have in the past three decades explored the more private and intimate recollections and hitherto unspoken and unexpressed emotions of Partition's victims and survivors.

This paper focuses upon the memories of Partition recorded in the journal of Fiqr Taunsvi (pen name/takhallus of Ram Lal Bhatia), a leading Urdu poet, columnist and member of the Progressive Writers ’Movement in Lahore, who stayed on in that city for three months after Partition but eventually was forced by circumstances to migrate to Amritsar in November 1947. Titled Chhata Darya/The Sixth River: A Journal from the Partition of India, a metaphor for the ‘river of blood ’that tore through Punjab, and translated from the Urdu by Maaz bin Bilal, Taunsvi's diary of these excruciating days records with razor-sharp precision the massacre of a land and its composite culture. It contains a valuable insight into the wounds inflicted by Partition on the collective memory of the people of the sub-continent for generations to come.