Likewise, Chander’s intervention was supported by his progressive comrades like Chughtai and Abbas, but roundly criticised by Askari and other critics like Mumtaz Shirin and Anwar Sadeed.
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Equally divide the blame on both sides of the scale. If in the beginning (of the short story), if five Hindus had been killed, then by the end of the story the calculation of five Muslims should balance it. Muhammad Hasan Askari, a noted Pakistani literary critic, not only wrote the preface to Siyah Hashiay, he also made a veiled attempt to attack Chander’s contribution in the same preface, in the following words: Manto’s intervention was criticised by Jafri, the doyen of progressive writers at that time. Both these interventions received excoriating accolades from either side of the ideological divide.
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Whether Jafri omitted Manto’s intervention because he was unaware of it, or whether he had already begun to distance himself from Manto, owing to the latter’s perceived ‘un-progressiveness’ is a moot point.īe that as it may, the year 1948 thus saw two notable literary interventions on the Partition of India, from Chander and Manto. However, there was yet another notable or notorious literary intervention curiously omitted by Jafri in his preface within Partition literature in the same year that Hum Vehshi Hain came out the equally biting sketches Siyah Hashiay (Black Margins) by none other than Saadat Hasan Manto. As Jafri had also noted in the aforementioned preface, Chander was among a handful of writers who refused to be silenced by the sheer violence and brutality of the Partition there were other notable interventions by Upendranath Ashk, Ismat Chughtai, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Kaifi Azmi, Yusuf Zafar and Fikr Taunsvi. Jafri was writing these words as a preface to a searing collection of Partition stories by his progressive comrade Krishan Chander (1914-1977), titled Hum Vehshi Hain (We Are Savages) which came out in 1948, less than a year after the horrific events of 1947. The words above were not written in the current scarcely comforting times of demagogic populism and right-wing fundamentalism in the two largest states of the Indian subcontinent, but amid the chaos and confusion of the Partition of India, 70 years ago, when the prominent progressive poet Ali Sardar Jafri and many of his comrades on both sides of the partitioned divide were thinking not only about the implications of the calamity that had just taken place but also how best to combat it. The revolutionary forces are supporting them and the best traditions of humanity are behind them. The demands of life are strengthening them. Because time, history and the future are with them. The healthy and progressive elements of India and Pakistan are trying to stop this civil war and it can be said with certainty that they are the ones who will be victorious. ∼ But there is no scarcity too of firefighters. Those who would fan these flames are also present. There are several embers beneath the ash which can be inflamed with just a blow. Today after many months these flames have lessened but have not gone cold yet. ∼ The fire of civil war is raging in India and Pakistan, its flames threaten to burn humans, houses and libraries alongwith our life, freedom, culture and civilisation to ashes.
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TRAIN TO PAKISTAN SUMMARY ANALYSIS SERIES
The Wire’ s #PartitionAt70 series brings a number of stories, through text and multimedia content that will attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of those weeks and months when entire geographies and histories changed forever.
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Among the short stories is one titled ‘Peshawar Express,’ which is told from the point of view of a train, an inanimate object which was travelling from Peshawar in what became Pakistan to Bombay in what became India.